Citizens in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey, are celebrating after its mayor ordered the demolition of a blue-and-yellow business complex known as the “world’s most ridiculous building”.
Officials even rejected an offer to buy the 18-storey tower on Trebizond Street for the equivalent of £1.65m from a businessman who wanted to reopen it as a hotel.
Instead, the 1994 Kahramanmaraş Special Provincial Administration Business Centre will come down gradually over the next two years.
The mayor, Hayrettin Güngör, said: “We are carrying out the demolition of the building that affects the city’s reputation and appears as the ‘world’s ugliest building’ on Google, because of its weird design, useless spaces and its incompatibility with the silhouette of the area.”
A Dutch artist has been criticised for recreating Auschwitz with Playmobil.
An 11-minute video by Ben Mechanicus shows toy characters arriving on trains to be greeted by guards in black, holding dogs. Later, bald figures appear in the striped uniforms worn by concentration camp prisoners before being seen naked as they head to their deaths.
Mechanicus said: “The past is fading. In order to show what happened back then, especially to the younger generations, I took inspiration from toys to depict one of the most unimaginable episodes from that time.”
Playmobil said that while it had not co-operated with the artwork, “We welcome it when valuable knowledge is imparted through artistic or other didactic work and subsequent generations are made aware of current issues.”
However, the International Auschwitz Committee’s vice-president, Christoph Heubner, asked: “What can young people do with this macabre and bizarre work? What does it explain to them, what does it tell of the suffering and pain of Jewish families?”
A 1979 Saab that had been parked in a barn for 42 years has been sold at auction for the equivalent of £33,250.
The green Saab 96 GL V4 Super had been bought shortly after the model’s release and sent from the Saab works in Nystad, Finland to its owner in Nossebro, Sweden by transporter.
However, the new driver managed to put only seven kilometres on the car’s clock before locking it away in the barn, where it stayed until his death at the end of last year. He left his estate, including the unwanted Saab, to a medical charity, who put it up for an auction concluded last week.
The model Janina Youssefian, who said she had entered the German version of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here to escape the “Carpet Slut” nickname given to her by the country’s tabloid newspapers, has been kicked off the show for racially abusing another member of the jungle camp.
The 39-year-old has had her unfortunate sobriquet since 2000, when she was working in a carpet shop and her affair with the pop star Dieter Bohlen, 30 years her senior, was exposed by the press. She was sacked from the popular TV show last Friday, after telling Black camp member Linda Nobat: “Go back to the bush where you came from.”
Youssefian says she feels “mentally broken, like I’m in the wrong movie” but has had her apology to Nobat rejected. Before leaving the show, she told campmates of her fling with Bohlen, “We didn’t even do it on the carpet, we did it on the cutting table.”
A Frenchwoman has given birth in an ambulance for the second time.
The unnamed mother was driving herself to hospital in Brittany from the country’s north-west coast when she realised she was going into labour, near Saint-Brieuc. She was able to alert medics and, soon after their arrival, they helped to deliver her daughter, Ohana, in a car park.
The same thing happened to her in 2018, but that time she had to give birth while parked on a roundabout.
A father of three in Kosovo woke up from hernia surgery to learn that doctors had found a set of female genitalia in his groin.
The 67-year-old had told his GP he was born with only one testicle but had recently noticed a swelling in his groin. Surgeons expecting to repair an inguinal hernia, usually caused by a leaking internal organ, instead found an undeveloped uterus, cervix, fallopian tube and ovary, as well as his undescended missing testicle.
The man has now been diagnosed with the extremely rare persistent Müllerian duct syndrome, in which patients are born with two sets of genitals. So far, only 200 cases have been diagnosed worldwide.
Globe-trotting boy detective Tintin is being celebrated on the new Belgian passport.
Illustrations featuring Hergé’s creation in the Sahara Desert and with his colleague Captain Haddock at Marlinspike Hall are included, alongside drawings of other Belgian comic book characters, including The Smurfs and cowboy Lucky Luke.
Tintin visited 42 real and six fictional countries during his adventures, as well as making a trip to the moon. Tintin In The Congo (1931) has been much-criticised, not just for its crude racist caricatures of Congolese people, but also for a scene in which Tintin drills a hole into a live rhinoceros, fills it with dynamite, and blows it up.
