The best tabloid stories of 2016

It must be true...

Party shops have long done a brisk trade in Donald Trump costumes for Halloween – but Jemima Khan decided to make her own this year. For a Unicef party, the activist and journalist dressed as Melania Trump, and strapped a groping Donald dummy onto her back. But not everyone saw the funny side: on Twitter, Khan was accused of trivialising sexual assault. She has since sold the costume on eBay, raising £5,600 for Unicef. The animal rights group Peta also came under attack this year for “repurposing” one of Trump’s lewd comments for one of its campaigns: the “grab a pussy” posters urged people to adopt cats from animal shelters.


A 91-year-old visitor to a gallery in Germany was questioned by police after filling in a crossword that was actually an artwork worth some £67,000. The 1965 piece, by the avant-garde artist Arthur Köpcke, features a partially completed puzzle and the phrase “insert words”. Taking this as an instruction, the nonagenarian got out a ballpoint pen and did exactly that. The Neues Museum in Nuremberg reported the incident to the police for “insurance reasons” – but said they understood that the woman hadn’t meant “any harm”, and that they didn’t want her to have “sleepless nights” about it.


To the usual list of public swimming pool rules (no running, no bombing, no heavy petting), Icelanders have added another. Users of a pool in Reykjavik were surprised to find new posters in the men’s changing rooms warning them not to use the communal hairdryers to dry their scrotums.


A benefits claimant who said he couldn’t leave the house because of his acute anxiety was caught working as a “stripping ninja”. Mark Hetherington, 52, told benefits officers that his anxiety was so severe, he couldn’t even get out of bed or brush his teeth unaided. But undercover investigators filmed him performing erotic dances under the stage name Ian Kognito, wearing only nipple tassels and a ninja mask. Hetherington, of Blackpool, pleaded guilty to fraud. “He accepts he should have told the Department for Work and Pensions that his confidence had improved,” said his barrister.


A young man pacing around a Chinese hospital, awaiting the birth of his first child, was given a haemorrhoid operation by mistake. The 29-year-old, named only as Mr Wang, was standing in a hospital corridor in Shenyang when a group of doctors ushered him into an operating theatre. He assumed he was needed to assist with the birth – but instead he was asked to drop his trousers and lie on the operating table. The doctors – who’d mistaken him for their patient – then removed some piles that he didn’t know he had. “Maybe I just know too little, and I’m afraid of being laughed at for ignorance if I ask more questions.” he told a Chinese TV show. His wife gave birth while he was under the knife.


As a protest against censorship, a film-maker forced Britain’s film censors to spend ten hours watching a film about paint drying. Charlie Lyne used Kickstarter to raise the £5,963 it cost to make his opus, and then submitted it to the British Board of Film Classification. The board’s examiners duly sat through the 607-minute-long film before granting it a U certificate. “Paint Drying is a film showing paint drying on a wall,” they concluded. “It contains no material likely to offend or harm.”


A macho kangaroo with bulging biceps has become a star in Australia. Visitors began flocking to Alice Springs’ Kangaroo Sanctuary after pictures of Roger flaunting his biceps went viral online. The 6ft 7in-tall, 14-stone beast works out by wrestling other males and “crushing metal buckets” between his paws, according to his keeper. Visitors aren’t allowed to take selfies with Roger, because he will “attack anyone or anything that gets too close to him or his women”.


Silent discos – where partygoers dance to music relayed through earphones – have been banned in the Swiss town of Lausanne, for being too noisy. Locals say that although the music is not broadcast on loudspeakers, the discos are not silent, because revellers can’t resist singing along to whatever they’re listening to, creating a hideous off-key cacophony.


A north London man called Bacon Double Cheeseburger was among the record 85,000 people who opted to change their names by deed poll last year. Mr Cheeseburger, formerly Simon Smith, said he fancied a change, and the Burger King favourite was the first thing that sprang to mind. Another man renamed himself Happy Birthday; a woman changed her name to Penelope Pitstop; while a couple decided to become Mr and Mrs Amazing. The UK Deed Poll Service also reported changing a Cock to a Cox, and a Smellie to a Smiley.


Residents of a town in Poland successfully slowed down speeding motorists by erecting a life-size papier mâché doll dressed in a high-vis jacket. The alarmingly unrealistic-looking “traffic cop” had a wonky face, an outsize moustache and, instead of a radar gun, an old hairdryer, which was pointed at oncoming traffic. The people of Moscice said it worked a treat, but the real police were not impressed: they said it was a dangerous distraction, and seized it.


The staff at a Burger King in Minneapolis smashed all of its windows, after a prank caller – posing as a fire officer – told them the restaurant was pressurised and in danger of exploding. It followed similar incidents in Oklahoma and in California, where a Burger King manager was filmed ramming his car into his eatery to “provide ventilation”.


An Austrian tattoo artist was jailed for etching an image of a penis, alongside the word “f***”, on a female customer’s back. She had asked for a tattoo of a yin-yang symbol, and only realised she’d got a penis instead when she got home and looked in the mirror. Asked in court why he’d done it, the tattooist replied: “Just because.”