Funny old world: The week's offbeat news 

From an Egyptian football star's embarrassing exam fail to the surreal world of China's censors. Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.

 No good deed unpunished 
Two Irishmen who carried a dead man to the post office to collect his pension have found themselves in a world of trouble.
The self-styled "Good Samaritans" said staff had refused to let them pick up the pension on the man's behalf on the grounds that he was ill.
So they carried the 66-year-old the 500 metres from his home in Carlow. 

"He was alive when we left the house," one insisted.
"We sort of had to lift him up and bring him the whole way down to the post office, but sure he never even got the chance to get his money.
"He probably died in the post office -- at the ice cream freezer. I'd say that's where he dropped off," he added.
Police were not so sure and the pair were later arrested.

 What could go wrong? 
In what is being dubbed "the stupidest crime of the century", a young man was caught taking university exams for Egyptian football star Mostafa Mohamed in Cairo while the striker was playing for the national team in the Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon.
The Galatasaray forward is famous in the football-mad country, and with the nation glued to their televisions to watch the tournament, a campus official could not believe his eyes when "Mohamed" turned up to take an exam.
The impersonator first claimed he was merely "helping a friend" before admitting he had "already taken three exams" for 24-year-old Mohamed.

 First rule of Fight Club... 
You may have a double take too if you ever watch the classic 1999 film "Fight Club" in China. 
Censors have finally passed it to be seen there -- one of only a handful of foreign films released each year -- but with some rather significant plot changes.
The anarchist, anti-capitalist message that made the film a global hit has disappeared, and the exploding building scene at the end replaced with the coda: "The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding."

What is more, the Brad Pitt character Tyler Durden -- a figment of The Narrator Edward Norton's imagination in the original -- is sent to a "lunatic asylum" for psychological treatment and is later discharged.
Even Chinese film-goers hardened to overweening censorship called the changes "outrageous".

"'Fight Club' tells us that they don't just delete scenes but add to the plot too," one user quipped on the Twitter-like Weibo platform.
It is far from the first time Chinese censors have put a surreal spin on a Hollywood hit.
In 2019, multiple scenes in the Freddie Mercury biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody" relating to his gayness mysteriously disappeared.

 Keep your Gere to yourself 
When Hollywood star Richard Gere took the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty by surprise at an AIDS awareness event by kissing her in a deeply awkward Errol Flynn-style clinch, it was she who somehow ended up taking the heat.
Shetty was hit with obscenity charges after radical Hindu groups burned effigies of both stars, accusing them of insulting Indian values.

While indecency counts against the world's second most famous Buddhist were quickly shelved, it has taken 15 years for the case against Shetty, the victim of Gere's unwanted amorous attentions, to be dropped.
"It seems that... Shilpa Shetty is the victim of alleged act of accused No. 1 (Richard Gere)," a judge ruled.
Gere apologised long ago, saying he was trying to show that kissing did not spread AIDS.