SAO PAULO, Brazil - November 11, 2010 - Grumpy the clown won election in a laugher, getting more votes than any other candidate for Brazil’s Congress. Now he has to prove that he can read and write.

The Sao Paulo Electoral Court held a closed-door exam for the clown turned congressman-elect on Thursday to determine if he meets a constitutional mandate that federal lawmakers be literate.

Once upon a time lying was unacceptable; it was simply not allowed. Those who lied were branded as untrustworthy. They were shunned in business and social circles. Lying was neither condoned nor ignored.

However, the voice of truth seems to have been silenced among the people. How else can you explain modern society’s acceptance of lies as a natural part of life? Lies are accepted as truth in every aspect of our culture. Lies are told between family members, government and citizen, clergy and parishioner, and no one seems to care.

November 3, 2010 - Getting into a climate change debate on Twitter could be even more exhausting than it sounds now that a software developer named Nigel Leck has automated the process.

Tired of arguing with climate change deniers in 140 character quips, the programmer wrote a script to do it for him. Chatbot scans Twitter every five minutes searching for hundreds of phrases that fit the usual denier argument paradigm. Then it serves them up some science.

WASHINGTON - October 26, 2010 - Pretty please, with sugar on top, don’t call it seeing through walls. That shorthand - with its connotations of the First Earth Battalion trying to phase through brick - gets Army engineers gritting their teeth. Instead, this cream-colored handheld senses through the wall, seeing if any live human being is behind it before a squad kicks down the door to see for itself.

WASHINGTON - October 22, 2010 - Printable body armor, better bulletproof glass, and tougher steel are just a few of the applications for a new materials technology developed by Israeli researchers. A team of scientists there have developed a transparent material made of self-assembling nanospheres that is the stiffest organic material ever created, surpassing the properties of stainless steel and even Kevlar.

TORONTO, Ontario, Canada - October 19, 2010 - Earlier this year, Constable Adam Josephs threatened to arrest a young woman for blowing bubbles in his direction during the G20 protest in Toronto.

Now he is threatening to sue YouTube for "ridicule" over a series of cartoon videos that have been posted mocking his overly aggressive demeanor.

October 14, 2010 - Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness?  According to the newest addition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), it certainly is. The manual identifies a new mental illness called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD. Defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.

LONDON, England - October 15, 2010 - Cancer is the bane of the modern world. It kills millions of people annually. Yet there is almost no trace of the insidious killer among the remains of ancient peoples.

This incredible epiphany rocked researchers on their heels. Ancient people simply didn't die from any cancer-related diseases.

Our Republic, the united States of America, was founded on a system of principles in which all Rights and Laws come from God, and established against a background of moral standards by which individual citizens could measure their behavior as well as the actions of others.

This social paradigm, based on a scripturally defined system of moral standards, was designed to perpetuate a society in which truth, justice and morality flourished. Our Founding Fathers considered that our country would only survive if it was populated by a just and moral people; any other situation would spell the death knell of our Republic.

BERLIN, Germany - October 15, 2010 - A German entrepreneur is bypassing a European Union ban on light bulbs of more than 60 watts by marketing his own brand as mini heaters.

Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have come up with a legal way of importing and distributing 75 and 100 watt light bulbs - by producing them in China, importing them as "small heating devices" and selling them as "heatballs."