Silver linings, and more

Good week for:

Silver linings, after Starbucks—reacting to a 10 percent sales slump for its pricey coffee confections—started serving recession-friendly value meals, such as oatmeal and a tall latte for $3.95.

Either R. Sathis Raj or Sabarish Raj, Malaysian identical twins who were freed by a judge in a death-penalty case because police were unable to say which of the brothers had been caught trafficking drugs. “I can’t be sending the wrong person to the gallows,” said Judge Zaharah Ibrahim.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Guys who go to Star Trek conventions, after two Chicago women launched a niche dating service called Nerds at Heart. “The people are better looking than you’d expect,” says co-founder Bathsheba Birman.

Bad week for:

The Kremlin, after a 13-year-old Russian girl wrote to President Dmitri Medvedev to ask for a pet guinea pig, and was forced by officials to apologize for wasting the president’s time. After newspapers reported the incident, Medvedev sent over two guinea pigs.

Mindfulness, after the Dalai Lama opened a Twitter account, allowing him and his staff to send a constant stream of 140-character messages to followers.

Daniel Bennett, a British doctoral student, who was heart­broken when janitors at Leeds University threw away a 77-pound bag of lizard dung he’d collected over seven years. “To some people it might have been just a bag of lizard s--t,” Bennett said, “but its loss altered the course of my life forever.”