The cover of the latest issue of Newsweek features a digitally altered photo of Princess Diana as she might look at 50 walking with her would-be daughter-in-law, Kate Middleton. The cover story conjectures that she would have moved to New York City, married two more times–neither time to Dodi Al-Fayed–and made peace with Prince Charles. Next week’s cover, shown at left, imagines what Queen Victoria would look like today walking with Diana and Kate.

When Jason Valdez holed up in a hotel room in Ogden, Utah, with a hostage for 16 hours, he kept in touch with friends and family by updating his Facebook page. He made at least six posts, added a dozen new friends, and received about 100 comments before finally shooting himself in the chest with his gun. No word on how much money he amassed or how many people he iced playing Mafia Wars.

Boeing has come up with an innovative design change for the interior of their new 737 jets–they’re moving the service call button away from the reading light button and making it look distinctive, which will save flight attendants footsteps and passengers embarrassment. The company hasn’t said how much money they spent researching this change that every passenger who’s ridden on one of the planes since they were put into service in 1967 knew within minutes of sitting down.

 A study published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology found that when people tried to do subtraction problems while listening to an infant crying, regular speech, silence, whining, a high-pitched table saw, and the exaggerated baby talk parents are so fond of doing, a child whining was more distracting and annoying than any of the others, even for non-parents. “You’re basically doing less work and doing it worse,” study co-author Rosemarie Sokol Chang, a professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz, whined. That’s why they invented earplugs, isn’t it? And wine without the “h”.

It seems they do all look alike after all. Presidents, that is. At least to Google they do. Google launched a beta of their image search, where you can upload a photo and it will try to identify it, then find other related photos. When the multimedia editor at MSNBC tried it, he uploaded a photo of President Barack Obama. Google took a look and said, “Best guess for this image: george w bush.” Does this make Google color blind? Or just blind?

Sean Murphy of South Yorkshire, England, had a wart on the middle finger of his left hand for five years. He tried creams, ointments and doctors but, alas, it wouldn’t go away. So he took matters into his own hands. Literally. He drank several pints of beer for an anaesthetic, then aimed a 12-gauge shotgun at the wart. “‘The wart was gone and so was most of my finger,” he said. He received a 16-week suspended sentence for illegal possession of a firearm, has to complete 100 hours of unpaid community work, paid court costs of $161, and will have to flip people off with his right hand from now on.

Scientists in China have inserted human genes into cloned cow embryos which were then implanted into surrogate cows, the result being dairy cows that produce human breast milk. The researchers at China’s Agricultural University in Beijing say the milk should be available in supermarkets within three years and expect it will sell well because it’s more nutritious than cow’s milk, tastes sweeter, and has less melamine than what Chinese shoppers usually find in the dairy case.

The gay Syrian-American woman who wrote the popular blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” and was supposedly kidnapped last week has turned out to be an American man from Georgia who wrote the blog as a lark. Tom MacMaster posted an apology on the blog, has agreed to shut it down, and insisted that he has nothing to do with the blogs “Incredibly Stupid U.S. Representative from New York,” “Bottom-feeder Former Vice-Presidential Candidate from North Carolina,” or “No Moammar, Don’t Tripoli On The Way Out The Door.”

Two months after the Sydney Morning Herald filed a Freedom of Information request asking the Australian Department of Defense to release all materials “which relate to unidentified flying objects,” they were informed that only one file could be found and the others had been destroyed. Or beamed up. Or abducted so they could have transponders implanted in them and return to mutilate cattle. Where’s Fox Mulder when we need him? Oh that’s right, he’s in reruns.