“The Minnesota city of Lake Elmo has been renamed to Tickle Me Lake Elmo”, said city spokesperson, Ella Peterson. “We have had so many requests over the last few years that we finally decided to put it to a vote!” The small city on the Eastern border of the Twin Cities is often times overlooked. “We wanted to put our city on the map!”, said Johan Cielsen. “I was more than willing to put my name on the online petition.”

For the last few years, Apple, Inc has been using animal names in its major operating systems. Hot on the heals of the latests release, Leopard, Microsoft announced a new naming scheme of its own. “I really think the new names for our operating systems will give excellent insight to our customers”, said Rajip Paleel, Operating Systems spokesperson for Microsoft. “It will be much easier to understand than say, Windows Vista or Windows XP, or even Windows 2000! What the heck is an ‘XP’ anyway?”

The new release, called Microsoft Pig 2017 is expected to be available within 10 years. “With over a billion man-hours of code, almost a half billion lines, we will be able to put almost everything that we want to put in there. We will have over three thousand DRM technologies, sixty-thousand clip art characters for our users to choose from, and complete customer lock-in! And the best part is that it will be be done by 2017!”, said Oliver Wilson, the Microsoft Pig 2017 Project Manager.

If anything, we can expect great things from the company that brought us Windows Vista. “With ‘Pig’, we can guarantee that all of your extra hardware resources will be non-existent”, promises Paleel. “It will truly be a resource-hog.”

China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission.

While the current 72-year-old Dalai Lama thinks about his political and spiritual successor, he has learned that the Chinese governing council has proclaimed that any unlawful reincarnation will be punished by death-by-firing-squad.

The Dalai Lama has claimed that he will “refuse to be reincarnated in Tibet so long as it’s under Chinese control”.