Thilafushi: Maldives’s Garbage Island

What does an island with not a speck of land to spare do to get rid of hundreds of tons of garbage generated each day by its one million yearly tourists and nearly four hundred thousand permanent residents?

The Story Of David Glasheen, A Real Life Robinson Crusoe

David Glasheen is a 70-year-old former businessman from Sydney’s North Shore who traded in his suit for a loincloth after losing most of his money in the stock market crash of 1987.

The Checkerboard Forest

If you pull up Google Maps and look at the forested areas of Western United States, you’ll notice strange checkerboard patterns, like the one below.A digitally enhanced screengrab from Google Maps. Coordinates: 48.4170389,-116.8918616

Colma: The Town of The Dead

South of San Francisco, near Daly City, lies the small town of Colma where the dead outnumbers the living by a thousand to one. It’s less than 2 square miles in size, but crammed within it are as many as 17 cemeteries where rest the bodies of more than 1.5 million souls.

The Tree That Was Arrested

In the Landi Kotal army cantonment area in present-day Pakistan, there is a banyan tree that is kept chained to the ground as if to prevent it from escaping. A board hanging from its branches read, in part: “I am under arrest.”

Spaso-Kamenny Monastery

The Spaso-Kamenny Monastery is located in a small island in the middle of Kubensky Lake, in Ust-Kubinsky District of Vologda Oblast, about 500 kilometers north of Moscow. It is distinguished as the first stone monastery of the Russian North.

Dutch Prisons Become Welcoming Homes For Refugees

With crime declining in the Netherlands, the country is looking at new ways to fill its prisons. The government has let Belgium and Norway put prisoners in empty cells and now, amid the huge flow of migrants into Europe, several Dutch prisons have been temporarily pressed into service as asylum-seeker centers.

Inside the FBI’s Colossal Fingerprint Factory

Before the FBI went digital, it looked a little more like a giant stock warehouse for Amazon.com. In the 1920s, the bureau was only employing 25 workers to classify around 800,000 print cards, but by 1943, there were more than 20,000 employees sorting through 70 million fingerprints.