When Hysni Rexha from Kosovo finally made his dream happen and took four wolves from the wild to feed and raise them he had no doubts over how to name one of them. He called it Trump.

“I have some other wolves but this one has a lot of energy in everything and he is very smart,” Rexha, who likes to be called a holistic vet, told Reuters from his small farm in western Kosovo.

Rexha, who puts his hand in the mouths of his wolves, has named himself an Alfa Wolf and made Trump his deputy.

“I admire (President) Trump, he has a lot of energy, he gives orders, he is a brave man, that’s why I named my wolf because he does the same things. He does not do what others do; he has his own style and does his mission.”

He also has different chickens, pigeons, horses, cows, an eagle and peacocks.

In a survey by Gallup International this month about how people rate the performance of United States government officials, Kosovo was ranked first in the world with 75 per cent of Kosovars approving of Donald Trump‘s administration.

Washington is Kosovo’s strongest ally politically and economically.

Many people in Kosovo have named their sons Klinton to show respect for former president Bill Clinton, who played the key role in the 1999 Nato intervention against Serbia which cleared the way for Kosovo’s declaration of independence.

Clinton is also the name of a boulevard in the capital Pristina and another one is called George W Bush.

“The Unites States was the biggest supporter during the war…I had no other way how to thank the US but to name my wolf as Trump. I see Trump as a wolf and my wolf as Trump,” Rexha said.

In the dog-eat-dog world of U.S. politics, a 3-year-old wire-haired Vizsla in Kansas was scratching his head, and behind his ears, after being denied a chance to run for governor, his owner said on Tuesday.

The Kansas man, who registered his dog named Angus for governor, said the secretary of state’s office has halted the campaign to put his pooch in politics.

“His platform was going to be free Chuckit balls for life,” said Terran Woolley, of Hutchinson.

“He is a little heartbroken and a little relieved because he doesn’t have to go to all those pointless debates,” Woolley said by telephone.

Woolley said he registered Angus after reading news reports that teenagers had filed candidacy paperwork and there were almost no requirements on who could run.

But there is at least one.

“A dog cannot run for governor,” Kansas Secretary of State spokeswoman Samantha Poetter said in a statement.

“Kansas statute and the Kansas Constitution make repeated references to a person being governor.”

One person running for governor is Kris Kobach, a Republican who is secretary of state.

“I am sure that Kobach is scared to lose to Angus in the general election,” Woolley said.

This is one contest no New York City subway rider wants to win.

An advocacy group for city commuters on Tuesday awarded its first “Worst Commute of the Week” award to a librarian from the borough of Queens for her story of an agonising two-hour wait in a tunnel one stop from her home after skipping a restroom visit before leaving work.

The Riders Alliance awards are aimed at shaming New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state’s Legislature into enacting a long-term plan to fund and fix the city’s declining subway system.

The inaugural winner, City University librarian Jennifer Tang, recounted being trapped underground on a train when the last five minutes of her ride home from Manhattan to the Forest Hills neighbourhood in the borough of Queens on Jan 20 deteriorated into two hours.

“I hadn’t used the bathroom, figuring I only had a 30-minute commute from Manhattan to Queens,” Tang, 49, said in an interview. Then the train stopped and an announcement warned of signal problems.

“Five minutes became 10 minutes, became 20 minutes, became one hour, became one hour and 50 minutes,” said Tang, who was in pain and urgently hoping the subway would quickly reach her destination. “Now, before boarding the subway, even if it’s for one stop, I use the bathroom.”

The Riders Alliance invited commuters to share their stories using the hashtag #WorstCommute. Winners of the contest receive a chocolate replica of the MetroCard, which the subway system’s roughly 6 million daily riders swipe to enter stations.

Cuomo controls the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the public agency that runs the subways. His transportation spokesman, Peter Ajemian, said, “The Governor has taken aggressive action to fix the subways.”

Ajemian said Cuomo’s actions have included funding the state’s half of the “Subway Action Plan,” and redirecting revenue streams directly to the MTA, and investing $8.6 billion in the MTA’s capital program. He said the governor’s office will work with the state legislature and New York City to ensure funding for the subways.

Overall subway on-time performance has plummeted to 65 per cent – a drop of 15 percentage points over the past several years and the worst of any major transit system in the world, the Riders Alliance said.

Train delays more than tripled from 2012 to 2017 and subway speeds are now slower than they were in 1950, it said.

Tang said the Jan. 20 incident stands out as a personal worst in a lifetime of subway riding: “Even in the ’70s when I almost got mugged on the subway, I never had such as horrible experience on the train.”

A small Australian town that claims to have created the mullet, the “short on top and sides but long at the back” hairstyle favoured by ’70s rock stars, picked the best of more than 150 specimens at the weekend.

“Here in Kurri, we believe that we actually created the mullet,” said Laura Johnson, who runs the Chelmsford Hotel, a vintage-style pub in Kurri Kurri in New South Wales and came up with the idea of the festival.

“We thought we would give our locals a chance to strut their stuff.”

The festival, held in the pub’s beer garden on Saturday, drew mullets of all stripes and colours, their owners dancing and drinking despite temperatures as high as 35 degrees Celsius (95°F).

“I’ve had mine since 1972, so most of the guys I’m competing with probably weren’t even born then,” said Laurie Manuele, one of the contestants.

A winner was declared in each of five categories, ranging from everyday and grubby, to red-haired, women’s and juniors.

The highly coveted award for the ‘best mullet of all’ went to Shane ‘Shag’ Hanrahan, who began growing his mane in 1986.

“I don’t know what to say, I’ve got stage fright,” said Hanrahan, whose hairstyle seemed to be his preferred mode of self-expression.

The festival is expected to return next year, as the Hunter Valley town of 4,000 people is dependent on the tourist dollar after losing its largest employer, an aluminium smelter, in 2012.

“If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me would we, could we?” Barbra Streisand had a hit singing this question in “The Way We Were,” but when it comes to getting a new pet she does not have to wonder.

The “Funny Girl” singer and actress had her beloved 14- year-old Coton de Tulear dog Samantha cloned after her death in 2017, and now has two new pups.

Streisand told Hollywood trade publication Variety in an interview published on Tuesday that cells were taken from the mouth and stomach of Samantha.

“They have different personalities,” Streisand said. “I’m waiting for them to get older so I can see if they have her brown eyes and her seriousness.”

Streisand said that when the cloned dogs arrived, she dressed them in red and lavender to tell them apart, which is how they got their names — Miss Scarlett and Miss Violet.

The Oscar and Tony winning actress, 75, said that while waiting for their arrival, she became smitten with another dog who was a distant relation of Samantha.

The Coton de Tulear dog was called Funny Girl, but Streisand adopted her and gave her the name Miss Fanny, which is how Fanny Brice’s dresser refers to Streisand’s character in the 1968 movie musical that launched her career.

Streisand followed up “Funny Girl,” for which she won an Oscar, with “Hello Dolly!” but said she had never much liked the movie.

“I thought I was totally miscast. I tried to get out of it,” she told Variety. “I think it’s so silly. It’s so old-time musical.”

A 24-year-old Cypriot woman is earning thousands of euros by selling her breast milk to men online who want to build their muscles, it was reported on Friday.

Rafaela Lamprou, 24, who gave birth to her second child seven months ago, found herself producing excess milk that she had no room to store, so she decided to sell it after being approached by men asking for some of the milk as they feel it helps them build muscles.

According to the Mail Online, Lamprou, has so far sold nearly 500 litres of breast milk and made £4,500 (around €5,000). No information was given whether Lamprou lives in Cyprus or the UK.

She said she had initially started by donating her milk to women who were struggling to produce it for their babies, but then men were approaching her for the milk “either as part of their fitness regime or for “fetish reasons” and began selling it to them”.

Lamprou, who lives with her husband Alex, 33, and their two children, now sends her milk out to men for cash on a regular basis.

“I gave birth to my son seven months ago. I had a lot of milk and I thought I needed to do something with it so I started storing it,” she told the Mail Online.

She said she was producing two litres of milk a day, and that it was too much though and it was taking up all the chest freezer. “It was full. I didn’t know what to do with it”.

Initially, she said, she asked mums who were having trouble breastfeeding if they wanted it.

“I started giving it away. I liked seeing the new mums’ faces when I was able to help them.”

But after getting enquiries from men, she decided to charge male buyers €1 per ounce of breast milk.

“It started with men who were interested in bodybuilding. They say it is good for building muscle mass, but then I started to get enquiries from men with fetishes,” she said.

Lamprou said she now breastfeeds on demand. She even took tests to prove to her customers she doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol.

“It was a bit strange at first giving breast milk to a guy with fetishes but as long as it is just that and not asked to show any part of my body, I don’t mind it at all. I am open-minded,” Lamprou said.

She started a Facebook group where customers can order her breast milk.

“I am also on a website where men can approach me for the milk. You do get some creeps on there but I avoid them.”

Lamprou said she was unsure how long she would carry on for, but said her husband was “supportive” of what she is doing. She added it is “quite addictive”.

“My husband is so supportive of me. He is really cool about it. He is happy as long as I am.”

The oldest known message in a bottle was found on an Australian beach 132 years after being thrown from a German ship in the Indian Ocean as part of an experiment to track currents, experts said.

The Dutch gin bottle, with no cork or top, was spotted by Tonya Illman in January in remote sand dunes 180km north of Perth, the capital of Western Australia state.

Inside, her family discovered a note tightly rolled up and tied with string, carrying the date June 12, 1886, and the name of the ship, Paula.

“We took it home and dried it out, and when we opened it, we saw it was a printed form, in German, with very faint German handwriting,” Illman said.

Her husband searched online to find that, in an experiment run from 1864 to 1933 by the Deutsche Seewarte, or German Naval Observatory, ship captains would throw bottles overboard, each with a message giving the date, the ship’s name, its location coordinates, home port and destination.

“It was clearly very exciting, but we needed a lot more information,” said Illman’s husband, Kym. “We wanted to know if what we had found was historically significant or a very inventive hoax.”

The family took their find to the Western Australian Museum, which got experts in Germany and the Netherlands to confirm the bottle was made in Holland in the 19th century, the paper matched the era and the vessel Paula had sailed from Cardiff to Makassar in 1886, as themessage stated.

German experts turned up the ship’s journal, with a captain’s entry from June 12, 1886 showing that a drift bottle was thrown overboard. The coordinates, 950km from Australia’s west coast, matched those on the note.

The handwriting in both journal and note also matched. The find has been authenticated by the German Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) and Germany’s National Meteorological Service (DWD).

“The forms have changed a lot over the years, but in the 1860 period, the form is exactly what you have,” the BSH said in a report.

Researchers think the bottle probably washed up on the coast within a year of being thrown overboard, to be buried in sand until a storm uncovered it.

The message and the bottle will be on display for two years at the museum in the Australian port city of Fremantle.

“It’s quite stunning, I’ve never experienced anything that corroborates so fully as this,” said Ross Anderson, a specialist in maritime archaeology at the museum.

Vladimir Putin’s paternal grandfather worked as a cook for both Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the president said in a film posted on the internet on Sunday.

In the two-hour documentary, called Putin, the president said Spiridon Putin was a valued member of Stalin’s staff. The wartime Soviet leader, who died in 1953, conducted extensive purges during his around three decades in power.

“(He) was a cook at Lenin’s and later at Stalin’s, at one of the dachas in the Moscow area,” Putin said in the film seen by Reuters.

Interviewer Andrey Kondrashov, who became the president’s election campaign spokesman in January, said Spiridon Putin continued to cook for the Soviet establishment until shortly before he died in 1965, aged 86.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the information in the film was accurate.

It might be called Cappuccino Catholicism.

Young Catholics told their Church elders on Saturday that the faith should be spread in the places where they like to hang out, such as coffee bars.

“We would like the Church to meet us in the various places in which she currently has little or no presence,” reads part of a 12-page document written by some 300 young Catholic delegates from around the world, who met for a week at the Vatican.

“The Church should try to find creative new ways to encounter people where they are comfortable and where they naturally socialize: bars, coffee shops, parks, gyms, stadiums and any other popular cultural centres,” it said.

The delegates met in Rome to share their ideas and concerns with Vatican officials ahead of a synod, or meeting of bishops, in October, on the theme of “Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment”.

At a news conference presenting the paper, which will feed into a larger working document to be used by the bishops, participants said they wanted their Church to be more open and transparent and less severe.

The document called for a greater role for women in the Church, which bars them from the priesthood.

“What are the places where women can flourish within the Church and society? The Church can approach these problems with real discussion and open-mindedness to different ideas and experiences,” it said.

“If it is difficult for young people to feel a sense of belonging and leadership in the Church, it is much more so for young women,” the document said.

They said they wanted to “encourage the Church to deepen its understanding of the role of women and to empower young women …”

Earlier this month, Catholic women led by former Irish president Mary McAleese, demanded a greater decision-making role for women in the Church, urging the pope to tear down its “walls of misogyny”.

The document said the 1.2 billion-member Church “oftentimes appears as too severe and is often associated with excessive moralism”. It called for a Church that is “welcoming and merciful … and which loves everyone, even those who are not following the perceived standards”.

A world away from Iraq’s battlegrounds, Basra’s cat-lovers have found a haven for their favourite pets.

Veterinary student Ahmed Taher Maki has turned his home in the southern city into what he believes is Iraq’s first cat hotel.

For as little as 5,000 Iraqi dinars ($4.20) a night – or half that for long stays – the guests can enjoy beds, regular meals, health checkups and a mini playground, all under the cooling purr of an air conditioner.

Maki said he was hoping to encourage more people to adopt cats in the city and give them a place to leave their pets when they are away on a trip.

Taking care of animals gives people a “merciful heart,” he said. “The hotel is a noble thing and unprecedented in the south of Iraq and Basra in particular.”

A 112-year-old Japanese man born months before Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity was recognised on Tuesday as the world’s oldest man. Masazo Nonaka, born on July 25, 1905, took the title after Francisco Nunez Olivera of Spain died this year at the aged 113, Guinness World Records said.

A man in northeastern China who always wanted to own an aircraft is doing the next best thing: building a full-scale replica of an Airbus A320 jet.
Zhu Yue, an aviation buff who worked as a welder and an auto mechanic, spent months studying plane models and technical drawings before he started building a homemade version a year ago with his friends.
Zhu, 40, who lives in the city of Kaiyuan in Liaoning province, said he planned to turn the replicainto an aviation-themed restaurant.
“I want to make sure the plane is created with finesse and be the best A320 model in China,” he said.
The replica – 37.8 metres (124 ft) long with a wingspan of 36 metres (118 ft) and height of 12 metres (39.37 ft) – will feature model engine turbines that can rotate and a simulation cockpit, he added.
Zhu, who has so far spent more than 1 million yuan ($158,810) of his savings and used 40 tonnes of steel on his project, hopes to complete it by the end of year at a total cost of 2 million yuan ($317,620).

AMSTERDAM, April 10 (Reuters) – Take the highway past the Dutch village of Jelsum and the road will play you a tune.

Created by strategically laid “rumble strips” as a way of livening up journeys across the flat landscape, the novelty has worn thin for locals who say the constant droning melody is driving them mad.

The tune is created when car tyres drive over the strips – which are usually deployed at the side of major roads to warn drivers they are straying off course.

If hit at the correct speed – the 60 kph (40 mph) limit – the road will sing out the anthem of the Friesland region – a northern part of the Netherlands that has a distinct language and culture.

But it is loud and the sound travels, and locals say the musical road had created a never-ending cacophony that keeps them awake at night.

“Last Saturday night the taxis were driving from Leeuwarden to Stiens and on the way back, they tried to go across the lines as quickly as possible and we had the anthem played all night at high speed,” said local resident Ria Jansma.

The Friesland authority has agreed to remove the rumble strips later this week, local newspaper Leeuwarder Courant reported.

Kristin Barnaby, a self-described arachnophobe, found a way to overcome what she dreads at a North Carolina burger joint.

“I am going to eat my fear,” the 27-year-old said at the Bull City Burger and Brewery, where she tucked into a hamburger topped with a crunchy full-grown, oven-roasted tarantula and a side of fries.

The tarantula burger was a feature of the restaurant’s April exotic meat month, which in the past six years has featured iguana, alligator, camels, python, turtle and various insects.

Tarantulas made their debut after restaurant owner Seth Gross read about how they have become a street food staple in Cambodia, where they are mixed with salt and sugar and cooked.

“I thought this would be a great way to really teach about diversity,” Gross said in an interview.

The tarantula burger is not for everyone. Gross gets only 15 of the farmed, organically raised creatures each year, so diners need to be lucky, as well as daring, to get a taste.

“You come in, you fill in a lottery ticket,” he said. “If we draw your name, you come and get to eat one.”

The lucky winners have up to 48 hours to claim their prize and Gross said none have yet backed out.

And what do tarantulas taste like?

“It reminded me of potato chips,” Barnaby said after washing down her first tarantula burger with a glass of water. “I like to eat weird food.”

Norway’s high school graduates should refrain from running naked across bridges and having sex on roundabouts lest they give drivers “too much of a surprise”, the national transport regulator said on Wednesday.

Norway’s annual post-graduation period called “Russ” lasts weeks, involves partying and drinking heavily – and tends to challenge public morals every spring.

Dozens of accidents involving students’ red- or blue-painted vans and buses are reported every year, and sometimes the celebrations lead to crashes killing those aged just 18 or 19.

While the list of rituals involved in the Russ celebrations vary from one school to the next, they almost invariably involve alcohol, nudity and sex.

In a statement titled “No to sex on roundabouts”, Terje Moe Gustavsen, a former minister of transport who now runs the Public Roads Administration, said: “Everyone understands that being in and around roundabouts is a traffic hazard,” .

“It may not be so dangerous for someone to be without clothes on the bridge, but drivers can get too much of a surprise and completely forget that they are driving,” he added.

Supermarket shoppers in the western German city of Aachen have stepped out of their comfort zone to sample insect burgers made of buffalo worms.

The worms, highly nutritious due to their high protein content, are the larvae of buffalo beetles and are bred in the Netherlands.

Served in rolls with lettuce, onions and tomatoes, they are being offered to customers at a supermarket in Aachen where they have just been added to the stock range after proving successful in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Max Kraemer bites into a hamburger made of Buffalo worms that he created

One passerby who tried one of the burgers, Manfred Roedder, said he believed they were a good alternative to meat, adding: “I had reservations at first but I got a second serving because it tasted so good.”

Baris Oezel, one of the founders of the start-up called Bugfoundation that makes the burgers, said he spent four years working on the concept along with company co-founder Max Kraemer.

The pair got the idea after travelling together to southeast Asia, where it is not uncommon to eat insects.

“It’s quite simple. You have to create an aesthetic product that looks good and doesn’t show any insects,” Oezel said, adding that people were attracted by the smell of the burgers.

But not everyone is sure about them.

“We have people who are totally thrilled to find out about the whole thing and have been looking forward to it for days,” said Michael Reinartz, manager of a Rewe supermarket in Aachen where the burgers are now being sold. “And we have people who say: You’re not seriously doing that?!”

As Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle inches closer, public hunger for all things royal will get its dessert as decades-old slices of cake from British royal weddings – including those of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and Prince William and Kate Middleton – go up for auction.

The five cake slices from royal weddings are expected to fetch hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars each next month as memorabilia at the sale in Las Vegas, Julien’s Auctions said.

But for those looking to play royal taster, there is a word of caution.

“They’re not edible,” Darren Julien, the Los Angeles-based auction house’s chief executive, said ahead of the June 23 sale.

A slice from Charles and Diana’s wedding, presented in a white box with “CD Buckingham Palace 29th July 1981” in silver printing and wrapped in a paper doily, is estimated to fetch $800-$1,200, the auction house said.

“These come from people who attended the wedding and kept them in the freezer the entire time,” Julien said of all the cake slices, adding they have not been preserved by other means.

More than 600 guests have been invited to Harry and Meghan’s May 19 wedding, which will take place at Windsor Castle’s St. George’s Chapel, with a further 200 being invited for the reception.

The fruit cake made for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s 2011 wedding comes in a tin presented to guests with an enclosure card saluting attendees that said: “With best wishes from TRH The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall in celebration of the wedding of TRH The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.”

It is pegged to sell for $600-$800. Julien’s sold a slice of William and Kate’s cake for $7,500 in 2014.

Other cake slices include Charles’ 2005 wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles and Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson’s 1986 nuptials, which each are estimated to fetch $600-$800.

The piece of royal cake from Princess Anne’s 1973 marriage to her first husband, Captain Mark Philips, is expected to sell for $300-$500.

“It’s kind of hard to throw something out that has been given to you by the royals,” Julien said.

A Paris museum opened its doors for the first time to nudist visitors on Saturday, granting them special visiting hours to tour an exhibit in a one-off naturist event.

The Palais de Tokyo contemporary art museum, in Paris’ plush 16th district, is the city’s first gallery to grant such access, though naturists have recently launched other initiatives in the French capital.

A park in the east of Paris, the Bois de Vincennes, last year trialled the city’s first dedicated nudist zone, and the space recently re-opened ahead of the summer months.

Naturist campaigners said the museum event, with around 160 attendees, was a breakthrough in one of the culture capitals of the world.

“The naturists’ way of life of is to be naked. Culture is part of our daily life, and this is a special opportunity,” said Julien Claude-Penegry, communications director of the Paris Naturists Association, in the Palais de Tokyo’s vast concrete and steel hallways.

“Today, the mentality is changing. Naturists … are pushing past barriers, taboos or mentalities that were obstructive.”

According to the association, which has 88,000 followers in Paris alone, there are 2.6 million naturist practitioners in France.

Next in store is a nudist clubbing night planned for later this year.

Nudist events at museums are not unheard of. A gallery in Vienna invited visitors to take their clothes off for a special viewing in 2013 of an exhibit dedicated to paintings of male nudity, while a museum in Australia has also opened its doors to naked viewers.

A 104-year-old Australian scientist killed himself in Switzerland on Thursday by lethal injection in an assisted suicide he hoped would trigger more lenient euthanasia laws in his home country.

British-born David Goodall, who was not terminally ill, personally triggered a lethal dose of a barbiturate and died at 1030 GMT in a clinic near Basel, the assisted suicide group Exit International said.

Goodall, a member of the Order of Australia for work as a botanist that included publications on arid shrublands, said he had unsuccessfully tried to kill himself in Australia after his faculties including his hearing deteriorated.

He came to Switzerland for its laws that have made assisted suicide legal since the 1940s, a legal curiosity that has made the country what some call a “death tourism” magnet.

“My life has been rather poor for the past year or so, and I am very happy to end it,” Goodall told reporters on Thursday, shortly before his death. “All the publicity that this has been receiving can only, I think, help the cause of euthanasia for the elderly, which I want.”

Physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia remains illegal in many countries, including Australia, though the state of Victoria became the first to pass a euthanasia bill last November to allow terminally ill patients to end their lives. It takes effect in June 2019.

Several family members were with Goodall until his death, which was preceded by formal paperwork that visibly frustrated Goodall, who said. “What are we waiting for?”

His last meal was fish and chips, and Exit International director Philip Nitschke helped organise Beethoven’s 9th Symphony to be played at his death, a spontaneous request by Goodallprompted by a reporter’s question at a news conference on Wednesday.

“The infusion started to drip as he activated the process — he had to do that himself — after answering questions which said he knew who he was, where he was and what he was about to do, and he answered these questions with great clarity,” Nitschke told Reuters after Goodall‘s death.

“In fact his last words were ‘This is taking an awfully long time!’ ” Nitschke said.

Goodall, a 20-year member of Exit International, was born in London in 1914 and moved to Australia in 1948, where he was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne. He also worked in Britain and held academic posts at U.S. universities, including at Utah State University in Logan.

‘I DID MY BEST’

There, news of his death prompted debate over his legacy, with some former colleagues suggesting his public suicide fit a personality that did not shy the limelight.

Others called Goodall a fine scholar who was well-liked.

“If I had been asked to provide my own comments on David Goodall, I would have said he is perceptive, brilliant and inventive,” said Robert Russon, a 30-year professor at the Logan school in a letter to the Herald Journal newspaper.

Before his death, Goodall said there were things he would have changed, had he to do it all over again.

“I’m not satisfied with what I have done, by any means,” he said. “But I did my best.”

Caitlin Helms was shopping with her mother in downtown New York when a sign in a store window stopped them in their tracks – “The world’s first gender-free store”.

The pitch struck a chord with Helms, who said she had been blurring gender lines with her choice of clothes since age 13.

“It’s nice to have a place where I can go find things,” said the 24-year-old, dressed in a tie, vest and chino trousers.

“I don’t have to go to a men’s section or a women’s section,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The new NoHo store, Phluid, opened in March and caps a growing interest among apparel brands for genderless collections, from giant retailer Zara to smaller fashion line Gypsy Sport.

Phluid’s founder Rob Smith said he came up with the idea after decades working in retail for department store Macy’s and lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret.

The store is more than a statement – it makes business sense, Smith said, with market research showing younger generations are increasingly accepting of lifestyles that do not fit with traditional views on gender.

A 2016 poll by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency found Americans age 13 to 20 were less likely than millennials to only buy clothes designed for their own gender.

On Phluid’s front door, another sign reads: “This is a welcoming, inclusive, diverse, and safe space. Intolerance will not be tolerated.”

Inside, cropped Chinese red sweat pants hang on racks next to mesh jerseys and colorful tank tops.

One hurdle was finding genderless mannequins for the sales floor, said Smith.

He commissioned a set with chests that are flatter that the usual female versions, but not completely flat.

“It’s not for everybody. There is always going to be a girl who wants to wear a full dress and a guy who wants to wear polo and cargo shorts,” said Smith.

“But I also think that there will be a girl who wants to wear a polo and cargo shorts and a boy who wants to wear a full dress.”