Congress approved a major Medicare bill that permits the elderly to buy prescription drug coverage; few citizens were able to understand the plan, though the health-care industry appeared to be well pleased by it. The legislation was endorsed by AARP, which nowadays makes a great deal of money selling health-care products to its members, and consumer advocates denounced it as “a classic election-year giveaway.” Some experts predicted a revolt among the elderly once the plan takes effect in 2006 and the true costs of reform become clear.New York TimesGovernor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California proposed cutbacks in therapy for the mentally …

The United States and parts of Canada suffered a massive blackout that left millions of people in 8 states without electricity; New York City, Detroit, Cleveland, and Toronto were all affected. Officials soon determined that the outage, the largest in American history, was caused by a failed line in Ohio. “We are a major superpower with a Third World electrical grid,” said Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico.New York Times“We’ll have time to look at it and determine whether or not our grid needs to be modernized,” said President George W. Bush, who has opposed legislation to improve the grid. …

Two hundred couples were selected by an Italian embryologist to take part in a human cloning project; the human clones will be made using a technique similar to that which produced Dolly the sheep. The United States House of Representatives voted to ban human cloning for both reproduction and medical research; the measure also prohibits the sale of treatments derived from such procedures. Some British and Indianscientists claimed that they had positively identified alien bacteria entering Earth’s upper atmosphere from space, which would tend, they said, to confirm the Panspermia theory of life’s origin. Hundreds of pounds of such bacteria, …

Governor Rick Perry of Texas vetoed legislation banning the execution of retarded people just a few days after President Bush declared that retards should never be put to death; Bush and Perry both have claimed that Texas has never done so, though six inmates with IQs below 70 have been put down since 1980. Minneapolis, hoping to boost tourism, was preparing to install a bronze statue of Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat in the air at the corner of Seventh Street and Nicollet Avenue, just like on TV. “Tossing the hat inspired so many women,” Mayor Sharon Sayles-Belton told …

The Motion Picture Association of America succeeded in convincing a federal judge in Manhattan that publishing or linking to a free computer program that allows people to play DVDs on their Linux computers will lead to widespread copying of DVDs; the judge rejected arguments that computer source code, or links pointing to such code, is expressive speech and is thus protected under the First Amendment. Ole Miss won the right to prevent spectators from waving the Confederate battle flag at sporting events. Bill Clinton signed the T-shirt of a woman who then stripped it off and waved it over her …