QUIRKY WORLD ... Our daily look at some of the world’s stranger stories
Posing bare-chested is the newest twist in the rivalry between populist candidate Frank Stronach and Heinz-Christian Strache, who heads the anti-immigrant and EU-sceptic Freedom Party, as they compete for the protest vote ahead of the Sept 29 poll.
Stronach was first to remove his shirt, revealing a trim 80-year-old upper body in photos showing him wearing only jeans and a smile.
Strache was close behind — a photo of the 42-year-old in swimming trunks appeared on his Facebook page.
EGYPT: A DJ is bringing underground Egyptian street music to Western nightclubs with the hope that it will paint the troubled country in a better light.
Joost Heijthuijsen, 35, from Tilburg in the Netherlands, does not speak Arabic and only visited Egypt for the first time last April.
However, he is the founder and one third of Cairo Liberation Front, a Dutch DJ collective dedicated to mahragan music, derived from the Arabic word for festival.
It is an unrelenting torrent of synthesisers, chanting, and rapping about street culture infused with Arabic rhythms and Egyptian humour.
It is low-budget music for the masses. Typically, DJs circulate their home recordings on their laptops via downloadable files and YouTube.
The new sound has flooded Cairo’s underground music scene since Egypt’s 2011 revolution. But it is spreading across the country and transcending its urban working-class roots even as turmoil grips the nation in the wake of the July 3 military removal of Egypt’s first freely elected leader, Mohamed Morsi.
ENGLAND: A football manager came out of a coma when he heard his team had won their opening game.
Wayne Thorne, 33, had just started his second season in charge of Larkhall Athletic FC when he was involved in a head-on collision on Aug 3.
He underwent series of operations and spent a week in an induced coma after suffering broken ribs, hip, and leg, and a tear to the main artery in his heart.
But he was “given the boost he needed” when wife Mandy, 32, broke the news that his team had won 4-3 on Aug 10.
USA: An American baseball club has donated a free funeral to a dying fan as part of a competition.
The Pennsylvania-based Lehigh Valley IronPigs announced the winner of the funeral giveaway during a home game and Steve Paul, 64, who has a progressive nerve disease, got a standing ovation as he was wheeled on to the field.
Fans had to submit a 200-word essay describing their ideal funeral, and explain why they deserved a free one.
Noisy cockerel told pipe down
ENGLAND: A noisy cockerel has been ruffling feathers in a small hamlet after attracting complaints about its crowing.
The chorus of Coco the two-year-old Light Sussex cockerel has landed owners Alison and Kevin Oliver with a letter from an environmental health officer about “alleged noise nuisance”.
The letter, while not a legal notice, advises on how best to keep Coco’s crowing to a minimum in Coles Green near Malvern, Worcestershire.
Worcestershire Regulatory Services, which sent the letter, said it was acting after receiving a complaint about the noise and set out measures that could be adopted “to minimise cockerel crowing”.
The Olivers said chickens had been kept on the same patch of their family’s land since 1977 and without a single complaint — until now.
“We have taken it seriously, but we’ve also joked that it’s like he’s been given an Asbo,” said Kevin.
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