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A UK man is trying to take tech giant Apple to court for £5 million ($6.3 million), accusing the company of revealing his private messages with other women to his wife by synchronizing his iPhone with the family iMac.
In the last few years of his marriage, Richard (not the man’s real name) had been soliciting the services of sex workers whom he had messaged using his personal iPhone. He had always been very careful to delete the messages from his phone but claimed not to have known that Apple makes it possible to share messages via its various platforms (iPhone, iPad, or iMac) when logging into the same account. One day, when his wife logged into the same family account on the iMac, she discovered years of spicy messages between Richard and multiple other women, who turned out to be sex workers. She ended up divorcing him and walking away with over $6.3 million. Richard blames Apple for everything and he wants the American company to compensate him.
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A military buff in China alerted authorities after discovering that the discarded books he had bought from a recycling station for just one dollar were classified military documents.
China’s Ministry of State Security recently took to social media to praise the actions of a military enthusiast surnamed Zhang who had alerted authorities after buying some military books from a recycling station without knowing that they actually contained confidential military secrets. Realizing the seriousness of the situation, Zhang called a hotline to report the incident and then handed over the documents to the appropriate authorities. The Ministry praised his responsible reaction, acknowledging that things could have been very different had the military secrets ended up in the hands of bad actors. But how do such secrets end up on the open market, especially in a strict country like China?
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A French woman is taking telecom giant Orange to court for “moral harassment and discrimination at work,” accusing the company of paying her for 20 years without giving her any tasks.
Laurence Van Wassenhove was recruited as a civil servant by France Telecom in 1993 before the company was taken over by Orange. Her original employer knew that she was hemiplegic – partial paralysis of the face and limbs – from birth and suffered from epilepsy, and offered her a position adapted to her medical conditions. She worked as a secretary and in the HR department until 2002 when she asked to be transferred to another region of France. Her request was approved, but her new workplace was not adapted to her needs, and an occupational medicine report confirmed that the position was not suited for her. Despite this, Orange allegedly failed to make any adjustments to her job, preferring to pay her full salary for the next 20 years, without giving her anything to do.
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Lina, a young Colombian woman involved in a polyamory relationship with seven pensioners, has been accused of taking advantage of the elderly men for financial gains.
Hailing from the city of Barranquilla, Lina has become the talk of an entire country after her unusual story went viral online. After a series of disappointing romantic relationships with men her own age, the young woman realized that she could achieve emotional and financial stability a lot easier if she targeted pensioners instead. Reflecting after yet another failed relationship, Lina remembered that her neighbor’s elderly husband always flirted with her, and she understood that she was a lot more desirable to pensioners because they would give anything to be with a woman her age. So she started spending time in parks and other places where lonely old men usually hang out, and she is now in a polyamorous relationship with seven pensioners who all support her financially.
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For the past few years, police in the Finnish city of Espoo have been employing an intriguing tactic to keep youths from partying on a local beach – blasting classical music from loudspeakers.
There is no scientific evidence that young people have an aversion to classical music, but police in Espoo swear that it works, and the fact that they have been using this tactic for the last six years is a testament to that. Apparently, at the end of the school, year, the beach in Espoo’s Haukilahti neighborhood becomes a popular gathering place for youths eager to party until the late hours of the night. Local authorities had tried multiple other methods to disperse youths, but nothing worked quite as well as classical music masterpieces like Strauss’ The Blue Danube, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Schubert’s Ave Maria. So, starting in early June, police blast classical music from a couple of loudspeakers on the beach to keep youths from gathering there after sunset.
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A Colorado man can consider himself extremely lucky to be alive after surviving a gunshot thanks to the silver necklace around his neck.
Last week, the Commerce City Police Department in Colorado posted photos of a bloodied metal necklace with a small piece of metal lodged in its links on its Facebook page. Apparently, it belonged to a local man who had been involved in a heated argument with another person and had been shot at. According to the viral post, the bullet would have pierced the victim’s neck if not for the silver chain around his neck, which turned what would have likely been a fatal gunshot wound into a minor puncture wound.
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An Algerian man was recently convicted for indecent behavior and sentenced to two months behind bars for hugging random people on the street to spread peace and positivity.
Mohamed Ramzi, a 30-something vlogger from Algeria, sparked outrage in his home country last summer by posting a TikTok video inspired by a popular European vlogger who became famous for social experiments like hugging random people on the street. Only that kind of thing is apparently frowned upon in Algeria, as the footage sparked outrage and attracted condemnation from the general public, and not even Mohamed’s apology could stop the imminent charges against him. Last year, a court found him not guilty on all charges, but his case was then referred to the Algerian Judicial Council after prosecutors appealed the decision, and this time he was found guilty.
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There is a bizarre craze sweeping China’s primary and secondary schools. Students are adding all sorts of smelly ingredients to plastic bottles to create the stinkiest recipes possible.
Chinese media recently reported multiple incidents involving bottles of foul-smelling water created by young school students using online recipes. Apparently, they were related to a strange craze where students add all sorts of disgusting ingredients to a plastic bottle of water and let the mix ferment to create the stinkiest concoction possible. They write the recipe on the bottle, and if stinky enough, share it online so that other can take the experiment even further. It has been dubbed the “stink-raising water” craze and education authorities are scrambling to prevent it from becoming even more popular, as experts believe it puts public health at risk.
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After the owner of a Russian supermarket chain announced that he would be paying 1 million rubles to each person proven to have gotten food poisoning from the store’s products, many decided to take him up on his offer.
Earlier this month, Yekaterinburg-based supermarket chain Zhiznmart came under fire for allegedly selling compromised food products that had landed at least 18 people in the hospital with food poisoning. As a result, several suppliers refused to work with Zhiznmart anymore for fear of getting audited by Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s federal agency in charge of consumer wellbeing and protection. Left with empty shells and a sullied reputation, Zhiznmart founder made a bold public statement, promising to compensate each person proven to have been poisoned by his products with 1 million rubles ($11,000). His promise went viral, and before long, people were trying to get food poisoning at Zhiznmart and get compensated.
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The organizers of a recent festival at a university in South Chungcheong Province, South Korea, were forced to apologize after the host decided to give away the water bottles used by the members of an idol group as prizes.
On May 22, the popular girl group Oh My Girl performed at a university festival in Asan, South Chungcheong Province. However, it was what occurred on stage after the group’s performance that made news headlines all around the country in the days that followed. On May 26, several videos were posted on South Korean social media showing the host of the event inviting male fans of Oh My Girl on stage and then collecting the used water bottles left behind by the members of the group. Fans were asked to participate in a talent show for the chance to win an unusual prize – the used water bottle of the Oh My Girl member of their choice.
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CCTV cameras in Mexico recently recorded one of the strangest street fights in history involving a band of mariachi and a fire-breathing performer quarreling over busking territory.
They say life is stranger than fiction and a short video clip captured by surveillance cameras in the Mexican city of Morelia proves it! Not even the brilliant Quentin Tarantino could have come up with the idea of a fiery street fight between a group of guitar-armed mariachi and a street-performing fire-breather in broad daylight, but that’s exactly what occurred last week, at a busy intersection in the Mexican capital. The viral video shows a man being chased by a mariachi and then put in a headlock until more mariachi arrives. They punch and kick the man, but then he turns the tables on them, as he starts blowing plumes of flames at them, literally setting them ablaze. Not the kind of thing you see every day, that’s for sure!
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A Moscow woman recently got the shock of her life when she entered her bathroom and saw a full-grown white Boa constrictor snake hanging out on her toilet bowl.
Exotic snakes crawling up from toilets may not be a worthy news topic in countries like Australia or Brazil, where the slithering reptiles are virtually a part of everyday life, but as a European living in a bustling city, it’s not the kind of thing you ever expect to see. However, one Moscow resident almost had a heart attack when she entered her bathroom and found an albino boa constrictor coming out of her toilet bowl. The shocked woman slammed the bathroom door shut and immediately called emergency service. It turned out that the snake was a fellow resident of the apartment building who had simply gone out to explore its drain pipe system.
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An Algerian man who had disappeared from his home one morning in 1998 was recently found alive in his neighbor’s cellar, just 200 meters from the house he had grown up in.
Omar bin Omran was only 17 years old when he disappeared from his home in Djelfa, Algeria, in 1998. It was during the Algerian Civil War, a time of great unrest in the African country, and many of his family and friends feared that he had ended up among the estimated 200,000 people killed, or the 20,000 kidnapped, during the conflict. Authorities stopped looking for him after a while, and his mother remained the only one who never gave up hope. Unfortunately, she died in 2013, and Omar bin Omran became yet another case that would likely never be solved. Only earlier this week, the brother of one of Omar’s neighbors took to social media to suggest that his sibling was involved in the teen’s kidnapping.
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A football referee has been suspended for life for allegedly celebrating with a club he helped win by eliminating 3 players from the opposing side and granting 15 minutes of extra time, enough for the winners to score a necessary goal.
Earlier this month, Dutch football clubs St. George and SV De Valken met in a final match of the country’s fourth division to decide which of the two teams would be promoted to the third division. It may not seem like very high stakes, but they take football very seriously in the Netherlands and passions ride high, so this particular match was very important to both clubs. It was supposed to be a close game between the two most dominant team in the division, but the match played out very differently than expected because of the one person responsible of fair play, the referee. Jan Smit stands accused of not only rigging the game in one team’s favor, but also celebrating with its members after the win.
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A Chinese man wanted for murder managed to avoid police detection for over 20 years by pretending to be a deaf and mute scavenger in the mountains of Hubei Province.
On the evening of May 22, 2004, a young and quick-tempered man named Xiao got into a heated argument with a neighbor in his home village of Oumio Daying, in Xianyang’s Xiangcheng District. At one point, Xiao allegedly picked up a shovel and hit his neighbor over the head with it, killing him on the spot. That night, knowing that he risked spending the rest of his life behind bars or worse, getting the death penalty, Xiao decided to abandon his wife and 11-year-old child to go on the run. He ran into the mountains of Anxi County, in Fujian Province, where he became a scavenger selling scraps to survive. To make sure he never gave anything away about his past life, Xiao pretended to be deaf and mute for the next 20 years, only smiling at people and communicating through gestures.
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