Like a very jowly and very cranky cat, Newt Gingrich rose up on his very sizable haunches during last night's GOP presidential debate and batted around any and all who would dare to challenge his status as front-runner for the nomination. Of course, for good measure, he also managed to create an international incident when he said Palestinians are an "invented" people.

But the biggest gaffe came courtesy of Mitt Romney. With the easy mien of a plutocrat casting about for couch cushion dubloons, the Sears catalog model challenged Brokeback Mountain extra Rick Perry to a $10,000 bet over whether Perry had correctly interpreted a passage on health care from a book Romney had written. And now Wall Street might be betting against Romney, too! The question, though, is "which Romney?" Even though he's fantastically wealthy, he's also still a cheapskate who buys his golf clubs from the fine pro shop at Kmart.

Viva Vivarin! World powers huddled into the wee hours to hash out a new climate treaty that calls for global emission reductions. A technicality surrounding some legal wording threatened a schism between established powers like the European Union and rapidly developing economic powers like India.

The United States Army has left Iraq, but the haunting memories of thousands of slain civilians, after nearly a decade of war and occupation, won't fade for decades—if ever. (Good thing we still have all those private militias—aka "security contractors"—to do mop-up work.)

So, some 10,000-plus Russians pissed off at Vladimir Putin, and also over suspected election fraud, mustered a once-every-20-years outpouring of democratic outrage. And shockingly Russia's notoriously censorious TV stations actually had to acknowledge it was happening and why. Meanwhile, Putin's puppet, Dmitri Medvedev, has promised a probe into the vote shenanigans. Which won't find anything, no doubt.

Want to stalk someone's Netflix queue? Congress is pondering a new bill that would let companies ask their customers for permission to release that information.

Another Occupy camp has been cleared: This time, it's Boston. Cops arrested 40 people and ripped down tents.

A year ago, the federal government hijacked and began censoring a popular hiphop blog over unfounded suspicions of criminal copyright violations.

A clever redneck looking for a day off the job wrote up an obituary for his still-living mother and then submitted it to the local newspaper, which printed the thing without checking to see if, y'know, she was actually dead.

I KNOW THIS HAS BEEN A SAD WEEK FOR TRAIL BLAZERS' FANS. I THOUGHT THIS MIGHT HELP. I LIKE TO BE HELPFUL. IT IS GOOD TO BE HELPFUL.