America’s democracy is tougher than it seems

Villain
A bottlenose dolphin that’s been terrifying the coastal Japanese town of Tsuruga. The unnamed male has reportedly been attacking swimmers, often biting them, and in some cases aggressively pressing his genitals against them in an apparent display of sexual frustration. Marine experts insist he’s just lonely and trying to “communicate”. Sod that, says Kevin Maher in The Times. “I’ll never look at Flipper the same way.”

Villain
Dunedin airport in New Zealand, which has introduced a maximum three-minute “hug time” at its departures drop-off zone. “For fonder farewells,” reads a new sign, “please use the car park.”

Hero
Joe Wardman, thought to be one of the world’s oldest paper boys, who has finally decided to retire. The 82-year-old began doing the paper round at his father’s newsagents in Barrow, Cumbria in 1954, aged 11. He took over the business 10 years later, and continued delivering papers after his retirement from the shop in 2011. “I’d done my 70 years,” he says, “and I thought there’s nothing else to achieve.”

Villain
A pizzeria in Düsseldorf which has been busted for serving customers a side of cocaine. Food inspectors tipped off police after discovering the drug during a routine kitchen inspection. Investigators noticed that “Pizza No 40” was suspiciously popular, and discovered that each order came with a bag of charlie slipped under the pie.

Heroes
Local councillors in Cork, who have voted to ban Benjamin Netanyahu from entering their city. It’s not clear whether the Israeli PM ever had plans to visit Ireland’s second-largest city, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, “or indeed whether he has ever heard of it”. And some might argue that the job of local councillors is to fix potholes and organise bin collections, not to “issue futile pronouncements on foreign conflicts taking place over 3,000 miles away”. Still, I’m sure Netanyahu will be left reeling by this “devastating blow”.

The Lincolnshire farmhand who became the world’s strongest man

Geoff Capes was a “giant bear of a man”, says The Times. Standing just under 6ft 6in and weighing around 25 stone, the champion shot putter, who died this week aged 75, competed in three Olympics and twice earned the title of “World’s Strongest Man”. Known as “Capes the crusader”, he had a reputation as a rather hot-headed competitor. In 1978, he was sent home from the European Championships in Prague after punching a referee and two machine-gun-toting guards when they complained that he wasn’t wearing the right competition number. At the height of his powers, Capes was eating 18,000 calories a day: a box of cereal, seven pints of milk, two tins of pilchards, three cartons of cottage cheese, two loaves of bread, a leg of lamb, two steaks, a dozen eggs, a pound of butter, a pint of orange juice, a tin of baked beans, a jar of honey, a grapefruit and two tins of tuna.

Born in Lincolnshire, Capes had a formidable mother who once punched his teacher to the floor for twisting her son’s ear until it bled. He left school aged 14 to work as a farm labourer, building up his strength by “loading 20 tonnes of potatoes onto a lorry in 20 minutes”. A wheel once fell off the former post office van he owned. “I didn’t have a jack, just a spanner,” he later recalled. “So I picked up the van with my left hand and put the wheel back on with my right.” The first time he competed at the shot put, also aged 14, he threw barefoot as he didn’t have money for shoes. He went on to represent his country 67 times, and later entertained television audiences by “bending steel bars and tearing phone directories in half”. Yet Capes was a “gentle giant” at heart. His great passion, besides throwing and lifting very heavy objects? Breeding budgies.

Pockets are the unsung heroes of clothing, says Mary Killen in The Oldie, and they’ve been “helping us for thousands of years”. A perfectly preserved mummy from around 3300 BC was found in the Ötztal Alps in Italy with an intact pouch sewn into its belt. In the 16th century, pockets were stitched into men’s girdles and concealed under clothing to outwit thieves. It wasn’t until the late 17th century that they became more mainstream, but still only in men’s clothes – women had to carry their valuables by fastening a small fabric sack to belts under layers of skirts and petticoats, or even tying them to clothing using ribbons. Those who sewed their own pockets into clothes were accused of witchcraft, in the belief that they were being used to “smuggle potions and herbs”.