PARIS: Our weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world:
Shear politics
When most young radicals enter politics, they cut their hair and smarten up. Not Spain’s Pablo Iglesias, the founder of left-wing Podemos.
Rebel to the end, the former deputy prime minister nicknamed “el coletas” — the ponytailed one — got out the scissors when he quit politics this week after his party was left with its tail between its legs in regional elections.
Iglesias, 42, who sometimes put his hair up in a bun, reappeared with a short back and sides.
Sensing a dramatic political conversion, right-wing newspaper La Razon claimed his new haircut had a right parting, though others insisted it was more to the left or just off centre.
This trophy is for you
In the hallowed lexicon of football cliches where every game has two halves and teams are forever parking the bus, few phrases are more hackneyed than “This trophy is for you”.
But Dutch champions Ajax really meant it when they won the league for the 35th time. They are melting down the trophy for their 42,000 season ticket holders who have not been able to watch them at the Johan Cruyff Arena because of the pandemic.
Director Edwin van der Sar, who has a good touch for a big man, said each of the tin “champion stars” they’re giving to fans will contain 0.06g of the league-winning shield.
Who says football’s billionaire owners take fans for granted?
Chinese farce
Staying with the beautiful game, two Chinese football teams are facing bans after being accused of scoring own-goals on purpose so they could avoid facing a stronger opponent in the knockout round of a cup competition.
Footage of the game on the southern island of Hainan showed both the amateur sides kicking the ball into their own nets so they would lose when the match was tied near the end at 2-2.
The local football association called the farce “an unbelievable scene” and one heavily-followed sports blogger despaired, “Chinese football, how low can you go?”
Majesty of the law
Good to know then that humanity has a nobler, loftier side. Take a bow Italy’s much-maligned legal system which has forced insurers to pay out to the lover of a man killed in a road accident as well as to his wife. The 39-year-old made no secret of his double life, with “three days with me and four with his family”, his lover said. Indeed, when he was killed in Turin, his wife was away and police broke the news to his girlfriend.
Never enough vaccine
It was the same typically Italian generosity of spirit that saw a 23-year-old woman injected with four doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine in Tuscany. At first it was thought that a whole vial of six doses had been mistakenly emptied into a young psychology intern called Virginia, but later officials realised it wasn’t not quite so dramatic. Pfizer had tested four jabs in a row in trials, but never as many as six.
Luckily after feeling headachy and exhausted, Virginia is now fine and is not going to sue.
“We all make mistakes,” she said.
Eruption of flavour
Daredevil accountant David Garcia is clearly a man with an appetite for risk. He has been making pizzas on top of the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala — which has been erupting since February — and offering them to anyone mad enough to follow him up the mountain.
He cooks his “Pacaya Pizza” on the smouldering volcanic rock in front of awed tourists and locals.
Wearing protective gear, Garcia spreads the dough on a platter that can resist temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit).
Some have pleaded with Garcia to stop, he told AFP. But with pizzas now being made on flowing lava — the ultimate pizza to go — there are no shortage of takers as his fame spreads on social media.
Donut look back
Some things about teenagers, and particularly American ones, never change. Asked what he planned to do first after getting his vaccine shot in Michigan, the wonderfully-named Harrison Hunger said: “Probably go to Krispy Kreme, because they are offering free donuts to people with one of these,” said the smiling 14-year-old, brandishing his vaccine card.
All-over orgasms? No thanks
A Canadian yogi has been kicked out of Bali for offering a tantric yoga class online that promised orgasms “all over the body” for 20 euros. The governor of the Hindu-majority Indonesian island was not amused, telling Christopher Kyle Martin that “if you want to return, you have to respect Balinese traditions”.
The holiday paradise has expelled several foreign influencers recently fleeing lockdowns at home for behaving inappropriately at religious sites or breaking coronavirus restrictions.
Martin tried in vain to explain there was nothing sexual about his breathing technique, but protesting locals were not persuaded. – AFP
