USA Today: June 5, 2015

Have you ever noticed how absurd popular newspapers have become? I have, and for a while I started taking the time to write down some of the most ridiculous things I saw in any given edition of USA Today. Some aspects are not ridiculous in and of themselves, but it's also the choice of what they focus on, the political bias, and the unholy mixture of the serious and the absurd. All of the following is real text from USA Today: June 5, 2015.

China suspected in gov’t hack
4 million federal workers may have had data stolen
        The federal government is notifying up to 4 million current and former workers that their personal and financial data may have been breached by a hack attack from China, the Obama administration said Thursday afternoon.
        Two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because it is an ongoing investigation, said hackers working with China are the main suspects. The Washington Post first reported the possible China connection.
        Earlier Thursday, The New York Times reported that the administration had secretly expanded the National Security Agency’s warantless surveillance of Americans’ Internet traffic to combat hacking from overseas.
        The FBI is investigating the latest hack, saying in a statement that “we take all potential threats to public and private sector systems seriously, and

Shania Twain enters a new stage
She says her ‘very rock and roll’ tour will be her last

GOOD DAY:
DUCHESS KATE AND DAVID BECKHAM
Thay have the UK’s best smiles according to a poll by Wrigley’s gum. Beckham nudged George Clooney from the top male spot, and Kate won for women for the second year in a row.

BAD DAY:
HAN SOLO
An Adulterer? A new comic book suggests the space smuggler may have been married during his romance with Princess Leia.

MAKING WAVES: The reality TV Duggar family got to explain themselves and their child-molestation scandal on Fox News Wednesday night, and the interview trended big on Twitter.

Piggy hogs feminist award spotlight
        They say it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. This seems to be the case with Muppets Miss Piggy, who collected a coveted feminism award in New York City on Thursday Evening.
        The porcine puppet has been quoted, saying, “what are awards? Mere baubles, mere bagatelles, mere Brussels sprouts… one does not labor to shape one’s craft just for some tacky statuette that looks like a hood ornament from an old DeSoto.”
        But it seems the faux-french-accented star could not resist the one handed out by the Brooklyn Museums Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art for “more than forty years of blazing feminist trails with determination and humor, and for her groundbreaking role inspiring generations the world over.”
        The evening featured Miss Piggy, who debuted on The Muppet Show in 1974, in conversation with the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, a co-founder of Ms. magazine. Also on hand was her long-time love interest, Kermit the Frog.
        Which presents another conundrum. How do feminist’s square Steinem’s pronouncement that a “woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” with the comely hog’s attatchment to the amphibian?

TSA failure sends message to fliers, terrorists

WATCH TOM GO “ROGUE”
New Installment of the Mission Impossible franchise means new ridiculous stunts from Tom Cruise. The trailer for ‘Rogue nation,” out July 31, teases Cruise hanging off an airplane and going through concrete and 70,000 gallons of pressurized water without any Oxygen tanks.

NO, IT’S NOT A HOMICIDE EPIDEMIC
Statistics show that this year’s spike in crime is just next year’s fall
        “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” proclaimed Chicken Little in the classic folk-tale about mass hysteria. The panicky bird convinced her friends Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, and Turkey Lurkey that their lives were in danger…

Famed Doctor’s Natural “Anti-Gas Pill” Hailed “Total Solution” for Digestion & Regularity!
Clinically tested all-in-one gut solution
The solution is very simple— replace good bacteria with bad. After decades of research, famed doctor David Williams isolated six super strain probiotics clinically shown to….

NSA spied on internet traffic of Americans
Report: warantless surveillance program was expanded to combat foreign computer hackers

ARKANSAS, Little Rock: Occasionally, meetings at Affirmative Risk Management are interrupted by a vice president barking at one of the staffers. Give him a milk-bone, and he’ll quiet down. The insurance firm’s roster of executives includes a few cats and dogs. “They go a long way to relieve stress,” Mark Pollack the human chief executive, told ArkansasOnline.

OHIO, Elyria: The cremated remains of Marvin Dallas were removed Thursday from the gravesite of his wife, Mary, whom he is now convicted of killing.

Memphis Pyramid aims for new peak
“The Pyramid presented a remarkable opportunity… to develop one of the most dynamic retail stores anywhere in the world.”