It must be true ...The best of the tabloids in 2007

An Indian businessman has launched the ultimate no-frills airline. Bahadur Gupta’s airline has only one plane, a used Airbus 300 with a missing wing, and it never actually leaves the ground. But in a nation where 99 percent of people have never flown, citizens are lining up to pay $4 to board the plane, strap themselves into seats, and listen to “Captain Gupta” make such announcements as, “We will soon be passing through a zone of turbulence” and “We are about to begin our descent into Delhi.”

A Wisconsin man who heard a woman moaning and shrieking in the apartment above him grabbed his cavalry sword and charged upstairs. When James Van Iveren burst through the door, his sword at the ready, he found his neighbor watching a porn movie. “Now I feel stupid,” said Van Iveren, 39. “This is nothing but a mistake.” The alarmed neighbor called the police, and Van Iveren was charged with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.

Two surgeons in Serbia got into a dispute in the operating room, and abandoned the patient to have a fistfight outside. While performing an appendectomy, surgeon Spasoje Radulovic took exception to a remark made by colleague Dragan Vukanic, and the two doctors began arguing. “Vukanic pulled the ear of the operating doctor, and slapped him in the face,” said the anesthesiologist. The surgeons went outside and punched it out, while an assistant completed the operation.

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A Washington state man is recovering after a disastrous attempt to loosen a stubborn lug nut with a 12-gauge shotgun. The unnamed 66-year-old lost his temper and blasted away at the lug nut on his Lincoln Continental from “arm’s length,” peppering himself with ricocheting buckshot from the waist down. Police say the man, who was hospitalized, was “bound and determined to get that lug nut off.”

A mayor in Russia’s Siberia region has banned municipal employees from making excuses. Alexander Kuzmin, mayor of Megion, says he lost patience with underlings coming to him with problems rather than solutions, and so has issued a list of 27 forbidden phrases including, “I don’t know,” “It’s lunchtime!” and “I was on sick leave at the time.” Underlings who use any of the banned expressions, said Kuzmin, “will speed their departure.”