What they don’t want you to know about eco-tourism
The next time you visit elephant ‘sanctuaries’ in Thailand or Cambodia or anywhere else and pose beside a cute baby elephant, remember what Dumbo had to endure to be put into a camp like this.
BBC
When North Korean regime failed, black markets rose
Apparently, the great North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was being so great that he forgot about his people during the great famine of 1930s. When a government food rationings program failed, an estimated 3.5 million people died of hunger and people were forced to take matters in their own hands to put food on the table. Watch the video here.
CNN
How much would a stranger pay to have sex with a virgin?
£900. The depressing truth of Cambodia’s child prostitution. “He bought Chamnan for six days and nights. He installed her in a hotel room on Phnom Penh’s outskirts and visited her many times to have sex. By the third day, Uy recalls, Chamnan was so weak and distressed that the man summoned a doctor on his payroll to give her painkillers and a vitamin shot, so she had the strength to keep going until the end of the week.”
The Guardian
The online market of buying babies
Apparently, renting a human incubator is no longer a thing of the past. It’s literally a booming marketplace where people buy and sell their eggs, or sperm, or rent out their wombs. Read more about the economics of surrogacy here.
New York Times
Fraud monks on the streets of New York City
Walking around Times Square New York is a pseudo-monk on a mission to obtain donations from unsuspecting and philanthropic hearts. Boys and girls, moral of today’s story is, never judge (or believe) a book by its cover.
New York Times
In this part of Australia, everyone lives underground
This is how a naked mole rat feels, except for the blind part. A mining town located in Southern Australia known as Coober Pedy has its population living underground. From bars to churches. Bloody oath.
Neatorama
Not everyone who works for Google is smart
What does confidence have to do with one’s outlook of life? Well if you’re a black and white kinda person, you tend to be over-confident. If you see tones, you may suffer deficiencies. But in any case, being one or the other does not mean you’re superior. It means you just are. Read on to find out why one Google employee says that his colleagues are too isolated from the real world.
Business Insider
Explore racism in the medical system
We’ve had enough of racial and gender stereotypes. The colour of your skin does not determine how good or bad one is, it does not determine anything. Read about the ignorance that persists in the healthcare system here.
Al Jazeera
Legal Pot Stores open. Dope!
Washington takes the second spot after Colorado in selling legalised marijuana. Avid pot users went all out undaunted by long queues and sky-high prices. There’s even a mapped out guide as to where one can find weed in USA. Smoke on!
Mashable
World’s Fastest Speaking Woman
11 words in a second, that’s how fast the fastest speaking female Fran Capo can churn out with her gift of speed and speak. As she narrates “Three Little Pigs” in under 15 seconds, we wonder how bedtime stories would be if she were our mum.
Huffington Post
Can you imagine if Google was a real life person?
Oh, the disaster. If Google were a human being sitting in an office answering all our queries, dumb questions, porn requests, even dealing with Siri who has difficulty understanding what we’re trying to say half the time, he would be like a modern day omnipotent Jesus, sans the gospel. Click to watch!
Sploid
What’s it like being a crime scene cleaner
Go behind the scenes with Renner and Baruchin as they clean up a house in the Bronx where a man had died and decomposed on his bed. Read about the struggles these men face as they try to distance themselves from the victims and do their jobs in the best way possible. “It’s hard to describe the smell of death. It makes your eyes tear and can make the strongest of stomachs churn.”
The Atlantic
