We’re used to reading about people struggling to find a decent job, or any job, really, but this story is about a small town clinic that has been unable to attract any applicants for a job that pays over $400,000 a year.

While the people of Norman Wells are struggling to find a hairdresser willing to move in and tend to their needs, another small town halfway across the world is dealing with an even more pressing problem. Tokoroa, town in the Waikato region of New Zealand’s North island, is finding it hard to attract young doctors willing to work for a salary most people would kill for – $400,000.

Dr Alan Kenny, co-owner of Tokoroa Family Health clinic, has been trying rather desperately to fill the position of GP, but he hasn’t received a single application in four months despite the huge salary he’s offering. He’s also promising no weekend or night duties and co-ownership of the clinic, but that hasn’t gotten anyone interested either.

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Romanian woman Ortansa Pascariu is the proud owner of a very unusual piece of wardrobe – a vest made of her own hair! Ortansa had been collecting fallen strands of her hair for 20 years, and when she thought she had enough, she decided to use it for a unique garment.

The 65-year-old revealed that she started collecting her hair in accordance with a tradition followed in her hometown of Stauceni, in the north-eastern part of Romania. The practice suggests that women should never throw away their hair if they want to retain their beauty and good luck.

“I heard from elderly friends that women should not throw their lost hair away after combing,” she said. “They need to keep it. If not, the elderly say, it is as if you are throwing away your beauty. I started gathering my hair when I was 40 and by the age of 60 I had managed to gather one kilo, which was as much as I needed for a vest.”

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Three decades after locking eyes with the woman of his dreams, a British man is finally trying to track her down. It was in 1986 that Vernon Burton briefly glanced at a beautiful woman while traveling on a double-decker bus in the New Forest area of southern England. Most people would forget such a fleeting encounter, but Burton never quite managed to put the mystery woman out of his mind and is now looking for her everywhere.

Vernon, aged 62, was born and grew up in Hythe, a small town on the south coast of Kent. He moved to Canada in the 1970s for work but briefly returned to the UK in 1986 for a holiday. He boarded the top deck of a Solent Blue Line bus from Mousehole Lane to Southampton city center, which is when he made eye contact with a woman on the top deck of another bus headed in the opposite direction.

“For some reason I looked back at that other bus and saw a woman looking back at me,” Vernon recalled. “I came over all light-headed, my stomach felt like it had butterflies and my legs started to shake. The buses started to pull away and I just had to reach my hand out to try not to let her go. To my surprise, she did the same.”

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La Modelo prison in Botogá, Colombia, is notorious for the free reign that its 11,000 odd inmates enjoy. The prisoners completely run the show, with easy access to guns and grenades, while the prison guards do not carry any weapons inside the premises.

The inmates frequently resort to violence in order to settle disputes between the left-wing rebels and the right-wing government supporters and paramilitaries that inhabit the north and south wings of the prison, respectively. The rivalry between the two sections has lead to several killings, all of which were carried out in the central area in between the two wings. Members of the guerrilla movement FARC who are imprisoned in the north wing actually carry out their military drills within their section of the establishment. Ammunition is smuggled into the prison and sold at about $1,000 per gun, thanks to the cooperation of corrupt officials.

Guns aren’t the only perks that the inmates enjoy. They use cell phones freely and have access to satellite communication, which allows them to carry on with their criminal activities in the outside world, like drug dealing, kidnapping, and extortion. They even have restaurants inside the prison, one of which is sponsored by FARC and provides free food to left-wing rebels. Other restaurants are run by individual inmates, who pay taxes to the gangs every month. But the most baffling of perks enjoyed by La Modelo inmates is ‘Ciambiazo’ or ‘big change’, in which a prisoner can change places with a visitor from the outside for only 2,000 to 2,500 dollars.

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18-year-old Malachi Love-Robinson, from West Palm Beach, Florida, was arrested last week for pretending to be a medical doctor. The teenager had opened a medical practice of his own in a professional medical building at 4700 North Congress Ave., where he swindled patients for thousands of dollars before he was caught and arrested.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time Love-Robinson has tried posing as a doctor. In January last year he was caught impersonating a gynecologist in an exam room at St. Mary’s Medical Center. Then 17, he happened to be wearing a coat with the clinic’s logo, a face mask, and a stethoscope. The staff at the clinic were flabbergasted and later recalled seeing him roaming the halls for at least a month before the incident.

“I’ve been in practice for 36 years, this is the first time something like this has happened,” Dr. Sebastian Kent, OB GYN at the center, told the Sun Sentinel. “It’s strange. Very, very strange.”

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You might think it ridiculous and even dangerous to put dogs behind the yoke of a plane and let them try to fly it, but that won’t stop some people from trying. Case in point, Dogs Might Fly, a new TV show from the UK that plans to train some dogs to fly a plane.

While the internet has plenty of videos of dogs driving cars, planes are an entirely different matter. The sheer number of things that could go wrong makes it sound like a foolhardy exercise, but it’s a risk the makers of the show are willing to take in a bid to demonstrate that dogs have “distinct personalities and incredible levels of intelligence.”

“People give up on them too easily and this series will show us why we shouldn’t,” presenter Jamie Theakston told The Telegraph. “They are just as deserving and just as intelligent. Even if a dog has been deprived of human contact or has been badly treated, it is just as able and motivated to initiate a new relationship with a human very quickly.”

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A mobile phone store chain in Georgia is experiencing a boost in iPhone sales after arranging for a priest to bless the entire Apple stock at one of their stores in Tbilisi. According to iPhone+ store manager Georgiy Machavariani, the holy ceremony has mollified fears and concerns that people have about iPhones being the “device of the devil”.

“We have a lot of customers that restrain from buying an iPhone for the sole reason that it is a so-called device of a devil,” he said. “In order to tackle this concern, we decided to sanctify our shop and have the phones blessed.” I guess the fear he is referring to has to do with the Apple logo, which people are probably associating with the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve.

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New Zealander Danielle Daals is taking up a 30-day ‘Living like Lolita’ bathtub challenge in Miami to protest the captivity of a killer whale named Lolita. For the next one month, the 29-year-old activist will sit in a bathtub from 10am to 7pm outside Miami Seaquarium, in order to represent Lolita’s plight. Since 1970, the 22-foot whale  nicknamed ‘the world’s loneliest orca’ has been confined to a 60x80x20 foot pen, the smallest whale enclosure in North America. 

Daals, who has a permit to protest outside the park’s private property, will also carry a poster with a picture of Lolita and the words: “Swims 100 miles per day; confined to equivalent of a bath tub.” She hopes that her campaign will be effective in freeing the 3.2-ton whale from captivity and reuniting her with her pod of extremely rare and endangered Southern Resident killer whales near Puget Sound, off the coast of Seattle.

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Fed up of DIY haircuts, the residents of Norman Wells, an isolated town in northern Canada, are desperately looking for a professional hairdresser. They’ve been cutting their own hair for the past two years and frankly, they’ve had enough of it.

Located near the southern edge of the Arctic Circle, with a population of about 800 people, Norman Wells has always been a small community with more pressing small-town problems. Food products need to be flown in, prices are higher, and sometimes the residents need to go without supplies because the planes don’t come in.

But they never realised that something like the lack of professional hairdressing could be a nightmare until their hairstylist moved out due to the lack of housing in town. “It’s been a long struggle for us,” Nicky Richards, the town’s economic development officer in charge of the hairdresser recruitment effort, told The Guardian. “We just don’t have anyone. It’s something that people down south don’t ever think about because they don’t have to worry about it.”

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Thanks to these new sneakers, you don’t need to wait for space tourism to take off to experience walking on the moon. Aptly named ‘MoonWalker’, these shoes rely on magnets to allegedly simulate walking in a low-gravity environment. 

On their Indiegogo campaign page, startup Moonshine Crea reveals that the ingenious shoes are made from an “incredibly durable yet soft and breathable” synthetic fabric on the outside, while the inside is made of a DuPont Tyvek synthetic polyethylene used by NASA in space station modules. The sole, made of memory foam, is designed to perfectly fit the unique shape of each wearer’s foot.

So far the shoes seem like regular sneakers, but what sets the 20:16 MoonWalkers apart are the two special layers hidden beneath the memory foam, which are embedded with the world’s most powerful magnets . According to the company, “each layer is made up of powerful N45 magnets that are strategically placed so the north poles face each other. This creates a repellant force, which leaves you light on your feet and happy as an astronaut.”

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While some of us find it difficult to host guests for a few weeks, this Chinese couple have generously shared their home with a mentally ill homeless person for the past 35 years.

When Xue Shunlu and his wife Li Huannv first found Xue Zhen on the streets of Fenglingdu, in China’s Shanxi Province, the poor man was in a terrible state – he was unable to talk or defend himself from bullies on the street. So the couple rescued him and took him to their house in a neighbouring village in Yuncheng city.

Although they lived in a small house and barely earned enough to support themselves, the kind couple didn’t hesitate to share everything they had with a total stranger. They told him to treat the house as his own and spent their free time teaching him to cook, clean, and take care of himself. They even allowed him to share Xue Shunlu’s family name.

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An Argentinian woman found it so hard to part with her recently deceased pet cat that she had its body stuffed by a taxidermist just so she could keep carrying it with her everywhere she goes.

Daniela Cardone and her stuffed cat Matute shot to fame a few days ago, when she posted some pictures of their trip to Lujan city, in the Buenos Aires province, on Instagram. Speaking to reporters, the former model said she simply couldn’t bear to part with Matute after he died around a month ago, so she sought out someone to help her preserve his body. She strongly believed that his soul was still around her, and it didn’t make sense for her to dispose of his body.

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A school in Sarajevo is making headlines for not only accepting a deaf student, but also teaching his entire class sign language to allow them to better communicate with him.

The heartwarming story began in September last year when Mirzana Coralic requested the primary school in her neighborhood to enroll her six-year-old son, Zejd, who has a hearing disability. The teacher, Sanela Ljumanovic, accepted almost immediately, but on the first day of school, she noticed Zejd sitting all by himself, unable to communicate with any of his school mates.

Sanela, determined to find a solution, tried developing a few tricks and signs of her own. But a parent of another child came up with an even better idea – getting the whole class to learn sign language along with Zejd. So they got sign language teacher Anisa Setkic-Sendic on board, and three months later, Zejd was happily able to communicate to all his classmates about regular things like homework and games.

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In a bid to better control unruly crowds that gather during protests, police in northern India have decided to replace their modern arsenal with rudimentary weapons like slingshots and chili powder balls. The decision was made after they realised that these “non-lethal” options might prove to be more effective than water cannons or tear gas.

“It is much better than firing plastic bullets that can cause bad injuries,” said Anil Kumar Rao, the Inspector General of Police in the state of Haryana’s Hisar district. “It will be used only in emergency cases so that we can manage minimum collateral damage.”

Police officers are currently being trained in the use of these “specially designed” locally made slingshots, learning to fire plastic balls filled with chili powder as accurately as possible. And if chili doesn’t prove effective enough, they plan to switch to marbles.

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Meet Ilona Richards, a retired truck driver who is well known as ‘Britain’s most frugal woman’. Some of her tips for simple living include scouring supermarkets for discounted food, having guests bring their own tea bags, saving ink by making your handwriting smaller, a weekly bath to save water, and flushing the loo only once a day with old bathwater.

Richards prides herself for her frugality in nearly every single aspect of life, managing on only £2,400 of her state pension of £10,000 a year. She detests wastefulness, so she tries to make everything last as long as it possibly can. She can make do with a bottle of dish soap for an entire year, but that’s probably because she hardly does any cooking. She’s a vegetarian, because it’s cheaper, surviving on a vat of vegetable stew made from expired produce. She makes it last an entire month.

There are plenty of other examples of thriftiness all around her kitchen. For starters, she doesn’t use her kettle to make tea. “I usually heat up my cup of water in the microwave,” she said, speaking to Daily Mail. “It takes two cups to cover the kettle element and I only need one, so why waste it?” Her oven has been broken for ages, but she hasn’t had it fixed because she has no use for it.

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