Firefighters in West Virginia were stunned to find that not one of the over a dozen paper bibles and several wooden crosses at the Freedom Ministries Church were destroyed by the devastating fire that engulfed the holy place last Sunday morning.

In a Facebook post that quickly went viral, the Coal City Fire Department shared photos of nearly two dozen bibles and three wooden crosses that survived flames so massive that at one point firefighters had to back out. The fire was so devastating that the church will have to be rebuilt, and firefighters themselves admit that judging by the intensity of the flames everything inside should have been turned to ashes, and yet none of the bibles and crosses were destroyed.

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If the idea of getting paid a decent monthly wage to do nothing, or whatever you want, for the rest of your life sounds appealing, you may be interested in this Swedish experimental art project that plans to hire a very lucky person for a responsibility-free job with just one very simple requirement.

This government-funded conceptual art project/ideal employment opportunity in Gothenburg, Sweden will select one very lucky applicant to show up at a train station currently under construction in the city every day and punch a time clock. This will turn on a set of fluorescent lights over the boarding platform to let everyone know that the useless employee showed up at work that day. After that, the person is free to do anything they want, or nothing at all, just as long as they return to the station to clock out and turn off the lights when their shift is over. They don’t have to hang around the train station during working hours, and they can quit or be replaced by someone else anytime they want. As long as they don’t get another job, the position is guaranteed for the rest of their lives.

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A Japanese tech startup claims to have developed an artificial intelligence software that analyzes surveillance camera footage in order to detect suspicious behavior and prevent shoplifting before it actually happens.

In 2002, when the movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, came out, the concept of preventing a future crime before the perpetrator did anything remotely suspicious was nothing more than a cool sci-fi idea, but thanks to the rapid advancement of artifical intelligence, we already have an early version of the technology displayed in that movie. VaakEye, an AI software developed by Japanese startup Vaak, can allegedly detect shoplifting before it occurs by analyzing surveillance camera footage for discrete suspicious movements and behaviors of people caught in the camera’s field of view. If the algorithm decides that there is a high-enough probability of a person shoplifting, it sends an alert via a smartphone app so the crime can be prevented.

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A 56-year-old woman from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been diagnosed with Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) after a terrible headache apparently caused her to completely forget the last 38 years of her life.

One day in early October of last year, Kim Denicola was leaving a bible study at a local church when she called her husband to complain about an excruciating headache and blurry vision. He told her to go to the emergency room, but some friends found her passed out in the church parking lot and rushed her to the hospital. The first thing Denicola remembers from after that incident is lying in a hospital bed and a nurse asking her questions she apparently had all the wrong answers to.

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Mansur Çalar, a 33-year-old soccer player from Turkey, has been accused of using a concealed sharp object to repeatedly slash players of the opposing team during a third-division game last weekend.

Allegations against the footballer started pouring in on Monday after several players from Turkish club Sakaryaspor, the club Çalar’s team, Amedspor, had played against a day before, started posting photos of sustained slash wounds online. Some had scratch-like marks on their arms, others on their backs and necks, but they all accused Mansur Çalar, asking that he be reprimanded. Both the accused and his club dismissed the allegations, but then a video collage showing Çalar’s behavior in several tense moments during the Sunday match went viral online and authorities opened an official investigation.

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The Department of Otorhinolaryngology at Taiwan’s Asia University Hospital recently reported the case of a student who fell asleep while listening to music with earbuds on and woke up completely deaf in one year.

The popularity of headphones and earbuds has skyrocketed right alongside that of smartphones, with people using them pretty much everywhere, either to listen to music, take phone calls or even study. Some people reportedly use them while sleeping to learn foreign languages subconsciously. Even though “hypnopedia”, or the ability to learn during sleep, isn’t supported by any scientific evidence, many people still believe that because the brain is able to perceive sound during sleep, by exposing it to new information will cause it to retain at least some of it. But apparently, testing this concept, or even listening to music with earbuds or headphones on while sleeping isn’t a very good idea.

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Oleg Omelchuk, the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Olevsk, recently became an internet meme after being tricked into posing for a photo in front of the city hall holding a poster accusing him of infringing on the rights of citizens.

The photo of Omelchuk standing shoulder to shoulder with the people protesting against him and his administration and holding a poster that read “The mayor and his minions infringe upon the rights of society” went viral after being shared on Twitter by journalist Taras Oleinik, an editor of Ukrainian news portal ITC.ua. However, his caption was a bit suspicious. Oleinik claimed that the mayor had been the one trolling protesters by showing up and holding up the poster as a joke, without anyone recognizing him. That would have indeed been some epic trolling by Omelchuk, but in fact he was the one getting trolled.

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Authorities in the German town of Ahlen have come under fire for seizing a family’s dog over unpaid taxes and then selling it on eBay to recover the money owed.

This bizarre story started back in November, 2018, when a court bailiff and two city officials showed up at an Ahlen family’s home to seize valuables as compensation for financial debts owed to the municipality. The family, who preferred to remain anonymous, told local newspaper Ahlener Tageblatt that the officials first tried to seize her disabled husband’s wheelchair, but couldn’t because it wasn’t their property. Instead, they settled on the family’s pet dog, a pedigree pug named Edda.

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Poppy farmers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh are forced to guard their fields day and night in a desperate attempt to fend off large groups of opium-addicted parrots who get high off the narcotic effects of poppy seeds.

Scattered rains have already affected poppy production in Neemuch district, but farmers here say that the increasing number of opium-addicted parrots that pillage their crops on a daily basis are making things even worse. Using loudspeakers and firecrackers to keep the birds at bay has failed and the farmers’ appeals to local authorities have fallen of deaf ears, so people have no choice but to guard the poppy fields day and night. But even so, the birds still come to get their fix dozens of time a day.

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Trying to move on from a failed romantic relationship can be hard, especially when your most beautiful travel photos feature your ex. A lot of people reluctantly delete such digital memories as part of a ritual known as “post-breakup purge”, but thanks to a new online service called Edit My Ex, that’s no longer necessary.

As the name suggests, Edit My Ex allows people who want to erase any evidence of their ex from meaningful digital photos to just have them edited out and keep the photos. All you have to do is upload a photo to their website, let the image editing experts know what exactly you’d like erased and pay a £8.99 ($11.90) fee. In up to 48 hours, you’ll get your photo back, ex-free.

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A South African pastor has been making news headlines all over the world for staging a hilariously ridiculous prank in which he appears to bring a dead man back to life in front of a congregation of churchgoers.

Pastor Alph Lukau, of the Alleluia Ministries International church, in Kramerville, South Africa, has landed in hot water after a video showing him supposedly bringing a dead man back to life went viral online. The controversial religious figure can be seen putting his hands on the “dead” man’s chest and shouting “rise up!”. The man, who had supposedly died last Friday due to an undisclosed illness, opens his eyes and rises from the coffin with his mouth and eyes wide open, to the shouts and cheers of churchgoers gathered around him.

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They say you can tell a lot about a person by the way they walk, but one Chinese startup has apparently developed technology that allows it to identify individuals by their gait, even if their face is covered or they have their back to the camera.

Known as “gait recognition”, the technology invented by artificial intelligence startup Watrix analyses thousands of metrics about a person’s walk, from their body shape and the angle of arm movement to their posture and whether they have a toe-in or toe-out gait. All these individual traits go into a database that the software then goes through when attempting to identify people. According to an official statement from Watrix, the accuracy rate of gait technology at the laboratory level exceeds 96 per cent.

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On May 26, 2019, Manuel Germán Ramírez Valdovinos will have been in prison for 19 years, serving a sentence of 43 years for the murder of a man who is allegedly alive and well.

Valdovinos used to work as a music teacher at a school in the town of Texapan, in the State of Mexico. On May 26, 2000, he had just come back from work and was celebrating his son’s one-month anniversary with his wife, when a commando of eight judicial policemen stormed into his home, beat him, handcuffed him and put him into the back of a car with no license plates. He was arrested without a warrant and taken to the local police station where he was hung up by his hands with metal chains, tortured with electric shocks and accused of the murder of a person he barely knew. Manuel was only 22-years-old at the time.

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Marine biologists in Brazil were stunned to discover the body of a young humpback whale on a remote island in the Amazon jungle, at a time of the year when it should have migrated 4,000 miles away, to Antarctica.

The whale’s body was found by members of the conservation group Bicho D’Água, after they spotted vultures circling a mangrove on Marajo Island, a large, forested island in northern Brazil. The marine mammal, approximately 26-feet-long, was lodged in thick shrubs and brush, about 50 feet from the shore. A team from the region’s Municipal Secretariat of Health, Sanitation, and Environment inspected the carcass and reported that it did not appear to have any visible injuries, so until officials conduct a necropsy, the cause of death remains a mystery. At this time, the two main theories are that a powerful tide launched the whale inland, or that it died at sea and was carried onto land by people.

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A 29-year-old insurance agent from Chongqing, China, has come up with an ingenious way to beat rush hour traffic. By paddle-boarding across the Yangtze River every morning he has cut his daily commute time from one hour to just six minutes.

Liu Fucao sells insurance in Chongqing’s Wanzhou District, but lives on the other side of the Yangtze, the longest river in Asia. Up until six months ago, he used to drive or catch a bus to work like everyone else, but then authorities started doing maintenance work on the bridge he had to cross every morning, and his daily commute got even longer than usual. It would take him an hour or more to get to work, and at one point he just couldn’t stand being stuck in traffic for so long. He has been paddle-boarding competitively for two years, and one day he decided to use it as an alternative means of transportation. It took him less than six minutes to paddle from one side of the river to the other, so he’s been doing it every morning since.

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