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”.

Lakes area business man, Wally Kaigreh was elated to realize that he can clap again. Mr. Kaigreh was involved in a dispute with his wife a little more than a year ago and had his hand amputated. “The Mrs. just flew off her coop”, said Wally. “All I know was that we were arguing about something, I forget what, but anyway, she was screaming at the top of her lungs. I just nodded off to sleep and the next thing I remember was waking up in extreme pain as my wife was wagging her finger in my face, only it wasn’t hers… It was mine.”

EMTs were unable to save his hand in time so he had to go through the process of getting a fake hand. “After over a year of physical therapy, we are happy to announce that he has relearned to clap!”, said his doctor, Angeline Kinney. “He is a joy to have around and we all look to him as an early success story.”

Mrs.  Kaigreh was unavailable for comment at the time of this story.