The crowd at the Miss Universe competition in Mexico City booed Miss America, and in Crawford, Texas, Cindy Sheehan resigned as the "'face' of the American anti-war movement." "Good-bye America," wrote Sheehan. "You are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it."
Paris Hilton went to jail and, according to family members, "breaks down crying a lot because she can't deal with the reality and the pressure." Hundreds of men serving life terms in Italian prisons demanded to be put to death. "We are tired of dying a little bit every day," said the inmates in a letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. "We have decided to die just once." Jack Kevorkian was released from prison, and Damien Hirst unveiled a diamond-encrusted human skull valued at $100,000,000. Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to point his country's missiles at Washington and Europe, China and India were preparing to race to the moon, and a Polish man who had been comatose since Communist rule awoke.
Adults and children in the European Union were getting fatter, and a judge in New Delhi ruled that government-employed air hostesses had to lose weight. "If by perseverance, the snail could reach the Ark," said Justice Rekha Sharma, "why can't these worthy ladies stand on and turn the scale"; farther south, in Agra, a mob of lawyers stripped a low-caste youth, tied him to a tree, shaved his head, spat on his face, and beat him. "No one," said Bar Council of India Vice President Rajendra Raghuvanshi, "can take law in their hands." Sex stimulants were banned in Australian prisons. Argentine researchers used Viagra to treat jet lag in hamsters, and in New York, a psychologist named Gordon Gallup announced that semen may be a powerful and addictive antidepressant for women.
An Italian doctor built vaginas for two women who lacked them due to Mayer-von Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome, Serb farmers were exchanging cows for penis-enlargement surgery, and an Egyptian jurist at Al-Azhar University was disciplined for issuing a fatwa that permitted women to breastfeed adult men.
Japanese engineers unveiled a gray-skinned child-android with the physical abilities of a toddler, and a robot was assigned to guard duty at a South Korean school. The robot, said DU Robo CEO Kang Jung-Won, "will alert officials when it detects someone trying to seduce a student." Duke University lost the the men's NCAA lacrosse championship.
Nazi-released raccoons continued to wreak havoc from the Baltic Sea to the Alps. "We like the United States of America," said retired German orthodontist Dieter Hoffmann, "but we do not like your Waschbaeren!"
Peruvian scientists were concerned that an itinerant penguin from Chile "could suffer discrimination" among Peru's penguins, a family in England claimed that they were being chased out of their neighborhood because they are redheads, and a family in Morocco were evicted from the toilet where they had lived for several years. "When he came home," said the mother of her son, "he would cry and asked me why we lived in the toilet.
"Elephants were fleeing war in Sri Lanka, while at least one elephant in eastern India was robbing motorists. Battalions of macaques were attacking the houses of Indian congressmen. "In the name of protection of monkeys," said an activist, "we cannot afford to be silent spectator to this perennial problem." Scientists in Des Moines, Iowa, talked to apes, who responded by pointing to lexigrams, and it was revealed that young sparrows learn their songs by eavesdropping. A group of men in New York City were accused of using GoogleEarth to plot a terrorist attack on underground jet-fuel lines, a hot-mud volcano in Indonesia had been erupting for one year, and in the midst of a bright, dusty lava-plain on Mars, astronomers discovered an immensely deep cavern from which no light escapes.
-- Rafil Kroll-Zaidi
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