Weird Europe: Annual Montenegro laziness championships are underway

The annual Montenegro laziness championships are underway in a village near Nikšic, with hopefuls attempting to lie down for at least seven days.
Contestants are allowed to stand up only every eight hours, when they can visit the toilet. Free food is provided, while books, art materials, and writing on a mobile phone are allowed, but making calls and watching videos are banned, together with alcohol and tobacco.

The competition lasts a minimum of a week, but organisers expect some to lie down for longer. The prize is 300 euros (£256).

Sayed Sadaat, Afghanistan’s communications minister until 2018, has found new work as a pizza delivery man in Leipzig.

The 50-year-old, who served in deposed president Ashraf Ghani’s administration and left his home country last year, was photographed delivering food for the Lieferando company, Germany’s version of Deliveroo.
Since the pictures emerged, Sadaat has been offered a new position in Lieferando’s PR department and also is considering a position as a parcel sorter at Leipzig Airport.

Switzerland’s high-end department store Globus has hit back at online criticism after they were found to be selling a single melon for 101.50 Swiss (£81).

Spokesperson Franziska Gämperle said the fruit in question weighed 14.4 kilos and is “a very rare melon. We get these from a small, exclusive supplier in Italy with a focus on quality and the environment. Such large watermelons are seldom available and are more complex to produce.”

Corsican beaches were temporarily closed after the island’s famous sunbathing cows turned on tourists and locals, wrecking picnics and damaging cars.

The shutdowns took place in the southern part of the island near its capital Ajaccio, but incidents have taken place across Corsica as the animals – which number 15,000 in total – come to terms with seeing large numbers of humans again, post-lockdown.

One cow gored a man in the neck on the Plage du Lotu, while another chased a group of visitors down a street. In a third incident, in the town of Lozzi, a 70-year-old was gored in the leg while hanging out her washing, with the wound missing her femoral artery by only two centimetres.

Hopes of a successful end to the tourist season on the Croatian holiday island of Ciovo has been hit by flying manhole covers and electricity blackouts. Locals say infrastructure cannot cope with the arrival of visitors who have doubled the year-round population of 6,000.

In the most spectacular example, a sewer explosion sent manhole covers flying into the air near the Trogir bridge, with one landing on a first-floor balcony. Local man Tudor Dekovic said: “My father saw smoke coming from the manhole, approached it, and then the lid flew into the air literally in front of him. Fortunately, it didn’t hit him.”

Ciovo was later left without power for four hours when a transformer substation burned out.

A shower of hay that fell from the sky in Zywiec, Poland was the result of a meteorological phenomenon that also occurs on Mars.

The bizarre event was because of a dust devil – a small whirlwind that picks up dust or, in the case of the red planet, sand from a hot surface and makes it rise.

The mystery of a young woman’s body found wrapped in plastic in shallow water in Charlieu, central France, turned out to have a happier ending than Laura Palmer’s in Twin Peaks.

Police and firefighters who answered an emergency call and rushed to the local canal discovered the ‘body’ was actually a discarded sex doll. Officers said: “Obviously, her owner can pick her up at the station.”