Kumitaiso, a gymnastic formation in which students climb on top of one another to create a pyramid, has at the center of growing controversy in Japan, due to the high number of serious injuries reported by schools.

At its core, kumitaiso is a routine supposed to encourage teamwork and endurance among young students, and as such it has been a mainstay of annual school sport festivals across Japan. However, problems began to occur as the human pyramids organized by schools started getting higher and more difficult to support by the students at the bottom. Seeing dozens of students working together to create these complex structures is undoubtedly impressive to behold, which is why many schools kept pushing the limits over the years, with some devastating results. With hundreds of reported injuries reported every year, many in the Asian country are asking authorities to ban kumitaiso.

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A famed restaurant in Peru was recently fined $62,000 for discriminating against women by giving ladies who dined with men menus that didn’t feature any prices.

La Rosa Nautica, a pricey restaurant built on a peer overlooking the ocean in the Peruvian capital, Lima, was ordered to pay a 210,000 sol ($62,000) fine for offering women a different menu when they dined with men. While gentlemen were given a blue menu that featured both the dishes available and their prices, ladies got a gold version that mentioned no prices at all. The owner of the high-end restaurant defended the practice by calling it a way for women to enjoy a romantic night out without having to worry about costs, but Peruvian authorities ruled that it was discriminatory against women.

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David Miles, an Australian inventor who has been peddling weather modification technology for almost 20 years, has been accused of preying on desperate farmers by charging up to $50,000 Australian dollars for delivering rain on demand without so much as explaining the technology behind his business.

On the official Miles Research website, controversial inventor David Miles explains that in the 1990’s he realised that “it was possible to incrementally influence weather patterns using a variant of the Einstein – Rosen Bridge hypothesised in the 1930’s, to effectively create a bridge between ‘the present’ in the physical space-time continuum, and a near-future event, forecast to exist from one to ten days ahead in time”. He found that by applying small amounts of energy intelligently, even a large, chaotic weather system approaching from the future could be mitigated.

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If you’re short on cash and don’t mind selling the rights to your face, you can stand to make £100,000 ($130,000) by licensing your mug to a robotics company to be used on one of their humanoid robots.

According to a recent blog post by London-based outsourcing company Geomiq, a robotics company is currently looking for a “kind and friendly” to put on a humanoid robot once it goes into production. This will potentially entail using this person’s face on thousands of robots around the world, so the company is willing to pay no less than £100,000 ($130,000) in licensing fees. The robot in question is designed to be a “virtual friend” for elderly people, and is scheduled to go into production next year.

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Part extreme reality TV show, part social experiment, “Meat the Family” follows four meat-eating families for three weeks as they interact with the animal that they enjoy eating most. At the end they are forced to make a choice between going vegan or eating their pet.

The premise of Meat the Family is that the three participating families have to treat the animal that most frequently appears on their plates like a pet for three weeks, and then decided whether it goes to an animal sanctuary or into their bellies. Deciding whether the animal lives or dies is one thing, but having to choose between going vegetarian or eating the animal you got to know for three weeks is just crazy. Over the course of the show, the four UK families will have to spend time with their pet, taking it for walks and playing with it, but also travel around their country to learn about animal welfare, farming and production, food processing, as well as the impact that eating animals has on the environment.

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A Chinese woman who spent 13,000 yuan ($1,850) on cosmetic double eyelid surgery has become unable to fully close her eyes, even when she sleeps.

Around 50 of Asians are born without a visible eyelid crease above their lash line, which basically means they have what is called a “monolid”. In 1896, to address this aesthetic issue, Japanese surgeon Mikamo developed a procedure called blepharoplasty or double eyelid surgery, which has since been performed millions of times. It’s the most requested plastic surgery in Asia, and in countries like South Korea, it’s been normalized as a way of becoming more attractive. But while the results of double eyelid surgery can indeed be visually appealing, in some cases it can have some really nasty consequences, like leaving patients unable to fully close their eyes.

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An Indian man recently shocked airport staff in Abu Dhabi, because his passport showed he was born in 1896, which would make him 123, the oldest human to have ever lived.

Swami Sivananda’s passport shows him to be a year older than France’s Jeanne Louise Calment , who holds the Guinness Record for the oldest verified person in history -122 – but the problem is that the only proof he has comes from an old temple register.  Mr Sivananda also looks decades younger than his alleged age, but he credits his youthful appearance and good health to leading a simple and balanced life, yoga, and a frugal, spice-free diet. His celibacy may have something to do with his longevity as well, he figures. He’s been trying to have his name included in the Guinness Book of Records for three years, but he has been having trouble proving his age.

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Chechen men are considered some of the most masculine in the world, and this is an image that authorities are keen to maintain, so anything that threatens to damage that hard-earned image of fearlessness is frowned upon. A young man recently learned that first-hand, after crying at his sister’s wedding.

According to historian Zelimkhan Musaev the public display of emotions at Chechen wedding parties is unbecoming, even among women, so when a video of a young man shedding tears at his sister’s wedding went viral on social media, it angered a lot of people. And seeing as the nation’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov – who boasts a very manly public image himself – had also criticized the violation of Chechen customs and traditions, the offender was identified and forced to apologize for showing excessive emotion.

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A Russian iPhone user recently filed a one million ruble lawsuit against Apple, accusing the American corporation of indirectly turning him gay.

In a court filing that went viral on Russia’s internet, the plaintiff alleges that he became “mired in a same-sex relationship” after receiving the wrong kind of cryptocurrency on a virtual wallet app that he installed on his iPhone in 2017. The man, identified as one D. Razumilov claims that he received 69 GayCoins – a cryptocurrency designed for member of the LGBT community – from an anonymous sender. The mysterious transfer was accompanied the message “don’t knock it till you’re tried it”, which kind of made sense to Razumilov and eventually pushed him to become involved in a gay relationship.

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News on an Indonesia toddler who has been living on brewed coffee for the last eight months, because her young parents were too poor to afford formula or cow’s milk, recently shocked millions in East Asia.

Hadijah Haura, a 14-month-old girl from the village of Tonro Lima Village, in Indonesia’s West Sulawesi province, consume 3 baby bottles of coffee – around 1.5 liters – every day. That’s more than most grown-ups. She’s been consuming the caffeine-rich drink daily since she was just six-months-old, because her young parents couldn’t afford to buy milk for her. Hadijah has been practically living on coffee for half her life, but appears to be growing at a normal rate and hasn’t had any serious medical problems yet. Her parents are aware that coffee is not fit for a toddler, but claims that they had no choice, because they had nothing else to give their daughter.

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Viewers of an exhibition match between two major football clubs last Sunday were outraged to see what looked like a child puffing away on a cigarette in the stands. However, the smoker turned out to be a lot older than he appeared.

During a televised exhibition match between Bursaspor and Fenerbahce, two of Turkey’s biggest football clubs, viewers were treated to some disturbing-looking scenes. As the reporter interviewed someone on the pitch while the players were warming up, the cameras jumped to a couple of young Bursa fans in the stands, one of whom was eagerly puffing on a tobacco cigarettes. Everyone was outraged, and the short clip spread on social media like wildfire.

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Mangayamma, a 74-year-old woman in India’s Anthar Pradesh state, recently became the oldest woman in history to give birth, after successfully delivering twin baby girls following an IVF procedure.

The Indian woman had married Yaramati Sitarama Rajarao, a farmer from Nelaparthipudi village, back in 1962, but despite visiting countless doctors and temples, the couple were unable to bear children for 54 years of their marriage. Mangayamma remembers people looking at her as if she had committed some kind of sin, and some calling her cursed, but luckily her husband stuck by her and gave her the strength to move on. Even after reaching menopause some 25 years ago, the woman still had a strong desire to give birth, and last year, after seeing a 55-year-old neighbor become pregnant via in-vitro fertilisation, she and her husband decided to undergo the procedure as well.

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With gun crime so frequent in the United States these days, even making a gun gesture with your hand can put some people on edge. A Pennsylvania man found that out the hard way after being charged with disorderly conduct for pointing a “finger gun” at another man during an argument.

The bizarre incident took place in June 2018, when, according to surveillance footage, 64-year-old Stephen Kirchner was walking with his girlfriend on a street in Manor Township, Pennsylvania. The woman reportedly had a no contact order against one of her neighbors, and when the couple walked by the neighbor’s residence, Kirchner stopped, turned around, formed a finger gun with his thumb and forefinger, pointed it at the neighbor and pulled the imaginary trigger. Little did he know that the gesture would lead to a year-long litigation.

The 64-year-old’s finger gun was apparently so disturbing to bystanders in the area that some of them actually called the police about it. To make matters worse, the neighbor he pointed he finger gun at later told police that he had felt “extremely threatened” by the gesture. Kirchner himself admitted that he knew his gesture would only inflame tensions, but he later learned that it was actually a crime.

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Cilla Carden, a vegan woman from Perth, in Australia, took her neighbors to court for “deliberately” allowing the smell of barbecued meat and fish to cross onto her property.

The frustrated vegan has been in a dispute with both her neighbors since 2017, and has taken one of them court several times, unsuccessfully. After having her case thrown out by a tribunal earlier this year, Carden recently applied to the Supreme Court of Western Australia for right of appeal, which was also rejected back in June. It doesn’t take a legal expert to figure out why, though, as the woman basically argued that one of her neighbors deliberately barbecued meat and fish in their backyard, because they knew she couldn’t stand it.

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Did you grow up wishing the school you went to every day looked more like a fairy-tale palace? No? Well this Russian billionaire sure did and when he became rich enough to afford it, he actually turned his old school into a flamboyant palace, complete with gilded walls, marble floors and even a water fountain.

Walking into the 106 Secondary School in Yekaterinburg after its recent renovation you couldn’t be blamed for thinking you had been magically transported to a French Baroque palace like Versailles. With golden chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, gilded decorations covering the walls and luxurious marble floors, it certainly looks nothing like a Soviet-era school dating back to the 1940s. That’s thanks to the generous donation of a former student named Andrei Simanovsky who grew up to become a successful businessman and decided to fulfill his childhood dream of turning his school into a palace.

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