World News Roundup

And now (rim shot) the news of the world, largely true and condensed for 21st-century attention spans.

– The U.S. election is still over.  It will remain over for seventy-two hours, at which point the next four-year news cycle will kick in again.

– A snake with tentacles has been born at the Washington, DC zoo.  Scientists rank this as the worst evolutionary development since the birth of Pat Robertson.

– India has announced that it is accepting applications for the world's least desirable job.  The new employees will be paid a handful of rupees an hour to come up behind people who are defecating in public and hit a pan with a stick to direct attention at what everyone within view is trying not to look at.  The campaign is designed to reduce public defecation, which is apparently not already sufficiently embarrassing.

– The family of the former head of the Communist Chinese Party was revealed by the New York Times to have amassed a fortune in the area of 2.7 billion dollars, proving that George Orwell was correct when he wrote, in Animal Farm, “Some animals are more equal than others.”

– The Chinese Communist Party announced for the seventh year in a row that rooting out corruption was a prime objective.

– The two major American political parties spent, during the election that is still over, approximately the same amount the family of  the former head of the Chinese Communist Party amassed during his years in power.  An international commission has been formed to decide which country got the better deal for the money.

– Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez have broken up.  That's it, that's the item in its entirety.

– Karl Rove, the political genius behind George W. Bush, proved that denial is not a river in Egypt when he claimed, live on Fox (of course) that the Democrats had not actually won the election.

– The Republican party made the strongest case yet for greater stress on basic math in the American school system by losing, by less than a million votes, an election in which they essentially wrote off the largest group of American voters (women), the fastest-growing group of American voters (Latinos) and the (possibly) most committed group of American voters (Blacks) and decided instead to appeal exclusively to old white men.

– Puerto Rico turned down a chance to become an independent country and expressed interest yet again in becoming a state.  A popular movement promptly arose with the objective of trading Puerto Rico for Florida, plus two outfielders.

Ugly as well as useless

– The Governor of Bangkok, who spent more than 1.3 billion Baht to create a new futsal (sort of indoor soccer) stadium for a world match, failed to get the stadium open in time for the tournament, created a building that did not meet the World Futsal League's safety standards, and then sued the League.  Orwell is alive and well in Thailand, too.

– And finally, on a more somber note, scientists at London's Kew Botanical Gardens announced last week that global warming trends could bring about the extinction of the wild Arabica coffee plant as soon as 2080.  The Arabica plant, in hundreds of varieties, is the source of all the world's really good coffee, which is to say almost all the coffee served everywhere but at Denny's. On the bright side, most currently mature coffee drinkers will be dead by then.

More news . . . as it happens.

Tim -- Sunday