Photographer Igor Shpilenok, 52, spent seven months with the community of bears at the Kronotsky Nature Reserve in Russia, which is home to more than 700 brown bears.

The junkie bears, addicted to discarded barrels of aircraft fuel and Kerosene, and have gone to extreme lengths just to get a sniff of the fumes emanating from the barrels…stalked helicopters, waiting for take off and drops of fuel to leak onto the hard soil for them to hoover up.

After sniffing the barrels of gasoline and kerosene, the addicted bears dig a shallow hole and lie down there to revel in the trip.

In one case a helicopter brought a few barrels of gasoline. Workers of the nature reserve didn’t take them away in time and a female bear named Suzemka – who is apparently fascinated by the smell of fuel – used the opportunity… She seems to be one of the addicts.

On the one hand, this is horrifying, on the other, who doesn’t like to get a good buzz every now and then?

[Cheers dailymail]

I didn’t think it could get anymore bizarre than a tattoo of bruising and black eyes being inked all over ones face, but once again the internet hasn’t let me down.

Before Tattoo

Rouslan Toumaniantz or ‘Ruslan’, inked his Christian name in lettering five inches high across Lesya Toumaniantz face.
The pair – who’d met online, only 24 hours earlier – now say they plan to wed and Lesya has already changed her surname to Toumaniantz on Facebook…NUT JOB!

‘Their plans for a life together include her learning to tattoo while she also gets the full-body ink that she’s always dreamed of and of course a family,’ said a friend of Toumaniantz.

Looks like they both have poor impulse control.

[Cheers dailymail]

Perfect for any living room, this intricately carved 20th century Russian styled skeleton rocking chair was recently auctioned for an estimated $2,500 – $3,500…why is everything so cool, so expensive?

[Cheers neatorama]

NO strings attached. I wonder what these guys would do for a Klondike Bar?

The Plate Roulette is a porcelain plate designed to look like a side-cut barrel of a revolver with one cylinder “loaded” to determine who is buying the pizza (or whatever food placed on it) à la Russian roulette style.

[Cheers gizmodo]

There’s a super bleak story in The Independent about a home-made heroin substitute that’s becoming popular in Russia. The problem is that “Krokodil” is so detrimental to the human body that it practically eats right through it.

Dubbed ‘the drug that eats junkies,’ Krokodil is a street version of desomorphine, an opiate that’s 3 times more powerful and 10 times cheaper than heroin. It’s named so because regular users develop gangrenous, scaly skin resembling that of a crocodile… it rots from the inside, causing such severe damage to tissue that users suffer from gangrenous sores which open all the way to the bone (as seen bellow).

The condition can lead to limbs being amputated, but life expectancy for addicts is at the most two to three years, with the majority dying within a year.

Extraordinarily, around 1.2 million Russians are believed to have been ravaged by the narcotic, which can be easily produced for a fraction of the price of smack.  At just $6 (£4) per injection it is a much cheaper alternative to heroin, especially in Russia where the painkillers are available without prescription.

Even hardcore methfreaks are better off than Krokodil addicts. Withdrawal from the drug can take an agonizing month (Heroin detox lasts a week to ten days, a relative walk in the park).

Kids… Stick to stuff that grows out of the ground, please!

The 64-mile (103km) tunnel would connect the far east of Russia with Alaska, opening up the prospect of the ultimate rail trip across three quarters of the globe from London to New York. The link would be twice as long as the Channel Tunnel connecting Britain and France.

The high speed railway and tunnel will be a private public partnership whose economic impact could be startling. 100 million tons of freight could be moved per year using the most efficient known way of transport.

Aside from being a civil engineering marvel, Russian officials insist that the tunnel is an economic idea whose time has now come and that it could be ready within ten years. They argue that it would repay construction costs by stimulating up to 100 million tons of freight traffic each year, as well as supplying oil, gas and electricity from Siberia to the US and Canada.

The project could save Siberia and the US $20 billion a year in electricity costs, according to Vasily Zubakin, deputy chief executive of Hydro, a subsidiary of Russia’s main electricity producer, Unified Energy Systems. The company plans to build two giant tidal plants in the Far East to supply ten giga-watts of electricity by 2020.

Cool so now you can move Russian and Chinese tanks into the USA quicker for an invasion. In the future, all continents will be connected with tunnels… Mark my words!

[Cheers inhabitat.com]

Formerly the Soviet “Varyag”, China Defense Blog points out the decks mostly cleared, so this refurbished bruiser could be ready for plane-flinging action as soon later this year.

In Soviet China, aircraft carrier fly Yu.

[Cheers defensetech.org]

[Cheers dailymail.co.uk]