Various British and Irish news outlets report that two Dublin museums unexpectedly acquired new nudes -- of Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen.

A guerrilla artist, using a trick popularized by grafitti-artist Banksy, placed portraits of the taoiseach in the Royal Hibernian and National Galleries. In one, he's holding his underwear; in the other, he's in the loo. In both, he's nude, though depicted in classically chaste poses. 

Irish police immediately confiscated the paintings and announced a public search for the offending, offensive artist -- although it's unclear that he or she committed any crime at all. Except against good taste, perhaps. 

Winners

Bertie Ahern: The Taoiseach (PM of Ireland) is victorious despite a series of scandals.

Monica Goodling: Gonzales's former counsel comes off surprisingly well in her long-awaited testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.

Fred Thompson: Whetting the right's appetite.

Cannes: Old-school Hollywood glamour resurrected, despite the appearance of a few losers.

Saudi-bound plane passengers: Spared a real-life "Snakes on a Plane" experience after 700 serpents are confiscated from the carry-on bag of an Egyptian en route to Saudi Arabia.

Losers

Democrats: Will have hell to pay with the left after Congress passes a war funding bill sans withdrawal timetable.

Lebanon: A Sunni militant group tries to radicalize Palestinians living in squalor in Nahr el-Bared, a refugee camp in northern Lebanon.

Bangladesh: UAE will accept more Bangladeshi workers.

Nilofar Bakhtiar: Pakistan's tourism czar forced to resign for hugging para-jumper instructor.

Photos: Getty Images; New Line Cinema; Getty Images 

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

Winners

Gordon Brown: Long-suffering, dandruff-prone UK treasurer prepares to succeed Tony Blair as the head of Labour and Britain.

Paul Wolfowitz: Survives the unsavory Euro-coup—for at least a few more days.

Vietnamese stocks: So hot right now.

Michael Moore: U.S. Treasury stupidly publicizes the perennial blowhard's latest stunt, which involves schlepping sick 9/11 rescuers to Cuba.

Timor-Leste: What better way to end the violence than to elect a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize? 

Losers

Iran doves: So much for engagement, eh?

Dave Einsel/Getty

Rudy Giuliani: Pope Benedict XVI's abortion pontificating underscores what will be the inevitable campaign-killer for the abortion-fickle former NYC mayor.

Syrian democrats: President Bashar al-Assad guaranteed a second-term; pro-democracy dissident Dr. Kamal Labwani guaranteed a stint in prison.

Japanese vending machines: Vital source of panties threatened by crackdown in Colombia.

Poland: Pootie-Poot scuppers Polish hopes bring Kazakh oil around, not through, Russia.

Winners

Knut: Ball of fuzz defiant after receiving death threat, rolls around in adorable fashion.

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

Lebanese plastic surgeons: Lebanese bank offers "plastic surgery loans" in famously image-conscious nation, where demand for cosmetic enhancement has increased 20 percent since last year.

British travelers: A pound'll buy you two bucks.

Chan Chun Chuen: Property investor and feng shui advisor inherits $4.2 billion from Hong Kong's richest woman.

Daquiri drinkers: Fruity drinks are good for you.

Losers

The Böög: Swiss cotton snowman goes up in flames, gets slammed by weather experts.

STRDEL/AFP

Bollywood fans: "Wedding of the century" between megastars Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan crashed by love-struck, wrist-slashing starlet.

Debbie Schlussel: B-list pundit guesses wrongly that the Virginia Tech shooter was from Pakistan. It goes downhill from there.

Yahoo! Sued by a Chinese political prisoner for allegedly ratting him out to the Chinese government.

Crackberry addicts: Nearly two days of Blackberry outages give North American users the DTs.

Screen capture/AFP

Winners

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Orchestrates the release of the 15 British soldiers with cynical aplomb.

French pride: TGV train smashes the speed record for conventional rail trains, whipping by at 574.8km/h (356mph).

Alexandra Hai: Becomes Venice's first female gondolier after a 10-year battle.

Observant Jews: Kosher foods getting cheaper as China ramps up production.

Bashar al-Assad: Basks in Nancy Pelosi's pratfall in Damascus.

Losers

Tony Blair: Gets schooled in public relations by a five-foot-two crazy man.

BERTRAND LANGLOIS/AFP

Sanjaya: Questionably talented American Idol contestant secures place as TV's laughingstock for another week.

John McCain: Lackluster fundraising and a much-lambasted optimism over Iraq dog the one-time leader of the GOP's 2008 pack.

Virtual gamblers: FBI sniffs around the cyber-gambling dens and parlors of Second Life.

Venezuelans: No booze for Easter.

Winners

AFP/Getty Images

Al Gore: Fresh from his Oscar win, the former veep gets feted on Capitol Hill and is running at 14 percent in the Democratic polls. Not bad for someone who hasn't even declared.

Berlin Zoo: Even Stephen Colbert loves little Knut, the zoo's abandoned baby polar bear.  

UFO buffs: France opens its files of extraterrestrial sitings from the past 50 years. 

Global advertising: Snickers wins the day with the best ad all year—shot in Jeddah, animated in Amsterdam, and all to the beat of a Kuwaiti hip-hop song. Why can't Super Bowl ads be more like this?

Losers

Robert Mugabe: You know he's truly lost it when inviting Angolan ninjas to restore order in Zimbabwe seems like a good idea.

AFP/Getty Images

Old feuds: Is the decades-old spat between literary giants Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez coming to an end?

Italy: Convinces the Afghan government to swap five imprisoned Taliban fighters for an Italian journalist held hostage in southern Afghanistan. (Because that's the message you want to send to militants.)

Preemptive political reports: Reuters, the Washington Post, and the Politico all jump the gun and get it wrong, reporting yesterday that John Edwards would suspend his campaign.

Mark Renders/Getty

Winners

India's 36 billionaires: Leave the rest of the region in the dust.

Aromatherapists:  New sleep study hands quacks a new, legitimate line of business on a silver platter.

Robots: South Korean experts aim to protect them from abuse. (Don't laugh. Widespread adoption of a robot code of ethics may save humankind from a massive cyborg retaliation someday.)

Chinese scientists: The research money is raining down like a Shanghai monsoon.

Obsessive liberal bloggers: It was Fitzmas after all.

Losers

The Fourth Estate:  But will the Libby verdict end the press's special privileges?

Win McNamee/Getty

Newt: Former House Speaker finally admits to having an extramarital affair while leading the charge to impeach Bill Clinton for ... lying about an extramarital affair.

Saudi women: "A Saudi woman who was kidnapped at knifepoint, gang-raped and then beaten by her brother has been sentenced to 90 lashes -- for meeting a man who was not a relative, a newspaper reported on Monday." - AFP

Norway: Sued by ostracized Nazi offspring. 

Gun-control advocates: Federal appeals court strikes DC handgun ban.

Winners

Ségolène Royal: She's back in business after a knockout TV performance.

ALAIN JOCARD/AFP

David Geffen: After trashing Hillary to Maureen Dowd and starting the first Obama-Clinton brawl, the leader of the Hollywood-political complex has become the early arbiter of the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Chimps: Today, it's simple hunting spears. Tomorrow, WMDs?

Nintendo: The Wii is crushing the competition.

Indian drug companies: Expect a spike in demand for generic drugs from India after Britain's Office of Fair Trading chastized the National Health Service for relying on expensive name brand drugs.

Losers

Islam: Michael Jackson may convert.

Getty Images

Cluster bomb makers: Forty-six countries call for a 2008 treaty to ban cluster munitions.

Italian stability: Prodi's left-wing coalition can't hold it together, rankling investors.

Tom Vilsack: Was it his gaffe on Social Security that doomed his presidential candidacy, his strange name, or his boring personality?

Iran: Will likely fail to meet goals of enrichment program; still getting slammed by the IAEA.

Winners

ROBERT SULLIVAN/AFP

NASA: The Lisa Nowak bizarre love triangle makes being an astronaut doubly sexy.

Frenchmen: The introduction of a line of male pantyhose, in a "thick, mannish knit," has answered many a prayer.

Harvard: After 371 years, the Board of Overseers picks Drew Gilpin Faust as the university's first female president.

Ganges dolphins: A Japanese acoustic tracking device may save the endangered cetaceans, one of only four dolphin species that inhabit rivers and lakes.

Reagan's ghost: Not only was February 6 the Gipper's birthday, but now residents of a Polish city are demanding that a statue of the former U.S. president replace a Soviet monument, in a plaza to be renamed "Ronald Reagan Freedom Square," no less. 

Losers

Iranian peaceniks: Iran takes it up a notch, as a top cleric insists on state radio that the United States is within his country's "firing range."

Kristian Dowling/Getty

Chinese spitters: Beijing is training residents to be on their best behavior for the 2008 Olympics, so anyone expectorating in public can expect a fine of 50 yuan ($6.50).

Indian consumers: Serious inflation—affecting everything from the price of lentils to apartment rents—threatens India's economic boom.

Godless communism: 300 million Chinese identify as religious, according to the first major survey of religious belief in China—triple the official number.

Caribbean wackiness: Anna Nicole Smith, former unwelcome Bahamas resident, passes away.

Winners

Maher Arar: The Canadian government awarded $8.9 million in compensation to the evidently innocent man who had been deported by the U.S. to Syria and subsequently tortured.

Hollywood: La-la Land finds itself at the center of Democratic attention.

Trevor Ncube: The prominent Zimbabwean publisher and government critic got his passport restored.

James Webb: A year ago, he was a Republican. Now he's getting rave reviews from Democrats for his rebuttal to President Bush’s State of the Union address.

Pandas: They've gotten so prolific that China's zookeepers need help coming up with names.

Losers

Ford Motor Company: $12.7 billion? Damn, that’s a lot of red ink.

Iranian Arabs: Four executed for terrorism after what Amnesty International says were unfair trials.

Lebanon: The fractious politics of Beirut have begun to slide into civil violence on the streets once again.

The ".um" Domain Name: No one was using it.

Vietnamese soccer players: How do you say Black Sox in Vietnamese?

Winners

Angela Merkel: No touchy-touchy in her meeting with Bush yesterday.

Xunlei: The Chinese downloading service inks a deal with Google. Let the renminbi roll in!

Government reformers: The new House ethics rules are more than window dressing. But did they have to take away the free tickets to 'Skins games? 

Ethiopia: The speed of their victory over the Islamists in Somalia stunned the world.  But if they don't get out of there soon, they could wind up in the loser column one of these weeks.

Russian workers: They don't come back from their extended New Year's break until next Tuesday. 

Losers

Cancer: Johns Hopkins researchers say they've found the cure. The secret? "A designer molecule made of sugars and fatty acids."

Democracy scholars: Seymour Lipset, the Hoover Institution scholar who made enormous contributions to the understanding of how democracies develop, has died.

Linton Brooks: The U.S. nuclear weapons czar was fired after a series of embarrassing security breaches at Los Alamos.

Felipe Calderon: Mexico's president can't travel without a note from mom. 

Lt. Gen. David Petraeus: Inherits General Casey's nightmare to become the Creighton Abrams of the Iraq War.

Winners

"El coco": Courageous Cuban journalist Guillermo Fariñas wins 2006 cyber-freedom prize from Reporters Without Borders.

Wii owners:  Those lucky enough to get their hands on the gaming device found that the strap on the controller wasn't sturdy enough to withstand their enthusiasm. Now Nintendo is promising to replace 3.2 million straps with hardier ones.

Namibia: The new face of Hollywood's Wild West.

Shiloh Nouvel: Brad and Angelina's new baby, born in Namibia, is so darn cute she might save Cambodia.

Two dolphins in China: The world's tallest man reached into their guts and saved them from choking to death.

Losers

Chinese dolphins: Yangtze river dolphins are "functionally" extinct. Pollution killed them.

Belgian jokesters: The Belgian revolution was televised by a state-run channel, but it was a prank. Belgians and foreign embassies were not amused.

Prince Turki: The Saudi ambassador to the United States quit suddenly this week in a huff, furious at getting out-maneuvered by his main rival.

<-- This guy: How long did it take film director Michel Gondry to learn how to solve a Rubik's cube in under two minutes... using only his feet?

Michael Crichton: One of the world's last prominent global warming skeptics proves he's also a big jerk.

Winners

Gay couples in South Africa: In a landmark law taking effect today, South Africa becomes the first African country to allow gay marriages. 

Latin leftists: Rafael Correa wins in Ecuador, and his "personal friend" Hugo Chávez looks set to win another term in Venezuela's election this Sunday.

AIDS patients: Thailand moves forward with production of generic retroviral drugs, and Bill Clinton's foundation strikes a deal with Indian drug makers to slash the price of more than a dozen pediatric AIDS medicines.  

Toyota: Tops Ford's auto sales in the U.S. market.

Losers

Russian Forbes:  The magazine's December issue was pulled from newsstands this week after its cover subject, the wife of Moscow's mayor, complained about her profile, leading the editor in chief to quit in protest. The German licensing company responsible for the decision to pull has since reconsidered.

American history: The U.S. citizenship test for immigrants drops questions about the nation's history in favor of queries about the nature of democracy.

Somalia: Suicide blasts moves the country closer to the brink of civil war.  

U.N. peacekeepers: The U.N. will hold a conference on Monday to discuss allegations that children in Haiti and Liberia have been victims of rape and prostitution by U.N. peacekeepers.

Winners

Ségolène Royal: The sexy Socialist looks set to become the next (and first female) president of France.

Al Jazeera International: It has finally hit the airwaves. And with 80 million viewers on the first day, it promises to give CNN and the BBC a run for their money. 

India: The U.S. Senate passes the nuclear deal. Too bad so many think it's such a bad idea.

Bond fans: The wait was long and hard, but the new film is finally a good one.

Sony: Gamers are willing to shell out $500 and camp outside stores for days - even get shot by robbers - in order to get their hands on the new Playstation 3.

Losers 

Iraq's Sunni minority: In more signs of the downward spiral, the government issues a warrant for the arrest of one of the country's top Sunni clerics. 

Catholic reformers: Benedict XVI isn't about to let celibacy for clergy go the way of Latin masses under his watch.

Residents of Bracciano, Italy: TomKat has arrived. The paparazzi nightmare begins.

North Korean fat cats: Japan cuts off North Korean officials' flow of caviar, cars, booze, and baubles.

Tonga: Eighty percent of the buildings in the capital's business district have been torched. And no one outside of Tonga notices.