While coronavirus lockdowns caused many men across the world to grow their hair longer than usual, none compare with Vietnam’s Nguyen Van Chien who has gone almost 80 years without a trim. The 92-year-old from the southern Mekong Delta region is the proud owner of five-metre long dreadlocks, owing to his belief in a faith that prescribes leaving untouched what a person is born with. “I believe if I cut my hair I will die. I dare not to change anything, not even combing it,” Chien told Reuters in his village about 80km (50 miles) west of Ho Chi Minh…

A Twitter account belonging to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has urged the Iranian government to end imports of "luxury American smartphones" in a tweet sent from an Apple iPhone. The anti-American appeal was sent by Khamenei's Russian-language Twitter account on Sunday. The ayatollah has multiple Twitter accounts in several languages, including English, Arabic, French, and Spanish. The Russian account was opened in January 2020 and has more than 7,000 followers. Its reach is far smaller than the English-language account, which has more than 809,000 followers. "Nat'l production is key to employment, welfare, reducing inflation& increasing nat'l currency's power,"…

A bald eagle launched an aerial assault on a drone operated by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy — known as EGLE — ripping off a propeller and sending the aircraft into Lake Michigan, United States. The attack happened July 21, when the drone was mapping shoreline erosion near Escanaba in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to document and help communities cope with high water levels, the department said in a statement. Environmental quality analyst and drone pilot Hunter King said he had completed about seven minutes of the mapping flight when satellite reception became spotty. King pressed a…

Li Jingzhi spent more than three decades searching for her son, Mao Yin, who was kidnapped in 1988 and sold. She had almost given up hope of ever seeing him again, but in May she finally got the call she had been waiting for. At weekends Jingzhi and her husband would take their toddler Mao Yin to the zoo, or to one of the many parks in their city, Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province in central China. And one of these outings has always remained especially vivid in her memory. "He was about one-and-a-half years old at the time.…