Your Thursday roundup of world eccentricity. To tip us off about stories we might have missed just follow the Become a Periscope Tipster link.

Sarah Palin defends Dr. Laura in a Tweet that read like a text from one of America's many near-illiterate teenagers. U no? Photo credit: Tom LeGro, NewsHour


Constitutional expert Sarah Palin
One-time US vice presidential candidate and erstwhile Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has once again come to the defence of the maligned and needy. When conservative talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger resigned after repeatedly using the word “nigger” on her radio show, it was Palin to the rescue. Using her preferred mode of communication – 140 character observations on Twitter – Palin immediately urged Dr. Laura: “Don’t retreat…reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence“isn’t American,not fair”)”

Are we to understand then that the former Governor believes Dr. Laura’s First Amendment right to free speech “ceased 2exist” because she was criticized for using a racially offensive epithet? Perhaps someone should remind the person who almost became America’s second in command that actually, the First Amendment of the US Constitution protects citizens from government infringing on individuals’ speech rights; it doesn’t take away other people’s right to criticize. As Gawker.com so aptly put it: “Sometimes it feels like you can’t go five minutes without learning something from Sarah Palin, Assistant Professor of Folksy Wisdom at Half-Understood University.”

Conspiracy Theory
Just when we thought high-ranking Mad Men candidate Fidel Castro had slipped quietly into some sunny retirement home for dictators, the 84-year-old former president of Cuba has started popping up all over the place. Castro’s latest reminder that he is still alive and opinionated came when he commandeered three full pages of the eight-page Communist Party newspaper Granma to support a conspiracy theory originally promulgated by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.

According to the theory, the AP reported, a shadowy cohort called the Bilderberg Group has become a sort of secret global government controlling international politics, economics, and culture. The public face of the organisation describes itself as having no activities beyond an annual three-day conference to discuss topics “of current concern.” But Castro and Estulin know better than that; the real truth is that this secret society consists of “sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists” manipulating the public “to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self.” So a bit like the aspirations of Cuban regime then really.

Raging Bull . . . Literally
Striking a blow for generations of abused Spanish bulls, an enraged bull in the Tafalla bullring turned the tables on spectators. The bull was about to be led out of the ring for failure to sufficiently entertain during the “recortadores” segment of the show where spectators taunt the bull and try to get as close as possible without being gored, when the bull finally lost the plot and launched into a dramatic crowd surfing rampage.

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