Winners & Losers

Posted By Carolyn O'Hara Friday, March 23, 2007 - 5:57 PM Share

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.

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