It must be true...

I read it in the tabloids

■■ Police in Florida rushed to the scene of an armed robbery at a men’s fashion store before realizing the fake holdup was part of a music video. When officers arrived, they found actors holding toy rifles on the store’s staff while ordering them to put money in a bag. Producers of the video had to explain to arriving cops that they had the permission of the store, Spazio, to film the video. Afterward, the management team of The Shops at Pembroke Gardens said it was “extremely disappointed” that it had not been advised of the filming ahead of time.

■■ The martial arts masters of a remote village in central China have undertaken a campaign to ensure the survival of an arcane technique: “iron crotch kung fu.” The method involves using qigong breathing to steel oneself to the agony of being beaten in the groin with sticks, bricks—or even a swinging 88-pound steel-capped log. Over the years, the number of kung fu students in the village able to endure such pain has dwindled to a mere five. Wang Liutai, an iron-crotch kung fu master, said that as long as “you push yourself, you will feel great.”

■■ A man named Adolf Hitler has won a local election in southwestern Africa—but insists he has no designs on “world domination.” Adolf Hitler Uunona won 85 percent of the vote in the town of Ompundja in Namibia, a former German colony. He said his father, who named him, “probably didn’t understand what Adolf Hitler stood for.” It was “a perfectly normal name for me when I was a kid,” he said. Uunona, 54, uses his full name only on official documents and is known as an ardent civil rights activist.