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 

Winners

WILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty Images

Australian farmers: It finally rains.

Illegal immigrants: Amnesty (or something like it) on the way.

Protectionists: Doha going nowhere.

The Japanese economy: Enjoying a record current account surplus.

Odyssey Marine Exploration: Struggling treasure hunters hit $500 million jackpot.

Losers

Prince Harry: Instead of going to war-torn Iraq he may be headed for … war-torn Sierra Leone. Also, no more nightclubs.

Chris Jackson/Getty

Team Landis: Tries to blackmail Greg LeMond. 

Russia: Cements global image as hacker-infested human rights abuser.

World Bank reformers: United States moving to install Wolfowitz replacement ASAP.

Al Qaeda of North Africa: Algerian elections go off with nary a peep.

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

Barack Obama: Towers over Hillary in the Democrats' first debate, gaffe or no.

STAN HONDA/AFP

Richard Gere: Kisses Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty. Ignites firestorm in India. Totally worth it.

Capitalism: The Dow hits 13,000. And China joins the fun. (Ignore those dark clouds.)

Stephen F. Hawking: Paralyzed physicist does flips in zero gravity.

Britney Spears: Much better!

Losers

Environmentalists: Earth Day overshadowed by ... another Earth.

The Blues & Royals: British squadron leaves for Iraq with a bull's eye in its midst: Prince Harry.

George Tenet: Didn't anyone tell the former CIA director that whiny, self-serving memoirs are unbecoming?

Al Qaeda: One hundred seventy-two of its operatives arrested in Saudi Arabia, a major commander captured in Afghanistan, and the organization's local #2 reported dead in Algeria.

Nigeria: Fraudulent elections mar the democratic progress of Africa's most populous country.

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.

Winners

Fidel Castro: Healthy again.

Lesbians: Synthetic sperm cells derived from a woman's bone marrow tissue could make male participation irrelevant for women who wish to conceive.

Iraqi chauvinism: The Islamic Army in Iraq, a Sunni nationalist group, splits with al Qaeda.

Mr. Bean: Bizarre appearance in the Tehran 15 controversy catapults film to box office smash.

Lost expats: Beijing corrects lousy English translations of 6,500 street signs.

Spencer Platt/AFP/Getty Images

Losers

Don Imus: Fired twice in two days for his comments about Rutgers' women's basketball team.

The Emerald City: The most fortified four square miles in Iraq appear more penetrable than anyone could've imagined.

Vonnegut fans: Lose a great one.

Paul Wolfowitz: May lose his job after preferential treatment for his girlfriend ignites mutiny among Bank employees.

Algeria: Back to the bad old 90s?

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

Swedish millionaires: Get a big tax cut.

China: Strikes oil for the first time in years.

Russian democracy: Putin rejects a proposal to change the constitution to allow a third term.

George Costanza: Fictional character gets his own foreign policy doctrine.

Northern Ireland: Rival leaders learn to share.

Losers

Iran: Gives wrong coordinates while accusing Brits of straying into Iranian waters.

U.N. Human Rights Council: Proves itself once and for all to be worse than useless.

Sting: Bono named Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his work on poverty, making him outrank the former Police singer.

MC Rove: The White House advisor may be in hot water, but there's still no reason to jump up and down about it.

HIV/AIDS: Male circumcision and green tea may slow down the spread of the deadly disease.

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.

PATRICK BAZ/AFP

Winners

David Petraeus: Eats sweets in war-torn Ramadi; the press swoons. 

AIPAC: Leads the fight to kill a Congressional bill constraining the U.S. president from taking military action on Iran.

Rudy Giuliani: News that the Republican presidential candidate's law firm lobbied for Hugo Chávez's oil company hits in February 2007, not February 2008.

Polish thongmakers: Go from cottage industry to global business.

Tony Blair: Gets his nukes over the objections of Annie Lennox.

Losers 

Alberto Gonzales: For obvious reasons.

GUANG NIU/AFP

Pervez Musharraf: Pakistan's president/dictator is wobbling, but will he fall down? (probably not)

Bangalore's strays: The southern Indian city captured 2,000 canines and killed 200 in the past week after two children were recently killed by stray dogs.

U.S. productivity: Down the tubes as March Madness begins.

Dinesh D'Souza: If the National Review doesn't like his book, who will? 

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

Moroccan prisoners: King Mohammed VI pardoned almost 9,000 inmates to celebrate the birth of his daughter, Princess Lalla Khadija.

Ben Bernanke: Soothes the savage beast of the markets, kind of. But Alan Greenspan is still daddy.

Somalia: The first good news out of the country in a while: the UN predicts peace there for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, it will require 8,000 peacekeepers.

GooTube: Scores BBC content.

Stephen Hawking: Released from gravity.

Losers

The U.S. Army: Loses face and personnel over the Walter Reed mess. 

Airbus: Downsizing makes unions mad.

Mañana: Peru's president launches anti-tardiness campaign.

State of the onion: The price of the tear-inducing bulb has recently skyrocketed 500% in India, and irate housewives are venting on talk radio.

Tokyo kids: No snow this winter for the first time in 131 years.

The American public: The AP's weeklong ban on Paris Hilton news has ended. 

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

China: The hero of the six-party talks.

Jack Bauer: The military's alleged emulation of the 24 hero's torture tactics is the highest form of flattery. Right?

Nicolas Sarkozy: Ségolène sinking fast.

Danish cartoonists: Prosecutors ask that all charges against Charlie Hedbo—the French journalist sued for republishing the notorious Danish cartoons of Mohammed—be dropped.

Ralph Fiennes: En route to Mumbai to spread the good word about safe sex, becomes a lifetime member of the Mile High Club.

Losers

Hillary Clinton: Gets deleted.

The surge: U.S. House of Representatives condemns it. 

Sam Brownback: Obscure Kansas Senator schedules announcement of presidential run on the same day as America's Mayor, never shows up for work.

Chrysler: On Valentine's Day, Daimler tells its U.S. car division: It's not me, it's you.

Anna Nicole Smith's baby: Becomes a football.

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

William Zabka: Bad guy "Johnny" from The Karate Kid makes a comeback on YouTube.

Al Gore: Global warming is big news, and now the unlikely matinée idol of An Inconvenient Truth gets nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Taliban: Back and stronger than ever in southern Afghanistan.

Heat-tolerant Belgian cyclists: Wilfried Cretskens wins the sixth annual Tour of Qatar.

Hugo Chávez: Just days after winning the power to rule by decree, the "non-dictator" announced plans to nationalize all oil projects in the country by May 1.

Losers

Palestinian unity: Eleven Palestinians die in Gaza as another Hamas-Fatah ceasefire crumbles. 

British childhood innocence: Harry Potter, erotic star of the stage?  

Paul Wolfowitz: First, there was the embarrassing sock incident. Now, the World Bank president is under siege by his own board.

AEI: Washington think tank busted for offering 10 Gs to anyone willing to cast doubt on global warming.

Tony Blair: The cash-for-peerages scandal threatens to bring him down, er, sooner.

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

China’s missile program: Stuns the world with its successful test of an anti-satellite weapon.

Mahmoud Abbas: Israel comes through on its delivery of $100 mil for the beleaguered PA leader on the eve of talks with Hamas.

Global golden globes: Mexican director wins best picture. Brit wins twice for portraying Elizabeths I and II. American wins for playing African dictator. And don't forget Borat.

Poor Mexicans: Faced with public outrage over the soaring price of tortillas, Calderon abandons his laissez-faire background and puts a cap on the price of corn products.

Losers

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Gets slapped by Supeme Leader Khamenei's newspaper for being a loose cannon on nukes. 

The Egyptian parliament: Who wants to see this MP (at left) do a striptease on the chamber floor?

Turkish modernity: Prominent Turkish editor who wrote of Armenian genocide is gunned down in broad daylight.

Oil producers: For the first time in 20 years, oil consumption dropped last year in developed countries. Even worse, the feds are taking $15 billion of your money and investing it in renewable technologies. Ouch.

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

Rwandans: Finally, something good happens in that country. An American millionaire promises to bring 8 million Rwandans free Internet.

Steve Jobs: Apple clears him of wrongdoing in Optionsgate.

Boeing:  The company's cargo plane business is saving their butts and putting Airbus to shame.

Gerald Ford: Sure, he died this week, but not before surpassing Ronald Reagan as the oldest ex-president. His reputation soared as commentators remembered him fondly.

The French: So far, no terrorist attacks despite the high alert level.

Losers 

FP Original: Elizabeth Glassanos

Venezuelan television viewers: Hugo Chavez shut down the country's second-largest TV station, a hotbed of opposition activity.

One unhappy German tourist: A typo nearly sent him to Sidney, Montana rather than Sydney, Australia. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he almost hopped on a puddle-jumper in Portland, Oregon before realizing his mistake.

Saddam Hussein: He may hang tonight. 

The Shia: A top Sunni cleric in Saudi Arabia declares them infidels during the Hajj as sectarianism roils the Middle East. "By and large, rejectionists (Shiites) are the most evil sect of the nation and they have all the ingredients of the infidels," Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Barak says on his website.

Richard Branson: The U.K. billionaire's latest airline venture, Virgin America, must be at least 75% American-owned in order to get a license.