Washington, DC, October 31, 2008 -- Outgoing President George W. Bush followed yesterday in the footsteps of his predecessors by applying his traditional presidential power to absolve a number of friends and supporters of their criminal convictions. Included in the last-minute mercy package, however, was a novel twist: preemptive pardons.

Berlin, April 2, 2009 -- A Lufthansa A380-800 passenger aircraft carrying 523 passengers was hijacked shortly after takeoff yesterday, apparently by its own autopilot. The aircraft, which was scheduled to fly from Berlin's Tegel airport to Bangkok, Thailand, experienced a "non-standard route deviation" roughly 12 minutes into its flight.

Washington, D.C., January 19, 2007 -- A federally-funded effort to counteract what some medical professionals have termed the "epidemic-level shortness in the attention spans of American citizens" has been launched with the backing of the Congressional Task Force for Making People Pay Attention.

Paris Hilton (interior)

Washington, D.C., January 4, 2006 -- Britney Spears will be the new Bush nominee for Supreme Court Justice, replacing Harriet Miers, whose nomination was recently withdrawn in the face of overwhelming bipartisan public sniggering. Close observers of the Miers fracas have pointed out that Bush's withdrawal of Miers' nomination was actually little more than a technicality, given that the Senate, in a rare moment of bipartisanship, had already voted 93-7 against confirmation last November.