David Bayo, a self-taught artist from Strasbourg, France, spends hundreds of hours carefully placing tiny ink dots on a white canvas to create incredibly detailed portraits.

To truly appreciate David Bayo’s skills, you need to lean in and examine his amazing artworks up close. Only when you see the millions of dots expertly placed by the artist over dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours, do you begin to understand the hard work and patience that go into each and every one of his stippled portraits.

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Bay View, a small upscale community in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, just outside of Petoskey, has been making headlines due to a lawsuit against its unusual ownership laws, which prohibit non-Christian from buying or even inheriting a home there.

What started out as a modest camping ground for Methodist families, over 140 years ago, has blossomed into one of the most beautiful resort communities in the United States. Bay View was named one of the 12 “Prettiest Painted Places” in the U.S., for its 444 Victorian-era cottages, fondly called ‘gingerbread houses’, and it is often referred to as a summer vacation paradise. However, it’s not a paradise open to all, at least not if you actually want to own property here, as according to a law dating back to the 1940s only practicing Christians are allowed to buy houses, or even inherit them.

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Valentine’s Day is all about love and happiness, which makes it that much harder a holiday for people who have just been dumped by their partners. Luckily, a design studio is giving scorned lovers a chance to cope with their breakup by symbolically walk all over them.

Created by the people at Bompas & Parr, the ‘Anti-Valentine’s Day Insoles’ present users with “the ultimate opportunity to get your own back on your ex, unrequited loves and the cruellest of heartbreakers and symbolically walk all over them.” All you have to do is send the design studio a photo of your ex-lover and they’ll print it on a pair of insoles that you can then cut to fit your shoes, so you can trample over their face every time you take a step. It’s supposed to be a cathartic way of moving on with your life.

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45-year-old Michelle Myers, from Phoenix, Arizona, suffers from Foreign Accent Syndrome, a very rare condition that causes her to speak in various foreign accents – British, Australian, Irish – despite having never traveled outside of the United States.

Myers was diagnosed with the unusual condition in 2015, when, after going to bed with a pounding headache, she woke up unable to speak and with the left part of her body completely numb. She was taken to the nearby West Valley Hospital in Goodyear, where doctors said she was suffering from aphasia, loss of speech, symptoms associated with strokes or brain injuries. However, their diagnosis was turned on its head when the woman finally started speaking again.

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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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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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Describing an ice-cream as hot might seem strange, but when talking about the Respiro del Diavolo (Devil’s Breath), it’s actually an understatement. Made using an assortment of hot chillies, the bizarre treat scores over 1.5 million units on the Scoville scale of hotness, making it the world’s most dangerous ice-cream.

Respiro del Diavolo was brought to Glascow, Scotland, by Martin Bandoni, owner of the Aldwych Cafe and Ice Cream Parlour, but he claims the recipe has been a closely-guarded secret among Italian gelato makers for centuries. It has been used as a test of bravery at yearly gatherings among masters of the trade, but Bandoni thought it could become a commercial hit as well, so he put it on the menu of his ice-cream parlour in Glasgow. So far, the response has been ‘crazy’, with people from all over the UK stopping by to try the fiery treat.

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The Didu Cafe in Moscow, is one of the most interesting-looking cafes in the world. Its walls are covered with over 140,000 colorful plasticine figurines made by visitors over the years. It’s also home to the largest plasticine Mona Lisa on Earth.

The founder of Didu Cafe wanted to give patrons a chance to leave their mark on this place in a semi-permanent way, but also give them something to do while waiting for their food and drinks. Plasticine was the perfect solution. It’s easy to work with, colorful and ends up looking good, or at least funny, even in the hands of someone with no artistic talents. So he placed boxes of plasticine on all the tables and started inviting guests to create small artworks out of it and decorate the walls and ceiling of the cafe with them. Today, Didu is home to over 140,000 plasticine artworks, from abstract designs and childish figurines, to popular symbols and even profane messages.

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Welcome to Monowi, Nebraska, population 1. According to 2010 U.S. Census data, Monowi is the only incorporated town in the country with only one resident.

As the only person living in Monowi, 84-year-old Elsie Eiler, is the town’s mayor, clerk, treasurer, librarian, bartender, among other functions. Every year she hangs a sign in the tavern advertising mayoral elections and then votes for herself. Federal law also requires her to produce a municipal road plan annually to secure state funding, and pay $500 in taxes to keep the water and electricity turned on. She also does the required paperwork to keep Monowi’s incorporated status and prevent it from becoming a ghost town.

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N’na Fanta Camara, a healer from Guinea, in Western Africa, was recently arrested for conning over 700 women into thinking they were pregnant by giving them a strange cocktail of plants and medicines that left them bloated for long periods of time.

Women desperate to become pregnant would apparently seek Camara’s help and pay her considerable amounts of money for herbal concoctions that the so-called healer claimed would help them bear children. The con artist would make her clients drink plant mixtures that caused vomiting and diarrhea, but she reassured the women that this was all part of the process. She made it specifically clear that they were not to go to the hospital to treat their symptoms, but rather see Etienne Balamou, a laboratory technician running a clandestine clinic in Conakry, who police say was her accomplice. In time, the strange remedy made some of the women’s bellies become permanently bloated, making them think they were pregnant. Some reported looking pregnant for 12 to 16 months.

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At first first sight, Alla Lebedeva farm doesn’t seem very different fro all the other in Prigorodny, a small village in western Siberia. But then you notice one of her fluffy Siberian cats, and then another, and another and you being to realize why this place is popularly known as Koshlandia, or ‘land of cats’.

59-year-old Alla and her husband Sergey got their first cat in 2003, a beautiful Siberian feline called Babushka. A year later, she gave birth to five kittens and before long cats pretty much took over the whole farm. When people ask how many cats live in Koshlandia, Alla simply says ‘a million, maybe more’. Some sleep in the henhouse, some in the shed, others are chilling on the fence around the farm or on the roof of the farmhouse. They’re pretty much everywhere, and that’s just how Alla and Sergey like it. In fact, they are so proud of their cat paradise that they always take photos of the cats and post them on social media.

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In 1980, when loggers for the Georgia Kraft Corp. cut a chestnut oak into logs they made a grim discovery. Lodged in a hollow stretch near the top of the tree was a mummified hunting dog. Rather than send the section of the tree on to the sawmill, the loggers donated it to Forest World, a tree museum in Waycross, Georgia. He has been a star attraction ever since.

The dog, named (slightly insensitively) “Stuckie” after a 2002 naming contest, had apparently been in the tree for approximately 20 years before the loggers discovered him. Experts believe that he had probably chased after some small game, wedging himself into the hollow tree and climbing a whopping 28 feet up before getting stuck.

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We all have that one acquaintance who takes their pet everywhere with them, so from that standpoint, Lisa Foxcroft,  of Merseyside, in North West England, isn’t that special. But what does make her stand out is that her pet is actually a taxidermy fox cub named Baby Jesus. The two of them have been getting a lot of attention on Instagram lately, as you can imagine.

Baby Jesus was apparently hit by a car as he was trying to cross the road, but he was (sort of) given a second chance at live with the help of taxidermy,  and gifted to Foxcroft as a Christmas gift, by a friend. She named him Baby Jesus to celebrate the holiday,  and before you start accusing her of blasphemy, you should know that Lisa considers a devout Catholic who respects all religious beliefs. Anyway, most people would probably wince at the sight of such an unusual Christmas present, but Lisa absolutely fell in love with Baby Jesus the moment she saw him, and they’ve virtually inseparable for the past two years.

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Two years ago, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin didn’t even know how to bake, but today she is widely regarded as the world’s most talented pie maker. And, believe it or not, she’s entirely self taught.

Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin’s amazing journey into the world of elaborate pies began a couple of years ago, as a New Year’s resolution to cut down on sugar. Pies just seemed like the safest way to satisfy her dessert cravings, but there was just one problem – she didn’t know anything about baking, or cooking in general for that matter. So she dedicated six months to developing her baking skills, and it paid off big-time. These days, Clark-Bojin’s fabulous pies are all the rage on social media and she’s able to make a living by selling how-to guides to like-minded pie enthusiasts who want to bake their own edible works of art.

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Arthur Wagner, a leading member of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right German political party whose slogan is “Islam doesn’t belong in Germany”, recently resigned after converting to Islam.

Originally created as an anti-euro party, the AfD has recently campaigned on an anti-Muslim, anti immigration platform, strongly criticizing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow over a million refugees into Germany, since 2015. Just last summer, Arthur Wagner, who sat on the party’s executive committee in the state of Brandenburg, accused Merkel of “making a big mistake” by allowing so many Muslim refugees into the country, and warned that “Germany is mutating into a different country”. On January 11th, he left the party citing personal reasons, but it was later revealed that he had converted to Islam.

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