A US woman is taking legal action against a fertility clinic after an error essentially made her an unwitting surrogate, carrying and eventually another couple’s baby, and having to give up custody. The day Krystena Murray learned that she was pregnant after undergoing IVF treatment at the Coastal Fertility clinic in May 2023 was one of the happiest of her life, but that happiness soon turned to horror when she gave birth in December of that same year. Despite being white and having chosen a white sperm donor, Krystena gave birth to a black boy. She didn’t allow her family and friends to see that baby, and in January of last year, a DNA test confirmed that she and the baby were not genetically related. Murrya alerted the IVF clinic about the terrible mixup, but decided to keep the baby and even got to raise it for a few months until his biological parents filed for custody. Read More »

A Frenchman appealed to the homeless thieves who stole his credit card to buy a jackpot-winning scratch lottery ticket, offering to split the €500,000 jackpot with them. They say every misfortune can be a blessing in disguise, and that certainly seems to hold true for a Toulouse man who had his credit card stolen earlier this month and now stands to pocket over $250,000 because of it. On February 3rd, Jean David discovered that the backpack containing his wallet had been stolen from his car, but before he could contact the bank to block all his credit cards, someone used one of them to make a €52.50 ($55) purchase at a local convenience store. Upon visiting the store, the man learned that the two men who had used his credit card appeared to be homeless and attracted the cashier’s attention because they didn’t seem to know the PIN code of one of the cards they attempted to use. Jean David was also shocked to learn that one of the scratch lottery tickets the two thieves had purchased was worth €500,000 ($525,000). Read More »

An Australian high school teacher has come under fire from concerned parents for allegedly identifying as cat and acting weird in front of students. Australian media have been reporting on the bizarre case of a teacher at Marsden State High School in Logan City, Queensland, who reportedly asked students to refer to her as “Ms. Purr”, allegedly hissing at students and licking the back of her hand. Photos of the unnamed teacher show her wearing a cat-ear headband and a lanyard that reads “purr” in class, which further fueled parents’ concerns that she was behaving inappropriately in class. One parent claimed that the teacher made her daughter purr for a lollypop, while another said that the teacher growled at students if they weren’t paying attention in class. Read More »

A 55-year-old woman tragically had both her hands bitten off by a shark she was trying to photograph while on vacation in the Turks and Caicos islands. The Canadian woman was reportedly trying to photograph a 6-foot-long shark in the shallow waters at a beach in the Turks and Caicos Islands when the marine predator attacked her. Alerted by her screams, the unnamed woman’s husband rushed into the water and bravely managed to scare the shark away and bring the victim ashore, but she had already suffered severe damage to both her hands. The attack occurred on February 7 and the victim was treated at a hospital before leaving the island for better medical care. Unfortunately, doctors could do nothing to save her mangled hands, both of which needed to be amputated. Read More »

For more than a year, at the start of every month, the people of Beeston, a town in the United Kingdom, have been finding a plate of peeled bananas in exactly the same place. Between the first and second day of each month, a plate stacked with 16 to 20 peeled bananas always shows up on the corner of Abbey Road and Wensor Avenue in Beeston and residents have no idea who is behind the strange custom or its meaning. All everyone can say is that the banks have been appearing in the same spot for more than a year, and despite several signs asking whoever puts them there to stop, it doesn’t look like the mysterious fruit is going away anytime soon. Some have speculated that the plate of honey-drizzled bananas has some sort of religious meaning, while others believe that it’s just someone feeding the local wildlife, although no animal ever touches them. So far, no one has come up with a real answer to this quirky mystery. Read More »

Unable to offer attractive wages, a Japanese tech company has been trying to attract new talent by offering ingenious benefits such as free alcoholic drinks at work and hangover leaves. Since the burst of the Japanese economic bubble in the early 1990s, the Japanese economy has been stagnating along with employee salaries. Even though some corporations have announced plans to increase starting wages in hopes of attracting new talent, small and medium-sized companies simply don’t have that option because their budgets don’t allow it. In order to compete with big players, they have to think outside the box and offer appealing and sometimes unorthodox benefits to potential employees. One small technology company in Osaka recently went viral in the Land of the Rising Sun by offering its staff free alcoholic drinks during work hours and hangover leaves to clear their heads. Read More »

A family of European beavers has become an overnight sensation in the Czech Republic after taking just two days to build a series of dams that the Czech Government had been struggling to build for 7 years. A project to restore water areas in the Brdy Nature Park began in 2018, but authorities had taken years to get all the right permits and finally get construction of necessary dams underway. The cost of the dams needed to restore the wetlands of the area to their original condition was estimated at around 30 million Czech crowns, but thanks to a family of diligent beavers, the Government doesn’t have to spend a single dime anymore. Environmentalists monitoring the Brdy area recently reported that a few beavers took just two days to build functional dams in just the right areas, sparing us humans the trouble. Read More »

A viral video shot at the Mekong Underwater World in Yunnan, China, shows a young mermaid performer getting attacked by a giant aquarium fish during a live show. A popular tourist attraction in Xishuangbanna, China’s Yunnan Province, recently attracted a lot of criticism for allegedly trying to cover up an incident involving a mermaid performer and a giant fish that attacked her during a live performance. Halfway through “The Mermaid Show”, an underwater ballet performance, the young Russian woman known only as Masha gets her head swallowed by a huge sturgeon that had crept up behind her. Luckily, the 22-year-old woman maintains her composure and manages to swim to the surface and get help. Although the show was reportedly stopped for at least an hour and a half, management at Mekong Underwater World allegedly offered the dancer a meager compensation for “moral damages” and specifically asked her not to talk about the incident.

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A Utah man was arrested and accused of manslaughter after allegedly shooting his friend in the chest because the latter claimed he could dodge bullets. 23-year-old Ashton Jonathan Mann was arrested yesterday on one count of second-degree felony manslaughter and one third-degree felony charge related to firearms for a bizarre incident involving guns and marijuana use. In the early hours of Sunday, February 2nd, first responders were called to a home in Kearns, Utah, where they found an unresponsive young man with a gunshot wound to the chest lying on the floor. The victim was quickly taken to a nearby hospital, but doctors there couldn’t save his life. Mann later told police that he had shot his friend after he bragged that he could dodge a bullet. Read More »

An Indian woman stands accused of tricking her husband into selling his kidney on the black market to fund their daughter’s education only to then steal the money and run away with her lover. A woman from West Bengal allegedly spent months trying to convince her husband to sell one of his kidneys in order to fund their daughter’s higher education and arrange her marriage in the future. Although reluctant at first, the man eventually grew to believe that his sacrifice would improve the family’s financial situation and secure his child’s future. He spent a year looking for a buyer on the black market, as selling human organs has been illegal in India for over three decades, but he finally found one about three months ago. After going through the painful procedure, he entrusted the money for his kidney (1 million rupees or $11,500)to his wife, only to have her steal the money and elope with another man. Read More »

A VW Golf abandoned in the short-term parking area of a Berlin airport for a whole year has made international news headlines after racking up a whopping 201,480 euros ($209,124) in parking fees. Airport parking fees are notoriously high, and Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport is no exception. The first ten minutes in the facility’s short-term parking area is free, after which it costs $11 for 30 minutes, $23 per hour, and $552 per day to park your car there, a significant chunk of change for any motorist. Now imagine parking a car there for a whole year. Unless you’re talking about an ultra-expensive luxury vehicle, you’d probably be better off just leaving the vehicle there than paying the ludicrous parking fees. Which is probably what the owner of a gray Volkswagen Golf told himself after leaving the car parked there since January of last year. Read More »

A Malaysian man has sparked controversy on social media by announcing an ingenious service where he rents himself out as a “villain” that harrases clients’ partners, allowing the latter to pose as heroes by confronting him. Earlier this month, 28-year-old Shazali Sulaiman took Malaysian social media by storm by announcing a “villain for hire” service that would allow clients to show off their masculinity and make a big impression on their partners or romantic crushes. After being told that his unkept long hair and biker clothing make him look like a gang member, Sulaiman was inspired to start a service that relied on his physical appearance to make a profit. For a fee, clients can set up a time and place where he would show up to pick on their partner, thus giving them a chance to intervene and pose as a hero or a knight in shining armor. Read More »

A female Chinese influencer has been urging men to wear Adam’s Apple covers to highlight gender inequality and promote women’s rights. Zhu Miaolin, better known as Ah Miao on Chinese social media, recently sparked a bizarre craze in her home country, urging her male friends to wear Adam’s Apple covers to protect what she describes a “sensitive area” of the male body, in the same way that women wear bras to conceal their breasts. Proposed as a unique way to empower women and shine a light on gender inequality in China, Ah Miao’s initiative went viral and spurred the production and sale of Adam’s Apple covers. Read More »

A Chinese man who refused the Government’s generous offer to buy his property for the construction of a new motorway now finds himself living in the middle of said motorway. A few years ago when Chinese authorities knocked on his door in Jinxi, a town southwest of Shanghai, offering to buy his two-storey house for a fair bit of money and three other properties, Huang Ping decided to play hard-to-get in hopes of getting an even better deal. Unfortunately, his bet didn’t pay off, as the Government simply decided to build around his property instead of giving in to his absurd demands. In the end, all the other property owners in the area sold their land to the Government, leaving Huang isolated in the middle of a soon-to-be-inaugurated highway. Read More »

A 10-year-old boy reprimanded by his father for not completing his homework took revenge on his parent by calling the police and telling them that his father was hiding forbidden drugs. The bizarre incident took place earlier this month in China’s Yongning County. After being severely scolded by his father for not completing his homework on time, a 10-year-old boy stormed out of the house and went straight to a nearby store and asked if he could use the phone. The fifth grader dialed 110, China’s emergency number, and asked to speak to the police, claiming that he had proof his father was concealing poppy shells, considered an illegal drug, at home. Then he waited calmly for the police to arrive and let them home so they could conduct a search and confirm his story. Read More »