Beard

"In the beginning we said that the first to get money were those whose houses collapsed. That wasn't the case. Then we thought maybe it was the poorest. That wasn't the case either. Could it be they distributed the first relief payments based on party criteria, we wondered. That didn't seem to have happened. Now, we are making jokes and saying maybe only the tall ones received aid.

Many virtual meetings begin these days with references to our cranial and facial hair, and the unfortunate state it is in due to our isolation at home. Greece's Chief Creative Officer Steve Vranakis jokes about his shaved head - the work of his wife and the cause of a state of mild embarrassment when he had to do a video conference call with the prime minister.

Anyway, I learned how to cross the street after a week - the traffic without street lights surprised me at first, but I survived.

So what was it like to be a Japanese person in Kosovo?

Bridge in Kosovska Mitrovica, Kosovo. View from north, 2014. Photo: Wikimedia/Pudalek

A lawmaker of Turkey’s main opposition party, Aytuğ Atıcı, had his long beard shaved off as he had promised after the two-year-long state of emergency was lifted on July 19.

For men of all faiths in the holy city, a beard can be an important statement of religious devotion, connecting past generations to God through the tangled strands of history

Mary Beard, professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, is among the most prestigious voices in the field of ancient history.

A Turkish Islamic scholar who said men who shave off their beards can look like women has received backlash for his comments from social media users.

For Mary Beard, the image of Hillary Clinton's severed head was the last straw.

The hipster beard has been the trendy look for men for some while now. Watch the priceless reaction of this little girl when she discovers her bearded daddy has clean shaven his beard. She bursts out into tears unable to recognise the strange man whose lap she is sitting on and lunges towards her mom’s safe arms, who is recording the whole the scared girl!

Tajik police forcibly shaved the beards off nearly 13,000 random men as part of a government campaign to tackle radicalization. The bearded men were stopped in the street, taken to police stations for questioning and then urged  to shave. The unusual beard-shaving tactics are part of a broader campaign against the adoption of Islamic practices that could lead to extremism.