The week according to First Dog On The Moon:

What a week!

Following Amnesty International’s support for abortion rights, the Catholic Church has urged people to withdraw… from Amnesty…

A young gay man who recorded a mawkish adolescent rant defending Britney Spears disastrous comeback performance has got his own TV show and also had the video accepted as a PhD dissertation in cultural studies…

A lesbian couple are suing a doctor for the costs incurred when he gave them IVF twins instead of a single child, including for an extra place at a Steiner school and for the remedial maths and spelling classes for when they go to a real school…

In an attempt to make it an interesting contest, AFL orders Geelong to play itself in Grand Final… 

A court has ordered Britney Spears drug tests, results indicating she is tolerable on smack but nothing else will cut it…

A milestone was passed in parliament as Kim Beazley gave the last in his ongoing series of concession speeches, a collection of which will hit the stores in time for Christmas…

Pop star Madonna has arrived in Israel for a kabbalah conference and says she considers herself so Jewish that she has asked her husband Guy Ritchie to have himself circumsised – removing from the end of his penis the useless bit of skin, known as Guy Ritchie…

Australian navy officials have defended the funding of breast implants for two officers, saying they technically count as flotation devices…

Wikipedia published its two millionth article – or seven millionth, according to Wikipedia…

Stephen Spielberg is to film a WW2 drama in Melbourne and Queensland, using meticulous redesign of these places to turn the clock back 60 and 10 years respectively…

A German company is developing a battery to store wind power. The size of several shipping containers, it will be sold in packs of four…

This year’s opium crop in Afghanistan is set to be one of the biggest ever. Authorities are bringing Kate and Gerry McCann in for questioning…

Just like Kevin Rudd, Peter Costello also had heart surgery as a younger man, the microsurgeon who did the op revealed today…

The week in numbers

100: number of poker machines the South Sydney Rabbitohs have sold so far

$7 million: Chris Judd should expect from a new contract in Melbourne

14000: estimated number of horses infected with equine influenza in Australia

$12000: one punter’s bet on John Howard retaining his seat of Bennelong

$40 million: the amount the Government wants to spend on installing seatbelts on regional buses

4 million: number of Iraqis that have been displaced since the invasion in 2003

193,000: hectares of opium poppies Afghanistan have cultivated this year, an increase of 17%

48: number of hours it took NZ police to check the boot Pumpkin’s parents’ car

3: number of goals the reigning A-League premiers, Melbourne Victory, have kicked in four games