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| - Our weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world: A book about far-right Italian leader Matteo Salvini entitled "Why Salvini Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration" is topping the country's bestseller lists. Open the cover of the weighty-looking treatise by "political analyst" Alex Green and you find 110 blank pages. Salvini, whose so-called "reverse Midas touch" has seen his party lose two regional polls this year, has been unusually tight-lipped about the tome. Its publishers, however, are laughing all the way to the bank. Umpires in Australia's Big Bash cricket league are now wearing advertising for deodorant under their armpits. Because umpires raise their arms when a player hits a four or a six, Rexona antiperspirant said the underarm endorsement is "a vertible petri dish of positive emotions". The brand is also trying to trademark its invention as "pit-vertising". Staying in Australia, people in a Melbourne suburb were trapped in their homes by a storm of tumbleweeds, known as "hairy panic" Down Under. Elon Musk wins for tweeting "Mars, here we come!" minutes after his protoytpe SpaceX Starship exploded in a ball of flames at a test launch in Texas. Spare a thought for residents of Stockholm. They have not seen the sun so far this month. The mood was already morose because of the pandemic, but many now fear the Swedish capital could be on course to match its 1934 record when there wasn't a single hour of sunshine in the whole month of December. Too late already for its far north, where the sun set for the winter on Tuesday. They are not quite in the fat cat league of Choupette, the late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld's pampered moggie who got part of her master's $200 million fortune, but the cats of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg got the cream this week. French doctor Christophe Batard left the mousers who live in the museum's basement 3,000 euros. Cats were first brought to the old imperial capital from Kazan in 1745 by the kindly Empress Elizabeth, the only Russian ruler never to have executed anyone. Beards may be a sign of authority in Iran, but state television admitted they went too far in presenting Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters to viewers as a "political expert". The outspoken British singer, who had qualified US president elect Joe Biden as a "warmongering servant of the oligarchy that rules the USA", was instead described as someone with "activities in the field of socio-political music". If there wasn't already enough reasons to give lions a wide berth, four at Barcelona Zoo have got Covid-19. fg/jmy/adp
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