Record-breakers in the news today

David Hasselhoff has joined a campaign to stop bulldozers demolishing the longest surviving remnant of the Berlin Wall.

The Baywatch star, who has a large following in Germany, joined a protest on Sunday against developers who want to build apartments there.

The Hoff's popularity in the country can be traced back to New Year's Eve 1989 when he performed his song Looking for Freedom at the Brandenburg Gate shortly after the wall dividing the former East and West Germany came down.

The 60-year-old American actor holds the title of most watched man in television history. Having debuted as the eponymous hero of the popular US series Knight Rider (NBC), he went on to star as LA County lifeguard Mitch Buchannon in the series Baywatch (NBC), which, at its peak in 1996, had an estimated weekly audience of 1.1 billion viewers.

Two prisoners in Canada have made the headlines after a daring bid for freedom after being hoisted away in a helicopter reportedly commandeered by their accomplices.

Benjamin Hudon-Barbeau, 36, and 33-year-old Danny Provencal made their escape from Quebec's Saint Jerome jail northwest of Montreal - but were recaptured hours later.

On 11 February 1979, an Iranian employee of the Electronic Data Systems Corporation (EDS) led a mob into Gasr prison, Tehran, Iran, in an attempt to rescue two American colleagues. The mastermind of the plan was EDS owner and future presidential candidate H Ross Perot. Around 11,000 other prisoners took advantage of the confusion to stage history's largest jail break.

Life has been the discovered in the world's deepest ocean.

According to the scientists, bacteria has been found nearly 6.8 miles below sea level on the floor of the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, despite no light reaching that part of the ocean.

The evidence of organisms thriving in inhospitable environments is helping scientists reshape their understanding of the conditions necessary for life.

The discovery comes almost year after film director James Cameron set a new world record for the deepest manned descent (solo)after a two-hour, 10,898 m (35,755 ft) journey to the bottom of the Challenger Deep section of the Marianas Trench onboard the Deepsea Chalenger, a one-man "vertical torpedo" submersible. He spent four hours at the seabed - the deepest known point in the oceans - and conducted the first ever direct exploration of the ocean floor.

A 3D film to celebrate the sci-fi show Doctor Who's 50th anniversary is to get a cinema release.

The movie-length episode will be shown at cinemas in Britain and around the world at the same time as it is screened on UK TV channel BBC1 in November.

Stars of the show - including Matt Smith who plays the Doctor, and Jenna-Louise Coleman, his sidekick Clara Oswald - are said to have received the scripts last week.

The show holds the record for longest running science fiction TV series, having chalked up 769 episodes as of June 2010, encompassing 212 storylines. This total does not include spoofs, spin-offs or webisodes.