During a live-streamed event last week, a controversial Tennessee pastor burned tens of fantasy books, including Harry Potter and Twilight, in an alleged attempt to fight “demonic influences”.

Pastor Greg Locke of the Global Vision Bible Church in Mt. Juliet, near Nashville, began his sermon last Wednesday by telling his congregation that he had received a missive from God to skip Holy Communion and instead organize a good ol’ fashioned book burning. The event, which was live-streamed on Facebook, was organized to denounce “witchcraft,” and involved dozens of copies of books like Harry Potter and Twilight, as well as other “dangerous” objects that Locke claimed symbolized witchcraft.

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A wanted prison escapee dubbed the “Galician Rambo” eluded capture by hiding in the forests of Galicia since March of 2021.

Alfredo Sánchez Chacón, a Spanish ex-military and survival expert, was sentenced to hard time in prison for shooting and killing a 24-year-old man in 1996. Back then, authorities spent months combing the forests of Galicia and hunting him down, but they eventually captured the wanted man. Then, during the murder trial, Sánchez Chacón escaped Vigo prison by using a brawl between other prisoners to climb down from the prison building using a bedsheet and then getting over the walls. It wasn’t until 2002 that he was once again apprehended. He was sentenced to 17 years for murder, as well as additional time for his prison escape and other minor crimes. The survival expert was still serving his sentence when he disappeared in March of last year…

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A new type of South Korean face mask that only covers the wearer’s nose has been getting a lot of attention from the western press lately.

Called ‘kosk” –  a combination of ‘ko’, the Korean word for nose, and ‘mask’ – the unusual face mask sold by South Korean company Atman consists of two parts, one of which can be removed to leave the wearer’s mouth exposed. They are apparently designed to provide some level of protection against Covid while eating, but can also be worn in nose-only mode at any time. Kosk is just one of the nose-only face masks available in South Korea these days, and the unusual trend has sparked some controversy in the western world, with many declaring the facial accessories utterly useless.

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Thanks to a new law, a Swiss man was able to change to officially change his gender so he could retire and receive his pension a year earlier.

On January 1st, 2022, a new law came into effect in Switzerland, one that allows any Swiss resident with the “intimate conviction” that they do not belong to the sex they are registered as in the civil status register to change their gender as well as their first name, for just 75 francs ($81.50). Technically, there are supposed to be regulations preventing individuals from taking advantage of the new rules for nefarious purposes, but in reality, civil servants have “no obligation to verify the intimate conviction of the persons concerned,” and usually assume that they are acting in good faith. Sadly, that’s not always the case…

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Chinese real-estate giant Vanke Group recently sparked controversy after naming its advanced AI-powered debt collector its employee of the year for 2021.

Looking at a picture of Cui Xiaopan, Vanke Group’s employee of 2021, you’d think she was a woman in her 20s with a very determined look on her face, but in reality, she isn’t even human. The AI-generated photo that the Chinese company uses to depict its star debt collector is just an attempt of attaching an eye-pleasing face to what is otherwise a cold-and calculated artificial intelligence. However, when it comes to performance, the AI debt-collector managed to surpass her human colleagues by quite a large margin, registering a 91.44% success rate in collecting overdue payments.

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A young Chinese man who had been experiencing severe headaches lately was shocked to learn that he had been living with a bullet in the left side of his skull for about two decades.

Xiao Chen (pseudonym), a 28-year-old man from Shenzen, had been suffering from random headaches for as long as he could remember, only lately they had been getting more frequent and more severe. At first, Chen thought that the pain was caused by his lack of sufficient sleep on weekdays, but sleeping wasn’t the answer, especially since the headaches kept him up at night. Finally, things got so bad that he decided to go to the hospital, where doctors discovered a rather bizarre cause of the pain.

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Residents of several villages in Russia’s Magadan region have recently reported black snow caused by the soot produced by an outdated, coal-powered water-heating plant.

In Omsukchan and neighboring Seimchan, two villages in the Siberian far east, snow doesn’t always look the way you’d expect. In fact, sometimes it’s quite the opposite. Instead of an immaculate white covering everything as far as the eye can see, locals are treated to a nightmarish view of black, soot-covered snow that the kids sometimes play in. Photos and videos of this disturbing scenery have been doing the rounds online every winter for years, but locals say that despite the temporary outrage they spark online, nothing ever changes.

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Corvid Cleaning, a Swedish startup specializing in training crows to pick up litter in exchange for food, claims that its program could save communities a fortune in cleaning costs.

According to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation, over a billion cigarette butts are left on Sweden’s streets every year which represents about 62 percent of all litter. Teaching humans not to throw cigarette butts on the street has so far proven impossible, but a Swedish startup claims it can teach crows to pick up after us and save local communities millions of krone in cleaning fees every year. Corvid Cleaning teaches wild crows to do our dirty work through a step-by-step learning process, that involves rewarding the birds with food for every cigarette butt they collect.

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People on the lookout for affordable housing in the Swiss city of Zurich can now opt for a two-person tent on an open balcony offering “a view of the starry evening sky” for just 500 Swiss francs ($540) a month.

Finding a cheap place to rent in Zurich is almost impossible these days, because of the city’s competitive property market, so one resourceful tenant decided to subsidize her own monthly rent by subletting the balcony of her apartment on the open market. The offer includes a waterproof tent complete with an insulating mat, mattress and pillows, as well as access to the apartment’s kitchen, living room and bathroom. Believe it or not, the woman, known only as Sandra, has already had a good response to the ad she posted earlier this month.

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Liang Xiaoqing is China’s most popular “auntie” fashion model, a niche segment aimed at marketing fashion products to middle-aged and elderly women.

Although Liang Xiaoning is only 29-years-old, you’d probably think she was well in her 40s, maybe even her 50s, if you looked at any of her professional modeling photos. She has been working as an “auntie” model since she was 18, trying her best to look distinguished and elegant, but also a lot older than her real age. Her tall figure and round, pleasant face apparently make her the perfect auntie model, and over the years she has perfected the art of posing and displaying the emotions that appeal most to her target audience.

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A team of Japanese high-school students recently won a regional innovation competition with a high-tech device that divides cake and pizza into equal portions every single time.

It’s a problem as old as the world – cutting a round treat into more than two equal parts. You either end up with portions that are not exactly the same size, or you’re left with a smaller extra slice that everyone has their eye on. Well, thanks to the ingenuity of a group of Japanese students from Kundong High School in Japan’s Oita Prefecture, dividing a cake or a pizza into perfectly equal portions need no longer be an issue. They have created a high-tech device that calculates the angle at which the tasty treat needs to be cut, depending on the number of necessary slices.

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Bubbles are fragile structures that only last a few seconds before popping, but a team of scientists has apparently found a way to keep bubbles from bursting for over a year.

Soap bubbles are subject to a series of processes that cause them to pop in a matter of seconds, minutes at best. They lose liquid through evaporation or gravitational drainage, and the gas trapped inside also diffuses through the membrane of soap and water back into the environment. However, a team of scientists at the University of Lille, in France, have been working on ways to address the fragility and ephemerality of bubbles, and they’ve apparently come up with a way of creating bubbles that maintain their shape and size for over a year.

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A Palestinian man who spent 15 years in an Israeli prison recently explained how he was able to father four kids during that time, despite not being able to be intimate with his wife.

Rafat Al-Qarawi was arrested in 2006 for terror activity during the Second Intifada against Israel and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. During that time, he allegedly fathered four children, and in a recent interview with Palestinian Media Watch, he revealed just how he managed to pull that off, despite never being intimate with his wife. Al-Qarawi claimed that he smuggled his sperm out of prison in potato chip bags which were then picked up by his wife and taken straight to an infertility clinic for insemination. His remarks raised some eyebrows in the medical community, as human sperm is known to only last a few seconds, minutes at most, outside the human body.

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A 31-year-old man from the UK works as an “expert waiter” in his spare time, spending hours in long queues on behalf of rich people too busy to do it themselves.

For the last three years, Freddie Beckitt, a historical fiction writer from Fulham, in the United Kingdom, has been supplementing his monthly revenue by working as a professional queuer, waiting in line on behalf of wealthy clients to the tune of £20 ($27) an hour. By virtue of being a Londoner, Beckitt says he has queuing “down to an art” and will easily spend hours standing in line, as long as someone is willing to pay him for it. In fact, he only wishes he could spend more time in queues, so he could turn his service into a full-time job.

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An 87-year-old Iranian man who has been living on the streets and hasn’t taken a bath in almost seven decades recently baffled scientists with his good health.

We first wrote about Amou Haji in 2014, dubbing him ‘the world’s dirtiest man‘. At the time, he was living in a small village in Southern Iran’s Fars province, surviving on roadkill and dirty water, and staying as far from bathwater as possible, thinking it would make him sick. He was 80-years-old at the time and appeared to be in good overall health, despite his questionable hygiene and living conditions. Well, apparently not much has changed since then, as a team of doctors recently conducted a series of tests that showed he was in surprisingly good health.

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