It’s getting and harder and harder for beggars to survive on spare change handouts these days. People have become too reliant on alternative payment options to carry cash around with them, and those that still have a few coins in their pockets are often afraid that recipients will just spend it on alcohol, drugs or cigarettes. However, a couple of Dutch advertising professionals have come up with an intriguing solution – a contactless payment jacket for beggars and homeless people.

Developed by Carsten van Berkel and Stefan Leendertse of N = 5, an Amsterdam-based advertising agency, the contactless payment jacket allows people to donate 1€ to the wearer using their contactless smart card. The unusual clothing item has a card reader sewn into it, and in order to donate 1€ to the wearer, all you have to do is hold the card close to the jacket for a few moments, and the sum is automatically debited from your bank account. The contactless payment jacket also comes with an LCD screen which constantly displays instructions of use.

“People have less cash in their pockets,” says Jan Jesse Bakker, the designer of the jacket. “And if you have a single euro on you and give it to a homeless person, then you do not know what happens to it.” That’s one of the big advantages of the contactless payment jacket. You’re not giving cash to a total stranger to do with it what he pleases. Instead, the fixed sum (one euro) goes into a bank account managed by a homeless shelter, and can only be used to purchase a hot meal, pay for a bath or spend a night at a homeless shelter (many such centers in the Netherlands require a contribution of 5€ per night). Homeless people who really want to turn their life around can also save money for various job certification courses or a down-payment for a home. “We can offer the homeless more than just a warm Christmas,” Bakker adds. “We give them back prospects.”

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Rubi Ibarra García, a 15-year-old girl from the small Mexican village of La Joya had arguably the highest attended quinceañera party in history, after thousands of people from all over Mexico, and even the U.S. turned up for the big event on December 26.

It all started earlier this month, when Rubi’s father, Crescencio, posted a video on Facebook inviting everyone to the girl’s birthday party. “We invite you on December 26 to our daughter Rubi Ibarra Garcia’s quinceañera in La Joya, everyone is cordially invited,” he wrote. Only he didn’t really mean “everyone”, just everyone in the village, but after setting the video to ‘public’ instead of ‘private’, people from all over Mexico started sharing it and Rubi eventually ended up with with over 1.2 million RSVPs from people she had never met before.

Crescencio later revealed that the invitation was meant for neighbors and friends only, but acknowledged his mistake, adding that he would not tun anyone away. In the weeks that followed, Rubi’s quinceañera became one of the most popular topic in Mexico, with the #XVdeRuby trending on social media and getting millions of shares, and TV stations scrambling to cover the story and get interviews with the García family. Actor Gael Garcia Bernal made a parody of the invitation video, while singer Luis Antonio Lopez “El Mimoso” composed a song especially for the birthday girl. Mexican airline Intejet even offered a 30% discount on flights to her home state for people wanting to attend. 

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Goldgenie, a luxury goods company famous for gold-plating just about anything for its wealthy clients, has recently launched a unique Donald Trump-themed iPhone 7 made out of solid 24K gold and encrusted with diamonds. And the best part is that this gem costs only $151,000.

The Goldgenie retail store in Sharjah, a city near Dubai, came up with the idea for this unusual product after it was specifically requested by a Chinese woman, last month. Frank Fernando, managing director of Goldgenie, declined to identify the customer by name, but said that he believes her family wants to give it to Trump himself after his inauguration, as a present. Anyway, Goldgenie loved the idea so much that they made it available to their other clients as well.

I guess I can see some of the world’s super-rich spending a whopping $151,000 on a gold iPhone 7 embellished with over 450 VS1 white diamonds within the Apple logo and around its edges, but who would want Trump’s grinning face stamped on it? Well, it turns out that the idea was very inspired, as Goldgenie claims that it has had nine more orders for its unique Trump iPhone.

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A school principal in China’s Henan province was recently suspended for making young students take tests outdoors in smog so thick that they could barely see their papers, despite receiving orders to close the school.

On December 20th, 480 students from the No. 1 Middle School in Linqi town, Linzhou, were forced to take their tests on the school’s an outdoor football field, in heavy smog. Photos taken by concerned parents and later sent to local media outlets show the children struggling to make out the writing on their papers, but the principal apparently decided that the smog was not “severe”.

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Pink is a nice color, but PINK is way better. Created by British artist Stuart semple, after a decade of working with paint manufacturers from around the globe, PINK is the world’s pinkest pink. If you’re interested, you can buy 50 grams of it for $4.95, unless your name is Anish Kapoor.

In 2014, Indian artist Anish Kapoor shocked the art world when he acquired exclusive rights to use the world’s blackest black in his art. Developed by a company called NanoSystems, “Vantablack” is composed of a series of microscopic vertical tubes, and when light hits it, it is continually deflected between the tubes, essentially becoming trapped. Vantablack absorbs 99.96 per cent of light, which makes it the darkest pigment known to man.

Originally created for military and astronomic purposes, Vantablack also sparked the interest of artists around the world, who dreamed of using it in their works. So when NanoSystems announced that Indian artist Anish Kapoor had been granted exclusive rights to use the world’s darkest black, everyone was furious. That includes Stuart semple, who is trying to make a point by making his pinkest pink available to everyone, except Anish Kappor.

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After failing to deliver on the contract he had signed with Russian online gift store Pich Shop, a 21-year-old entrepreneur agreed to be auctioned off to the highest bidder and marry a complete stranger for at least one year, in order to avoid being sued.

A week ago, a strange listing showed up on PichShop.ru – a young man named Aleksandr Kramarenko available for marriage, with a 1 year warranty. The “product” was listed as “in stock” and featured a detailed description – including age, height, weight, zodiac sign and interests – and photos (both dressed and topless). The listing mentioned that Aleksandr was going to be auctioned off to be married to the highest bidder, and invited women no older than 35 to bid for the chance to become his wife for at least one year. The minimum bid was set at 10,000 rubles.

This all sounds a bit too corny to be true, and, to be fair, such pranks are not exactly uncommon around the holidays. Some of them are actually pretty elaborate and end up attracting a lot of media attention, which translates into free publicity for companies, but this particular story seems legit.

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Tateyama Bay, in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, is the meeting place of two very unlikely friends – local diver Hiroyuki Arakawa and an Asian sheepshead wrasse by the name of Yoriko. The pair met 25 years ago and have been visiting each other ever since.

Arakawa has been looking after an underwater Shinto shrine located in Tateyama Bay for over a quarter of a century, also acting as a guide for tourist who want to visit it. During that time, he has become unusually close with a giant friendly fish who comes to greet him whenever he calls. All he has to do is call – by knocking with a hammer on a piece of metal – and the fish shows up. They’ve been friends for 25 years now, and Hiroyuki has even named the fish Yoriko.

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It’s not unusual for youth nowadays to speak more than one language, but 32-year-old Muhamed Mešić is not your typical polyglot. He can communicate fluently in 56 different languages and claims to understand over 70 of them.

Ever since he was a little boy growing up in Tuzla, an industrial city in the former Yugoslavia (currently in Bosnia Herzegovina), Muhamed Mešić was fascinated by languages. His exceptional talent for quickly learning to communicate in different languages was discovered by chance, when he was just 5-years-old. He was on vacation with his family, in Greece, and recalls being able to listen to their local neighbor speaking Greek and figuring out what he was saying from the situation they were in.

“This was the first time I met people whose language I couldn’t recognize,” Muhamed remembers. “I could listen to our neighbors talking and then figure out the meaning from the situation. At the end of the vacation, I was able to help my father to communicate with a local mechanic who repaired our car. My parents were shocked.”

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45-year-old Rakesh Shukla is a talented software engineer and CEO of a successful tech company, but among India’s animal lovers he is known as “The Dog Father”, an exceptional man who founded the country’s most advanced dog rescue center and who personally takes care of 735 abandoned pooches that nobody else wants.

10 years ago, Rakesh and his wife founded The Writers Block, a technical communication outsourcing company which today works with some of the biggest names in the tech industry – Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.. The Bangalore-based company quickly became successful, and over the next few years the software engineer got to travel the world, buy expensive cars and lead the fancy lifestyle he always thought he wanted. But he still didn’t feel happy and fulfilled. It wasn’t until 2009, when Kavya, a beautiful Golden Retriever, came into his life that he truly felt that his life had meaning.

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Otona Maki, or ‘adult wrapping’, is a Japanese therapeutic method of correcting posture and alleviating body stiffness by wrapping the human body in a large piece of cloth that emulates the comfortable feel of a mother’s womb.

Well-known for their long work hours, many Japanese people develop posture problems and body stiffness. For a long time, getting massages and stretching have been the most popular ways of dealing with these issues, but now someone claims to have come up with an even better solution. Otona Maki is a new and intriguing way of improving posture and making your body more flexible than ever, while at the same time helping practitioners relax by recreating the comfortable feel of a mother’s womb.

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A 6-months-pregnant Florida student has found a very simple yet highly controversial way of paying her college fees – selling positive pregnancy tests online for $30 a piece.

“Very self explanatory: I am 6 months and I am providing a product in which the consumer is able to purchase positive pregnancy tests or urine for your own use,” the woman’s Craiglist ad states. “Whether you are using it for your own amusement such as a prank, or to blackmail the CEO of Apple who you are having an affair with I DON’T CARE AT ALL.” As if it wasn’t clear enough already, the woman assures potential clients that this is an “absolutely no questions asked type of deal”.

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If you’re in need of some emotional advice, but have neither the time or the money to waste on a qualified therapist, this 11-year-old kid has you covered. Ciro Ortiz has set up shop in a New York subway station, and for a measly $2, he offers five-minute “emotional advice” sessions.

Every Sunday, Ciro Ortiz spends about two hours at the Bedford L subway station, sitting at a folding table with a cardboard sign that reads “emotional advice $2”. Believe it or not, people actually do stop by for some pearls of wisdom from the “emotional advice kid”. They ask him about all sorts of things, from relationships and career advice, to Donald Trump, and he does his best to help them find the answer to their problems.

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In an effort to make women’s period more comfortable, Swiss confiseur Marc Widmer has come up with a special chocolate that he claims can ease cramps and has a calming effect on consumers.

Called Frauenmond (German for “women’s moon”), the Swiss chocolate created by Widmer’s company, Chocolate with Love, contains 60% cocoa and 17 different herbs from the Swiss mountains. Widmer, a famous pastry chef with loads of experience at top hotels in Switzerland, says he came up with the idea for Frauenmond three years ago, after meeting a peasant family from Grafenort who brewed a tea to alleviate female period symptoms, from the same 17 plants he uses. Interestingly, their tea was also called Frauenmond.

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From the outside, Thomas Jeromin’s house, in Rinteln, Germany, doesn’t look at all out of the ordinary, but as they say, ‘it’s what’s inside that matters’, and in this case the inside is nothing short of spectacular – a forest of artificial Christmas trees, 110 to be exact, decorated with a whopping 16,000 baubles.

Up until five years ago, Thomas Jeromin decorated a single Christmas tree for his house, just like the rest of the world. However in 2012, he decided to get more of them just to spread the Christmas spirit throughout his home. The idea turned out so well that the next year he upped the number of Christmas trees to 20, then 45, 80 and finally this year he got his epic collection to a whopping 110 trees. They are literally everywhere, from the living room and halls to the kitchen and even the bathroom. The only no-tree zone of the house is the master bedroom, at his wife Susanne’s request.

As you can imagine, installing and decorated over 100 Christmas trees takes a while, and Jeromin confirms that this year he has needed eight weeks to get his house ready for the winter holidays. He began in October, and spent a whole week just bringing the artificial trees down from the attic. It then took him another seven weeks working from morning until evening decorating them with over 16,000 Christmas baubles, hundreds of LED light installations, garlands and wreaths. It was all worth it, though.

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Pepper Bomb Your Mom is a new online service that allows you to send chocolate-covered Carolina Reaper peppers – the world’s hottest peppers – to your friends/enemies anonymously, for just $9.99.

This past summer, 18-year-old friends Lizzy and Sabrina shot to internet fame after filming themselves doing the world’s hottest pepper challenge and posting the footage on YouTube. 2.2 million Scoville units on the hotness scale proved too much to handle for these girls and they experienced all kinds of nasty symptoms, from the classic burning sensation and panic attacks to nausea and asthma. The extreme experience got them over 8 million views on YouTube and inspired them to launch an unusual business which basically allows people to inflict the same kind of pain they went through by sending them chocolate-covered Carolina Reaper peppers.

“Want to prank someone you love/hate for $9.99? What better way than to send them chocolates with Carolina Reaper peppers on the inside. No, these aren’t your Grandma’s chocolate in the mail. This chocolate is filled with the Guinness World Records ‘Hottest Pepper,” their website states.

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