The Media Research Center has announced its Notable Quotables: the 14th annual awards for the year’s worst reporting. In the category of “Good Morning Morons Award” Bryant Gumbel and the dimwitted crew at the CBS Early Show.

Here’s the prizewinning exhange:
Bryant Gumbel: “At the risk of starting an argument, are you a believer in global warming?”
Mark McEwen: “Absolutely.”
Jane Clayson: “Of course.”
Julie Chen: “Yeah.”
Gumbel: “So am I….And you wonder what it’s gonna take. I mean, is it gonna take some kind of a real catastrophe? I mean, does an iceberg have to come floating down the Hudson before somebody stands up and goes, ‘Oh, yeah’?”

Julie Chen was also a runner-up for asking a consumer advocate whether it was legal for potato chip companies to put less product in the bag without lowering the price.

2001 Notable Quotables Awards

A young woman in Lisvink,Russia, who works as a doctor was returning home when suddenly a she was struck on the head. When she regained consiousness, she found out that she was hit with a rubber filled with water. Pravda reports the condom balloon culprits were two teenagers on a balcony. The court sentenced the parents of the young criminals to pay the victim damages of 2150 rubles ($70 US).

Wendy Doniger, a University of Chicago researcher, has discovered important mistranslations in the Kamasutra. The original was written in Sanscrit in the 3rd century.

Among the items that have been mistranslated for decades are the location of the G-spot and how to mix up a powerful aphrodesiac.

Full story in the Chicago Sun-Times

The Associated Press has photographed a giant dog, believed to be president Bush’s dog, Spot. This is the image as posted by the Taipai Times. It isn’t known how the dog grew to such a massive size.

A Nebraska woman who received an ornate box for Christmas and returned it to Wal-Mart without looking inside discovered later it contained the ashes of her recently deceased sister, a newspaper reported on Friday. Judy Money, of Nebraska, received an ornate box box as a gift from her brother. But after unwrapping the package she saw the box had a broken knob and decided to return it to Wal-Mart.

She later told her brother she had taken it back to the store and her brother told her that it contained the ashes of their dead sister who had recently passed away.

Money hurried back to Wal-Mart, but the box had already been discarded in the trash. She and her brother went to the local dump and after frantic searching, were successful in finding the box.

Full story from Reuters

Greene County, Missouri will have to pay four inmates $25,000 each because two jailers urinated on them from a catwalk above a recreation yard at the jail. Misdemeanor charges are pending against the two men who urinated on the four inmates.

Full story from KYTV

An American-Chinese toy importer has been held hostage for 20 days by workers at a bankrupt factory who are demanding payment for toy deliveries. Zhu Haiou, in his late 30s and based in New Jersey, said he and his wife were seized December 7 by about 500 workers laid off from the Sheda Toy Factory in Sheyang, China.

Mr Zhu said he was being guarded around the clock in a dispute involving US$55,000 (HK$429,000) in toy deliveries. Mrs. Zhu was released earlier this month and is in New York trying to raise the ransom for her husband.

Full story from the South China Morning Post