It does not get more unusual that this three sisters are affected by one of the most unusual condition in the world, affecting just one in a billion.

Three Sangli sisters are suffering from a rare genetic disorder referred to as werewolf disease – whereby they are completely covered from head to toe in thick hair.

Named Savita, 23, Monisha, 18, and 16-year-old Savitri Sangli, the girls live in a village near Pune, they were passed down the hypertrichosis universalis disorder from their dad.

Hypertrichosis universalis is a unusual genetic mutation, in which cells that normally switch off hair growth in uncommon areas, for example the eyelids and forehead, are left turned on.

Unfortunately the girls have excessive hair growth on their faces, which affects their eyebrows, nose and portrays them a beard.

The sisters partake in hair removal cream to keep their condition under wraps on a very temporary basis.

The cost of a laser surgery is around Rs 3,50,000, but the family is not wealthy enough to afford the specialised treatment.

The girl's mother Anita Sambhaji Raut has six daughters in total with three of them living with werewolf syndrome.

Max, a 3-year-old Argentine Mastiff, fresh off being saved from the freezing waters of the Smith Reservoir, has taken a bite from veteran KUSA anchor Kyle Dyer on the face during a segment being filmed at at 9News studios. Luckily, 9News reports that Dyer is "currently in fair condition and is being evaluated by the trauma team. She is awake and visiting with family who asked that we thank the community for their immediate outpouring of support."

The dog, and it's owner and the rescue firefighter involved in the Smith Reservoir rescue Tuesday afternoon were recording in the 9News studios with Dyer for a follow up report on the dramatic rescue, according to The Denver Post. In the clip below, Dyer is seen kneeling on the floor petting the dog's neck and getting close to it's face (big mistake), when suddenly Max, perhaps still traumatized from the rescue, bares his teeth, lunges and bites Dyer's face.

On the 9News Facebook page, viewers reacted to the bite with sympathy for Dyer's injury. Some expressed that it might have been too early to put the dog on television or that perhaps Dyer may have been too close to the dog's face and that his "reaction was out of trauma."

The 85-pound Argentine Mastiff is lucky to be alive after being rescued from the freezing cold waters of Smith Reservoir, Tuesday afternoon.

Gun smoke: Four-stone Ardi puffs one of 40 cigarettes he smokes a day while toting a water pistol

Taking a deep drag on his cigarette while resting on the steering wheel of his truck, he looks like a parody of a middle-aged lorry driver.

But the image covers up a much more disturbing truth: At just the tender age of two, Ardi Rizal’s health has been so ruined by his 40-a-day habit that he now struggles to move by himself.

The four-stone Indonesia toddler is certainly far too unfit to run around with other children – and his condition is set to rapidly deteriorate.

Truck on bad habits: Ardi Rizal sits smoking on his favourite toy at home in Musi Banyuasin, Indonesia 
But, despite local officials’ offer to buy the Rizal family a new car if the boy quits, his parents feel unable to stop him because he throws massive tantrums if they don’t indulge him.  

His mother, Diana, 26, wept: ‘He’s totally addicted. If he doesn’t get cigarettes, he gets angry and screams and batters his head against the wall. He tells me he feels dizzy and sick.’

Ardi will smoke only one brand and his habit costs his parents £3.78 a day in Musi Banyuasin, in Indonesia’s South Sumatra province.

But in spite of this, his fishmonger father Mohammed, 30, said: ‘He looks pretty healthy to me. I don’t see the problem.’

Ardi’s youth is the extreme of a disturbing trend. Data from the Central Statistics Agency showed 25 per cent of Indonesian children aged three to 15 have tried cigarettes, with 3.2 per cent of those active smokers.

The percentage of five to nine year olds lighting up increased from 0.4 per cent in 2001 to 2.8 per cent in 2004, the agency reported.

A video of a four-year-old Indonesian boy blowing smoke rings appeared briefly on YouTube in March, prompting outrage before it was removed from the site.

Child advocates are speaking out about the health damage to children from second-hand smoke, and the growing pressure on them to smoke in a country where one-third of the population uses tobacco and single cigarettes can be bought for a few cents.

Seto Mulyadi, chairman of Indonesia’s child protection commission, blames the increase on aggressive advertising and parents who are smokers.

‘A law to protect children and passive smokers should be introduced immediately in this country,’ he said.

A health law passed in 2009 formally recognizes that smoking is addictive, and an anti-smoking coalition is pushing for tighter restrictions on smoking in public places, advertising bans and bigger health warnings on cigarette packages.

Puff baby: Ardi blows smoke while trundling around on his truck
But a bill on tobacco control has been stalled because of opposition from the tobacco industry.

The bill would ban cigarette advertising and sponsorship, prohibit smoking in public, and add graphic images to packaging.

Benny Wahyudi, a senior official at the Industry Ministry, said the government had initiated a plan to try to limit the number of smokers, including dropping production to 240 billion cigarettes this year, from 245 billion in 2009.

‘The government is aware of the impact of smoking on health and has taken efforts, including lowering cigarette production, increasing its tax and limiting smoking areas,’ he said.

Mr Mulyadi said a ban on advertising is key to putting the brakes on child and teen smoking. 

‘If cigarette advertising is not banned, there will be more kids whose lives are threatened because of smoking,’ he said.

Ubiquitous advertising hit a bump last month when a cigarette company was forced to withdraw its sponsorship of pop star Kelly Clarkson’s concert following protests from fans and anti-tobacco groups.

Always having a break: Ardi, who is rarely seen without a cigarette, insists on the same brand, costing £3.78 a day
However, imposing a non-smoking message will be difficult in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest tobacco consumer.

Tubagus Haryo Karbyanto, a member of the National Commission of Tobacco Control, said Indonesia must also address the social conditions that lead to smoking, such as family influence and peer pressure.

‘The promotion of health has to be integrated down to the smallest units in our society, from public health centres and local health care centres to the family,’ he was quoted as saying by the Jakarta Globe on Friday.

Health Minister Endang Sedyaningsih conceded turning young people off smoking will be difficult in a country where it is perceived as positive because cigarette companies sponsor everything from scholarships to sporting events.

‘This is the challenge we face in protecting youth from the dangers of smoking,’ she said in a statement on the ministry’s website.

Over the past years China has build up a reputation of its own in welcoming out of the ordinary animals-if not to say fantasy-animals-turn-real.  For example some recent cases include the discovery of the Cyclops shark and Man Pig and the birth of a goat with seven legs or even the recent case of the [...]

She lost her ring more than a decade back and even gave up the idea of ever finding it again until last October when she finally found her ring.  Lena Paahlsson who lives on a farm in Northern Sweden was picking her last carrots in her farm when she saw something glittering on one of [...]

The discovery of a 400 year old witch cottage comes only few months away from the 400th anniversary of the Pendal witch trials and represent a great discovery according to archaeologists, similar to that of finding the tomb of King Tut.  The cottage was discovered by British engineers on a construction project in Lancashire.  The [...]

Here we have a virgin by the name of Trent Arsenault who has hit the headlines last December when his free sperm bank came under investigation from the US Food and Drug Administration. The California local who claims to have the "perfect" gene pool, has announced that he is a 36-year-old virgin (wasn’t that a [...]

A group of villagers in an undisclosed location in the Indonesian part of Borneo, captured a female orang utan, shaved her all over and used her as sex slave.

According to a report purportedly quoting Michelle Desilets, the director of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, the female orang utan named Pony, was being kept at a prostitute village on Borneo.

“We found her chained to a wall, lying on a mattress. She had been shaved all over her body,” Desilets said. “I want to cry”.

According to her, if a man walked near Pony, she would turn herself around, present herself, and start gyrating and going through the motions.

“She was being used as a sex slave. She was probably about six or seven years old when we rescued her, but she had been held captive by a madam for a long time.

“The madam refused to give up the animal because everyone loved Pony and she was a big part of their income.

“They also thought Pony was lucky, as she would pick winning lottery numbers,” she said, adding that she was being guarded by villagers who were armed with guns, knives and poison darts.

She also said that clients came to the village especially for the orang utan. “You could choose a human if you preferred, but it was a novelty for many of the men to have sex with an orangutan.”

It took 35 policemen armed with AK-47s to rescue Pony. As they took away Pony, her keeper yelled, “They are taking my baby, you can’t do this!”

Desilets said that it was unlikely that the keepers would be taken action as there was “no law enforcement in Indonesia so these people didn’t face any sentence or anything for what they had done.”

Having sex with Animals can have graver consequences than most realise.

If this strange creature growled at you, you wouldn’t know whether to run from his sharp claws or pat him on the head and give him a biscuit.

From a distance, its striped orange and black coat makes it look like a particularly odd tiger.

But it’s actually a retriever, the victim of the latest craze among some dog owners in China to dye their pets to look like other animals.

The Chinese are always quick to embrace bizarre trends, and it is not unusual for owners to take their dogs to grooming parlours where they are not only given a shampoo and trim, but a multi-coloured dye job as well.

Created more than 5,500 years ago at the dawn of civilisation this perfectly preserved brown leather lace-up is the oldest shoe in the world

For lovers of fashion, it’s the ultimate vintage shoe.

Created more than 5,500 years ago at the dawn of civilisation this perfectly preserved brown leather lace-up is the oldest shoe in the world.

It was created from a piece of cow hide 1,000 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza and stitched together with leather thread.

The size 4 shoe – discovered buried in a cave in Armenia – is so well preserved that its lace is still intact.

Archaeologists say it probably belonged to a woman who deliberately buried it in the cave during a mysterious ritual. The cave also contained three pots, each containing a child’s skull, along with containers of barley, wheat and apricot.

For Dr Ron Pinhasi, University College Cork, the shoe is a discovery of a lifetime.

‘We thought initially that the shoe and other objects were about 600-700 years old because they were in such good condition,’ said Dr Pinhasi.

‘When we discovered that the shoe dated back to 3,500 BC and that it was the oldest leather shoe, we were very excited.’

The shoe was worn by an early farmer living in the mountains of Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia close to the border of modern-day Turkey and Iran.

The region was on the edge of the Fertile Crescent – the great sweep of land that gave birth to the first towns, cities and farms.

It was made from a single piece of leather, tanned using vegetable oil, and shaped to fit the wearer’s foot. It contained grass, although archaeologists are unsure whether this was to keep out the cold, or maintain the shape of the shoe.

The shoe was made from a single piece of leather, tanned using vegetable oil, and shaped to fit the wearer’s foot

This is the cave pit where the shoe was found. It is believed to have been worn by a farmer living in the mountains of Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia close to the border of modern-day Turkey and Iran

It was laced using a strip of leather threatened through slits. At some point in its life, one of the slits tore – forcing the wearer to make repairs by recutting another gash for the lace.

‘It is not known whether the shoe belonged to a man or a woman,’ said Dr Pinhasi, who reports the findings in the journal PLoS One.

However, the small size makes it most likely that it belonged to a woman, he added.

The cool and dry conditions in the cave helped preserve the shoe which appears to have been buried in the ground on its own. The floor was covered with a thick layer of sheep dung which helped conserve the shoe and other finds.

Three samples of the shoe were carefully radiocarbon-dated at laboratories at Oxford University and the University of California, Irvine.

The shoe was discovered by Armenian PhD student, Diana Zardaryan, of the Institute of Archaeology, Armenia, in a pit that also included a broken pot and sheep’s horns.

Researcher Dr Gregory Areshian, of the University of California, Los Angeles, said: ‘We couldn’t believe the discovery. The crusts had sealed the artefacts and archaeological deposits and artefacts remained fresh dried, just like they were put in a can.’

The top and bottom close-up images show in detail how the shoe was laced together with a strip of leather. The image on the right shows its smooth sole

The entrance to an Armenian cave, marked with blue plastic in the centre of the picture where the shoe was found

The previous oldest known footwear were sandals made from plants found in a cave in Missouri. They were made and worn a few hundred years after the Armenian shoe.

The design is similar to the ‘pampooties’ worn on the Aran Islands in the West of Ireland up to the 1950s.

‘We do not know yet what the shoe or other objects were doing in the cave or what the purpose of the cave was,’ said Dr Pinhasi.

‘We know that there are children’s graves at the back of the cave but so little is known about this period that we cannot say with any certainty why all these different objects were found together.’  

Armenia’s climate 5,500 years ago was similar to today’s – hot in the summer, snowy in winter. The owner of the shoe would have worn wool and leather clothes, and relied on the shoes for protection as she walked around the rocky terrain.

The shoe may have been made locally, or traded with the more sophisticated towns and villages in the heart of Mesopotamia, Dr Pinhasi added.

The spot in Armenia, marked with a red square, where the ancient shoe was discovered in the old ‘fertile belt’ of Fertile Crescent.

(via dailymail)