A young couple who quit their jobs and sold everything they owned in order to buy a boat and go on an epic sailing adventure had to put their bold dream on hiatus after their sailboat sank just two days into their voyage.

Tanner Broadwell and Nikki Walsh had been planning their once-in-a-lifetime adventure for over two years. They both had jobs they didn’t really enjoy and felt that there had to be more to life than constantly being involved in a rat race. Tanner, who had grown up in Cocoa Beach, Florida, convinced Nikki that sailing around the Gulf of Mexico, maybe even the world, was the escape they were both looking for, and they started working harder to make their dream a reality. They started saving money, he Ubered on the side, and last year they took the plunge. The couple quit their jobs, sold everything they owned and bought a 49-year-old sailboat in Alabama. The boat cost $5,000, but they had so spend that much more fixing it up.

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Ginza is known as the most fashionable district of Japan’s capital, Tokyo, and one public elementary school located there recently decided that it would be very fitting for children to dress accordingly. Thus Taimei Elementary School students will be donning $700 designer uniforms created by Italian fashion label Armani.

The school’s decision to replace its old uniforms without even consulting the parents has sparked outrage all over Japan, and was even discussed in Japan’s Parliament last week, with one opposition lawmaker noting that the 80,000 yen ($700) school uniforms were more expensive than most business suits. In a country where school tuition fees are already a heavy burden for most parents, Taimei’s decision to introduce luxury uniforms that cost almost three times as the old ones has been branded as unnecessary and elitist.

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28-year-old Rita Sarkar’s husband frequently complained about her family’s failure to pay her dowry after their wedding, but she never imagined he would go as far as stealing one of her kidneys to make up for the unpaid dowry. She was wrong.

The young woman recently told reporters that she had been the victim of domestic abuse from her husband and his family over her unpaid dowry for many years. She had gotten used to it, but what Rita didn’t know was that her husband, Biswajit Sarkar, would stop at nothing to get his hands on the money he felt he was owned. So when an opportunity to steal one of his wife’s kidneys presented itself, the man did not hesitate.

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Investing in crypto-currency like Bitcoin is a bit like going on a wild roller-coaster these days, and that can really take a toll on investors’ psyche. To help them better cope with the fear of losing huge sums of money due to devaluation, one Russian crypto-currency fund will start offering investors free psychological support.

Moscow-based Blockchain Fund, one of the largest crypto-currency funds in Russia, recently announced that it has hired a professional psychologist to counsel desperate investors who lost a lot of money after due to Bitcoin sharp drop in value and make sure that they “don’t do anything stupid”. Owner Andrey Karpukhov claims the new service will help depressed investors recover mentally and return to their normal lives.

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A man in Liuzhou, China’s Guanxi Autonomous Region, recently made national news headlines after getting his arm stuck in a squat toilet while trying to retrieve his iPhone 8.

The man, surnamed Tang, had been drinking with some friends at a local hotel’s cafe, last weekend. At one point he had to go to the bathroom and apparently decided that checking his phone while relieving himself in a squat toilet was a good idea. It never is, particularly if you’ve bee drinking. As you’ve probably already anticipated, Tang fumbled, and dropped his new iPhone 8 in the toilet.

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When it  comes to making sure that her disabled grandson gets the education he deserves, there’s nothing 76-year-old Shi Yuying won’t do. The elderly woman has been making eight daily trips pushing Jiang Haowen to and from his school in Guangxi Province, for the past 4 years, and plans to continue doing it for as long as she can walk.

9-year-old Jiang Haowen was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was 2-years-old, and his parents divorced a couple of years later. His mother remarried several times and his father went to work in Guilin to support the boy and pay for his treatments. So he fell in the care of his grandmother, Shi Yuying. She not only pushes the boy to and from school several times a day, but she also massages his limbs, prepares all kinds of herbal medicines for him in hopes of improving his condition, and also pushes him to walk with support. Pretty much everything she does is for Haowen.

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If you passed by Chris Arsenault’s home, in Medford, New York, and saw the 300 cats living there, you’d probably consider the 58-year-old retired train conductor a crazy cat person, but that’s only because you don’t know his history with them.

In the summer of 2006, about two months after Arsenault lost his son Eric, 24, in a motorcycle accident, the train conductor found a colony of young cats by some train tracks, in Long Island. There were over two dozen kittens, and Chris knew just by looking at them that if he left them there they would die. So he took them all home, doctored them back to health, fed them and gave them a home. They in turn helped the mourning father deal with the pain of losing his son.

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Noise-cancelling audio gadgets have been around for a while now, but one Berlin-based designer believes that blocking “visual noise” is as important, if not more so, as cancelling out unwanted sounds. To this end he has created a simple accessory called the Focus Cap.

Open work spaces definitely have their benefits, but they come with the drawback of offering employees little to no control over visual distractions. With so many people around and so much going on, some us can easily get overwhelmed by this information overload and lose focus in what’s really important. That’s where the Focus Cap comes into play. As the name suggests, it’s a cap, but one with a folding visor, allowing the user to block out peripheral vision distractions in a matter of seconds. Think of it as horse blinders for humans.

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You probably didn’t even know your shoes needed sandals, did you? Well, that’s because you’re not as avant-garde as Sankuanz, a Chinese fashion label that knows just what you need to keep your brand new sneakers looking flawless for longer – sandals, of course.

Now, we’ve featured commercially-available sneaker protectors aimed at sneaker-heads before, but they looked more like artistically designed plastic bags, whereas Sankuanz just went with the “shoes for shoes” idea. They just came up with these bulky plastic and Velcro that can fit your already “sneakered” feet and protect them from, well, wear and tear, I guess, because I don’t see these sandals doing anything if it starts to rain. They made quite an impact at the recently-concluded Paris Fashion Week, but let’s just say the feedback wasn’t 100% positive. Either people are too conservative or they just don’t get the practicality of the idea.

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How far would you go to achieve that extreme hourglass figure you’ve always dreamed of? How about wearing a tight corset around your waist for 23 hours a day?

When Navy veteran Diana Ringo, 39, of Chula Vista, California gave birth to her twins three years ago, she felt that the loss of her curves had masculinized her once feminine figure. Diet and exercise alone weren’t giving her the desired results, and so she turned to waist training. She now wears a tight corset 23 hours day, only removing it to shower or work out. The mother-of-three currently has an 18-inch waist to show for her efforts, down from her post-birth 27-inch waist.

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Ten years ago, Abby, a year-old black lab, was playing with her human family outside of their Apollo, Pennsylvania home, when something caught her attention and she just wandered off. Her owner,Debra Suierveld, spent weeks searching for the pup, but she eventually gave up, assuming the dog had been killed. Life went on for Debra and her family, but last week they got an unexpected blast from the past.

On January 30th, 2018, the Suiervelds received a phone call from Animal Protectors of Allegheny Valley who claimed to have their dog. Debra told them that they must have made a mistake, because of the family dogs were within view, but then they mentioned the name of the dog, ‘Abby’, to which the woman didn’t know what to answer.

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Hermien, a plucky cow from Lettele, in the Dutch province of Overijssel, recently became a social media star and a symbol of freedom, after making a daring escape just as her owner was trying to load her on a truck bound for the slaughterhouse. Named after her owner Herman Jansen, the cow initially escaped with her sister, but sadly the latter was recaptured after being shot with a tranquilizer gun. Hermien, however, managed to hoof it to the nearby woods in northern Friesland where she has been living on her own for the last six weeks.

Much to the delight of her fans on Twitter and other social networks, Hermien has somehow managed to evade all attempts at recapture. A slew of hashtags like #JesuisHermien, #GoHermien, and #MeKoe have been trending on Dutch social media site in recent weeks. ‘Koe’ is the Dutch word for Cow, making the #MeKoe hashtag a play on the now famous #MeToo movement. The bold bovine has even won the hearts of Dutch royalty, with Pieter van Vollenhoven, the son-in-law of former Queen Beatrix, tweeting “we’ve got to save Hermien, let’s all buy her together and give her freedom”.

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In 1980, when Robert Shafran arrived for his first day of college at Sullivan County Community College in New York, he was confused and overwhelmed by people he had never met warmly greeting him with hugs and high-fives, and, strangest of all, calling him Eddy. The reason behind the odd reception emerged when he met his new roommate Michael Domitz.

It turned out that Michael’s roommate from the previous year was Eddy Galland, a young man who not only looked exactly like Robert, but walked, talked, and acted like him as well. The two men were exact copies of each other, so after Michael learned that Robert was born on the same day as his old roommate and that, like him, he was adopted, he decided the two of them had to meet.

“He had the same grin, the same hair, the same expressions — it was his double,” Domitz says in Tom Wardle’s new documentary “Three Identical Strangers”, which won a special jury award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

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Describing an ice-cream as hot might seem strange, but when talking about the Respiro del Diavolo (Devil’s Breath), it’s actually an understatement. Made using an assortment of hot chillies, the bizarre treat scores over 1.5 million units on the Scoville scale of hotness, making it the world’s most dangerous ice-cream.

Respiro del Diavolo was brought to Glascow, Scotland, by Martin Bandoni, owner of the Aldwych Cafe and Ice Cream Parlour, but he claims the recipe has been a closely-guarded secret among Italian gelato makers for centuries. It has been used as a test of bravery at yearly gatherings among masters of the trade, but Bandoni thought it could become a commercial hit as well, so he put it on the menu of his ice-cream parlour in Glasgow. So far, the response has been ‘crazy’, with people from all over the UK stopping by to try the fiery treat.

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Arina Aliyeva, one of the finalists of the 2018 Miss Virtual Kazakhstan beauty contest, recently shocked the nation after announcing that she was actually a 22-year-old man who had signed up for the national contest to prove an important point.

It all started with an argument Eli Diaghilev, a young Kazakh male model, had with his friends about female beauty. He argued that in the old days women valued qualities like individuality and charisma, while most young women nowadays just follow the most popular trends – be they in fashion, makeup or hairstyle – thinking it makes them beautiful. Eli added that thanks to all the available cosmetics, digital editing tools like Photoshop and the general falseness in the beauty industry, even a man could pass as a beautiful woman. Diaghilev’s friends apparently didn’t agree, so he decided to prove his point by signing up for the Miss Virtual Kazakhstan beauty contest.

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