THE MAGPIE:AN ITALIAN priest who planned to hold the world's first beauty contest for nuns has decided to cancel the pageant after complaints. Fr Antonio Rungi wanted to host the Miss Sister Italy contest to end the stereotype of nuns being old and dour.
He wanted to hold the contest on his internet blog but changed his mind after the local religious authorities expressed their displeasure. "Do you think that all nuns are old and sad? It is not like that any more," read Fr Rungi's advert in an Italian newspaper prior to the cancellation.
"My superiors were not happy," Fr Rungi said from the town of Mondragone, near Naples. "The local bishop was not happy, but they did not understand me. It was interpreted as more of a physical thing. Now, no one is saying that nuns can't be beautiful, but I was thinking about something more complete."
Fr Rungi insisted he never intended to put sisters on the catwalk and wanted only to highlight that they were "above all women and beauty is a gift from God".
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In Bulgaria, a priest has been placed under police surveillance because of a field of cannabis he claims is a gift from God and nothing to do with him.
Fr Cyril Papudov has been arrested seven times but police have never caught him actually cultivating the crop.
"There has been a great deal of suspicion over the years about what is going on with these plants," said a police source. "He is a man of the cloth and so a lot of people don't want to think badly of him, but frankly, if someone has a huge crop of cannabis in their back garden it's highly unlikely they are just sitting there admiring its horticultural properties."
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Cows automatically point north because they have their own in-built compasses, say scientists.
Their ability to find north is believed to be a relic from when their ancestors needed an accurate sense of direction to migrate across the plains of Africa, Asia and Europe.
Dr Sabine Begall and colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen looked at thousands of images of cattle on Google Earth in Britain, Ireland, India and the USA.
"We conclude that the magnetic field is the most likely factor responsible for the observed alignment," the scientists wrote in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
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A Ryanair plane was forced to land in Germany after a jar of mushroom soup in an overhead locker started leaking. It dripped on to a passenger who was severely allergic to mushroom soup.
His neck reportedly swelled up and he struggled to breathe, forcing the Budapest-Dublin flight to divert to Frankfurt Hahn airport for medical help.
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A four-year-old cat called Bonny has survived after being walled in beneath a bathtub for seven weeks. "It's a miracle," said Monika Hoppert, a 60-year-old widow from the western German town of Stadthagen. "I think she must have had a guardian angel. I'm so happy."
Bonny disappeared on June 19th while workmen were replacing pipes in the block of flats where Ms Hoppert lives. The black cat was last seen in a neighbouring apartment, just before the cladding around a bathtub was resealed.
When found the cat's weight had dropped from six kilograms to two kilograms. "She's almost back to normal now," said Ms Hoppert.