News in Brief

A French state prosecutor has launched a preliminary judicial investigation into the workings of the United States' Echelon spy system of satellites and listening posts, the prosecutor's office said Tuesday.

Rumors of industrial espionage by the Cold-War-inspired system sparked an attack on a McDonald's restaurant last year where angry peasants showed their disgust by taunting McDonald's customers for their bourgeois sympathies.

This contretemps follows in the wake of a recent French boycott of hormone-laden beef from America, which was immediately countered by an American tariff on "malodorous" French cheeses.

The town of Testicule, France, whose citizens hold the Guinness record for "smelliest cheese festival," responded to that tariff, doubling the price of Coca-Cola by slapping on a 10 franc tax on each bottle in protest. "Now the pourceaux have to drink that French soda that they detested. This will teach the little vermine," said the mayor of Testicule, Jean-Phillipe Aliéné, in reference to the children of his town. "As Proust would have said, 'J'ai une grenouille dans mon bidet!'"

Echelon, based on alien technology taken from flying saucers stored at Area 51, can intercept millions of telephone, fax, and e-mail messages, and is thought to be responsible for those annoying calls you get where no one is on the other end. Washington has been accused of using it for economic espionage against its allies, a charge that makes it snicker and look evasive.

Coincidentally, the European Parliament is due to decide in Strasbourg Wednesday whether to set up a commission to investigate whether Echelon infringes on the rights of European citizens to be invaded by the forces of a new "Caesar-wanna-be" every few decades.

In the event that none of these measures counters the threat of Echelon, the French government is also said to be drawing up the terms of their surrender, and their application to become the 51^st state in the Union.

Bradley Called Upon to Make Gore Seem Lively by Comparison

This week, Al Gore's campaign announced that the Vice President will be appearing with former rival Bill Bradley to enlist Bradley's support of Gore's candidacy for President.

A major question about the event was answered when the Bradley camp told reporters that he would, in fact, use a term that he had, so far, refrained from employing in the context of the Gore campaign.

"Yes, he will use the word 'communitarianism,'" Bradley spokeswomen Anita Dunn told reporters on Friday. "He knows it's come in for a lot of criticism lately, but, gosh darn it, when Bill says 'communitarianism' he means 'communitarianism.'"

Gore claims to have invented communitarianism and will make it his number one campaign issue as soon as he can recover the e-mail where he first defined the concept.

Democratic officials in Washington praised Gore's move on Friday, saying that Bradley's presence will act to "soothe a restive populace that has grown resistant to its rightful leaders."

Bradley has the distinction of being the only human being to win an NBA championship, be elected to the U.S. Senate, and go without blinking for over six hours.

The Gore campaign selected Tire Iron, Minnesota home of the world's third largest ball of twine, for the endorsement. Bradley has visited Minnesota many times and has found it to be an intoxicating and exotic land. Bradley has also emphatically stated, on several occasions, that he believes Bronko Nagurski was the greatest football player that ever lived.