News you can lose:

George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate in economics, described the Bush Administration’s budget policies as “a form of looting.” A German man who taught his dog, Adolf, to perform the Nazi salute by raising its right paw escaped prosecution for the trick. Residents of a mountain village in Fiji apologized to the descendents of an English missionary who made the mistake of touching a chief’s head and was cooked and eaten for the insult. Happy Serbs accidentally shot down a small plane when they fired guns into the air at a wedding. Thai protesters captured the soul of George W. Bush, imprisoned it in a clay pot, and then drowned it in the Ping River. The Staten Island Ferry crashed in New York City; of the 10 people who died, two were decapitated and some were cut in half. Several people lost limbs. The captain, who apparently passed out, left the scene immediately, slashed his wrists and shot himself twice in the chest with a pellet gun. Coffee makes sperm swim faster, a Brazilian study found, and men who smoke a lot of marijuana have a lower sperm count and sperm that swim “too fast, too early.” In France, a judge was caught masturbating in court. A genomic survey of human feces
found it inhabited by 1,200 viruses, about half of which were previously unknown to science.