Satellite images revealed that global-warming-induced melting had left the North Pole an island.
The jobless rate rose from 5.7 percent to a five-year high of 6.1percent, with more than 84,000 jobs lost in August.
Despite McCain’s opposition to earmarks, Palin,when mayor of the 6,700-resident town of Wasilla (known tostate troopers as Alaska’s “meth capital”), hired lobbyist Steven Silver to help win federal earmarks totaling $27 million. It also emerged that Palin, 44, received her first passport in 2006.
“Paris Match” published a glossy eight-page spread of Taliban fighters wearing the uniforms of the French soldiers they had killed.
Virginia Tech students were falsely told by the local registrar of elections that if they voted at college their parents would no longer be able to claim them as dependents on their tax returns, and that they could lose their scholarships and their health- and car-insurance coverage.
Tens of thousands of copies of a Swedish food magazine were recalled after an error in a recipe for apple cake sent four readers to hospitals with nutmeg poisoning.
A British teenager’s head swelled to the size of a soccer ball after she consumed a Baileys chili-tequila-absinthe-ouzo-vodka-cider-and-gin cocktail.
For the first time in a century, a month passed without a visible spot on the sun. An ice age, said scientists, may be forthcoming.
The Victorian Aboriginal Education Association warned Australian girls not to play the didgeridoo because it was “men’s business” and could lead to infertility.
The author of the book “100 Things to Do Before You Die,” having completed about 50 of the things on his list, fell, hit his head, and died.