On the eve of Mike Tyson’s controversial fight with the YouTuber Jake Paul, here are five other memorable oddities

George Foreman v the Toronto five
In 1975 the former heavyweight champion Foreman takes on five opponents on the same afternoon in bouts of three three-minute rounds each in Toronto. Muhammad Ali is ringside providing withering putdowns for the ABC television network six months on from their colossal “Rumble in the Jungle” . Foreman, who is attempting to rebuild his reputation, takes on respectable fighters in Alonzo Johnson, Pedro Agosto, Mac Foster, Terry Daniels and Boone Kirkman. To a background of booing, Foreman wins the lot. “I’d put on a show. I’d fought five guys, and I’d made it through. It was a big victory for me,’ he says afterwards.

Muhammad Ali v Antonio ‘The Pelican’ Inoki
Nine months on from his third and final fight against Joe Frazier, the “Thrilla in Manila” , Ali has been busy boxing stooges such as the Yorkshireman Richard Dunn in Munich. So in June 1976 he travels to Tokyo and takes on the gigantic Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki for a cool $6m, contesting the title of “Toughest Man on the Planet” at a soldout Budokan. Ali has a less than complimentary nickname for Inoki – “The Pelican” because of his big bullseye chin – and what follows is 15 rounds of pure slapstick as Inoki lays flat on the canvas offering only kicks and Ali, leaping out of the way, throws just six punches.

Witness from Porton Down laboratory says ‘many lethal doses’ of nerve agent were applied to Sergei Skripal’s door

A “minuscule” amount of the nerve agent used in the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal – as small as a sixth of a grain of salt – could have been enough to prove fatal, a government scientist has told an inquiry .

The scientist, an expert in chemical and biological weapons, said “many lethal doses” of novichok were daubed on the handle of the former Russian spy’s front door in Salisbury and it was so pure that it must have been manufactured by a sophisticated laboratory.

The ultimate multi-player has survived ‘frat boy’ slurs, a ropey film, one mega lawsuit, legions of change-averse puritans – and Mr T in a Night Elf Mohawk. As it hits 20, join us on a trip to the green hills of Stranglehorn

In 2004, Holly Longdale was a game designer on EverQuest, then the champion of a new genre of video game that allowed for multiplayer role-playing on a huge scale. In these online fantasy worlds, players could quest together rather than alone, adding a fascinating new social – and competitive – dimension to the static, offline role-playing that Holly’s generation had grown up with. But whenever she could, Longdale would sneak in a few hours playing EverQuest’s main competitor instead. That game was World of Warcraft (WoW).

“There were so many moments in WoW I was envious of,” she says, “and completely lost in. I remember running through Ashenvale as a Night Elf Hunter and the music and the ambience – there was a mood you couldn’t deny. Then I saw another player running in the opposite direction, a Druid who buffed me on their way by. That was when I knew I was going to be in this for the long-haul.” Twenty years later, Longdale is now WoW’s VP and executive producer at its developer, Blizzard, as well as one of millions who embraced the game as part of their lives.

Chancellor makes fiery appeal in parliament for opposition support ‘for the good of the country’

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The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has called on opposition parties to support key legislation after last week losing his majority in parliament, urging them to prevent his country from becoming as polarised as the US.

“There is no democracy without compromises,” Scholz said in a speech to the lower house of parliament on Wednesday. “Let us, for the good of the country, work together until the new election,” he said in an unusually fiery appeal to members of the Bundestag.

The plan to introduce league tables is a simplistic, retrograde gimmick that will demoralise NHS staff – and sideline their incredible work

• Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor

Seriously, Wes Streeting? After 14 wretched years of Tory austerity, stealth privatisation , draconian outsourcing, the Brexit staff drain and the horror and trauma of Covid from which – as you know – staff haven’t remotely recovered, the big NHS plan is to be … naming and shaming ? Complete with inflammatory language that’s designed to scapegoat staff, such as the bad managers you’ve branded the NHS’s “ guilty secret ”? Do you genuinely think this is constructive?

At a point when Ofsted – having contributed to the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry – has finally rowed back from its absurdly blunt tool of one-word school inspection ratings, it beggars belief that the new health secretary thinks hospital league tables will help the NHS. Streeting insists the new public rankings are a necessary way of stamping out poor performance. He wants hospitals judged on quantifiable factors such as A&E waits, cancer care and the size of their budget deficits. Trusts will be publicly ranked from best to worst, with the CEOs of the worst offenders facing dismissal. Meanwhile, the best-performing trusts will be rewarded with extra money to buy new equipment or repair facilities, further skewing the playing field.

Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and the author of Breathtaking : Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic

German energy firm shaved €3bn from spending plans for next financial year to €7bn

A German energy giant has warned that Donald Trump’s election victory has increased the risks of investing in offshore wind projects – but his return to the White House could help to bolster Britain’s renewables sector, according to UK developer SSE.

Germany’s RWE has cut its spending plans and warned that, as a result of the US election, “the risks for offshore wind projects have increased”.

Schools closed in Málaga and Granada regions, with 3,000 people evacuated from areas near Guadalhorce river in Málaga

Authorities in eastern and southern Spain have closed schools and begun evacuating some residents as the country is pounded by further torrential rains two weeks after the catastrophic floods that killed at least 215 people and unleashed a bitter political blame game .

By Wednesday morning, the state meteorological agency, Aemet, had put large parts of eastern and southern Spain on amber alert and issued the highest level of warning for the provinces of Tarragona in Catalonia and Málaga in Andalucía.

Valery Trankovsky had ordered missile strikes from Black Sea on civilian targets, a Ukrainian official said

A senior Russian naval officer was killed in a car bombing in Crimea on Wednesday, marking the latest in a series of targeted attacks on Russian military personnel and pro-Kremlin figures in occupied Ukrainian territories and inside Russia.

An official in Ukraine’s security services told the Ukrainian Pravda outlet that the agency had orchestrated the car bomb attack in the Russian-controlled port city of Sevastopol that killed Valery Trankovsky, the chief of staff of the 41st Missile Brigade of the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet.

Johan Grimonprez’s documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat reveals the curious link between Black Americans’ fight for civil rights and the assassination of Congo’s first democratically elected Black African prime minister

Half-way through Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington’s soulful version of In a Sentimental Mood is interrupted. Suddenly, we see and hear Malcolm X giving a speech at New York’s Harlem Square in 1960. It’s like being shaken from a delicious reverie and thrown into the ice bath of reality.

“You’ll never get Mississippi straightened out,” Malcolm X snaps at the Harlem crowds, “until you start realising the connection with the Congo.” The curious connection between Black Americans’ fight for civil rights and the second-largest country in Africa is the subject of Johan Grimonprez’s documentary.