20-year-old Kasandra Smith, from Macon, Georgia, has shun all kinds of footwear for the last three years, and claims that despite occasionally stepping on glass shards or metal pins, going barefoot full-time has done wonders for her confidence and overall well-being.

Kassandra Smith was never really big on shoes. In school, she would often wear flips-flops just to have an excuse to get out of participating in gym class, but the more she wore them, the freer she felt, and the more she loathed the thought of putting on shoes. She started wearing flip flops when shopping or going to the restaurant, and after leaving school in 2015, she started walking completely barefoot as well. Just two months later, she decided to give-up footwear all-together, and she’s been walking barefoot ever since.

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They say “no good deed goes unpunished” and one Chinese billionaire learned that the hard way after spending tens of millions of dollars on hundreds of luxury villas for all the residents in his home village, only to see them remain deserted as greedy recipients continue to argue over who should own multiple houses.

Five years ago, Chen Sheng, the founder and chairman of drinks company Tiandi No 1 Beverage Inc, committed 200 million yuan (US$31.9 million) to the construction of 258 luxury villas on a plot of land offered by authorities in the village of Guanhu, China’s Guangdong province. Each property measures 280 square meters and the three-story villas feature five bedrooms, two reception rooms, a garage and a small garden. The new village also has a small stream passing through it, several pedestrian bridges, basketball and badminton courts and even a public stage for various cultural events, but even though everything was completed last year, the place remains deserted.

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A Japanese animal lover risks her life every single day by venturing into the Fukushima exclusion zone to feed a heard of 11 cows abandoned after the 2011 nuclear disaster.

The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Fukushima in 2011 claimed the lives of over 20,000 people, and forced another 160,000 to leave everything behind and flee to safety. But while people were able to escape the threat of radiation from the damaged reactor at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, animals could not. The area was home to over 3,500 cattle which became known as the “nuclear cows of Fukushima” after being exposed to high levels of radiation. Most of them are dead now, killed by starvation or euthanized by the government, but the few surviving cows now rely on the kindness of humans brave enough to risk their lives to bring them food and water.

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53-year-old Juana Munoz, from Cadiz, Spain, has been living in a custom glass cage for the last 13 years. It is her prison, but also the very thing that keeps her protected from all the things that would otherwise kill her.

After being diagnosed with four life-threatening conditions – multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and electrosensitivity – Juana Munoz had no choice but to isolate herself inside a 25-meter glass cage. She cannot leave that space without following a very strict protocol, and anyone coming in must first shower with chemical-free cleaning products and wear only organic cotton clothes. The most painful thing is that her family cannot touch, let alone hug her without putting her life in danger. Juana’s two children, aged 26 and 29, are only allowed to hug her two times a year, and only after undergoing several days of preparation.

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At 17-years-old and suffering from kidney failure, Stanley the cat was on the last of his nine lives. Luckily, his owner decided to gift him a tenth, by shelling out $19,000 for a kidney transplant.

Betsy Boyd earns just $46,000 a year, working as a part-time writing professor, and her husband Michael is a freelance journalist and a stay-at-home dad for their 3-year-old twin boys. They’re not exactly rolling in dough, but when presented with the chance to save their favorite cat’s life in exchange for $19,000, they didn’t hesitate. They even agreed to adopt his donor after the transplant, just so they could have Stanley a little longer.

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Tired of ketchup dripping all over your favorite clothes? Had enough of soggy, ketchup-filled burger buns? Well, one company seems to have come up with the perfect answer to your problems – ketchup slices.

Emily Williams, co-founder of Bo’s Fine Foods, the company behind ketchup slices, came up with the idea for this revolutionary way of enjoying the world’s most popular red sauce while fiddling around with one of her father’s barbecue sauce recipes. It required the braising of large quantities of vegetables that were afterward discarded, but seeing as food waste is currently one of the world’s main economic and environmental problems, she decided to take a different approach. Little did she know it would result in a completely new way to enjoy ketchup.

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A 26-year-old woman recently made headlines in Thailand after posting photos of her enormous tattooed eyebrows on social media. They had been permanently inked by a cheap, inexperienced tattoo artist, but the woman was lucky to have them corrected for free by a kindhearted beauty therapist.

The woman, who goes by the name Kanyarat Dew Chaichan on Facebook, reportedly decided to get her eyebrows permanently tattooed last year, after finding a tattoo artist willing to do it for very little money. Unfortunately, the age-old saying “you get what you pay for” once again proved true, as Kanyarat was left with two giant slug-like tattoos above her eyes. She had always had wide, fluffy eyebrows, but these tattoos were almost double in size.

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Cats get stuck high up in trees all the time, and there’s often no one to call for help, but if you live within an hour’s drive of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, you can rely on Randall Kolb, a 64-year-old retiree who has dedicated the last four years of his life to rescuing felines from trees.

Kolb, aka “Cat Rescue Guy”, discovered his calling in 2014, just two days after retiring from his IT job at Louisiana State University. A cat had become stuck in a tree near his house in Baton Rouge, and he spent two days trying to find someone willing to climb up and bring the feline down. When he did, he paid close attention to the rescue and decided to learn how to climb trees so he could rescue cats in the future. He has since bought or created his own tree climbing equipment and used it to save over 150 cats, for free.

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The Beer Wall, a popular bar in Bruges, Belgium, has recently installed alarm sensors on all of its beer glasses as well as a scanner at the entrance, in order to deter patrons from stealing them.

All of the roughly 1,600 Belgian beers sold at The Beer Wall are served in their own specially designed glasses, some of which are apparently very interesting. From goblet-like glasses that usually accompany abbey-made beers, to glasses shaped like hourglasses or even sliced coconut shells, the famous Bruges bar has plenty of attractive glass artworks. The problem is that many visitors, tourists in particular, don’t settle for feasting their eyes on these unique glasses while sipping a cold one. Instead they steal them as souvenirs, ignoring the warnings in four languages on the bar’s beer mats, which state state that the glasses are not free, and that they can be bought from the souvenir shop next door.

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A 70-year-old woman from Salt Lake City, Utah, was recently found guilty of conspiring to have her ex-husband killed two years ago. But what’s really interesting about this case is that on the day of her trial she was also charged with repeatedly trying to have the hitman who ratted her out killed, while she was in prison.

In December of 2016 Linda Gillman was arrested and accused of trying to hire someone to murder her ex-husband and make it look like an accident or a break-in gone wrong. She had hired a man named Christian Olsen to do some work on her property, and at one point asked him to arrange the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife. She gave him a $5,000 down-payment, but also promised him a $7,000 diamond ring and $18,000 from the victim’s life insurance policy, which she would collect after his death.

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Vietnamese women looking to avoid the social stigma of having a child out of wedlock are increasingly turning to grooms-for-hire businesses that specialize in throwing fake weddings complete with fake grooms and guests for a hefty fee.

Becoming pregnant before marriage is usually frowned upon in Vietnam, particularly in the northern parts of the country, where traditional social norms are still very strong. With over 300,000 abortions recorded every year, Vietnam’s abortion rate ranks fifth globally and first in Asia. Data shows that most of these pregnancy terminations are caused by social pressure, as 20 to 30 percent of women seeking abortion are not married, while most of the rest are young students. But what happens when a mother wants to keep the baby while at the same time avoid disgracing herself and her family? Well, that’s where the grooms-for-hire businesses come in.

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If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the features and apps available on smartphones these days and miss the good old days when mobile phones were simple communication devices, you’ll probably love Light 2, a stylish “dumb phone” designed to eliminate time-wasting distractions from your life.

The original Light mobile phone launched in 2015, and was about as bare-bones as a cellphone could get. You could basically only use it to make and take phone calls, but its creators, Joe Hollier and Kai Tang, recently decided that in order to improve its usefulness while still keeping users safe from smartphone distractions, the handheld needed a few extra features. The recently announced Light Phone 2 is just as tiny and stylish as the original version, but also features text messaging capabilities, an alarm clock and a headphone jack.

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Junaid Ahmed, a 22-year-old man from Peterborough, UK, is obsessed with selfies. He can spend up to three hours getting himself ready for his daily photo-shoots, and claims to snap around 200 photos of himself, uploading the best of them to his Instagram page.

An ex-fashion student and model, Junaid treats every day like a photo-shoot and even calls himself the ‘selfie king’. To make sure he looks his best for his 50,000 Instagram followers, the young man gets weekly facials, has his eyebrows done and spends hours in front of the mirror applying makeup. Over the years, he has also undergone several cosmetic procedures, including veneered teeth, chin fillers, cheek fillers, jawline fillers, lip fillers, botox under the eyes and on the head, tattooed eyebrows and fat freezing. That’s a lot for anyone, let alone a 22-year-old, but Junaid claims it’s all worth it as long as he gets the attention he seeks on social media.

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A couple in Volvograd, Russia, were recently reunited with the child they had though had died seven years ago, right after birth. What’s even more astonishing is that the startling revelation was the result of a completely accidental administrative error.

In 2011, a young girl gave birth at a hospital in Volgograd, but was soon told that her child was not viable and that it would not survive a week. Advised to give up the child, the depressed mother agreed to sign a waiver leaving the newborn in the care of the state and went home. Five days later, guilt overwhelmed the two parents, so they returned to the hospital to retrieve their baby and look after it for as little as it had to live. They were told that they were too late, that the baby had died. After grieving their terrible loss, the parents went on with their lives, but last year, they were shocked to discover that the child had been alive all this time.

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Sally Dawly is a woman on a mission. Over the last three and a half years, the anti-littering activist has spent most of her free time picking up cigarette butts from the streets of her home city of Auburn, in California, and on this year’s Valentine’s Day she picked up her millionth butt.

Dubbed the “Butt Lady” by her local community, Dawly began her quest to rid the streets of Auburn of cigarette butts in October 2014. Armed with a broom, dustpan and a pair of tongs, the woman started scouring the streets of her town in search of discarded cigarette butts, picking them up and throwing them in the trash, where they belong. To keep a tab on how many butts she picks up, the Butt Lady has been using a clicker, and earlier this month, she hit a historic milestone – one million cigarette butts.

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