A Chinese man who won the praise of his employer by working 12-hour shifts basically 30 days a month recently sparked controversy in his home country.

On February 18, pictures of a framed billboard depicting the “model employee” of a company in Zhengzhou, Henan went viral on Chinese social media, sparking a heated debate. The honorary billboard praises the man, one XueLintao, for working 12-hour days, basically 30 days a month, influencing both new and old employees through his actions, improving the company’s daily production, saving his employer money in labor costs and improving equipment utilization. But most netizens didn’t see Xue as an example, but rather as a “traitor” and as an “accomplice in overtime hell”.

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A Georgia woman allegedly faked several pregnancies in order to benefit from paid maternity leave, but co-workers became suspicious when they saw her fake baby bump detach from her body.

In October of 2020, Robin Folsom, who worked as Director of External Affairs at Georgia Vocational Rehabilitation Agency, told her bosses that she was expecting a baby and arranged to take maternity leave. She reportedly had a yearly salary of $100,000 and was entitled to $15,000 in paid leave. However, during her alleged pregnancy, one of her co-workers noticed a bizarre incident in which Folsom’s baby bump seemed to “come away” from her body, which led them to believe that she was wearing a fake pregnancy stomach.

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A Chinese man claims he was kidnapped by a criminal gang whose members used him like a “blood slave,” routinely draining his blood and selling it on the black market.

We’ve heard of people being kidnapped and having their organs removed, but one 31-year-old man from Beijing claims his kidnappers were more interested in his blood. The man, whose identity has not been revealed, to protect his privacy, used to work as a security guard in Beijing and Shenzhen, but decided to try his luck as a nightclub bouncer after finding an online job advert. The pay was a lot better, so he decided to travel to the southwestern region of Guangxi for an interview, not knowing that the job offer was actually a trap.

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Three African men were recently arrested in Algeria for allegedly disguising themselves as Arab women in order to reach the wealthy country of Dubai.

In a scene reminiscent of the cult comedy film “White Chicks”, three black with half their faces covered in thick makeup foundation can be seen posing for mug shots in Algeria. The sad-looking trio were reportedly apprehended in Algeria, after officials noticed that they were not who they claimed to be – Arab women wearing traditional clothing, including niqab face covers. They had gone through the trouble of covering the exposed parts of their faces with a thick layer of foundation and used black eyeliner to increase their chances of passing off as women, but it wasn’t enough.

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Thousands of Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini cars have been abandoned on a cargo ship after it caught fire on its way from Germany to the United States.

The Felicity Ace was traveling from Emden in Germany when the crew announced a fire on board, last Wednesday. The 22-member crew has since been evacuated, but the ship and its precious cargo continue to burn, despite firefighters’ best efforts to contain and hopefully put it out. The cargo ship was carrying an estimated 4,000 vehicles including Porsches, Audis and 189 Bentleys, some of which were equipped with lithium batteries. It has been speculated that one of these batteries could have sparked the blaze, and while has yet to be confirmed, firefighters say that the lithium batteries are now definitely “keeping the fire alive”.

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A Rhode Island has been suffering from an extremely rare fungus-caused condition that literally causes black mold to grow in his brain.

Tyson Bottenus, a 35-year-old man from Rhode Island is only one of only 120 documented cases of infections with Cladophialophora bantiana, an exotic fungus known as “black mold”, since 1911. In his case, the fungus made its home in the brain, causing all sorts of issues that Bottenus has been dealing with ever since symptoms began, about four years ago. Tyson is lucky to be alive, as black mold kills over 70% of its hosts, and he is doing everything possible to fight and hopefully get it out of his brain, but it’s a tough battle, one that even modern medicine is struggling with.

Tyson’s ordeal began 4 years ago, when he and his fiancée, Liza, decided to celebrate their engagement by going cycling together in Costa Rica. Everything was well and good until the third day of their vacation when Tyson accidentally fell off his bike and scraped his left elbow. It wasn’t the most serious injury, so he just rinsed and bandaged the wound as best as he could, and had it looked at by a nurse early the next morning.

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A viral video showing a flock of hundreds of yellow-headed blackbirds flying straight into the pavement in the Mexican town of Cuauhtémoc has left a lot of people scratching their heads about the cause.

Footage from a security camera shows a large flock of yellow-headed blackbirds descending upon on a house before brutally crashing into the asphalt. Although most of the birds manage to take to the skies after the bizarre crash, many can be seen scattered on the street, barely moving. Subsequent videos showing dozens of bird carcasses confirm that the unusual descent had been fatal for some of the birds.

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A Swiss man has found himself at the core of a modern mystery after discovering that he had been by a bullet that seemingly came out of nowhere.

Last Thursday, the unnamed 38-year-old man was walking with his two children and an acquaintance in Frauenfeld, a town around 45 kilometers northeast of Zurich, when he felt a sharp pain in his lower body. Unable to explain the pain, the man headed to the emergency room of the local hospital, where doctors informed him that he had been shot. They removed the projectile and treated his wound, but neither they nor the patient could explain how the bullet had entered his body.

Thurgau canton police spokesman Matthias Graf told reporters that an investigation in this bizarre case is currently underway and that there are currently no leads. Neither the shot man, the people he was with at the time of the incident, nor anyone else in the area heard any gunshot or saw someone with a firearm. It’s like the bullet came out of nowhere.

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A Catholic priest who has performed thousands of baptisms over the last two decades recently resigned after learning that they are all invalid, because of a simple mistake.

Father Andres Arango recently resigned as a priest from St. Gregory’s Catholic Parish in Phoenix, Arizona, after a 25-year career. He stood accused of botching thousands of baptisms while serving as a priest in California, Brazil, and Arizona, and he was recently found guilty. Interestingly, it all came down to a simple wording issue, which apparently mattered a lot more than Aango or anyone outside the Catholic CHurch ever imagined.

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A so-called faith healer in Pakistan convinced a pregnant woman that she would give birth to a baby boy if she had a metal nail hammered into her skull.

Doctors at the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar were shocked when they examined the head of a pregnant woman who claimed to have a two-inch-long nail stuck in her skull. An X-ray confirmed the woman’s claim, but it was her story that really left hospital staff speechless. The woman explained that the nail in her head had been recommended by a faith healer who promised her that it would guarantee that she gives birth to her first son, rather than her fourth daughter.

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It’s no secret that non-alcoholic beer tastes much worse than regular lager, but scientists in Denmark now claim to have developed a way of making it taste just as satisfying.

When making alcohol-free beer, either by heating it up or by minimizing fermentation, what is lost is the complex aroma of the hops. However, after decades of having to put with the flat and watery taste of non-alcoholic beer, we can now enjoy the satisfying taste of the real thing, minus the alcohol. Researchers led by Sotirios Kampranis, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, engineered a species of yeast called Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce a group of molecules called monoterpenoids, which are found in hops.

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A 39-year-old Vietnamese man recently went viral because of his obsession with gold, wearing kilograms of jewelry around his neck and on his hands, and driving gold-plated cars and motorcycles.

Tran Duc Loi, an entrepreneur from Vietnam’s An Giang province has been getting a lot of attention in his home country because of his fascination with the world’s most popular precious metal. For the last three years, Tran, who makes a living selling South American lizards as luxury pets, has been surrounding himself with gold, as a way of boosting his luck and prosperity. He believes gold attracts good fortune in business, so he makes sure to wear as much of it as possible whenever he goes out.

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For over half a year now, border control points in Longzhou County, along China’s border with Vietnam have been using geese as part of their arsenal of detecting and apprehending illegal immigrants.

As part of China’s strategy to prevent the spread of Covid-19, the country has taken a very hard stance on illegal immigration, with border patrols and control points playing a big part role. However, China’s a big place with a long border, so keeping people out isn’t the easiest thing to do. In Longzhou, a county in Guanxi Province, the border with Vietnam stretches for 184 kilometers on land and 22 kilometers on waters, with many trails and paths for patrols to keep an eye on. Luckily, since last summer, they have had a new secret weapon in their arsenal – geese.

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Hikmet Kaya, a retired forest technician from Turkey, is being praised as the main driving force behind an impressive ecological achievement – turning a barren hill in Sinop city into a green oasis of million trees.

During his 24-year tenure as Head of Afforestation at Boyabat Forestry Operations Department in Sinop’s Boyabat district, Hikmet Kaya focused on afforestation, planting over 25 million saplings on a barren hill overlooking Sinop and turning it into a green oasis. He began work in 1978, and focused on afforestation in the steppe areas of Boyabat, relying both on specialized teams and the local community to transform inhospitable land into a green oasis for both humans and animals. Even though he retired in 2002, Hikmet Kaya’s project lived on, and today he is regarded as somewhat of a local hero.

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Michael Amoia, a music producer and entrepreneur from New York, recently set a new world record for the most insects tattooed on his body, a whopping 864.

But just because he has a giant centipede covering most of his front torso, and a menacing scorpion inked on the right side of his face does not mean that Michael Amoia likes insects. In fact, the opposite is true, as the Queens native says he hates bugs and is afraid of them. They represented one of the fears he had as a child, and having them permanently inked on his body was his way of dealing with and embracing that fear. It all started with one tattoo when he was 21-years-old, and it just snowballed from there. Today he has twice as many insect tattoos as the previous holder of the Guinness record for most insects tattooed on a human body.

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