Weekly Round-Up

Taking a sweeping look at the trending topics of the last week, we can see Australia getting all hot under the collar at the antics of Alizee Sery, a French 'exotic dancer' who decided to carry out (and film) an 'impromptu' strip tease on top of Ayers Rock. Ayers Rock is known as Uluru to the Aborigines, who own it and consider it their most sacred site and they were (strangely enough) less than pleased at Ms. Sery's antics - describing it as the equivalent of 'defecating on the steps of the Vatican'. Alizee, however, was quick to defend her actions 'I am aware that Uluru is sacred in their culture. My project is a tribute to the greatness of the rock. What we need to remember is that traditionally, the Aboriginal people were living naked. So stripping down was a return to what it was like.'

In Brazil, attention is firmly focused on presenter Ana Maria Braga after a series of allegations that she had been having an affair with her dance instructor on the Brazilian version of Dancing With Stars. While such allegations seem to surface with some frequency around these type of shows, Ana Maria refused to ignore them and instead came out fighting - tearfully declaiming the accusations as lies on her live TV show in Brazil and swearing to take everyone involved to court...

As in Australia, India was all atwitter with regards to someone taking their clothes off. Sherlyn Chopra hit the headlines - both in India and abroad - for posting nude (or at least implied nude) images on her Twitter via Twitpic and asking for people's opinion on them. Subsequently, she removed the images but was (allegedly) banned from uploading images any further images to Twitpic (although this ban seems to have been lifted yesterday). Now, I am certain that the flood of search enquiries for Sherlyn this week have all been to do with a desire to read her quotes on the issue, and nothing to do with people trying to find the aforementioned images.

In Poland, Bruce Willis has been making headlines for his Sobieski Vodka adverts - in which he makes it clear that he's become a Partner in the company and that he knows nothing at all about vodka. Make up your own mind as to whether this is madness or genius...

The UK meanwhile, was mourning the death of cult legend Frank Sidebottom - well, not so much Frank Sidebottom as his creator and alter-ego Chris Sievey who unfortunately passed away on the 21st June. After enjoying considerable success in the 1980s and early 1990s, Frank made less appearances in the time following but will be deeply missed by a generation for his bizarre humour and cover versions...

Finally, in the US, Twitter is again helping to make headlines when actress Amanda Bynes used it to announce that she's retiring from acting at the grand old age of 24. It apparently came as something of a shock to her publicist, who knew nothing of her retirement but, despite a wave of disappointed tweets from her 350,000 twitter followers, Amanda is adamant that she's going to call it a day.