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Iceland just announced a no-nonsense plan to eliminate its wage gap in 5 years.

On Oct. 24, 2016, thousands of Iceland's women stopped working at 2:38 p.m.

At the time, the country's men were earning an average of 18% more for doing the same jobs.

So women decided they were going to work 18% fewer hours (hence walking off the job at 2:38 p.m.) for a day to prove a powerful point.


Thousands took off early and poured into the streets to voice their displeasure with the wage gap (which, hey, is actually a lot better than in most of the world but still needs to be fixed).

In early March 2017, not even five months later, things may finally be changing, in no small part thanks to the work of these protestors.

Government officials in Iceland just announced new legislation that would require companies to open their books and prove they're providing equal pay for equal work.

According to USA Today, the measure is expected to be approved by parliament because lawmakers across the political spectrum all agree that the wage gap needs to be fixed ASAP.

(That must be nice.)

"Equal rights are human rights," said Social Affairs and Equality Minister Thorsteinn Viglundsson. "We need to make sure that men and women enjoy equal opportunity in the workplace. It is our responsibility to take every measure to achieve that."

Iceland won't be the first nation to enforce equal pay, but its policy is considered to be one of the most aggressive yet as it targets any company, public or private, with at least 25 employees.

The government is hoping measures like this one will help to completely eradicate the pay gap in the next five years.

This is a massive victory, not just for women, but for the power of engaged citizens who refuse to accept inequality.

The news out of Iceland comes hot off the heels of A Day Without a Woman, which called for women all over the world to strike — from work, from home duties, from the multitude of tasks they juggle day in and day out — to make their value known to the world in no uncertain terms.

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A post shared by Áslaug Lárusdóttir (@aslauglar_) on

Critics of the strike questioned its ability to make a difference since turnout would be smaller and more scattered than the massive Women's March that took place shortly after Inauguration Day.

But the citizens of Iceland are proof-positive that public demonstrations can and do work. It sounds trite, but when enough people come together to make their voices heard, people in power have no choice but to listen. Even if it seems like they're not.

Change may not happen overnight, or even in five months as it did in Iceland, but as the saying goes, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Sometimes, the arc just needs a couple thousand badass women forcing it to bend a little more quickly.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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An English doctor named Edward Jenner took incredible risks to try to rid his world of smallpox. Because of his efforts and the efforts of scientists like him, the only thing between deadly diseases like the ones below and extinction are people who refuse to vaccinate their kids. Don't be that parent.

Unfortunately, because of the misinformation from the anti-vaccination movement, some of these diseases have trended up in a really bad way over the past several years.

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A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

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Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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