It’s back to the well once again. It’s time for the weirdest and wackiest stories from around the world. It’s the Not News of the Week.

By now, we’ve all heard that Google is planning on ceasing its specialized operations in China. In order to gain favour with the Chinese government, they produced a special censored version of their search engine. Well, after alleged invasions of privacy by the Chinese government on users and Google itself, Google decided they were done. However, that means that over 200 employees are being put out of work. So what is Google doing for its soon-to-be former employees? They let them have an afternoon off and took them all to see Avatar. Talk about a quality severance package. I wonder if Avatar was censored by the Chinese government.

A Weight Watchers group in Vaxjo, Sweden, learned the meaning of the word “irony” first hand. Twenty member of Weight Watchers had gathered for a meeting to see how much weight they had dropped. It turns out that their weight wasn’t the only thing that dropped at the meeting. The floor of the meeting room collapsed underneath them. The meeting wasn’t cancelled as a result. They conducted the weigh-in in the adjoining hallway. I guess it would be cruel to make a weight joke but maybe they should have built a more robust floor given the load it had to bear.

Rocket fuel isn’t the only that helps things take off at NASA. A small bag of cocaine was discovered in a secured hangar that houses the space shuttle Discovery. NASA is in the middle of conducting their own internal investigation and has brought in drug testers and drug-sniffing dogs. A spokesman says that there are no problems with any of the equipment and no one appeared to have been working under the influence of drugs. I guess shuttles aren’t the only things that blast off at NASA.

Video billboards have provided a few unintentionally entertaining moments but none like one in Moscow. Rather than run its usual loop of ads, the billboard showed a two-minute clip from a porn film. An AP report made it sound like the 27-by-18-foot billboard showed two minutes of amateur pornography during the height of Moscow’s evening rush. The billboard’s owners claim they have been a victim of a hacker attack. I guess in Soviet Russia, advertising fucks itself.

In Pennsylvania, there is a unique way for business owners to handle customer service complaints. A customer scuffled with a hairdresser after an apparently poor hair weave so the hairdresser shot the customer in the back. The hairdresser was convicted on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon but the fun doesn’t end there. The hairdresser’s defence of the charge? She claims that she didn’t realize that a .38-calibre handgun was a deadly weapon. I suppose that’s one of the dangers of being a hairdresser. That blonde hair dye tends to soak in a little too much.