Seventeen long years after witnessing the brutal murder of her husband Li Guiying’s struggles have finally borne fruit – she has managed to track down four of his five killer and provide enough evidence to have them locked up. 58-year-old Li doesn’t plan on stopping until she finds the last killer as well.

The determined widow’s sad story began in the winter of 1998. Li, her husband Qi Yuande, and their five children were a happy family living in Xiangcheng city, China’s Henan province. But things went wrong when an argument broke out with a neighbor named Qi Xueshan, who feared that she might start complaining about him to the local authorities. To ensure this wouldn’t happen, he invited the couple to his house under pretext of having a civilized conversation, but attacked them as soon as they arrived.

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A group of Canadian kids are already spreading a bit of Christmas spirit in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by wrapping warm clothing around lamp poles for the city’s homeless to pick up and use. The unusual sight of warmly dressed poles caught recently the attention of locals, who stopped to click pictures to share on social media.

Every year, Tara Atkins-Smith collects warm clothing from her community, in order to give to the less fortunate. This year, she took to Facebook to call for donations and the response was overwhelming – their front porch was overflowing with bags of clothes. Since the family was traveling to Halifax on November 15 with their daughter Jayda and seven of her friends to celebrate her 8th birthday, Tara decided it was the perfect time to teach the children valuable life lesson.

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Despite having lost everything, a Syrian refugee is doing his bit to return the kindness extended to him by German locals. For the past year, Alex Assali has been serving hot meals to the homeless in Berlin in order to “give something back to the people that helped him.”

Assali arrived in Germany in 2007, after fleeing Damascus on foot because his life was in danger for posting negative messages online about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He changed his name, adopted a new identity, and did his best to become not a burden but a blessing for his adoptive country. Since August last year, he has offering free food to those less fortunate than him.

A photograph of Assali standing on the side of a busy street, behind a table laden with hot rice, gravy, and bread, was recently posted to Facebook by his friend Tabea Bü. She revealed that Assali sets up a table outside Berlin’s Alexanderplatz station every Saturday and serves about 100 homeless people. The photo was shared thousands of times, and Tabea said they were overwhelmed with the positive comments.

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42-year-old Laura Arnolds came up with the perfect plan to get back at her husband for cheating on her – she sold the house while he was away on a business trip! When Craig Arnolds returned, he was utterly bewildered to find his locks changed and six students in his living room.

It all started when Laura found a message on her husband’s phone that he’d accidentally left behind when he left for a business trip to the US. The rather ‘steamy’ message from an American woman about what Craig could expect once he reached New York clearly implied he was being unfaithful.

Laura was obviously upset, but instead of blowing up at him she decided to get even. Lucky for her, her parents had taken over the mortgage of their Warwickshire property, so she was able to sell the house within a fortnight through a website that specializes in selling houses fast, to a group of students at the University of Warwick. She then packed her bags and left.

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Darshan Karwat, a post-doctorate at the University of Michigan, is making headlines for having maintained an incredibly frugal and sustainable lifestyle during his student years. The man gave up fast food, new clothes, and even toilet paper, until he got to a point where his trash for an entire year fit in just two plastic bags!

Karwat, who is originally from India, started the trash-free experiment when he lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and managed to keep it going for two and a half years. In the first year, he produced only 7.5 lbs of trash, and in the second year, he brought that number down to a meager 6 lbs, which is a mind-blowing 0.4 percent of the 1,500 lbs of yearly trash produced by the average American.

Looking back, Karwat says that his inspiration to start the project came from an episode of the radio show The Story, on which he heard of a British couple who lived trash-free. “I walked home from my laboratory at the University of Michigan and told my roommate Tim that I thought I could do better – I’d live trash- and recycling-free and that I’d start soon,” Karwat wrote in an essay for The Washington Post. “And just like that, I began an experiment in individual activism in the face of large environmental problems.”

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It’s a little known fact that Nacho Libre, a character played by Jack Black in the 2006 eponymous movie, is actually based on a legendary real-life Mexican wrestling priest. In the film, Nacho Libre is the undercover identity adopted by Black, a monastery cook, in order become a luchador, a masked lucha libre wrestler. The idea of a priest donning a lucha libre mask is rather outlandish, but Sergio Gutierrez Benitez, a.k.a Fray Tormenta, actually did that in real life!

Born in 1945, Benitez is a Catholic priest who runs a home for orphans. As he struggled to support the kids, he decided on a rather radical means of raising money – becoming a wrestler. He designed his own red-and-yellow lucha libre mask (yellow for liveliness he must display in the ring, and red for the blood he must spill on behalf of the orphanage), and adopted the name ‘Fray Tormenta’.

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They say we all have seven doppelgängers scattered across the world, but you’d be lucky to meet just one of them in your lifetime. However, one Irish woman has had the good fortune of meeting not one, not two, but three other women who look almost exactly like like her. And she’s now made it her mission to find the other four!

Niamh Geaney launched a project called ‘Twin Strangers’ – a website where people can upload their photographs and find their lookalikes for a small fee. She wanted to find her own doppelgänger within 28 days, and was amazed to discover Karen Branigan, a spitting image of herself, living just an hour away.

Photographs of Karen and Niamh went viral and nobody, including them, could get over the coincidence of two unrelated people resembling each other so closely. “For the duration of our encounter, I pretty much stared at her,” Niamh later said. “I couldn’t get over her face. And some of the expressions she would pull I think to myself or say aloud, ‘Oh my God, that’s my face.’ I can’t remember the number of times I said ‘this is so freaky’. It was truly amazing.”

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There was a time when freckles were considered unsightly, but they might just become the ‘in’ thing when this new cosmetic fake-freckle kit hits the market!

Called ‘Freck Yourself’, the kit comes with a set of 72 self-adhesive stencils and a rollerball containing skin-pigmenting formula. Users need to place the stencil on the spot where they want freckles, and then roll the formula all over it. The result is a sun-kissed look that is guaranteed to last for two days with one-time use, or up to six weeks with everyday use.

Freck Yourself is the brainchild of Los Angeles-based Remi Brixton, who always wanted to have freckles her whole life. “There is nothing more beautiful to me than bare skin and fresh freckles,” she said in a promotional video. “To me, they’re a mark of rebellious dreamers, wild adventures, and unapologetic beauty.”

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Meet Zaq Landsberg, a New York artist who created the ultimate escape from hectic city life – his own country in the middle of nowhere!

It all started in 2005, when Zaq managed to acquire a two-acre piece of uninhabited land in a remote Utah desert for a mere $610. Believe it or not, he actually bought it on eBay. On his first visit to the site, he installed a red-and-yellow flag bang in the middle for future identification. Not long after that, he was struck by an idea – why not turn the area into a sovereign nation named after himself? And that’s how the nation of Zaqistan was born.

“When I bought the land, it was right after Hurricane Katrina, and it was a pretty dark time, politically, in our country,” he said. “I thought, ‘I can run a country better than these clowns.’ So I started creating something out of nothing in the desert.” And that became the nation’s official motto: “Something from nothing.”

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If you’re bored with old-fashioned running, or if you feel that it’s not a complete workout, you might want to try crunning, a new fitness craze that’s taking Australia by storm. No, it does not mean crying while running, it’s actually a cross between crawling and running that involves getting down on all fours and moving as fast as you can.

The bizarre workout, best described as your thighs’ worst nightmare, was invented by Australian fitness enthusiast Shaun McCarthy. We’re not sure what prompted him to come up with the bizarre activity, but he seems convinced that it will revolutionize fitness as we know it. “The only thing that crunning’s changed about fitness… is that it’s changed everything about fitness,” he says.

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With more and more people buckling to the selfie-stick trend, a self-defense sports school in Moscow has come up with a unique combat class where students learn to use the stick as a weapon.

“In many countries, assaults on tourists have become a frequent occurrence, and the only instrument of self-defense that travelers always carry on themselves is a selfie-stick,” the M-PROFI sports center said in an online statement. Clicking photographs on an expensive smartphone attached to the end of a stick can easily mark a person out as a tourist, making them a vulnerable target for robberies. In such cases, it only makes sense to wield the tool for self-protection.

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A car owner in Kunming, southwest China, has come up with an unusual way to punish the vandal who dared smash his car window – he actually set up an elaborate shrine around his car and asked the gods of the underworld to curse him.

The man, known simply as Wang, appears to have decided on the bizarre ritual after the police failed to find the culprit. He told local media that he has parked his car in the same spot place near where he runs his barbecue stall for over a decade. He’s never had a problem before, not until earlier last month.

When Wang arrived to set up his stall on the morning of October 12, he found that his car’s window had been smashed during the night. A surveillance video later obtained by the police showed a man getting out of a silver car and repeatedly striking Wang’s windows with a long umbrella. The incident took place at around 5.30 that morning.

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Breaking up with someone is one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do, but, luckily, you can now outsource it to an online company called ‘The Breakup Shop’.

The shop lets you choose from a variety of methods, depending on how much you think the breakup is worth. An email or text breakup will cost you $10, a letter $20, and a phone call will set you back by $29. The full Breakup Gift Pack starting at $80 comes with all the trimmings to help your ex cope with heartbreak – cookies, Netflix gift card, and depending on their tastes, a copy of a weepy romantic film like The Notebook or a video game like Call of Duty. You can also include two wine glasses and a handcrafted sympathy letter.

“The Breakup Gift Pack box can also be repurposed as a memory oven” the website states. “Empty the box and stuff it full of your ex’s photos, jewelry, underwear, or whatever and set it ablaze.”

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Thanks to a new Japanese invention, smelly, sweaty feet might just become a thing of the past. ‘Curetex’ socks, created by product design shop Muse Ricette, work as a sweat absorbent, deodorant, humidity controller, and UV block. 

The socks are made using a special Japanese paper called Washi fiber, which is believed to have antiseptic and anti-odor properties. It absorbs moisture, bacteria, and bad odor, keeping feet fresh and clean all the time.  “The socks are based on a very old traditional Japanese paper called Washi,” said product designer Aiko Yukawa. “It was used 1,500 years ago to make summer kimonos. It was found to have properties of antiseptic, anti-odor, UV block, and humidity control. It used to be mixed with other fabrics because it was so hard, but we have developed a soft fiber called curetex yam.”

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Meet ‘Saalumarada’ Thimmakka, an uneducated environmentalist who, along with her late husband, planted and cared for 384 banyan trees in her hometown of Hulikal village, in Karnataka, India. Now 103 years old, she lives on to tell the tale.

When Thimmakka was a young girl, she married a farmer named Chikkaiah and together they made a living out of tilling land and cutting stones. The couple remained childless for many years, enduring crude remarks from their fellow villagers. But instead of wallowing in self-pity, they decided to make the best of their situation. “One day, we thought why not plant trees and tend to them like we would our children,” Thimmakka said.  

They started by grafting 10 saplings from the banyan trees that grew abundantly in their village. Using their meager resources, they planted those saplings on an empty stretch of land about four kilometers from the village. There wasn’t any water available in the area, so they filled four pails at their home and carried them all the way to the trees every single day. They protected the saplings from the elements, from animals and disease, until they took root. The next year, they planted 15 more saplings, 20 the year after that, and kept going until they planted a total of 384 trees, worth about 1.5 million rupees.

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