A pig the size of a shetland pony has turned on a woman who tried to look after it, effectively holding her hostage on a property in northern New South Wales.

Sixty-three-year old Caroline Hayes says she has been unable to leave her Uki house to use the farm’s outdoor toilet at times because the white pig is aggressive towards her.

… and my favourite line makes this story look like it’s straight from a horror movie:

“I picked up a broom and poked him out with it and he snapped it in half with his mouth.”

Brilliant.

News services who thought it was a fantastic idea to publish this were: Bigpond News | NineMSN | The Australian | Daily Telegraph | Live News | The Daily | ABC News | I’m sure there will be plenty more.

A man who refused to pay for two bunches of flowers his hungry horse “Donkey” ate was riding it home because he had lost his driver’s licence for drink driving.

The man - nicknamed “Cowboy” - said he had been “drinking Coke” at The Royal Exchange at Windsor before the incident on Sunday night. 

Cowboy revealed he had to restrain himself when a service station attendant tried to make a citizen’s arrest because he wouldn’t pay for $40 worth of flowers his horse consumed. 

“He was annoying me,” he said. 

“He was a dickhead… he was a total dickhead.” 

Cowboy said he was “minding his own business” when Donkey ate two bunches of flowers worth $20 each outside a service station on Windsor Rd, McGraths Hill just after 9pm. 

He called Merrick and Rosso and Kate Ritchie’s Nova 969 breakfast show this morning after they put a call out for him to ring in. 

When asked if he had lost his licence for drink driving he replied “maybe”. 

A pub patron, who wished to only be known as Tim, said Cowboy had arrived at the pub around 4pm. 

“We thought it was a bit unusual - a horse tied up out the front of the pub,” he said. 

“We thought it was funny without the horse eating the flowers. 

“I live in Parramatta so to the locals it might have been a normal thing but we don’t get to see that very often.
 
“He had his white cowboy hat on - he’s a real bushy. 

“He got up and grabbed one of the mic’s and sang Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler with the band halfway through. 

Tim said Cowboy had had a few beers.

When asked about Cowboy’s claim he was drinking Coke he said: “There must have been bourbon in the Coke.”

“We had to go outside to smoke and he had the horse tied up in the laneway where everyone was smoking,” he said. 

“He was raving on about his horse. 

“He hopped on and rode off and he said he was going to Vineyard which is a good 15km away. 

“We thought he couldn’t be going that far in the state he was in.” 

Police inquiries into the man’s identity are continuing. 

SOUTH Australian men are already in front of the pack when it comes to attracting British women.

So says British backpackers Hannah Taylor and Katy Buckingham, who have found Adelaide men are more attractive, particularly because they don’t fight as much as Brisbane men.

But Ms Taylor, a Lancashire-based backpacker, said there needs to be more romance and less speed-dating.

“I wouldn’t normally consider it,” she said. “They shouldn’t label it (the event) as speed dating, it’s a bit desperate. But if it was a special night with all those Australian hunks, I’d consider it.”

There may also be a need for Adelaide City Council to step in and bring more singles on to the streets, Nottingham backpacker Ms Buckingham said.

A Malaysian welder had to have a nut removed from around his penis after an attempt to lengthen it before he gets engaged next week went embarrassingly wrong.

The nut got stuck on his penis following an erection, the Star newspaper reported today, forcing him to seek help at a hospital in southern Johor state.

Staff from the Sultanah Aminah hospital had to drain some blood from the penis and cut away a top layer of skin before the object could be removed, the newspaper said.

It said the fire and rescue department were also involved in trying to remove the nut from the unnamed welder, who is in his 20s and hoped the nut would weigh down his penis to make it longer.

“The patient is now recovering and we hope to discharge him today (Sunday),” hospital director Daud Abdul Rahim told the Star.

On August 25, another young man in Kuala Lumpur had tried to increase his sexual prowess by slipping a steel ring around his penis, forcing the fire department to cut off the ring after doctors were unable to remove it, the newspaper said.

AFP

Ci@lis for you!

Police in Japan are trying to determine whether they were the victim of a hoax after a “body” they found wrapped at a seaside resort was actually a life-sized doll.

Investigators found what seemed like a body in a forest in Izu City, a seaside resort in central Japan, after an anonymous caller reported seeing it, a state spokeswoman said.

Investigators felt it from outside but never actually looked inside, and brought it back to the city police station for a post-mortem examination, she said.

Apparently no one doubted a human body was inside until a medical examiner unwrapped it and found a doll there, she said.

The Asahi newspaper said the doll was sophisticated and life-sized, and wore a brown wig, a blouse and a skirt.

It appeared to have been wrapped or enclosed in a dark green sleeping bag.

The city was participating in nationwide earthquake drills on Monday, but the doll was not part of a readiness drill, the spokeswoman said.

AP

Where else but Japan?

(for those of you who aren’t aware…this guy died a few days ago)

STOCKHOLM - An elderly woman misunderstood instructions while checking in at Sweden’s main airport and was whisked down a baggage chute after she placed herself instead of her luggage on the belt, media reported today.

The 78-year-old woman, who was not named, was preparing to fly from Stockholm’s Arlanda airport to Germany on Tuesday when she lay down on an unmanned baggage belt in the belief she was following check-in instructions, the Upsala Nya Tidning local daily reported on its website.

She was quickly swept off to the baggage handling centre, where staff members helped get her back on her feet.

The woman suffered no serious injury and caught her flight as planned.

AFP

Original link here

Thanks to Stewart for sending this in.

It’s no secret cats hate baths, but at least one feline in central Germany now has a good reason – Bonny was sealed behind her neighbour’s bathtub for seven weeks. (read the rest of the original article after the break)

We have a world news article about a cat. It actually isn’t a badly reported or poorly written article. It covers the facts, and keeps on the ball of fur. 

So, why is this failnews? 
The world’s media has reported it en masse. For example, I discovered it on ABC News’ front page. (see image) It’s right there among a judicial review, a murder and a newspaper editor being sacked.

Sure, this news is interesting to some, heart warming to a few - but is it really worthy of a “Top Story” status? In my opinion: Hell no.

All over the world today, important pieces of news are being shunted out of the public eye because of trash articles like this one. This is the age of the internet where anyone can report a funny story on their blog, but only real news agencies can cover serious news properly. If we can’t go to real news agencies for serious news stories, where can we go?

Click through to read the rest of the blog trash.

Rest of the article, as promised:

The gaunt Persian-mix was recently pulled from underneath the tub by plumbers after the neighbour heard crying and scratching during her morning shower. 

It wasn’t until her husband was called to investigate that the source of the noises was identified. But then the couple immediately thought of Bonny.

The cat’s disappearance was well-known in the building. After a burst pipe caused water damage in several flats, Bonny’s owner Monika Hoppert and her neighbors left their doors open to help air out the building. Bonny apparently escaped and hid in the neighbor’s bathroom, where plumbers tiled her in while making repairs. 

After determining the source of the scratches, the neighbors called Hoppert over. She easily recognized the meow. Workers were summoned and retrieved a near-lifeless Bonny. 

“I took her straight to the veterinarian. He wanted to put her to sleep right then,” Hoppert told TheLocal. “I haven’t been back since.”

Hoppert hand-nursed her half-comatose cat back to life, using a syringe to feed and provide water to Bonny. 

“It’s a miracle. She’s almost back to her normal self now,” Hoppert said.

A local veterinary specialist suspects some water had pooled beneath the tub, offering a tiny bit of sustenance to the fearful feline.

It’s “sensational that the cat lived so long,” Ingo Nolte, a professor at the Hannover Veterinary School, was told local daily Schaumburger Nachrichten. Nolte said the cat may have set a survival record.

The cat’s seven weeks behind a tub may have cost it more than a few lives, but it has earned the obligatory 15 minutes of fame.

“The phone started ringing at 6:30 this morning with television teams,” Hoppert said. 

 A MOUNT Gambier woman has warned the community against cleaning lawnmowers in bedrooms while smoking. 

In other news, yokels in Dubbo re-affirm their grave warnings about hitting one’s self on the head with a hammer.

…although she had been convicted of arson before, this time it was an accident.

Incredible. Thanks to Katie for sending it in. Slightly reminiscent of this old news grab that has done the rounds of the internet already.

Update: I found the editor’s opinion on this article in the comments on the paper’s website. “A house fire is news. The cause of the fire was somewhat unusual, which also makes it news.”

Mr Editor: Perhaps focusing the article on the actual news (which as you’ve stated is a house fire) rather than a laughable, simplistic and absurd ’safety warning’ would make it more difficult to mock?

A MAN is lucky to still have a penis after he inserted it in a metal park bench and became stuck, doctors say.
At least a dozen police and emergency services workers were called to the park in Hong Kong after 41-year-old Le Xing’s penis became trapped in a hole, apparently after he became aroused.

According to reports from Hong Kong, the “lonely and disturbed” Mr Xing told police he thought it would be fun to have sex with the bench, UK’s The Telegraph reported.

Unfortunately for Mr Xing, news crews descended on the park to film the rescue effort:

Doctors had tried to drain some of Mr Xing’s blood in an attempt to loosen his penis, but to no avail.

Rescuers eventually cut away part of the bench and Mr Xing was taken to hospital where doctors took another four hours to free him.

They said if Mr Xing had been stuck for another hour they would have had to amputate his penis.

Thanks Katie for sending it in. Original links are here, here and probably on every other news site in their “offbeat section”.

In a statement on Tuesday, police said: “He pees up in the air in a big arc, so it goes in the coin slot and out the hole where people collect their tickets.”

Mike Webster of the Napier City Council said the culprit - believed to have doused the machine four or five times in the last year - had a good aim and was “obviously a male without prostate issues”.

Yes. That’s a real grab from a real article. Possibly it does have newsworthy attributes in a local rag, but not linked from the front page of “World News Australia“. Thanks Katie for sending it in.

This is more an organisation fail than a content fail. SBS News: Get your categories sorted. This is the second time I’ve seen ‘offbeat’ under the ‘Europe’ category. They even get a Guernsey for covering yesterdays flying shit article.

For reference, this category sits below the main headline and the Olympics coverage, and above the rest of the world news, so it is quite prominent.

Vets have warned men using hair growth stimulants to keep their pets away from their head after a Sydney cat went into heart failure after licking its owner’s scalp.

The question I present to you is this: What percentage of cat owners are men who use hair-growth stimulants? The answer to that question is the exact number of people who the above article is relevant to.

I found this one on the front page of Fairfax’s flagship Sydney Morning Herald website. Fail.

House-sized dog poo causes chaos at museum

A giant inflatable dog poo by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday.

The art work, titled Complex Shit, is the size of a house.

The wind carried it 200 metres from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children’s home, museum director Juri Steiner said.

The inflatable poo broke the window at the children’s home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Mr Steiner said.

The art work has a safety system which normally makes it deflate when there is a storm, but this did not work when it blew away.

Mr Steiner said Mr McCarthy had not yet been contacted and the museum was not sure if Complex Shit would be put back on display.

Thank you, ABC News. Honourable mention to NineMSN for being the top search result for “Swiss museum giant poo“.

The Federal Opposition’s environment spokesman has compared Water Minister Penny Wong to Saddam Hussein, saying she and the Federal Government have condemned South Australia’s Lower Lakes region to death.

It’s all a little bit dramatic. Isn’t it.

UPDATE: (Thurs 7th Aug, 11:30am cst) Fairfax has teamed up with the Federal opposition to make this a nation-wide mega-fail. The article is repeated in the Sydney Morning Herald today.

Yellow cake found in Iraq
A national defense analyst says President Bush should be commended for keeping quiet about a discovery that could have blown his critics out of the water.

 Oh, Really?

Retired Major General Jerry Curry is a decorated combat veteran… [who] …recently wrote on his blog about a very under reported story by theAssociated Press. 

…Curry says the president kept mum about the discovery in order to keep terrorists in the dark. “He made a very brave stand, a resolute stand…, in which he decided that he wasn’t going to blab everything to the press,” Curry commends. “…And in the meantime while he kept it quiet, he was buying time from the terrorists to get all that stuff out of the country. So that’s what was done – he just very quietly kept his mouth shut.”

“The press beat him to death for the last several years,” he continues, “and now it turns out that, yes, there were weapons of mass destruction….” Curry also maintains that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear program and the material could have been made into a nuclear weapon.

 Emphasis there is mine. There are over 150,000 American troops in Iraq who have been looking for evidence of WMD’s for the last five years. Only Maj. Gen. Curry has spoken out about this ‘discovery’. 

President Bush’s actions took courage, he notes, and all Americans should be thankful to have such a brave president who puts the welfare of the American people above personal considerations.

This isn’t a fluff piece made to praise the American President at all… noooo…. 

Of course, I did find this news article from browsing through the same christian ‘news’ site who have recently made headlines for grabbing every instance of the word ‘gay’ on their site and replacing it with ‘homosexual’. This of course led to a story on Tyson Gay’s Homosexual’s trip to the Olympics, which has sadly been pulled from their site. Thanks Katy for sending that one in.

Whole-news-site-Fail.

Critical. According to the LA Times, who quoted the actor’s sister-in-law and spokesperson Donna Lee, “He says he’ll be OK and is looking forward to a full recovery. He and we thank everyone who has sent them for the good wishes and prayers.” - This is not the description of someone in a ‘critical’ state.

Curse. One actor dies between the film being made and released. Another has police called to a domestic dispute. This one has a car accident. To suggest that Mr Freeman is the “latest victim” of a curse sets a precedent that the herald sun should update it’s readers with news from the Voodoo world.

Yes, I’m probably going too far on this one. Though, it is a sensationalist headline above a factually exaggerated inaccurate story which cites a local newspaper as the source. Fail.

Thanks to fulltimecasual for sending it in.