For the last 20 years, Elizabeth Eaton Rosenthal, a.k.a. Elizabeth Sweetheart, a fine artist in Brooklyn, New York, has been dressing from head to toe in various shades of green. To her, green is the happiest, most positive color in the world, so she can’t imagine wearing anything else.

‘The Green Lady of Carroll Gardens’, as Elizabeth is most widely known, has always had a thing for experimenting. At one point in her life she wore only 1930s print dresses, before moving on to single colors, like silver, pink, purple, blue and finally green, which she surprisingly never got bored of. Her passion for green started with some home-mixed green nail polish and a neon lime streak in her hair, but it quickly spread to her clothing and her home, as well. Today, she always sports green hair, an attire made up of different hues of green, and most of the things she buys, from towels and skin care products to furniture and appliances, are also green.
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29-year-old Johanna Watkins suffers from an extremely rare condition which makes allergic to literally hundreds of things, including the scent of her husband. For the past year, she has been living alone in a specially-built “safe zone” of her house, and claims that every times she leaves this space her body “goes into attack” mode.

Johanna met her husband Scott five years ago, at Hope Academy, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she worked as a first grade teacher Scott as a second grade teacher. They got married in 2013 and started making plans about their life together, but just two years into their marriage, the allergies that Johanna had suffered from all her life started getting considerably worse. At first they though it was just food allergies, and changed their diet, but that didn’t help. In 2015, she was diagnosed with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), a rare genetic disorder that causes her body to develop life-threatening anaphylactic reactions to virtually everything.

MCAS causes  mast cells, which release chemicals that tell our immune system how to react to various stimuli, to build up and go haywire. Basically Johanna’s mast cells release the wrong chemicals, to the wrong place, at the wrong time. The cells react to all sorts of triggers, releasing chemicals that overwhelm the body, leading to anaphylaxis. Unfortunately, the condition was discovered just nine years ago, so little is known about it.

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The Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, China, is one of the most popular suicide spots in the world, and also the place where one man has spent all his weekends and holidays over the last 13 years trying to convince people out of ending their lives. He has so far been able to save over 300 people.

Chen Si claims that he can approach and talk people out of jumping off the bridge, because he knows how they feel. Many of those who attempt to commit suicide on the Yangtze River Bridge are not actually from Nanjing, but migrant workers living far away from home. Mr. Chen was like them once, a migrant disappointed with his life, living far away from his family. But then he met an old man who offered him optimistic advice and helped him look at life in a positive way. Unfortunately, not longer after they met, the old man’s sons started arguing about their inheritance, and he got so upset that he stopped eating and eventually died. It was this tragic event that inspired Chen to help troubled souls overcome their difficulties and persuade them that life is worth living. He always believed that if he had visited the old man sooner, as he had planned to do, he might have convinced him of that as well. “What could be more important than life itself?” he asks.

So every weekend since 2003, Chen Si has been traveling 25 kilometers from his home to the Yangtze Bridge and patrolling it for hours, either on foot or on his scooter, looking for people who look like they might be thinking of jumping into the river. He pays particularly close attentions to loners staring into the muddy waters below. Chen says he has become an expert at spotting people contemplating suicide. “It is very easy to recognize,” he says. “A person walks without a soul.”

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Students at Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, in Yorktown Heights, New York, have been casting their votes to determine the winner of each presidential election, since 1968, and for the past 48 years, they’ve gotten it right every time.

Every four years,  just days before the actual presidential election, the elementary school sets up mock voting booths and invites its students – from kindergarten to fifth grade – to cast their ballot for the candidate that they think would deserve to become president of the United States of America. But it’s the process leading up to the vote that’s genuinely interesting. The students spend months learning about the candidates, who they only know as ‘Candidate A’ and ‘Candidate B’, focusing on policy and real issues, instead of on their personality and popularity. “We talk about exact facts and issues and put them on two sides of a spreadsheet. Then the students debate the facts in class,” principal Patricia Moore says.

Eventually, the kids are told which candidate they had been siding with, and with this last piece of information in mind, they are ready to cast their vote. The same scenario been unfolding every four years since 1968, since Tom McAdams, a fifth-grade social studies teacher initiated the tradition, and the kids have predicted the result of the election every time.

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Swiss luxury goods company Golden Dreams recently unveiled the iPhone 7 Carbon Concept Edition, a special version of the popular Apple smartphone featuring a hand-made carbon fiber casing that makes it extremely light and nearly impossible to break. But before you get too excited, you should know that they only made 77 units, each priced at a whopping $17,000.

The Geneva-based company claims that the the iPhone 7 Carbon Concept Edition is the world’s first smartphone to have a full carbon casing hand-crafted from a single block of carbon fiber. Golden Dreams CEO, Alexandre Masson said that he received many requests for an iPhone 7 light enough and strong enough to fit the fast life pace of his rich and powerful customers, but he didn’t know exactly how to approach this challenge until he saw some beautiful wristwatches made out of carbon fiber. He knew that was the material Golden Dreams needed to use to reach their objective. They spent two years researching how to machine the casing out of a solid block of carbon fiber, but Masson says that the end result was more than worth the wait, exceeding all their expectations in terms of both aesthetics and functionality.

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Tribal Huk, an ethnic gang from Ngaruawahia, a small town in New Zealand, took it upon themselves to rid their community of methamphetamine dealers, after seeing the local youth negatively affected by the synthetic drug. After giving offenders an ultimatum, the gang cleaned their town of meth dealers in just one weekend.

It all started on Thursday, October 13, when Jamie Pink, the notorious leader of the Tribal Huk gang gave methamphetamine dealers 24 hours to pack up and leave, during a local town meeting. He told attendees that his group had polled local children, and around 75% of them were affected in some way by methamphetamine, so they had decided it was time to take action.

“For a lot of years, the Huks have kept a lot of other gangs out of here in Ngaruawahia and we are always going to do that, but we haven’t kept their poison out of here. We are a bit sorry about that,” Pink said. “From this second on, without disrespecting, we know who they are – some of them are whanau (extended family), but they’ve got to go. They have 24 hours to stop. We ask nicely first, then they’ve got to go. We’ve got no choice. The kids are asking for it. They’ll be asked nicely the first time.”

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Adam Crapser was just three years old when he was flown from South Korea to be adopted by a U.S. family, but because they never bothered to apply for his naturalization, he is to be deported back to his native country 37 years later.

Adam was born Shin Song Hyuk, to a mother who abandoned him and his older sister when he was three years old. They ended up in an orphanage outside Seoul, and five months later they were flown to the United States to be adopted by an American family. Their adoptive parents fought often and punished the children viciously – Crapser remembers being whipped and forced to sit in a dark basement. But six years later, they decided they didn’t want the Korean kids anymore, so Child Services split up the siblings and put them in various foster homes. Adam ended up with a family in Oregon, which turned out to be even worse than the first one.

Thomas and Dolly Crapser, always had their house full of foster and adopted children, sometimes as many as ten at a time. They also subjected their kids to gruesome punishments, like slamming their heads against door frames, burning them, duct-taping their mouths to shut them up. Adam remembers Thomas once broke his nose just because he couldn’t find his missing car keys. They were eventually charged with dozens of counts of child abuse, including rape, sexual abuse and criminal mistreatment, and in 1992, they were convicted on several counts of criminal mistreatment and assault. However, Thomas served only 90 days in prison, and Dolly got three years probation.

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At first glance, Bella Devyatkina, from Moscow, Russia, is your typical carefree, playful four-year-old, but ask her a question in Russian, English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese or Arabic, and you will be shocked by her articulate response.

Bella made headlines in Russia a few days ago, when she appeared on a TV talent show, where she spoke seven different languages without a prominent accent, stunning both the judges and millions of viewers. Since then, a YouTube video of her performance went viral online, transforming the four-year-old polyglot into on overnight internet celebrity. She has since been invited to appear on a variety of television programs where moderators and other guests conversed with her in several of the seven languages she is fluent in, and she always understood their questions and answered accordingly.

So how does a four-year-old girl learn so many languages in such a short period of time, when most people spend years struggling to become fluent in just one foreign language. Bella’s mother, Yulia, said that she and her father started teaching her English when she was just two years old, and after noticing her interest in the language and the ease with which she picked up everything, they decided to gradually adding more languages to her schedule. They hired native tutors for each new language, and by the time she was three and a half years old, she was already speaking two languages. She mastered two more, in the next six months.

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A brand new iPhone 7 costs as much as four and a half average salaries in Ukraine, but a local retailer is giving Apple fans the chance to get one for free, by simply changing their names to “iPhone Seven”.

Allo.ua, Ukraine’s largest mobile phone retailer, is currently running a very unusual iPhone 7 giveaway. The company is asking people to legally change their first name to ‘iPhone’ and their last name to ‘Seven’ for the chance to win Apple’s latest handheld. Participants must first visit their State Registry of Civil Status Acts and fill out an application to officially change their name. Once their new ID is issued, they have to take a selfie with it and send the photo to Allo.ua as confirmation of the name change. If they are among the first five people to have successfully changed their name to ‘iPhone Seven’, they qualify to receive an actual 32GB iPhone 7, and will be invited to visit by an Allo store, show their official ID, and pick up their prize.

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Mohammed Bello Abubakar is one of the most controversial figures in Nigeria. Despite having no discernible income, the 92-year-old man somehow convinced 107 women to marry him throughout his life, 97 of which are still his wives. He claims that marrying as many women as possible is a divine assignment he has received from God.

Mr Bello first shot to fame in 2008, when a series of articles revealed that he had 86 wives and around 150 children, either living with him on his compound in Bida, Niger state, or in his house in Lagos. Muslim clerics accused him of breaking religious rules, which most scholars agree allow a man to marry up to four women, as long as he can provide for all of them and treat them equally. He was given a very simple choice, either divorce 82 of his wives or face the consequences. He refused, arguing that there was no punishment stated in the Koran for having more than four wives, and that every man should be free to marry as many women as he can support. He was arrested at the request of the local Shariah Court, but subsequently released, on the condition that he only keep four of his wives.

Not only did the ‘superpolygamist’ ignore this requirement, but he has since married other women as well. In total, he married 107 women so far, divorced 10 of them, which brings the total wife count to a whopping 97. And despite his ripe old age, Abubakar says he plans on marrying even more. “What I am doing is divine. It is an assignment and I will keep doing it till the end,” he told Nigerian  newspaper Vanguard.

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Bruno Geyer, a passionate florist from the quaint village of Rougemont Le Chateau , in the Franche-Comté region of France, has been decorating his flower shop with water cans for the last 15 years. He currently has around 800 of them hanging from the walls and roof of his shop, and even covering a nearby hillside.

It’s hard to miss Bruno Geyer’s unique shop when passing through Rougemont Le Chateau. If the colorful flowers and climbing plants outside don’t give it away, the hundreds of hanging water cans definitely will. They are virtually everywhere and make the place look like it came out of an Alice in Wonderland illustrated book. And with new additions being installed every few days, you could say it’s a work in progress.

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When it comes to tasty food, nothing beats grandma’s cooking! Well, except maybe more grandmas cooking in the same kitchen, which is exactly what goes on at Staten Island’s Enoteca Maria, a charming restaurant that employs grandmas from various parts of the world, instead of professional chefs.

Enoteca Maria owner Jody Scaravella says that he came up with the idea of placing grandmothers in a restaurant kitchen about 12 years ago, after suffering a series of tragic losses. His grandmother, his mother and his sister had passed away within a few years of each other, and the idea of having an Italian grandmother in the kitchen just felt comforting to him. He got his first cooks by posting an ad in the paper seeking ‘Italian housewives to cook regional dishes’. “I was still building the restaurant then, so I asked them to come to my place to cook instead — I live in the neighborhood. And they came with dishes, and their husbands and a few grandchildren they were looking after for the day. The whole thing was like a Fellini movie,” Scaravella remembers.

But that was only the beginning. These days, the unique New York restaurant has a rotating staff of grandmothers from around 30 different places around the world, including Palestine, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Nigeria and Algeria. They are known as ‘nonnas’ – Italian for ‘grandmas’ – and take turns in cooking traditional recipes from their respective culture, offering patrons the chance to experience new and exciting dishes virtually every night.

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Andrew Dyhin, an Australian inventor and founder of the PotatoMagic company, claims that he has spent the last 12 years researching ways of transforming common potatoes into a cheese-like product that is completely dairy-free.

“The product is called chato – cheese potato. It looks like cheese and melts like cheese, but it is nothing but potato,” Dyhin says. While he won’t reveal the exact production process, he says that the potatoes are peeled, liquefied and processed with no added ingredients into a basic product that can be melted, sliced, turned into cubes or mixed with water and other ingredients to make dips, just like cheese. The PotatoMagic founder said that he is confident that chato can become a sustainable plant based alternative to cheese, milk, custard and even ice-cream.

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For the past 40 years, Ramon Archundia, has dedicated his life to the preservation of Mexico’s endangered iguanas. His magical ‘iguanario’, a reptile sanctuary in the center of Manzanillo city, is now home to 642 iguanas, as well as other wild animal species.

The story of Iguanario Archundia began over four decades ago. Sickened by the plight of iguanas at the hands of man, Ramon Medina Archundia rescued a pair of these majestic reptiles and set up a small enclosure for them in a marshy space in downtown Manzanillo, where two huamúchil trees offered the perfect place for sunbathing. But that was only the beginning, because Ramon and his father Juan, kept bringing in new rescued iguanas, and after word of their small ‘iguanario’ spread around the city and the whole Mexican state of Colima, other people started bringing in iguanas, knowing that they would be well taken care of. Today, Iguanario Archundia is home to over 640 iguanas, as well as other ‘donated’ animals like raccoons, badgers or turtles.

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Andy Pope, a Police Community Support Officer for West Midlands Police, in the UK, has come to be known as memory cop, thanks to his incredible photographic memory, which has helped him successfully identify over 850 suspects in the last four years.

Every day,  PCSO Pope arrives at work half an hour early, logs on to his computer, and browses the pictures of suspects in the day’s internal police briefing. He has been doing it even since he joined the West Midlands Police, in 2008, and as his brain stores more faces year-on-year, his record of recognizing bad guys keeps getting better. His exceptional identification skills have made him somewhat of a secret weapon, and when detectives exhaust all other possible options trying to put a name to a suspect’s face, they turn to him.

 

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