Seriously, Charlie Hales? Several weeks after his 2002 school-bailout claim was revealed as false, the mayoral candidate was called out by the Oregonian last night after the paper "discovered a published letter"—signed by Hales and sent to the St. Johns Review —had "lifted two passages from a 2009 newspaper article." The letter, written by a staffer and submitted before the primary election, made it seem like Hales joined a tour of St. Johns. He didn't.

No doubt setting back Afghanistan's burgeoning tourist industry, gun-toting Taliban militants who frown on simple pleasures like liquor, dancing, and sex forced their way into a lakeside resort near Kabul and killed close to two dozen vacationers and staffers. Hey! Wait! Isn't that also the plot to Footloose?

Promising to show dissenters "the utmost firmness," Egypt's military either wants to shoot or romance protesters massing now for the fourth day since the dissolution of the country's rightfully elected parliament.

Syria's military, on a break from shelling apartment buildings in restive towns, appears to have bagged itself a Turkish warplane.

Evil has triumphed over good. Because good is dumb.

Willard Romney's Bain Capital helped pioneer/perfect/polish/whatever the soul-sucking practice of sending living-wage American jobs out to "low-wage" countries like China and India. In other shocking Romney news, he has a closet full of spats.

This is how it begins. Mysteriously, air maybe filled with deadly monkeypox and bird flu germs wound up leaking from a CDC "safe" lab into a clean-air corridor, bypassing the usual filters. Visitors on a tour noticed a "puff of air."

Breasts and curse words, when displayed or spoken briefly and accidentally, are totally legit on TV and radio, says the Supreme Court.

In Georgia, an Apple Store employee refused to sell an iPad to an Iranian woman after overhearing her talk in her dangerous native tongue.

George Zimmerman, the very next day after shooting Trayvon Martin to death, recorded a video with his lawyers in which he dramatically re-enacts the attack—and also launches his new career as a pulp crime storyteller.

Here's a buffet for sharks, but not inside a casino filled with fat, scooter-driving pensioners.

Because "the Party keeps digging," the state-fueled real estate bubble that powers China's economy might never explode. Not true for the country's increasingly fractured political landscape.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KIDS! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KIDS! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KIDS! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KIDS!