Enhanced Games, a sports competition where performance-enhancing drugs are not only allowed but encouraged, will be held for the first time in May next year, in Las Vegas. Ever wondered how much better top human athletes could be if they were allowed to use performance-enhancing substances in competitions? Well, in May of next year, these questions will be answered, as the first edition of Enhanced Games kicks off. Marketed as an event designed to remove the stigma of using PEDs and to safely push the limits of human athletic performance, Enhanced Games has rightly been nicknamed the “Olympic Games on Steroids”. Originally announced as a concept in 2023, the Enhanced Games will host its first ever edition in May of next year, in las Vegas, with eight different events in swimming (50- and 100-meter races in freestyle and butterfly), track (100-meter sprint and 100/110-meter hurdles) and weightlifting (snatch, clean and jerk). Read More »

A Mexican bank has been accused of lacking sensitivity after insisting that a bed-bound 96-year-old woman be brought to a physical branch to confirm her identity in order to release her pension. Photos and video clips of an elderly woman being transported to a BBVA (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria) bank branch in Oaxaca, Mexico, on an ambulance stretcher have been going viral on Mexican social media and sparking outrage among the general public. 96-year-old Fidelia Vásquez Nuño cannot move due to her advanced age and various illnesses, but despite her son’s attempts to file the necessary paperwork with the bank to verify her identity, she had to be brought to a local branch to correct a glitch in her biometric registration that had prevented her from cashing her pension for six months. Read More »

A well-respected family in the UK was recently awarded compensation of $100,000 by a restaurant that had publicly accused them of leaving without settling the bill. In July of last year, Peter and Ann McGirr, along with their children Peter Jr and Carol, visited The Horse & Jockey Inn in the Peak District, England. It was a pretty uneventful affair; the family ordered ribeye and gammon steaks and washed them down with ales and lagers before leaving for their home in Omagh, Northern Ireland. Only shortly after their departure, The Horse & Jockey Facebook page posted a video of the McGirrs’ allegedly leaving the establishment without paying the £150 ($200) bill. The family was soon making national headlines for allegedly dining and dashing, which negatively impacted their otherwise great reputation, so they found themselves with no choice but to sue the inn to clear their name. Read More »

An Australian radio station has come under fire for reportedly using an AI-generated female host for six months without mentioning it before listeners started questioning “her” identity. Last year, Australian Radio Network’s CADA station, which broadcasts in Sydney, introduced a new host named Thy and even created a new show for her called Workdays with Thy. The young-sounding woman presented music for four hours a day from Monday to Friday, and things went smoothly until people started asking questions about the mysterious Thy. The fact that she had no last name and no biography anywhere was suspicious enough, but then some listeners noticed that certain phrases she used sounded identical every time she uttered them. Questions and theories about Thy’s true identity started spreading online, and CADA eventually revealed that she wasn’t a real person. Read More »

Authorities in Montgomery Township, Pennsylvania, have introduced wavy lane patterns on some streets in an effort to slow down traffic in the area. Driving along Gray Lane in Montgomery Township for the first time must be quite the trip, both literally and figuratively. That’s because the regular lane patterns have been replaced by wavy, zig-zag lines that look like they were painted by a drunk. But they are wavy by design. According to Montgomery Township officials, the unusual patterns were deemed as the best solution to discourage speeding on some of the municipality’s streets. Police sources told local media outlets that the “traffic-calming measures” were installed in response to numerous complaints about certain streets being used as “speedways”. Read More »

Members of the State Duma (Russian Parliament) and activist organizations in Russia have called for the ban of Turkish soap operas because their perfect male protagonists put Russian men in a bad light. Representatives of the “Veterans of Russia” movement have appealed to the Russian State Duma and Roskomnadzor (the agency responsible for monitoring and censoring the media in Russia) to ban Turkish soap operas, due to their projection of an “unrealistic image of men,” which makes women lose interest in Russian men, ultimately contributing to the country’s demographic decline. In its petition, Veterans of Russia proposed introducing the concept of ‘destructive propaganda,’ calling Turkish soap operas part of an ‘ideologic war for minds’ that target Russian women and threaten to destroy the institution of family in the country. Read More »

Popular Cambodian beauty pageant Miss and Mister Majestic has been getting a lot of attention after photos of its “ordinary-looking” participants went viral on social media. The winner of Mister Majestic 2025 will represent Cambodia in the Mister Universe international beauty pageant, but the contest has created a lot of buzz online due to the questionable looks of some participants. Last month, organizers released the introductory photos of the 17 male participants selected to take part in the competition to become Mister Majestic, and, judging by the feedback on Cambodian social media, they were not what people were expecting. It’s true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but many people complained that most of the guys competing for the title of Mister Majestic looked ordinary, and some of them had sub-standard looks. Read More »

A journalistic investigation by the Chinese newspaper The Paper revealed the widespread commercialization of “fake meats”, such as fox or raccoon meat being sold as beef, mutton, or rabbit to restaurants. The Paper reports that in Chinese areas known for fur production, such as Tangshan, Hebei, Weifang, Linyi, or Shandong, animal farms resell fox and raccoon ‘white strips’ (carcasses with the internal organs and subcutaneous fat removed) all over the country, passing them off as beef, mutton or rabbit. Some vendors even go through the trouble of braising and grilling their fake meats before freezing them and selling them to restaurants to make them even harder to tell apart from meats meant for human consumption. Experts warn that the hormones and medicines used in the breeding of animals for fur, but also the pathogens they carry make these meats extremely dangerous. Read More »

Efecan Kultur, a Turkish Tiktoker who rose to prominence for his “mukbang” binge eating streams, tragically lost his life at the age of 24 due to obesity-related health complications. The “mukbang” trend, in which people costume copious amounts of food on camera to the delight of their fans, originated in South Korea but quickly spread all over the world raising concerns about obesity and mindless food waste. With more than 156,000 TikTok followers and 12,000 Instagram followers, 24-year-old Efecan Kultur was one of Turkey’s most popular mukbang streamers, but his popularity came at a cost. As he continued ballooning in size, he started experiencing various health problems, including heart disease, and in October of last year, he announced that he would be going on a diet and avoiding extra salt to try and lose weight. Sadly, earlier this month, the 24-year-old died as a result of his obesity. Read More »

The Murmansk branch of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia political party made the controversial decision of gifting meat grinders to mothers of soldiers killed in the war with Ukraine to celebrate International Women’s Day. Over the past three years, the meat grinder has become a symbol of the Russian military’s high casualty rate in its assault on neighboring Ukraine, so the decision of the United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region to celebrate mothers whose sons died in the war by gifting them meat grinders on March 8 can be considered questionable, at best. Photos published on the party’s social media account last Wednesday show the executive secretary of the Polyarnye Zori United Russia branch, Anna Makhunova, alongside Maxim Chengaev, representative of the “Defenders of the Fatherland in the Murmansk Region Foundation” posing next to women who lost their sons in the war against Ukraine, smiling and holding meat grinders. Read More »

Chilean-born artist Marco Evaristti has come under fire for trying to starve three little piglets to death as part of a controversial art installation meant to raise awareness about animal welfare. Marco Evaristti sparked controversy when he originally announced plans for his “And Now You Care?” exhibition, but he really attracted criticism both from animal rights activists and the general public when it actually became a reality. Located in a former butcher’s warehouse in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen, “And Now You Care?” featured three little piglets on a pile of hay, trapped in a cage made up of two metal shopping carts and surrounded by paintings of slaughtered pigs and the Danish flag. It was already an unsettling display, but it was his plan to only give the piglets water and let them starve to death that really shocked everyone.

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A video that has been doing the rounds on Chinese social media appears to show a humanoid robot malfunctioning and erratically “attacking” the crowd at a festival in Tianjin. The footage, shot during the Tianjin Winter Gala Festival on February 9th, shows one of several Unitree H1 humanoid robots seemingly attacking a spectator who had extended their hand out for a handshake. Instead of responding to the gesture, the robot displays erratic arm movements and aggressively rushes toward the crowd before being pulled back by security guards and what looks to be a robot supervisor. The H1 robot appears to calm down before the video cuts off, but its violent outburst has raised concerns about the use of these autonomous machines around humans. Read More »

A US woman is taking legal action against a fertility clinic after an error essentially made her an unwitting surrogate, carrying and eventually another couple’s baby, and having to give up custody. The day Krystena Murray learned that she was pregnant after undergoing IVF treatment at the Coastal Fertility clinic in May 2023 was one of the happiest of her life, but that happiness soon turned to horror when she gave birth in December of that same year. Despite being white and having chosen a white sperm donor, Krystena gave birth to a black boy. She didn’t allow her family and friends to see that baby, and in January of last year, a DNA test confirmed that she and the baby were not genetically related. Murrya alerted the IVF clinic about the terrible mixup, but decided to keep the baby and even got to raise it for a few months until his biological parents filed for custody. Read More »

An Australian high school teacher has come under fire from concerned parents for allegedly identifying as cat and acting weird in front of students. Australian media have been reporting on the bizarre case of a teacher at Marsden State High School in Logan City, Queensland, who reportedly asked students to refer to her as “Ms. Purr”, allegedly hissing at students and licking the back of her hand. Photos of the unnamed teacher show her wearing a cat-ear headband and a lanyard that reads “purr” in class, which further fueled parents’ concerns that she was behaving inappropriately in class. One parent claimed that the teacher made her daughter purr for a lollypop, while another said that the teacher growled at students if they weren’t paying attention in class. Read More »

An Italian doctor is currently being investigated for using hospital equipment to diagnose his injured pet cat and then operating on her in order to save her life. Gianluca Fanelli , head of the simple structure of Interventional Radiology and Neuroradiology at the Parini Hospital in Aosta, Italy, recently split his home country into two camps – one that considers him a hero who values life over rules and regulations, and another that thinks he should face the consequences for knowingly breaking the rules of his workplace. On the evening of January 27, after taking his injured cat to a veterinarian and receiving a dire diagnosis, the radiologist took his feline, Athena, to Parini Hospital and put in the CT scanner to get an idea of the internal organ damage she had suffered. He then performed pneumothoracic surgery on her in the unit’s angiography room in order to save her life. Read More »