By all means, dive off cliffs… just never mix politics or TV presenting with anything else unless you want to appear in Crazy Talk, our regular update on the maddest, baddest and most spectacular stories making the world's news.
Hunt for victory called off
Personally we’d never seen the point of visiting Hawaii… until, that is, we saw this video… Englishman Gary Hunt saw off the challenge of former champ Orlando Duque (who actually won the Hawaiian round) to claim the 2010 Cliff Diving World Championship, a series in which brave competitors complete spectacular 26m dives in some of the world’s most stunning locations, like Kawainui Falls in Hilo. In a slightly less pretty location, Philippe Croizon nevertheless also achieved something stunning this week. The Frenchman, whose limbs had to be removed after a severe electric shock received as he tried to remove a TV aerial from his roof, swam the English Channel from the UK back to his home country in just 13 and a half hours, despite having no arms or legs and wearing prosthetic flippers.
Newscasters caught with their pants down
It’s a longstanding joke that newsreaders wear nothing below the level of their newsdesks, because viewers never see, right? Well, wrong. A newsreader on Slovenia’s 24UR programme got caught out when a camera revealed the fact that he was wearing only his underpants beneath conventional anchorman get-up as a broadcast ended. Elsewhere in the world, Norwegian newsreader Pia Beathe Pedersen decided she’d had enough and announced live on air that there wouldn’t be a news broadcast that day because ‘nothing had happened anyway’, and promptly quit (perhaps hastening the inevitable). Weathermen aren’t immune, either. Gaffe-prone British TV favourite Tomasz Schafernaker’s latest spot of bother came after he swore at a colleague not realising he was on live, only to then pretend he was scratching his chin. You can enjoy that here, too…
Kicked out of government
Politicians like a bit of tough guy stuff to show their people they’re both brawn and brains (and not to be messed with) – think Russia’s karate black-belt former president and now prime minister Vladimir Putin (who visited the stars of the Silk Way Rally in Russia this week), or Governor of California Arnold ‘The Terminator’ Schwarzenegger. But 64-year-old Direk Tungfang and fellow Thai senator 59-year-old Payap Tongchuen took it a stage further by kickboxing each other in a specially-prepared ring at the parliament in Bangkok. According to the referee, both men apparently won, but we imagine he just said that to stop one or the other trying to make political capital…
One prick and it’s gone
Someone else using naughty profanities suffered more than a slapped wrist from the authorities this week. Drunken British 17-year-old Luke Angel emailed none other than US President Barack Obama and called him a ‘prick’ because of a 9/11 documentary that had upset him. While this was never likely to speed up the green card application process, the result of this slur is that Angel, despite his name, will never be allowed to visit the USA again, due to the fact that the FBI intercepted his rant and blacklisted him. Perhaps after Obama had spent all week telephoning crazy pastors of small congregations, to prevent them destabilising attempts at world peace by burning the holy books of other ‘extremists’, he wasn’t in the mood to take any more shit.
The Witch report: senators horrified
Everyone’s been hit hard by the global economic downturn, but Romania’s proposed solution was pretty bizarre. The government there attempted to introduce punitive taxes on witches and soothsayers, with extra penalties for those who got their predictions wrong. After the laws were rejected by senators, bill proponent Alin Popoviciu claimed they were all frightened of being cursed. Meanwhile, the University of Baltimore in the USA has just started offering English students a course in ‘zombie studies’, where they write horror scripts and presumably take Hallowe’en even more seriously than everyone else in the USA. The fact that most students look like zombies before 12pm every day should help the creative process.
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