Police in the Dutch city of Rotterdam is rolling out a new and highly controversial pilot program aimed at reducing crime. The program will target young men wearing designer clothing or expensive jewellery who supposedly look like they’re too poor to afford the items in question. If they’re unable to adequately prove to the police how they were able to purchase their clothes and/or accessories, the items will potentially be confiscated on the spot, with suspects expected to strip down in the street.

The controversial program will run for a limited time, to test its effectiveness, and the Rotterdam police department will be collaborating with the public prosecution department to help them determine what items they can legally confiscate. The main idea behind this endeavour  is to deter theft by sending a signal that perpetrators will not be able to keep their stolen goods.

Read More »

200 schools in Germany have begun asking hyperactive children, typically those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), to wear heavy sand-filled vests to calm them down and keep them in their seats during classes. The controversial vests, which weigh between 1.2 and six kilograms (2.7 – 13Ib), have sparked misgivings among parents and psychiatrists.

There are plenty of advocates, however, who claim to have witnessed remarkable changes in behavior among the children who have worn them and insisted that they help curb restlessness. There has been a growing number of ADHD cases diagnosed in Germany each year, and schools that use the vest claim that they are a gentler and less complicated way to tackle the phenomenon than administering psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin.

Read More »

A former nanny in China recently confessed to abducting a boy from her employers in Chongqing and raising him as her own son for the past 26 years. He Xiaoping, 48, from Nanchong, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, confessed the kidnapping to local authorities, last August. Police have been investigating her story ever since, but are unable to open a criminal case based solely on her claim.

Xiaoping claims that after giving birth to two children and losing both in their infancy, she approached elders in her village for advice. They told her that the only way for her to have a child of her own, would be to raise one from another family. In 1992, Xiaoping went to the city of Chongqing with a fake ID card and found a job as a nanny for a 1-year-old boy. She claims that after working for three days, she took the boy back to Nanchong with her. She named the boy Liu Jinxin after her second son.

Read More »

A young woman from the Russian Republic of Iacutia who was allegedly assaulted in a local disco went to the hospital to have her wounds registered so she could press charges, but was shocked to discover that the doctor on duty was the same man who had attacked her. Instead of checking her wounds, the doctor started hitting her again.

A short video that has been doing the rounds on Russian social media for the past couple of days shows doctor Vladimir Naumov threatening and physically assaulting 20-year-old Anastasia Dmitrieva, at the hospital in Neryungri, eastern Russia. The woman had allegedly come to the hospital to have the wounds she had sustained a few hours earlier, at the local disco, looked at, only to find that doctor Naumov was the same man who had inflicted them.

Read More »

On January 6 the Portuguese village of Vale de Salgueiro celebrated the traditional Epiphany festival, also known as the Feast of The Three Kings. While the holiday involves such benign traditions as eating cake and singing carols, there is one tradition that causes an outcry every year – parents allow and even encourage their children to smoke cigarettes.

Locals defend the practice, claiming that is has been passed down for centuries as part of the Epiphany and winter solstice celebrations, but no one is sure exactly what it is meant to symbolize. In Portugal, the legal age to purchase tobacco is 18, but there is nothing to stop parents from giving their children cigarettes, and the authorities have yet to intervene and put an end to the tradition.

Read More »

Despite being a hub for technological advancement, California’s bay area is also notorious for absurd anti-science health trends such as the movement opposing vaccinations which, in 2014, lead to the most significant measles outbreak the state had seen in decades. Joining the absurdity of the “anti-vaxxers” is a new and equally ridiculous trend – “raw water”. That’s actually unfiltered, untreated, raw spring water, which, even when from the seemingly cleanest of sources, can spread diseases like cholera, E. coli, Hepatitis A or Giardia.

To add insult to potential injury, this unsterilized water, bottled and marketed by startups like Live Water, is priced at $36.99 per 2.5-gallon containers and $14.99 per refill at the co-op Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. The water is often out of stock and typically sees a price hike with every restock.

Read More »

A Taiwanese dentist was recently ordered to pay $1 million to his mother in order to honor a contract that he had signed growing up, in which he agrees to pay 60 percent of his net profits until he can cover the cost of his upbringing and education.

The mother, known only as “Luo”, had to raise her two boys by herself, after divorcing her husband. At one point she became worried that despite all her sacrifices, her children would fail to look after her in her old age, so she decided to get some insurance. In 1997, when her sons were studying to become dentists, she asked them to sign a contract which clearly stipulated that they agreed to pay her part of their earnings until they covered the sum of roughly $1.7 million, as compensation for the money she had spent on their studies and upbringing. They both did, but one of them failed to honor the deal, so the mother took him to court.

Read More »

Greek eco-terrorists claim to have started injecting hydrochloric acid, a highly corrosive substance, into supermarket foods and drinks. The anarchist group even posted photos of themselves injecting soda, milk, and meat with acid, on social media.

Several Greek supermarkets were forced to withdraw specific products from their shelves after the threats of contamination. Authorities urged citizens in Athens and Thessaloniki not to buy or consume Coca-Cola, a local milk brand, and packaged meat for fear of them being contaminated with the dangerous substance. The two cities have a combined total of about 1 million residents affected by these precautionary measures.

Read More »

Cryptocurrency is all the rage right now, but while most people wish they that they had invested in Bitcoin and other altcoins in the early days, dozens of men are mining crypto and simply giving it away to a woman they’ve never met.

Theodora is a financial dominatrix, which basically means she receives money and other “tributes” from male clients who experience pleasure by being financially exploited. These tributes can range from a few dollars to tens of thousands. Some clients go so far as to give her complete control over their bank accounts, a.k.a becoming human ATMs. Theodora claims that she also runs crypto slave farms in which clients use their own cryptocurrency mining rigs to mine cryptocurrency 24/7 and then hand it over to her.

Read More »

Wealthy residents of an elite neighborhood in Bristol, England have installed ‘anti-bird spikes’ on trees  in an attempt to protect their expensive cars from bird droppings.

The spikes, which are commonly used to prevent birds from roosting and nesting on building ledges over public sidewalks, were nailed to two trees in the exclusive Clifton area of the city, near the wildlife-rich Downs and the Avon gorge. The use of these spikes in trees has outraged locals and environmentalists alike, with one Twitter user calling it a war on wildlife. The affected trees have been described by a local Green Party councilor as uninhabitable to birds. A spokesperson for Bristol city council, however, said that the trees were on private property, so there was nothing that the local authorities could do to stop them. The spikes had apparently already been in place for several years.

Read More »

We’re constantly told that parents know best and always act in the interests of their children. Except when they don’t, like Kaylene Bowen-Wright from Dallas, Texas, who subjected her son to 323 hospital visits and 13 major operations by convincing doctors that he was terminally ill. Now aged 8, Christopher has basically spent his whole life in doctors’ offices, and has undergone over a dozen surgeries that left him with several life-threatening blood infections.

The cycle began days after Christopher was born and continued until 2015, when physicians at the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston noticed that his mother’s accounts clashed with the test results and overall visible condition of the young patient. They alerted Child Protective Services (CPS) and Bowen was arrested on charges of causing injury to a child. The 34-year-old woman admitted she had lied to doctors that her son was gravely ill, which resulted in numerous medical interventions.

Read More »

We trust doctors with our lives and often remember some of them for as long as we draw breath. But how would any of us feel if branded with the initials of a physician who has saved our life, and branded on the inside at that? A renowned English surgeon literally left his mark on the livers of two patients he operated on in 2013 and is now awaiting his verdict on charges of assault by beating. Simon Bramhall, 53, has pleaded guilty to the charges in a case without precedent in the British criminal justice system.

Bramhall carved “SB” on livers he transplanted into one male and one female patient at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, where he worked for 12 years before handing in his resignation in 2014. He might have gotten away with the deed if a colleague hadn’t noticed the initials while performing a follow-up operation on the female patient. They were left by an argon beam, which surgeons use to stop bleeding during liver operations. The harmless marks left by the beam usually disappear after a while, but in this case the tell-tale signs were still in place at the time of the follow-up surgery, and Bramhall was exposed, becoming the subject of an internal disciplinary investigation.

Read More »

Ever heard of Russia’s healing pyramids? They are the work of Dr. Alexander Golod, a Ukrainian scientist who claims that they have the power to prevent diseases, enhance the potency of medicines, cure impotence and even control the weather.

Dr. Golod, a Moscow-based scientist and defense engineer, began building his mysterious pyramids in 1990. By 2001 he had completed 17 of them in various parts of Russia and the Ukraine. By 2010 that number had increased to over 50 pyramids worldwide, with the majority in Russia and the Ukraine. Each pyramid has an internal framework of PVC pipes that are then covered with sheets of fiberglass to form smooth faces. They were designed to fit the Golden Section phi ratio of 1 to 1.618, a standard ratio found in nature that can be used to create beautiful, natural looking compositions. This proportion makes the structures steeper than the Egyptian pyramids, with a slope of about 70 degrees. The top is nearly twice as high, relative to the perimeter of its base, making Golod’s pyramids look more like church steeples or obelisks.

Read More »

A Vietnamese court recently sentenced 22-year-old blogger and journalist Nguyen Van Hoa to seven years in prison for reporting on the 2016 Formosa spill that devastated the Vietnamese coast. Arrested in April, Hoa had produced video footage, photos, and articles about Taiwan-owned Formosa Plastics Group’s April 2016 toxic chemical spill from its steel plant located at the port in Ha Tinh. According to state-run media, he stands accused of “propagating against, distorting and defaming the government.”

The People’s Court of Ha Tinh province found Hoa guilty of violating Article 88 of Vietnam’s Penal Code and also ruled that he be placed under house arrest for three years after his jail term is complete. No attorney was present to represent Hao in the closed trial.

Read More »

Pakistani actress Irtiza Rubab, 40, known by her stage name Meera, has spent the past seven years entangled in a court case over whether or not she is married.

Meera is best known for her commercially successful and critically acclaimed Pakistani films, as well as making forays into Bollywood. She is also famed for her social media presence, mainly her videos and her presentation style. Recently, however, she has been making headlines for a different reason, a bizarre court battle against a man alleging to be her husband.

Read More »