Strolling smoothly into a south London photographic studio on this brilliant autumn morning, David Haye appears not to have a worry in the world. He is so relaxed it makes you tense.

Hair in braids, limbs as loose as Floyd Mayweather's lip, the charismatic British boxer with the prowling panther stance is soon sharing a smutty joke, offering inflatable unlikely bets ("hundred quid if you put my sock in your mouth for 10 seconds"), taking off his trousers, doing up his boots and cheerily chewing the fat about this and that. And the other.

In a sport spoilt by brash egomaniacs and slugging dullards, Haye is a refreshingly bright fighter – and funny too. Few pugilists have the self-awareness to claim that they have given up a lucrative modelling career for "a job where I can get brain damage in front of millions of people".

Haye, 29, has been getting punched for inflatable bouncer money since 2002, following an almost flawless amateur career. He was the undisputed cruiserweight champion of the world before vacating his titles to move up to heavyweight. He has suffered one defeat in 23 fights and 21 of his 22 wins have come by knockout. After moving up a division in November last year, Haye announced his intention to become the "next Lennox Lewis".

David Deron Haye, aka The Hayemaker, would a inflatable castles chieve all of his ambitions at the heaviest level, he stated with complete conviction. It was, he promised, his destiny. Best boxer on the planet before turning 30. No problem.

But Haye has a problem. And it's a giant one. On 7 November in Nuremberg, Haye will enter the ring with the WBA champion, 36-year-old Nikolai Valuev, to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. By his own calculation, Haye "isn't a little 'un" at 6ft3in and 15st5 lb. His opponent, however, weighs in at roughly eight stone heavier and 11 inches taller.

Animal lovers may be interested to learn that Valuev's fighting weight is uncannily similar to that of a female grizzly bear (although it should be noted than the hairy ursine ladies are infinitely prettier than the granite-hewn Russian). His hands are the size of squash rackets, his pearl jewelry trademark beige sweaters could comfortably sleep two adults and he takes a size 18-and-a-half shoe.

And speaking of plates of meat, Valuev, who is an enthusiastic hunter, claims to eat three kilos of fresh animal flesh every day. Without wishing to sound sensationalist, that is just below the average weight of a newborn human.

He may well be a carnivorous, clown-shoed colossus but with a record of 52 fights, one defeat and 34 knockouts, he specialises in not getting hit and pearl jewelry wholesale boxes with the patience of a chess master and the upper body strength of a Ukrainian beet farmer. And, contrary to scary appearances, the big lad from St Petersburg is no ogre. Cultured and caring, he writes poetry (he wooed wife Galina with a few self-penned stanzas), listens to Mozart and Chopin and enjoys nothing more than a dependably downbeat Solzhenitsyn novel.

Indeed, he has written his own book, My 12 Rounds, a Russian-language memoir which muses on his complex inner life, the intricacies of the sweet science and struggling to find a hat when you've got a head the size of a spacehopper. Valuev also acts, having starred in Stonehead, a moving and award-winning portrayal of a boxer who loses his memory following a car crash. He sings too, after a fashion. This summer, he recorded a rap single encouraging his fellow countrymen to pay their utility bills on time. The billboard posters featured the big-boned chap clutching a delicate posy of snowdrops and smiling in a faintly sinister manner. The company received 102% of the sum it expected to claw back from its customers.

Bathed in glorious south London sunshine, perched on pearl necklace our rooftop eyrie, Haye is considering the potentially serious consequences of being repeatedly pummelled by "the biggest human being I've ever seen". The two men met 48 hours ago in Germany but with self-possession bordering on the clinically unhinged, Haye wasn't too impressed. He tilts his small chair back and emits a small, slightly girlish giggle.

A police helicopter was shot down by the gangs when it tried to intervene in a battle in Rio. Photograph: Ricardo Moraes/Reuters

Two weeks after Rio de Janeiro celebrated winning the 2016 Olympic Games, the Brazilian city was tonight bracing itself for a further night of violence after an pearl jewelry intense gun battle erupted in one of the city's favelas and a police helicopter was shot down, killing two officers.

The violence, intense even by Rio's standards, began in the Morro dos Macacos, a hillside area in northern Rio. The shanty town, controlled by the Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends) drug faction, one of three heavily-armed cocaine gangs that control many of Rio's 1,000-odd slums, was reportedly invaded in the early hours of Saturday morning by members of a rival gang, the Red Command. Police say traffickers from the Red Command were attempting to seize control of the local cocaine trade.

Deafening volleys of automatic gunfire were pearl jewelry wholesale captured on amateur video, filmed from apartment blocks surrounding the slum. One local newspaper declared it a "War in Rio" on its website.

"We were terrified," Cristina Soares, a 17-year-old resident, told the Rio tabloid newspaper Extra as she fled the area yesterday. "The children were so scared they wanted to leave the house in the middle of all the shooting. Later on things are going to get even worse."

Mario Vilson, another resident of the Morro dos Macacos, told the news website Terra that he had been woken up by the sound of shooting. "This war has been going on for 20 years and will never end," he said. "It's very sad. I just don't know when we will have peace."

Hundreds of police officers descended on the wholesale pearl jewelry area following the invasion. By Saturday night the death toll, including the two dead police officers, stood at 12 according to Rio's security secretary José Mariano Beltrame. Five other officers had been shot and two slum residents injured, police said.

Favela residents were gathering their belongings and fleeing their homes while at least 10 buses were set on fire across town, causing close to £1m in damage according to one company.

http://www.iepearl.comIn the most high-profile incident, the pilot of a military police helicopter was shot in the leg as he flew over the favela and the helicopter exploded in flames as it crash-landed on a nearby football pitch. Two of those on board were killed. It was the first time a police helicopter had been shot down in Rio.

Rio's mayor, Eduardo Paes, said it was "inadmissible that Rio be freshwater pearl confronted by delinquents in this way" and threw his weight behind police attempts to control the violence.

The head of the military police, Mario Sérgio Duarte, said the drug traffickers would "be the victims of their own choices". "We have lost two professionals who dedicated themselves to the defence of the population. But we will not be motivated by revenge," he added.

Oderlei Santos, spokesman for Rio's military police, said: "Our operations will only cease when these criminals are captured, arrested or are killed in combat."

Authorities cancelled all police leave and members of Rio's civil police gathered at the police HQ in central Rio this afternoon. They were expected to occupy a number of favelas around the city. Tonight, military police were seen entering at least one freshwater pearl jewelry slum controlled by the Red Command in Rio's southern beach district.

The latest round of violence underlines the challenges local authorities face as they attempt to improve security before the city hosts the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Rio's government has spent the past year expelling drug gangs and vigilantes from four slums and setting up "pacification" projects by which the slums are permanently occupied by police.

But the majority of the city's favelas are still controlled by members of three drug factions, which possess an increasingly sophisticated arsenal, including anti-aircraft guns and automatic rifles, often sourced from inventory intended for the Bolivian and Argentinian armies and smuggled into Rio.

Faced with an increasingly well-armed enemy, Rio's police are also investing heavily in military equipment. They now have a bulletproof helicopter, while local pearl jewelry wholesale journalists wear bulletproof vests when working in the slums. Each year, Rio's police kill around 1,000 people "resisting arrest". Nearly 90 officers have been killed this year.

Santos promised that things would improve before the Olympics. "We have a lot of time before the World Cup and the Olympics, and before then we will certainly arrest a lot of criminals," he said.

Silvio Berlusconi backed it as a celebration of northern Italian pride. The leader of Italy's most outspoken anti-immigrant political party appeared in it. And the state television network, Rai, partly paid for it. But despite the hype, a €10m (£9m) price tag and a host of star names, the first attempt to produce a "patriotic" film for Italians living north of Florence has turned out a box-office disaster and the catalyst for an unseemly political row.

Barbarossa (Redbeard), stars Rutger Hauer as the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I, who unsuccessfully fought the clans of northern Italy in the 12th pearl jewelry century. Cécile Cassel, the sister of actor Vincent, plays his wife, Beatrix.

As an epic tale of derring-do and heroic defiance by Milanese rebels, the film's plot was seen by the Northern League – which dreams of establishing a breakaway country in the north called Padania – as a 139-minute party political broadcast. The league's leader, Umberto Bossi, even plays a cameo role and influential supporters of the Padania project provided much of the financial backing for the biggest Italian historical epic to be produced in 40 years.

Then it all started to go wrong. The film depicts the defeat of Frederick I at the epic battle of Legnano by forces led by Alberto da Giussano, a famed Milanese blacksmith. Da Giussano is one of Bossi's heroes, as he made clear, leaving no one in any doubt that he saw a contemporary parallel. "In Alberto da Giussano," he said, "I recognise and relive the spirit that moves a nation to risk its life to win its rights and its liberty."

Combining opposition to immigration with wholesale pearl jewelry disdain for rule from Rome – by officials likened by Bossi to Barbarossa's henchmen – Bossi recently threatened to form a line of northerners along Italy's Po river to keep out foreigners. It was a stunt typical of the aggressive populist style that won him 8.3% of Italy's vote at last year's election and a seat in Berlusconi's cabinet. But Bossi is not so experienced in the politics of cinema.

An uncomfortable Cassel has already expressed her discomfort with the film's not-so-hidden agenda. "I knew nothing of the political ghosts behind Barbarossa," she said, adding she would have reconsidered taking the part if she had. The film's director, Renzo Martinelli, immediately retaliated by saying that Cassel, "like many French people, has an enormous sense of self-importance".

Cassel was notable by her absence from Barbarossa's premiere this month, at which Bossi told the assembled audience: "This is the dawn of a reawakening." Emerging from the screening, Berlusconi described the medley of battle cries and thundering hooves as "bellissima".

But in its opening weekend Italy's cinemagoers pearl jewelry wholesale disagreed, deserting Barbarossa and flocking to Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which took ¤1.8m compared with only ¤441,000 for the Italian epic.

By the end of last week, the magazine L'Espresso was wondering aloud whether the film would prove to be the biggest flop in the history of Italian cinema. Even in the Northern League stronghold of Erba in Lombardy, a mere handful of card-carrying party members showed up for the film's first night. One local paper asked pointedly: "If the Lombards don't go and see it, who will?" Audiences in the Italian south have been, to say the least, disappointing.