Washington, D.C., December 29, 2008 -- In an unprecedented development, Harriet Miers, who was confirmed in 2005 as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, announced this morning she will be voluntarily stepping down from the post, citing "confusion over constitutional issues, court procedure, and generally how to be a judge." Should she proceed with her announced intentions, Justice Miers will become, with three years on the job, the shortest-serving Supreme Court Justice in American history.

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.

Washington, D.C., January 24, 2007 -- President Bush's 2007 State of the Union address bumped into an unexpected snag with the "rapturing" of approximately 150,000 Fundamentalist Christians yesterday, Washington sources said.

Remains of raptured former Bush supporters

Washington, D.C., March 12, 2006 -- Vice President Dick Cheney, a leading advocate of the use of torture in the so-called "war on terror", successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique this month by allowing himself to personally undergo a one-week program of "coerced interrogation", the compassionately conservative term for the practice. During the week, the Vice President proved the value of torture by unwillingly confessing to a wide range of infractions, some of them quite surprising.