World’s Strangest

What’s better than writing a letter to Santa? Well, obviously, the answer is talking to him on the phone, then getting a gift, then having snow magically appear from nowhere with the press of a button as a choir of children sing and cheer for you. And that’s exactly what happens when children dial up [...]

What we’ve got here is failure to lose weight. That was something that Rafael Valadão should have done before boring a hole through the wall of a prison in Ceres, Brazil. That or dig a bigger hole. Rafael Valadão, the well-built tattooed convict, tried to follow one of his smaller fellow prisoners who had already made a [...]

In honor of the founding of the Red Cross on October 29, 1863, here’s a closer look at the organization, how it works, and its greatest triumphs. How It Works There is no international Red Cross. Instead, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) oversees and approves national Red Cross organizations, ensuring those local organizations always [...]

Continuing his use of maps, Fernando Vicente created a series of images celebrating the literatures of Latin America. It’s as much decorative as it is informative as pages explode out of Cuba, ink pours out of Chile and a writer’s eye peers out of Brazil. View them all at the link. Link -via Ian Brooks

You know what a love hotel is: heart-shaped beds, dimmed lighting, mood music. Now the same accomodations will be available for your pup, assuming you live in Brazil.  Fabiano Lourdes and his sister Daniela plan this week to inaugurate “Animalle Mundo Pet,” an eight-storey building with an entire floor devoted to dog tryst in the southeastern [...]

Photo: Shutterstock In the midst of the discussion over marriage equality these days, let us ask this question: Should three people be allowed to marry each other? After all, they’re all grown ups and what business does society have in regulating what they do in private? That’s the controversy [...]

Photo: Arthur Anker/Flickr Is that mothra as a baby? Zoologist Arthur Anker of Brazil’s Federal University snapped this fantastic photo of a Venezuelan poodle moth or muslin [...]

This week, the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada won its first Olympic medal when 19-year-old Kirani James took the gold in the 400-meter dash. With a population of 104,000, Grenada is the 17th-smallest country in the world, and now the smallest nation to win a gold medal. Here’s a look back at eight other great Olympic [...]

[YouTube Clip] – via VideoSift In the premiere of HBO’s new Aaron Sorkin series The Newsroom, news anchor Will McAvoy played by Jeff Daniels was asked "what makes America the greatest country in the [...]

Inmates at  the Santa Rita do Sapucai prison in Brazil are being offered a deal too good to pass up-put in 16 hours on a bicycle and get a day knocked off your sentence. It’s an interesting way to encourage prisoners to cooperate and literally work towards their freedom, and the stationary bikes are being used [...]