A Texas anarchist requests his own FBI file, and winds up receiving a 440-page, heavily redacted glimpse at the FBI's ongoing, pervasive, and very expensive obsession with stalking anti-war protesters and other political dissenters whose actions rarely rise to the standard of criminal intent. This, incidentally, is why Portland's recently concluded JTTF debate was no trifling matter.

Barack Obama is heading to tornado-wrecked Joplin, Missouri, for a memorial service to honor the nearly 140 people who died in last week's mega-storm. In a town where a third of all structures were flattened, including decades-old landmarks, even longtime residents find themselves getting lost amid the destruction.

NATO misfires in an Afghanistan airstrike, reportedly killing 14 women and children. Afghan President Hamid Karzai shouts that this is NATO's "last warning," or somesuch.

Karzai's outrage, however, might also be aimed at diverting any criticism from this headline: A panel appointed by Karzai announced today that it had cleared his brother of helping perpetrate nearly $1 billion worth of fraudulent transactions from the country's central bank.

In strife-torn Yemen, a coastal city has fallen into the hands of Islamic militants. Some say Yemen's embattled president—targeted in weeks of protests and now faced with breakaway military units—orchestrated the defeat to keep his grip on power.

Heads-up, everyone who relies on government iconography to plot their daily lives: The USDA is going to replace the stupid food pyramid with an equally insipid diagram based on a dinner plate.

More suppertime news! China's wealthy, urbane and newly emboldened dog lovers find themselves in conflict, more and more, with the massive country's millions of mostly poor, rural dog eaters.

A mysterious, flu-like virus in South Korea is infecting, and killing, pregnant women. Two women "died of multiple organ failure triggered by severe scarring and thickening of the lung tissue."

God weeps; Satan smiles. Malta, the littlest Catholic pebble in the Mediterranean Sea, has voted to legalize that which must not be named: D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

John McCain genuflects to the Roger Ailes machine. Asked on Fox if Sarah Palin—a woman he so loves—could do what he couldn't and beat Barack Obama, the old man says: "of course she can."

I'd rather watch Barney Miller, too. A man in the Bronx threatens to blow up a local New York television station if they don't stop airing reruns of Two and a Half Men.

WHEN I GROW UP? I WANNA BE JUST LIKE THIS GUY. HE CAN THROW AND CATCH HIS OWN DRUMSTICK!