Pope Francis was named Time Magazine’s 2013 Person of the Year. The Pope responded by saying, “this sort of accolade does not really mean anything. If it did, there’d be a little cash in it for me.”
The founder of a French breast implant manufacturer has been jailed for fraud. A French prosecutor said he was outraged when he realized that his favorite topless dancer’s breasts weren’t real.
NASA has released an illustration of a possible extinct lake on Mars, which may have contained sufficient material to support life. NASA then drew some little Martians flying around on jet packs and having a laser gun fight, saying that also could have happened, and that studying rocks from very far away for your entire career can get pretty boring.
200,000 people have already applied to be among the first to live on Mars. NASA then had to reiterate that the illustration of those Martians was not real.
Co-star of the hit TV sitcom Modern Family, Sophia Vergara, shares her secrets to success. First, be really stunningly gorgeous. Then, just still be gorgeous, and that’s it.
Dennis Rodman has returned to North Korea. Stay tuned for the upcoming film of inspiration about a fledgling Olympic basketball team from an obscure little nation that comes in last but inspires anyway before returning home to shame and execution.
Vice President Joe Biden arrived in China amid tensions over China’s increase in military airspace that now overlaps with Japan’s. Biden said there should be no tension because, “Japan is a city in China, so what’s the problem?”
Biden visited a U.S. travel visa office in China to thank the people waiting in line for wanting to visit the U.S. He also told them to ‘challenge their government,’ because by the time they’ve been imprisoned, he’ll be back in the U.S. playing skee ball at Dave and Busters.
A truck in Mexico carrying radioactive Cobalt-60 to a hospital Tijuana for use in medical treatments was hijacked. Mexican authorities expressed satisfaction that this was the closest this truck shipment has ever gotten to its destination before being hijacked.
Also in Mexico, the Michoacana Cartel has threatened to harm Catholic priests unless the Archdiocese pays protection money. The Archbishop of Mexico City said that they would not pay, because the church answers to a higher power, The Sinaloa Cartel.
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2013 is the word ‘science,’ beating out the more expected word ‘selfie,’ which was Britan’s Oxford Dictionary word of the year. Webster said that ‘science’ was the most searched word on the internet this year in the U.S. because now more than ever, American children do not know what science is.
Also in the U.S., an activist group has gone to court in an attempt to give chimpanzees the same rights to ‘bodily liberty’ as a human. They argue that chimps should have the same rights as a ‘human person’ because it can now be proven that chimps are equal to American school children in their knowledge of science.