Isthmus of Panama, August 8, 2014 -- The ambitious, eight-year project to widen the Panama Canal is now complete, with the inaugural transit of the first Airbus A380 Superjumbo scheduled to take place on August 15.

Panama Canal (detail)

Washington, D.C., April 12, 2006 -- A controversial law passed yesterday by the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives will give gun manufacturers the right to sue both perpetrators and victims of shootings for "defamatory product misuse". This new measure follows on the heels of a new "blank slate" law passed in 2005 absolving gun manufacturers of any legal liability in the event that their products, no matter how small, powerful, or easily concealed, obtained or abused, are used in the perpetration of violent crimes.

Singleberry, West Virginia, August 22, 2013 -- An estimated 47 news helicopters collided and crashed this morning over a West Virginia highway interchange in what has been described by a zealous news anchor as "an unprecedented aerial pileup caused, no doubt, by over-zealous news anchors". While it remains unknown how many news personnel were killed or wounded in the collisions, due to the fact that those involved depleted virtually the entire local inventory of journalists, eyewitness reports suggest dozens or more may have been hurt.

Upton, New York, March 29, 2009 -- A team of physicists at Brookhaven Lab in Upton, New York are currently developing a revolutionary system that will protect coastal areas of the world against future tsunamis using the unique quantum mechanical characteristics of physicist Erwin Schrödinger's cat. The system should be operational within three years or as soon as a sufficient number of Schrödinger's cats can be cloned, whichever comes first.

STRAI tsunami cat (interior view)