Tourist 'taking selfie' plunges from church in Athens after being 'swept by winds'
A tourist has been rushed to hospital after he plunged from a church at the top of Athens' highest point after being 'swept by winds' while taking a selfie.
The incident unfolded at the Agios Georgios church on Lycabettus Hill yesterday morning. The man, reportedly aged between 25 and 30, was said to be taking a photograph when he fell from the edge of the church courtyard onto rocks and stone-paved steps below. Police, a motorcycle unit and ambulance crews attended the scene and the man was taken to hospital, where he remains in a stable condition. Agios Georgios - a popular landmark in the Greek capital - was closed to visitors yesterday in the aftermath of the incident. It comes after a mum a left 16-month-old home alone to die when she went on holiday.
One eyewitness told Newsbomb : 'A tourist woman came and told us that a man had fallen onto the landing and asked us to call EKAB. We stayed with him until the rescuers arrived. They took him away conscious and transferred him to the hospital.'
Another said 'He was sitting on the ledge outside the church, and people saw him fall. I wasn't there at the moment—it was a tourist who told me. I went and saw him lying there, bleeding. It was a bit hard to watch.'
The man was said to be "conscious" and "blinking his eyes" when the ambulance arrived, according to witnesses.
It is only the latest injury said to be linked to selfie-taking. In May, an American tourist was left seriously injured after impaling himself on a metal fence whilst taking a selfie at Rome's Colosseum.
The man, a US citizen living in Taiwan, had climbed up one of the railings between the Colosseum's seven-metre long arches but slipped and fell onto a sharp metal spike, which pierced his spine - leaving him dangling from the fence screaming until he fell unconscious.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Herald Scotland
22 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
Michigan sign-stealing scandal highlights college football tribalism
And now, as Michigan braces for the findings and penalties stemming from its NCAA infractions case on Friday, we will hear all of it again regardless of the outcome: Complaints from Ann Arbor over selective enforcement, complaints from Columbus (and perhaps points beyond) that the NCAA didn't hit hard enough, half-baked justifications for Stalions' behavior and eye rolls from the sports nihilists who think all of this is silly because rules were never meant to be followed in the first place. We undeniably live in a more permissive culture than at any time in NCAA history. The Overton Window on what we consider a college sports scandal changed forever on Nov. 5, 2011 when Jerry Sandusky was arrested are charged with 52 accounts of sexual abuse. Things that used to shock people, like agent involvement in a recruitment or payments to college athletes, no longer registered the same way - and that true even before the NCAA made that stuff legal. So the impulse now is to shrug our shoulders at all of it. If you don't like Michigan, you probably want them punished. If you root for Michigan, you probably think this was all a ridiculous witch hunt. And if you have no skin in the game, you probably are just laughing at the NCAA for trying to punish anyone for anything at this point. But I'll propose a radical thought here: Maybe, just maybe, the way all of us experience sports would be better if we simply pushed back a little harder on the idea that cheating - even in the ridiculous world of college sports -- isn't a big deal. A couple months before I ever heard the name Conor Stallions, I was having a phone conversation with Shawn Klein, an Arizona State philosophy professor who has extensively written about and studied ethics in sports. At the time, I was working on a project that became an award-winning 10-part series about the history of cheating in sports, which human beings have grappled with dating back to chariot races in Greek and Roman antiquity. When I asked Klein why people tended to view cheating in sports differently than, say, cheating on their taxes or cheating on their significant other, his explanation forever changed how I thought about this stuff. The gist is that while we live in a world of rules that have been put in place to help us make our lives better and organize society, we'd still a society in some form even if there were no rules or laws. Sports don't work that way. If there were no rules, the game itself wouldn't exist. "The point isn't to get the white ball in the hole with a stick," Klein said. "It's doing it given the constraints you've all agreed to, which is what creates the game. By going outside that, you're not playing the game anymore in some way. So the process is maybe more important in sports than in other parts of our lives. What we actually care about is the doing of the thing, not just that we get there first." Let's apply that to Michigan. If Stalions' in-person scouting allowed the Wolverines to obtain higher quality information about their opponents than they would otherwise have been able to obtain by following the rules, this wasn't a gray-area issue. It was cheating, and we should be honest about that and treat it with a level of seriousness that discourages others from similarly tainting a sport they profess to care about. The hard part, though, is what that means in a practical sense. Would it feel right to strip away Michigan's title when we all saw that, sign stealing or not, the Wolverines were by far the best college football team in 2023? Would it be fair to tell Michigan's current players who had nothing to do with the actions of a low-level analyst that they aren't eligible for postseason games? Does suspending current head coach and then-offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore for a few games look like a just punishment or symbolic fluff? There are no great answers, and it's symbolic of why the NCAA's enforcement model ultimately failed. As much as schools knew that cheating was culturally corrosive and wildly prevalent in college sports, they never truly trusted themselves with the instruments to manage it. Michigan will most likely be hit with a potpourri of penalties that won't hurt much, and perhaps that's the right outcome. Stalions is back in obscurity and Jim Harbaugh is in the NFL, the latter being a far bigger penalty than anything the NCAA could come up with. But whether Michigan cheated on its way to a national title shouldn't be up for debate. Thanks to an enterprising staffer who was so desperate to impress his bosses that he crossed every line imaginable, the Wolverines were playing a different game than their opponents. And if you can't acknowledge that, they played you too.
ITV News
9 hours ago
- ITV News
Melania Trump threatens $1bn lawsuit over Hunter Biden's 'salacious' Epstein comments
Melania Trump has demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and threatened to sue him for over $1 billion in damages if he does not. Trump takes issue with two comments made by the son of former President Joe Biden in an interview this month with American journalist Andrew Callaghan. He alleged that Epstein introduced the first lady to her husband, President Donald statements are false, defamatory and 'extremely salacious,' Melania Trump's lawyer, Alejandro Brito, wrote in a letter to Biden. Biden's remarks were widely disseminated on social media and reported by media outlets around the world, causing the first lady 'to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm,' he wrote. Biden made the Epstein comments during a sprawling interview in which he lashed out at 'elites' and others in the Democratic Party he says undermined his father before he dropped out of last year's presidential campaign.'Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep,' Biden said in one of the comments Trump disputes. Biden attributed the claim to author Michael Wolff, whom Trump disparaged in June as a 'Third Rate Reporter.' He has accused Wolff of making up stories to sell books. Asked in a subsequent interview on Callaghan's Channel 5 News YouTube channel if he would like to apologise, Biden bluntly responded: "F**k that. That's not going to happen." The first lady's threats echo a favoured strategy of her husband, who has aggressively used litigation to go after critics. Public figures like the Trumps face a high bar to succeed in a defamation president and first lady have long said they were introduced by Paolo Zampolli, a modelling agent, at a New York Fashion Week party in letter is dated August 6 and was first reported Wednesday by Fox News Lowell, a lawyer who has represented Biden in his criminal cases and to whom Brito's letter is addressed, has been contacted for comment.
Telegraph
9 hours ago
- Telegraph
I fear visiting Britain to promote my book, when speaking freely can get you in trouble
'New Zealand woman … and 6-year-old son detained by US immigration,' blared a recent story in the New Zealand Herald. So far, so scary. It seems the woman went to the US based on her marriage to an American. They divorced before she adjusted her status to permanent resident. When she tried to get back into the US from a trip to Canada, she and her son were detained by US Customs and Border Protection. She reportedly applied to re-open her green-card application on the grounds that she was allegedly a survivor of domestic abuse. She may or may not have a case. But the bottom line is that this is a complicated immigration case that will work itself out in due course, not an innocent tourist mum being blocked by the American jackboots of Leftist imagination. A few weeks ago, I was invited on a podcast in New Zealand. The other guests were Stephen Young, a professor at Otago University whose 'areas of research involve the intersection of Indigenous peoples … drawing from critical and social theories,' and Zane Wedding, 'an activist who's been involved in recent pro-Gaza rallies'. They appeared to want me as a proxy pinata for President Trump's highly successful (though controversial) policies to control the southern border and deport aliens here illegally. The podcast's premise was that Kiwi academics were being hassled at US airports. 'A number of our universities are now advising academics to clean their social media profiles, travel with burner phones, and reconsider attending US conferences altogether,' they said. Their implication was that research would grind to a halt, tourism would dry out, and sundry other disasters would result from the alleged border crackdown. But when I researched the claims, practically nothing came up. Yes, a May 2025 article alarmingly said 'NZ travellers warned of increased detention risk at US border', and the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade's travel advice for the United States is set at level 2, 'exercise increased caution'. But the Ministry said that in the year to that point, '24 New Zealand passport holders have sought our assistance because they have experienced immigration difficulties in the US … Typically, we would see 14-25 cases per year.' No crisis there. Indeed, a government spokeswoman said that 169,000 New Zealanders had travelled to the US in the year to March 2025 – up from 168,000 for the same period a year earlier. The global Left is panicking about the US president or secretary of state using powers in immigration law to deny visas or entry to foreigners who endorse or espouse terrorism or undermine our national security or foreign policy. They seem to believe that the United States, uniquely among nations, is obliged to admit foreigners who rail against our system of government and capitalism, and advocate for radical foreign political causes. We don't. We have rules which visitors are asked to respect, or else they're not welcome. Meanwhile, the rest of the Anglosphere is policing speech not just about politics, but about statistical and biological truth. I worry more about free speech there than here. Armed with facts, I was easily able to counter the narrative that the US was a threat to free speech. In fact, I told the podcast hosts that I was more afraid of speaking in New Zealand – or Australia, Canada, and Great Britain, the rest of the 'Five Eyes' of English-speaking countries that share intelligence data. To promote my new book, The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey), I will be speaking in the US and Europe. In the United States, our First Amendment protects my free speech. I'll go to the Five Eyes countries if invited, but with trepidation, because several of the woke commandments I urge readers to reject in the book appear to have become state-sanctioned truth in some of these countries. Deviation from that dogma, or adherence to factual truth that threatens some sub-group's subjective sense of safety, can result in cancellation, ostracisation – or, in some cases, legal trouble. In Australia, the case of Tickle v Giggle grinds on. It boils down to a website for women being sued by a biological male who wants access to the site. Commenting on the case might be risky – 'transgender vilification', defined as 'a public act that could incite hatred, serious contempt or severe ridicule towards people who are transgender', is against the law in New South Wales. Kirralie Smith, head of the Australian group Binary, says she's had 'vilification' complaints against her 'for calling male soccer players 'male''. In my book, I discuss gender ideology in two chapters. I state the fact (not opinion) that mankind is a sexually dimorphous species with only two sexes. If one bloke in Scotland finds it offensive, could that be 'stirring up hatred' – an offence under their Hate Crime and Public Order Act? I'd hope not, but the fact the question even has to be asked is chilling to free expression. In the chapter titled 'You Will be 'Woke' to Imaginary Oppression', I use hard data to debunk myths about crime – who are the victims, and who are the perpetrators. In Britain, a data point in the debate about migration is the rate of crime by foreign compared to UK-born men. Whatever the true statistics are, they might cause someone offence – but that does not make them false. Facts are facts. Their purpose is not to vilify, but to inform policy. The Free Speech Union is fighting to protect ordinary Britons who state factual truths or express their opinions. The British Government, meanwhile, seems determined to crack down on negative views of mass migration if they are injudiciously expressed. In Canada, former PM Justin Trudeau's government suppressed free speech over Covid mandates and advocated an Online Harms Act that would create a new hate-crime offence with a maximum sentence of life in prison. His Liberal Party successor, Mark Carney, seems little better. And in New Zealand, they have a Human Rights Act under which using 'words which are threatening, abusive, or insulting' or 'inciting racial disharmony' are offences. Such laws naturally chill free speech, because the definitions and lines are rarely clear, absent court cases of which no one wants to be the guinea pig. The New Zealand Law Commission has been looking at extending the categories protected under the Human Rights Act to 'people who are transgender, people who are non-binary and people who have an innate variation of sex characteristics'. But while people with disorders of sexual development indubitably exist, the concepts of 'transgender' or 'non-binary' require a belief – that humans have a 'gender' which sometimes doesn't match their biological sex, and that human beings can exist without being of either sex. These are convictions of faith, not facts that can be proven or disproven empirically. Despite the panic from the Anglophone Left, the home of free speech remains the United States. It's in the rest of the ex-British Empire where it is in jeopardy. Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Border Security and Immigration Center and author of The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey) from Academica Books
