Zhang Xiaoen, the son of a successful businessman from Hangzhou, China, is facing prison time after borrowing tens of millions of dollars to satisfy the needs and desires of his beautiful and allegedly manipulative girlfriend.

Growing up as the only child of a wealthy Chinese family, 29-year-old Zhang was accustomed to luxury and spending large sums of money on anything he desired. But even his family’s substantial financial resources were apparently insufficient when it came to satisfying the desires of Yang Yizhen, the young woman who became his girlfriend two years ago. An online influencer, livestreamer and freelance model, Yizhen was reportedly the light of Zhang’s eyes, and he spared no effort in making sure that she was happy. Unfortunately, even for a rich boy like him, Yang’s needs were apparently too much to handle.

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Albar Tessier, a blind teacher from France, recently arrived in Bolivia to prepare for a grueling challenge – walking 140 kilometers across Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest sand desert, in just seven days.

Tessier, who teaches blind children in his home country, set this personal challenge for himself before losing his vision completely, and has reportedly been training for it for the past couple of years. He wants to show the world that people with disabilities are also capable of performing amazing feats, and to this end he will be travelling alone, guided only by audio GPS, and with an emergency team maintaining a safe distance.

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After falling from an airplane and roaming through the Atacama Desert for 6 days, “Gaspar the miracle dog” was recently rescued and reunited with his owner.

Surviving the harsh Atacame Desert for almost a week is a challenge for any human, let alone a scared dachsund that happened to have fallen out of an airplane at landing. So it’s no wonder that 2-year-old Gaspar has been dubbed a “miracle dog” for defying the odds and making it out alive out of the driest desert on Earth.

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eXp Realty, one of the world’s fastest growing and most successful real estate companies, has become famous for not investing in any actual real-estate, opting instead for virtual reality offices that allow its agents and brokers to interact and socialize from anywhere around the globe.

Glenn Sanford, eXp Realty’s founder and CEO, founded the company a decade ago, soon after the real estate market collapse of 2007. He couldn’t afford to buy or rent office space, and figured that focusing on a system that allowed his team to work remotely would help the company avert disaster, should another real-estate crisis occur in the future. So eXp Realty relied on services like Google Docs and spreadsheets, project management solutions like Trello, and communications app Slack to help its workforce work together without actually sharing the same space. But three years ago, the company took this remote collaboration system to a whole new level, by building a campus complete with offices, meeting rooms, auditoriums, lounges and more, in virtual reality.

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A Florida-based conman who somehow managed to steal millions from wealthy investors all around the world by posing as a Saudi Arabian prince and diplomat was finally exposed after he made the mistake of eating bacon and other pork products at business meetings.

Anthony Gignac, a Columbian-born man who was adopted by a Michigan family as a child, started his grandiose swindling operation in 2015, by setting up a fraudulent investment company, Marden Williams International, to purportedly invest in business opportunities worldwide. Using various aliases, the con artist spent the next two years posing as a wealthy Saudi prince and stealing over $8 million from 26 victims all around the world. Gignac bought fake diplomatic license plates on eBay and put pompous words like “sultan” in the door nameplates of penthouses and mansions where he met with his victims. This was apparently enough to fool people into thinking that he was a real prince.

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Police officers in the Mexican town of Alvarado were recently stripped of their firearms and armed with slingshots and rocks instead, after most of them failed their control tests and were deemed unfit for service.

After only 30 officers of the 130-member police department in Alvarado managed to pass their control tests for the use of firearms, Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares, governor of the Mexican state of Verracruz, decided to strip the entire department of firearms. The governor’s office has confirmed that similar actions have been taken in other municipalities, like Ixtaczoquitlan, Ciudad Mendoza and Pueblo Viejo. However, some local officials have accused Yunes Linares of stripping local law enforcement of what little protection they had against the criminal organisations in Verracruz. In Alvarado, the officers were armed with slingshots and rocks.

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An Australian man who was left with “catastrophic” injuries after jumping out of a car driven by his wife has sued her for not slamming the brakes earlier, after seeing that he was about to jump.

This unbelievable incident took place in December of 2012, when Brian Lim, his wife, Eunkyung Cho, and their two children were driving home after a family dinner at a barbecue restaurant. The two spouses had began arguing after Mr. Lim spoke to an acquaintance at the restaurant, and their argument continued on the drive home. At one point, Ms. Cho allegedly made a critical comment about her husband’s parents. Lim responded by telling her that he wanted a divorce, but then, all of a sudden, opened the car door and jumped out before his five could grab him or slam her foot on the brake.

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Chinese media recently reported about a new high-tech laser assault rifle that can allegedly fire an energy beam that cannot not be seen by the naked eye, but can cause “instant carbonization” of human tissue from up to half a mile away.

Called ZKZM-500, the laser rifle was developed by scientists at the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shaanxi province, and is apparently ready for mass production, with the first units scheduled to be given to anti-terrorism squads in the Chinese Armed Police. It has been described as a non-lethal weapon that can be used in various situations, like hostage situations, where police would fire it through windows at targets and temporarily disable them while other teams moved in to free the hostages. It definitely wouldn’t be the first time that a sci-fi technology became reality, but in this particular case, many believe that laser rifles are still impossible in real life.

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An African flamingo that famously escaped Wichita’s Sedgwick County Zoo in 2005 has been on the run ever since. The freedom-loving bird was recently spotted hanging out with a flock of seagulls, in Lavaca Bay, Texas, 700 miles from the zoo it once called home.

The runaway bird is known as ‘No. 492’ because of the number on a plastic band still attached to its leg. Its legendary escape was due to an error by zoo staff who thought his flight wings hadn’t fully developed, so they didn’t bother cutting them. One night, the flamingo took advantage of some strong storm winds and escaped the zoo before staff even got the chance to determine its sex. The long-legged bird has been enjoying its freedom ever since, as the zoo never attempted to recapture it. That would be difficult to do anyway, both because sightings of No. 492 have been rare in the last 14 years, and because it was born in the wild and is wary of approaching humans.

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Big sporting events like the World Cup are supposed to bring people together in support of their favorite teams and players, but for one Russian couple married for 14 years, the 2018 World Cup was reason for divorce.

40-year-old Arsen and his 37-year-old wife, Ludmyla, are both big football fans. In fact, they met in a Chelyabinsk sports bar during the 2002 World Cup, and they bonded over their mutual passion for the sport. The fact that they were fans of two rival Moscow football clubs, Spartak Moscow and CSKA Moskow, didn’t stop them from getting married, but last week, it was their love for the two biggest rivals in modern football history – Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo – that ended their 14-year marriage.

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Polish environmental group EkoLogiczna recently had to pay a massive phone bill, after the SIM card in a GPS tracker they put on the back of a white stork, so it could collect data about the bird’s winter migration route, got stolen.

In April 2017, members of EkoLogiczna fit Kajtek, a white stork, with a GPS tracker so they could monitor his migration route to Africa, as well as his feeding habits. In the next year, the bird flew around 6,000 km and EkoLogiczna was able to collect the data they wanted, but in February of this years, something weird happened. On his way back from Africa to Poland, Kajtek stopped in Sudan, and “for unknown reasons” remained in the area for over two months, “travelling 25 kms in different directions during the day”. Then, on April 26, they lost the signal completely.

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Some people find it hard to cry when their loved-ones’ die, but wailing and mourning are a big part of funerals in the African country of Ghana, as it is indicative of the deceased’ social standing or how beloved they were by their family and community. So it’s no wonder that some Ghanaians are willing to pay professional mourners to cry on their behalf.

Ami Dokli is the leader of one of the several groups of professional mourners in Ghana. In a recent interview with BBC Africa, she said that some people cannot cry at their relatives’ funerals, so they rely on her and her team to do the wailing. Dokli and the other women in her team are all widows who, after their husbands died, decided to come together to help others give their loved-ones a proper send-off to the afterlife. But crying for strangers is not the easiest thing in the world, so professional mourners charge a fee for their services, the size of which is in direct relation to the size of the funeral. If it’s a big funeral, their tears cost more.

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The head of a Russian advertising agency tasked with creating large building facades to promote the 2018 World Cup in Russia has come under fire for using one of the nearly 50-meter-tall facades to pay tribute to his wife, by using her as the model.

Ivan Panteleev, director of advertising agency Novatek Art has been criticised by street artists and members of the general public for putting a giant portrait of his wife Daria on a building facade funded by the Moscow city budget. Four murals were commissioned and co-sponsored by the city’s public relations committee in 2016, to remind the people of Moscow of the upcoming (now ongoing) World Cup, and some people didn’t like that Panteleev used his wife, of all people, as the model for one of the giant artworks.

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Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, head of Iran’s Civil Defense Organization, yesterday told members of the press that Israel has been stealing Iran’s clouds while also working to ensure that whatever clouds do make it into Iranian air space are unable to release rain.

Relations between Iran and Israel have always been tense, but I doubt anyone imagined one side would go as far as to accuse the other of stealing their clouds. Well, that’s exactly what happened yesterday, when, during a press conference, Iranian General Gholam Reza Jalali said that his country’s prolonged drought has been caused by foreign interference, more specifically by Israel and “another country”. Jalali tried to back up his claims by citing a survey showing that all mountainous areas above 2,200 meters between Afghanistan and the Mediterranean are covered in snow, except those in Iran.

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Indonesian media has been buzzing with news of a woman declared missing over one and a half years ago, after being swept away by a large wave, who was allegedly found alive three days ago,on the same beach that she disappeared from, and wearing the exact same clothes she was wearing on the day of her disappearance.

52-year-old Nining Sunarsih was on vacation in Sukabumi, West Java, when she was swept away by a strong wave on Citepus Beach, and carried out to sea by strong currents. At the time, eyewitnesses said they heard the woman screaming and waving her hands for help, but they were too scared to go in after her. Search and rescue operations didn’t find any sign of her, until a week after the tragic disappearance, when a dead body was discovered in the area. They asked Nining’s family to come and identify the body, and even though it was reportedly in very bad condition, her relatives were convinced that it wasn’t her, because it lacked a distinctive birthmark on the abdomen, and the fingernails looked very different.

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