An Israeli illusionist spent 66 hours in an eight-tonne block of ice, breaking the record of the American magician David Blaine. Hezi Dayan, 29, had himself sealed into a specially constructed transparent ice cube in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square, where he apparently stayed for nearly three days wearing just jeans and a thin T-shirt.
"My aim," Mr Dayan told Haaretz newspaper before attempting the feat, "is that at two or three in the morning, people on their way home from a night out will say, 'Come, let's go to the square and see if that loony is in his ice.'"
At the stroke of the New Year, assistants cut open the ice block and removed the weak-looking illusionist, taking him straight to a waiting ambulance.His condition was not immediately clear.
Some 200 onlookers celebrated the arrival of the new decade with Dean, many of the them carrying signs - from the encouraging "Hezi the great," to the more practical "Don't die Hezi Dayan." David Blaine spent 63 hours in a similar ice cube in New York's Times Square in 2000.