A naked Russian artist nailed his own testicles to the ground in a bizarre protest against his country's authoritarian regime. Self-styled performance artist Pyotr Pavelnsky hammered a large metal nail through his scrotum and into the cobblestones in front of Moscow's Red Square as hundreds of horrified tourists watched on.

Police eventually covered him up with a blanket before removing him from the scene. He was taken to a clinic for treatment and placed under arrest.

Pavelnsky has previously performed painful protests to highlight political causes. In 2011 he sewed his lips together to highlight the plight of the jailed Pussy Riot group and he later wrapped his naked body in barbed wire outside a government building in St Petersburg.

Izzy Dix (pictured above), a gifted pupil who had ambitions to go to Oxford University, took her own life after complaining she could no longer cope with being bullied, both at school and online.

‘Izzy would come home and sob in my arms" Her mother Gabbi said "They called her “ugly”, “freak”, “frigid”. If she put her hands up in class, she’d be labelled a “swot” and they’d snigger at her, or make crude comments. They’d exclude her from events, tell her to go home, she wasn’t wanted. They’d turn their backs on her, literally. When she did come home, it didn’t stop, because it doesn’t, these days. They name-called her by text, then online. She’d log onto Facebook and get abuse. Then onto that awful site Ask.fm and be subjected to filth."

14 yr old Izzy committed suicide on September 17th. Her mother explained what happened that night

"When she came home from school that night, she seemed tired and a bit cranky. We had words because I wanted to watch The Great British Bake Off and she didn’t. But there was nothing to suggest she was going to do what she did. I remember she painted her nails - she was so meticulous about how she looked - then went up to her room and did her homework, had a shower, got her bag ready for school, laid out her uniform. I popped in and we had another chat about how the bullying was getting on top of her. It was nothing we hadn’t done 100 times before, and I’d always give her the talk about how she was stronger than the bullies.

‘Then I went downstairs while she got ready for bed. I had a cup of tea and a cigarette — she hates me smoking so I did it outside. I was gone 15 minutes, tops. In that 15 minutes my life was destroyed.’

When she came back inside, Gabbi went back upstairs to see if Izzy was getting into bed, but the bedroom door did not swing back as usual. 
‘Something was blocking it, and it was Izzy,’ she says, and breaks down completely.
Her description of the hours that followed is too awful to relate in detail, but she managed to get her daughter’s body down and dial 999, then ran hysterically into the street. Neighbours tried to revive Izzy while she ‘just took off’.

‘It’s all a blur. At one point I ran into a car. A police officer had to restrain me. 
‘I remember him saying, “I am so sorry to have to do this” as he got me to the ground.’

Not long before her suicide, Izzy wrote a heartbreaking poem about her ordeal. She called it I Give Up. See it below

You can read the full story HERE