GAMES

It seems the Empire has fallen on hard times. Presumably to get finishing funds for his latest Death Star, Darth Vader-or a man pretending to be Darth Vader?-was reduced to robbing a bank on Long Island this morning.

Impotent Rebel Alliance security forces tell Newsday (paywall) that Vader marched into a Chase bank in Setauket around 11:30 a.m. today. Brandishing a completely unnecessary handgun-as he had the power to choke the oxygen out every teller's throat-the fallen Jedi demanded cash.

It's unclear whether he also found their lack of faith disturbing, but one Rebel policeman says, "The teller complied with the robber's demands and gave him money from the drawer."

An artist has provoked condemnation by filming her father, a holocaust survivor, singing and dancing to the Gloria Gaynor hit I Will Survive at Auschwitz. Jane Korman, who is Jewish, filmed three generations of her family performing dance routines to the 70s disco track during a trip to the infamous concentration camp in Poland.

The Australian claims the video, which has received more than 200,000 hits on YouTube, is a "celebration of life and survival". However, holocaust survivors have lambasted the film, claiming it trivializes the death and suffering millions of Jews faced under the Nazis in the Second World War.

The video features Mrs Korman's father Adolk, 89, and her three children dancing to the song at various holocaust landmarks including the concentration camps at Theresienstadt and Dachau.