How not to get to know your neighbors: an apartment complex in Lynnwood is evacuated and 14 people are taken to the hospital for carbon monoxide poisoning after a family forgets to use the fireplace damper for a charcoal cooking fire.

They hate us for our maple-bacon donuts: at a Portland Christmas tree lighting ceremony, a Somali-born teenager attempted to blow up a van full of explosives … which were duds, and provided by undercover policemen.

McGinn and US House Repugs have opposing plans for transit; while McGinn wants to promote transit, Republicans want to “focus on the National Highway System.” Oh, Repugs, is there any area in which you aren’t head-slammingly backward?

South Korean protesters are calling for a more aggressive response to North Korea’s lethal shelling, and the North Koreans have recalled some of their workers from Russia - presumably to help gear up for military operations. If you need to do something as embarrassing-looking and unproductive of national confidence as yanking workers from their across-the-border jobs to help the homeland, methinks you’re probably serious. Stay tuned.

Another wikileaks release looms, this time of a massive collection of diplomatic cables. US envoys are preemptively apologizing, which indicates that some of these cables will be pretty amusing; but after so much work trying to repair our reputation abroad — seriously, what the fuck?

Fox News North will launch in Canada. Yep.

In another stop on his never-ending-until-biology-dictates-otherwise debate tour, terminally ill anti-theist Christopher Hitchens argued against Tony Blair on the question of whether “Religion is a force for good in the world.” Hitchens won, unsurprisingly to anyone who’s watched him argue.

Sweeeeeeeeeet: the Big Bang might not have been the beginning of the universe, but merely one iteration in its ever-changingness. Crazy!