Vladimir Putin: Man of Bronze

It's easy to dismiss reports of Russian Prime Minister/Dictator for Life Vladimir Putin's superheroic feats of strength, but there's no denying the manly image cut by those beefcake fly fishing shots that appeared in the Russian state media a while back. I mean, with pecs like those, how can anyone disparage this man's way with testosterone? What? Something about tonguing a little boy's stomach? I don't know what you're talking about, sir. Anyway, Putin's latest triumph comes from--who else?--state-controlled media, who say the P.M. single-handedly saved a television crew from being mauled by a Siberian tiger. Putin was casually strolling through the wilderness, living off the land and carrying a freshly killed vole carcass as some kind of blood canteen (as he does) when he stumbled across a team of researchers who had captured one of the rare tigers for study. The tiger broke free and ran toward a nearby TV crew, as there's nothing Siberian tigers hate more than paparazzi. Fortunately, Putin was able to fire off a few rounds with his handy tranquilizer gun, subduing the beast, measuring its incisors, and tagging it with a radio transmitter. Truly, there's nothing this man can't do. Meanwhile, an anti-Kremlin journalist just died while in policy custody of a bullet wound to the head. No, these two stories are not related. More tiger-fighting details here.