53-year-old Juana Escudero is alive and well, but she’s been struggling to prove it for the last seven years. Following an administrative error, she was registered as deceased, and has been unable to accomplish simple tasks, like renewing her driver’s license or scheduling a doctor’s appointment, ever since. Escudero has become so desperate to fix things that she now wants to dig up her own grave to prove that she’s not the one buried there.

It all started seven years ago, when a woman whose name and date of birth matched Juana Escudero’s perfectly died in Malaga, Spain. Even though the protagonist of this story was alive and well in Alcalá de Guadaíra, a town near Seville, the strange coincidence caused their Social Security data to clash, and the living Escudero has been dead to the Government ever since. She and her family thought it was funny at first, but they’ve stopped laughing at it for a long time now.

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Catt Gallinger, a young woman from Canada, is using her own experience to make people to think twice and do their research before getting an eyeball tattoo. In her case, the botched procedure left her with blurry vision in her left eye and purple discharge coming out of it.

Gallinger, from Ottawa, Canada, said that she decided to get an eyeball tattoo so that she would “feel more at home in my body”, but never imagined it would end up costing her her sight. Soon after coloring the white of her left eyeball purple, the 24-year-old pet nutritionist noticed purple discharge oozing out of it. She went to the hospital, where doctors administered antibiotic drops and sent her home. Unfortunately, things got even worse after that. Her eye became swollen shut, and after doctors used steroids to alleviate her symptoms, the tattoo became congealed around her cornea, affecting her vision and causing severe discomfort.

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It’s no secret that Japanese men have a thing for maids, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some businesses try to use their popularity as an advantage over the competition. Like this new programming school in Shibuya, Tokyo, that is trying to attract male students by having cute maids studying alongside them.

MadeInMaidFamily is one of many trade schools in Tokyo, so its founders knew that they had to come up with something special to give them an edge in a very competitive market. Their solution – cute maids to keep male students coming back and motivate them to hone their programming skills. The lessons are designed to encourage interaction between students with the maids asking and offering help to the guys.

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In order to show people that basic healthcare needn’t be expensive and that recyclable trash has value, a young Indonesian entrepreneur came up with the ingenious idea of allowing the poor to pay for their healthcare with garbage.

The Garbage Clinical Insurance thought up by Indonesian health care entrepreneur Gamal Albinsaid may sound like a laudable idea that’s doomed to fail in the long-term, but it’s actually been working for seven years now, and the unique model has already been copied by others across Indonesia. Inspired by others’ desire to help the poor access basic healthcare by recycling waste, Gamal Albinsaid has actually put together a free 70-page startup manual for businesses looking to get into garbage health insurance, instead of franchising his innovation.

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Sick of playing the same old Halloween pranks every year? Want two pull an original bone-chilling Halloween prank on your friends or family? One Dallas doughnut shop has you covered with a scary clown doughnut delivery service.

Riding the wave of the recent Box Office hit Stephen King’s It, the Hurts Donut shop has decided to implement a new, Halloween-themed delivery option for their delicious treats . For just $5 extra, you can have your donuts delivered by a person dressed as a menacing real-life Pennywise and subsequently scare the pants off of your unsuspecting friends and family members. Not only will this clown deliver a fantastic fright, but he will immediately make amends for your prank by handing the recipient a dozen of Hurts’ delicious treats! Who can stay mad while chowing down on homemade donuts, glazed to perfection?

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On the surface, Japan’s newest stock exchange platform, Valu, may seem like an innovative game changer in that it allows users to sell shares in themselves. The goal of which, for many, is to raise money to start a business or work on personal/freelance projects within their profession. That being said, however, there is at least one kink the company still needs to iron out if they wish to take Valu to the next level – keeping stock buyers from being conned by those just looking to make a quick buck at others’ expense.

Which is exactly what happened this week when a Japanese Youtuber who goes by the name of Hikaru exploited one of Valu’s features to basically cash out on his popularity. While the concept of selling stocks in oneself may seem very similar to basic crowdfunding, Valu also allows the trading of tokens called “VA” between those who list them, and the tokens are also exchangeable with bitcoin. So Hikaru used his popularity to boost the price of his stocks, and then sold them at a huge profit.

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Fall is here and so is the crisp sweater weather. This year, however, tree leaves won’t be the only thing changing color as it gets colder, thanks to this line of innovative thermo-sensitive sweaters from Stone Island.   Stone Island’s “Ice Knit” sweater made out of color changing yarn.

Italian high-end men’s clothing brand Stone Island is known for experimenting with unconventional fabric treatments and coming up with all kinds of impressive innovations. For their Spring 2017 collection, they introduced something called “hand corrosion technique” that allowed garments to be faded by hand, using a special corrosion paste, and for autumn, they recently unveiled a line of thermo-sensitive sweaters that change color depending on the air temperature.

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Getting a divorce is never easy for anyone involved, but it is particularly difficult at the Yibin People’s Court, in China’s Sichuan Province, where one magistrate recently implemented a divorce exam that both the husband and the wife must fail in order for their divorce application to be approved.

The divorce exam is the brainchild of Wang Shiyu, a judge at the People’s Court of Yibin County, who, after noticing that divorces accounted for an alarmingly large percentage of the court’s cases, decided to do something about it. His intention was to make couples think twice before ending their marriage, and also give them an opportunity to reminisce the good times they had together. So he came up with a series of questions for both husband and wife, which they must answer separately. If they score under 60, Wang approves their divorce application, if not, well, they have to keep working on their marriage, whether they like it or not.

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As a teacher,  if you want your middle school students to get off their smartphones phones and and actually pay attention in class, you have to get creative. Take Oregon teacher Kyle Hubler for example, who transformed his classroom into an amazingly detailed, Harry Potter inspired dreamland – equipped with wands, owls, and costumes!

Hubler, who teaches seventh and eighth graders at Evergreen Middle School in Hillsboro, first implemented Harry Potter-themed elements to his classroom, last year, and the students loved it. So when he heard that he would moving to a new classroom for the 2017-2018 school year, he decided to go all out and turn into a real-life version of Hogwarts.

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Some people dream about getting married on a mountain top, others in a beautiful church with stained glass windows, but not Sue Berkeley. All Sue cared about is that she and her husband-to-be, Eli Bob, tie the knot in a place near and dear to her heart, surrounded by all the things and all the people that make her happy. Which is why the Australian couple decided to hold their ceremony at their local Costco store, in Sydney.

At first, the idea of getting married in a store was purely sarcastic. “We were joking one Friday,” Eli explains in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “People were asking when were were getting married – so I suggested Costco. I know how much she loves it there.”  

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The internet has revolutionized crowdfunding by creating an unprecedented interconnectedness that allows people from all over the world to hear each other’s stories and help those whose stories touched them in particular. Today, you can send aid to hurricane victims in Florida, help a single mother start her small business in Ohio, and even help this couple from Saskatchewan make their dream wedding a reality, all in just a few clicks.

Jason Mielke and Rebecca Winter Hansen from Saskatchewan, Canada are engaged to be married, but they need some help making their wedding a special one. Young couples ask friends and family for help planning their big day all the time, these two lovebirds are actually asking complete strangers to basically sponsor their nuptials. They’ve set up a website where they try to explain why they opted for crowdfunding to celebrate their union with a wedding that accurately captures their unwavering love instead of simply eloping, and hope that their love story will make people and corporations want to give them a hand.

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Luo Dengping has become famous as the only woman in a group of “spider men” who climb vertical cliffs of up to 100 meters high, without ropes or safety equipment of any kind, for the entertainment of tourists in China’s Guizhou Province.

Men of the Miao people, in Southwest China, have been free-climbing steep cliffs for centuries. They originally developed this skill as part of a burial custom, to lift coffins of relatives up the cliffs and place them in small caves or just hang them on the cliffside, like the Tana Toraja tribe, in Indonesia. This practice fell into obscurity, but the Miao spider men continued climbing the perfectly vertical cliffs of Ziyun, in order to collect rare medicinal plants said to cure asthma and rheumatism. However, as Western medicine started taking precedence over traditional Chinese medicine, spider men found themselves struggling to support their families. Today, only a few members of the Miao people still practice this ancient tradition, and one of them is a woman.

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The “Mr. Model Tabasco 2017” male beauty contest was supposed to bring together the most handsome men in the Mexican state of Tabasco, but the modeling agency behind the event recently announced its cancellation, after failing to find candidates that met their beauty requirements.

In order to be accepted as contestants for the Mr. Model Tabasco pageant, candidates needed to have a height of at least 1,78 m, be between 17 and 27 years old, have a “harmonious face and body”, have a college degree or an education equivalent to their age, speak English, have a valid passport, and not be a stripper. Apparently, these requirements proved to be a big problem, as just a few days before the contest, organizers had only selected 6 candidates. Those didn’t really meet the agency’s beauty standards either, so they ultimately decided to cancel the whole event.

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Do you have stubborn migraines that just won’t go away? Maybe you’ve recently been in an accident or contracted some life-threatening virus? Have you tried everything Western and Eastern medicine has to offer? Well, in that case, maybe you should look to the stars for your next treatment and give Jerry Sargeant a call. All you need is £90 (about $120), 15 minutes, and an open mind – the rest is up to Sergeant, or, as he prefers to be called “The Facilitator”.

It all started one day in Romania when Sargeant was in a life-affirming car accident. His taxi allegedly crashed into two women who were crossing the street. Sergeant claims that one woman came through the window – causing him to hit his head and the last thing he witnessed was “her soul hovering over her body”. This was apparently what kickstarted his abilities and awoken Sergeant to the healing powers that have always resided within him.

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It’s one thing to get scouted by a modeling agent when you’re walking downtown, dressed to the 9’s, but you have to be both striking and extremely lucky to get scouted while washing dishes at a Chipotle in Austin, Texas. But that’s the unlikely story of Remington Williams, the fashion world’s hottest new show stopper, who went from doing the dishes to walking the runway at the New York Fashion Week in just 12 days.

Williams was working at her local Chipotle restaurant not more than two weeks ago, when a scout walked in and offered her a life changing opportunity. Days later, Williams was on a plane for New York City, to sign with DNA Models, the modelling agency that launched the careers of legends like like Linda Evangelista and Natalia Vodianova. She arrived just in time to book the Calvin Klein Show at New York Fashion Week – an impressive achievement by any model’s standards, but made even more amazing by the fact that this would be her first time working as a model, ever.

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