(Odd) News of the day

President Bush has sent Congress a $2.57 trillion budget for fiscal year 2006 that bolsters defense and homeland security and puts most other programs on a diet aimed at halving the federal deficit by 2009. He asked Congress to reduce or kill 150 federal programs that affect schoolchildren, farmers and health care for the poor - and make his tax cuts permanent. He also proposed to shift more resources to faith-based groups that provide a social safety net. Update: NPR reports that these budget cuts amount to 6 percent of the deficit. The tax cuts, on the other hand, make up 50 percent of the deficit.

West Hollywood may ban cosmetic surgery for pets (finally - there were just too many dogs on the streets with a facelift..).

Scandal: U.S. military police threw a mudwrestling party at a prison camp in Iraq. At least three female guards stripped to their underwear and wrestled each other in a paddling pool full of mud. One young military woman lifted her T-shirt to expose her breasts, while another revealed her thong panties.

A former American guard at the Nuremberg Tribunal claimed that he had smuggled in the poison that allowed Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command, to escape the hangman’s noose. Herbert Lee Stivers, 78, a retired sheet-metal worker from Hesperia, California, broke almost six decades of silence to appear to solve one of the great mysteries of the Second World War.

According to the upcoming book "Disney War" by Pulitzer prize-winning author James B. Steward, Disney CEO Michael Eisner called his executives "monkeys". Eisner, who was able to obtain several chapters of the book, strongly denies that. Apparently the Disney management is so distraught over the Stewart unflattering revelations, that the company's head of public relations has offered to resign - an offer Eisner refused.