The U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision seized the IndyMac Bank of California, worth an estimated $32 billion, after the bank's closure in the wake of the mortgage-industry collapse, and the Bush administration proposed a rescue package for ailing mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would allow the Treasury to buy billions of dollars of their stock and lend them billions more to meet their short-term funding needs. The two companies' total debt is estimated at $1.54 trillion.
Abu Dhabi bought New York City's Chrysler building for $800 million, and the Belgian brewer InBev planned to buy Anheuser-Busch for nearly $50 billion. The Environmental Protection Agency announced that the value of an American's "statistical life" was $6.9 million, $1 million less than five years ago. Republican strategist Karl Rove ignored a subpoena to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, citing "executive privilege," and the Green Party selected Cynthia McKinney, the first African-American woman elected to Congress from Georgia, as its 2008 presidential nominee. President George W. Bush met with other world leaders at the G8 summit to discuss climate change. "Goodbye," he said as he left, grinning and punching the air, "from the world's
biggest polluter."
Former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow died of cancer, and Iran released photos of a missile test that had been doctored to make it look as if four missiles were being launched instead of three. Mak Erot, an Indonesian woman who used herbs, Islamic prayer and supernatural powers to enlarge penises, died at 130. A new report revealed that the global population of zooplankton has drastically shrunk in the past 40 years, and world space officials announced the launch of a 2018 mission to procure samples of Martian rock and soil.
The British retailer Marks & Spencer defended a policy of charging extra for bras that are bigger than size DD, saying the charge represented "a small premium for (necessary) specialist work," while the protest group Busts 4 Justice derided the price increase as an unfair tax. A British teenager who assumed that tremors in her bosom were caused by her vibrating mobile phone found a baby bat nestling in the padding of her 34FF bra. The World Health Organization warned people not to go into Ugandan bat caves after a Dutch tourist died from the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola. Scientists discovered a new form of mad-cow disease in the United States.
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