Let’s be honest, finding clean and decent-smelling gas station toilets is hard enough, but one that makes you feel like royalty? Normally, I would say such a place doesn’t exist, but I recently saw these photos of a unique toilet in Quezon, the Philippines.

To be honest, I kind of already knew that gas station toilets in the Philippines can be quite different than what most of us are used, after writing about this Shell Gas Station toilet in Tagbilaran City, Bohol, which featured wood furniture, a bookshelf and even a phone next to the toilet bowl. But I didn’t know the island nation actually had a public toilet fit for a king until seeing some photos of a Petron gas station toilet in Quezon.

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Thomaz Vieira Gomes, also known as 2N, is considered one of the most dangerous criminals in Rio de Janeiro, but recently he actually did something decent, albeit still illegal, for once. He and his gang kidnapped two male nurses and made them vaccinate the poor people of his favela against yellow fever.

For months, Brazil has been dealing with a yellow fever epidemic that has already left dozens dead. Despite the Health Ministry’s plans to vaccinate millions of people in the hopes of containing the outbreak, immunization centers struggle to keep up with the high number of patients, and, as always, the poorest communities are usually ignored. That was apparently the case of Salgueiro, one of the poorest regions of Rio de Janeiro, and the headquarters of 2N’s drug dealing operations. So he decided to speed up the process by using a very familiar technique, kidnapping.

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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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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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Hardcore feminists searching for a vacationing spot where they don’t have to interact with men at all need look no further than SuperShe Island, a women-only island resort off the coast of Finland.

SuperShe Island is the brainchild of American entrepreneur Kristina Roth, who decided to invest in a women-only resort after realizing that being around men was distracting to other women. While vacationing at the Ashram in Calabasas, Calif., and the nearby Ranch Malibu, Roth noticed that women would focus more on the men than themselves, so she started contemplating the idea of a women-only resort where visitors could relax without any male distractions.

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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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It was 1997 when Muhammad Iwan, 41, saw some children playing with a newborn estuarine crocodile that fisherman had recently caught at Pangandaran Beach, in West Java. He bought the reptile for just 25,000 Indonesian Rupiah ($1.8), named it Kojek, and welcomed it into his family home in Sempur Sub-District, West Java, as a pet.

Fast forward two decades, that tiny crocodile has grown into a massive 200kg gentle giant that Muhammad claims would never hurt him and his family. It’s this gentle side of Kojek that has made him a star in Indonesia, with people traveling to Sempur from all corners of the archipelago just to see him interact with his human family . His already immense fame has recently reached new heights, thanks to social media. Amazing photographs  showing Muhammad bathing the large 2.7m (8ft, 8in) apex predator in his front yard just meters away from his small children aged 2 and 10, went viral last week, sparking all kinds of reactions.

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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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