At age 16, Pavel Stepchenko joined the school of Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs as a student, and by age 23, he had already retired, becoming the country;s youngest pensioner. Retirement is traditionally associated with old age, and while today’s youth dream of retiring young to focus on living their best lives, that usually means retiring by age 40 or so. Well, one Russian youth managed to do something most of us can only dream of – retire with a full pension in his early 20s. Pavel Stepchenko’s story is an unusual one. He enrolled in the educational institution of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs at age 16 and after five years of diligent studies, he began working in the territorial division of the internal affairs system. The young man from Donetsk only worked there for two years, because at age 23, he officially retired, taking full advantage of a special provision stating that for each month of service during a period of martial law, a person received three months of credited length of service. 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 »

Chinese people desperate to get rich by any means necessary are putting their faith in bags of “bank soil” sold online as wealth-bringing talismans. Bank robberies usually involve cold harsh cash or gold ingots, but several Chinese banks have recently become the target of an unusual type of theft, that of soil from potted plants or from around the buildings housing them. Several online shops in the Asian country are selling small bags of ‘bank’ soil as get-rich-quick talismans that can cost as much as 888 yuan ($120), and demand for the unusual products is steadily increasing. Some sellers boast a “999.999 percent success rate in generating wealth,” while others record the harvesting process to guarantee the authenticity of their bank soil. 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 Chinese man reportedly needed emergency surgery after rupturing his facial artery by incessantly picking his nose. The man’s bizarre case was shared online by his wife in the form of a short clip documenting his experience in the hope that it may dissuade other avid nose-pickers from indulging in their favorite pastime too much. Hailing from Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province, the unnamed man had reportedly always loved picking his hose. Whether he was standing, sitting down, or lying in bed, he would always be exploring his nostrils with a finger. Only recently, his obsession with nose-picking came back to bite him. One day, while picking his nose as usual, the man triggered a serious nosebleed that simply couldn’t be stopped, despite his and his wife’s best efforts. Read More »

The HR manager of a Shanghai technology company was imprisoned for defrauding his company of millions of dollars by “hiring” dozens of fake employees and collecting their salaries. The People’s Procuratorate of Minhang District, Shanghai recently released a “White Paper on the Prosecution of Duty-Related Crimes by Company and Enterprise Personnel in Minhang District” featuring a list of duty-related crime cases involving enterprise personnel handled in 2024, one of which attracted the attention of newspapers all over the country. Back in 2022, employees in the finance department of an unnamed Shanghai technology company discovered something strange: Xiao Sun, an employee who had been with the company for half a year and had perfect attendance throughout that whole period, seemed to be a complete mystery to everyone. No one had ever seen them in person or knew anything about them for that matter. The investigation that followed uncovered a massive fraud orchestrated by a single HR manager. Read More »

A textile worker in Brazil’s Goias state stands accused of poisoning a co-worker’s water bottle after quarreling with them over what the woman considered an unfair promotion. The incident occurred last month at a textile factory in Abadia de Goias, a town in the Goiânia Metropolitan Region. Police claim that the 38-year-old suspect was caught by CCTV cameras tampering with another worker’s drink container before the latter drank from it and felt a burning sensation in her throat. Subsequent analysis of the container found a high concentration of a potent solvent in the water, which strongly suggests that the perpetrator wanted to poison their co-worker. Witnesses testified that the two women used to be friends, but their relationship went sour after the victim received a promotion that didn’t sit too well with the prime suspect in the poisoning case. They fought all the time and they had allegedly had an argument prior to the solvent poisoning. Read More »

A Russian man has allegedly been trying to force his neighbors into selling their share of a communal apartment by playing the national anthem and other patriotic songs from early morning until late at night. Several tenants and apartment owners in an apartment building in Volgograd, Russia, have been complaining of insufferable loud music playing on repeat in a communal apartment there, but so far, no one has been able to do anything about it. It all started on February 5, when Maxim (pseudonym), the owner of a room in a communal apartment in building No. 2A on Volgograd’s Engels Boulevard, installed a pair of powerful speakers and started playing the Russian national anthem, other patriotic songs like “I Am Russian”, and the sound of dogs barking. The entire building has been subjected to this musical torture every day since, and despite contacting the police, no one has been able to stop it. Read More »

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 »

Russian media outlets have been hailing a Russian soldier as a hero for allegedly continuing to fight in the Kursk region for a week after getting shot in the head. The unnamed man, reportedly a member of the 155th Marine Brigade of Russia’s Pacific Fleet, was fighting Ukrainian troops in Kursk when he got shot. At the time, his helmet was blown off of his head, but he thought the bullet must have ricocheted from it. He developed a hematoma above his right eye which eventually caused his eye to swallow shut, but he just went about his business, thinking the swelling would heal on its own. It was only after suffering another shrapnel-related injury that the man ended up in the hospital and learned that the bullet that had knocked his helmet off had actually pierced his skull and was lodged in his brain. Read More »

What began as a broken water pipe in Havana’s El Cerro neighborhood is now a small banana plantation, after local authorities forgot to fix the pothole. Cuba’s infrastructure crisis is a well-known fact, with around 70% of the country’s roads deemed in “regular” or “poor” condition, but some streets are in such a bad state that they can hardly be considered functional. For example, a street in the El Cerro district of Havana, has become famous for having a veritable banana plantation square in the middle of it. The large pothole housing this urban oddity began as a broken water pipe that was eventually fixed by the local authorities three years ago. The asphalt, however, was never replaced, and at one point, plants began taking root in the massive pothole. One of these plants was a banana tree which gradually turned into a small plantation that residents tend to religiously. Read More »

Doctors in Henan, China, were shocked by the case of a middle-aged man who suffered a pneumothorax after mild physical exercise – 20 pushups and a few minutes of skipping rope. The unnamed man told physicians that he had decided to get in shape as part of a New Year’s resolution, but things didn’t really play out like he imagined. Last month, he started doing pushups and skipping rope as a way of losing weight, but he only managed to do two sets of pushups and skip ropes for a few minutes when he started feeling bad. He stopped and went about his day, but when he woke up the next day, he started experiencing severe chest pain and difficulty breathing, especially after minimal physical effort, like climbing stairs. At one point, the pain got so bad that he went to the hospital where doctors diagnosed him with pneumothorax. Read More »

A young Chinese doctor has gone viral for his rapid weight loss, shedding 25 kilograms (55 pounds) in just 42 days and then entering and winning a professional bodybuilding contest. At the end of 2024, Wu Tian Gen, a 31-year-old surgeon at Hubei’s Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, weighed 97.5 kg (215 lbs), the heaviest he had ever been, but by the end of January 2025, the 1.82m tall doctor had shed over 42 kilograms and was in such an amazing physical condition that he won a bodybuilding competition. How did he do it? Well, he didn’t share every detail, but it was a combination of personal ambition, physical training, and a carefully thought-out diet. Even so, losing so much weight in 42 days is nothing short of impressive. Read More »

Isamu Tomioka met his wife, Midori, when he was still in school. She was the mother of one of his classmates and 21 years his senior, but he didn’t let that stop him from marrying her. Isamu and Midori’s unusual love story went viral in Japan after the Shizuoka couple spoke about their relationship on a popular television show. The 32-year-old man said that he first saw Midori at a parent-teacher at his school when he was a minor. She was the mother of one of his classmates, and he recalls thinking that the woman was very beautiful. When they met again, 20 years later, he was attracted by the woman’s mature and dignified look and contacted his ex-classmate in order to get close to her. Midori rejected his advances at first, thinking that the significant age difference made them incompatible, but she was eventually overwhelmed by his persistence and grew to like him too. Read More »

A Chinese woman subjected her fiancee to simulated childbirth pain for three hours as a sick pre-marriage test that caused the man to develop intestine necrosis and undergo emergency surgery. It’s not uncommon for people to test their partners in various ways to see if they are right for each other, but some people take it a bit to far. Case in point, one young woman from Henan Province, China, who reportedly subjected her fiancee to three hours of electric shocks to the stomach as a twisted way of simulating the pain of childbirth. It’s unclear why the man accepted the test, or of he had any idea what he was getting into, but he clearly didn’t expect to develop intestine necrosis and have to get emergency surgery because of it. The horrific experience convinced him to not only break off the engagement but also sue the woman he was going tot marry for damages. Read More »