Daredevil Completes Grand Canyon Tightrope Walk The 34-year-old, who walked across the Niagara Falls last year, prayed constantly as he crossed a tributary gorge of the US landmark on a quarter-mile long high wire some 1,500 feet (457 meters) above the Little Colorado River. Wind gusts were higher than expected, and he twice crouched down on the wire. "Those winds (were) so unpredictable ... just out of the blue there would be a 35 miles (56 kilometers) an hour gust," he said. "My arms are aching like you couldn't believe," he added, hugging his wife and children after the nerve-wracking walk -- without a harness -- over the stunning gorge in eastern Arizona, broadcast live around the world. Organizers said he took 22 minutes and 54 seconds to cross the 1,400 feet (426 meters) -- faster than anticipated -- giving a thumbs up and half-running the last several yards to reach the other side. Wallenda's feat made it into the top 10 global topics on Twitter, with organizers saying there were some 700,000 tweets during the walk alone. There was some debate over whethe

Saddam Hussein It’s a different league of vanity, of course, but dictators are often vain to the point of caricature, and none more so than former Iraqi president Saddam. His face adorned office buildings, schools, airports and shops. His statues sprang up like weeds. But perhaps most damningly of all, he wrote an appalling novel in which a hero much like himself falls in love with a peasant girl (representing Iraq), who is in turn violently raped by her husband (representing America), leaving the hero (Saddam) to exact heroic revenge. It won't win the Booker prize.