Well, of course it is. Disney is a gigantic corporation that couldn't possibly care if one of its most marketable stars gets more publicity. What about that Vanessa Hudgens flap a few years ago? But now TMZ has blown the lid off of the situation by locating images of Disney lingerie ads elsewhere in the world that are significantly more revealing than the Cyrus's Vanity Fair photos?

According to MSNBC, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the woman who was named in the call-girl scandal that took down former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, has surfaced on a video telling representatives of Girls Gone Wild that she was 18 years old. This is important not because Dupre was lying, but because the admission torpedos her chances of winning a $10 million suit filed in Miami federal court against Girls Gone Wild and its founder, Joe Francis. THe article goes on to detail the back-and-forth between Dupre and Francis, neither of whom has exactly been a paragon of virtue up until now:

In her lawsuit, Dupre said she was on spring break in Miami Beach in 2003 when she was approached by "Girls Gone Wild" producers, given alcoholic drinks and then signed a release agreeing to appear. The series depicts women in various provocative poses or topless, often in such party locations as Mardi Gras or spring break beach towns.

Francis has said that Dupre was on the "Girls Gone Wild" bus for a week and made seven full-length videos. He said the video of her agreement to appear is proof that her lawsuit has no merit.

"It is incomprehensible that Ms. Dupre could claim she did not give her consent to be filmed by 'Girls Gone Wild', when in fact we have a videotape of her giving consent, while showing her identification," Francis said in a written statement.

It's spring, and the conspiracy theories are already beginning to blossom. Maybe the Clinton campaign paid the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to act like a loose cannon and sink the Obama candidacy. Maybe Wright's erratic behavior is the result of a brain tumor (evidently, this was a recent plot on a TV soap opera). Maybe Wright wants Obama to lose so that he can continue to denounce America as a racist nation. We'll see how the real story plays out, whether Obama's opponents manage to tar him with the guilt-by-association brush. In the meantime, please share your conspiracy theories here. But only conspiracy theories: no linear thought, please.

The Southwest seems to have more than its share of alien sightings. Maybe it's the vast open spaces. Maybe it's habitual. Whatever the case, there was yet another alien sighting earlier this week: mysterious red lights that appeared Monday night in the sky over North Phoenix. Now, a local man is claiming that the lights were not in fact aliens, but rather a balloon-and-flare contraption of his own invention that he sent sailing into the sky as a joke. This is predictable, of course: somewhere around ninety-nine percent of unexplained phenomena result from eyewitnesses somehow misreading those phenomena to start with. Less predictable was the previous day's story, which contained all the touchstones of an alien-sighting story: it breathlessly reported switchboards being "flooded" with calls as a result of the "mystery lights" and, of course, included quotes from various military personnel. Whenever these stories have cropped up before-it was recently the tenth anniversary of another alien sighting in Phoenix-we have asked the same question: have you ever spotted an alien ship?

Presidential candidates have been all over the TV-in debates, on panel shows. Now the sitting President is going to be on network television, but not because of the Pope's visit or the State of the Union or anything so trivial. No: George W. Bush will appear briefly on "Deal or No Deal" to wish a contestant luck. Not just any contestant: a 29-year-old serviceman who was in Iraq. Farming soldiers out to game shows is one way to ensure military benefits. No word on whether Bush will stick around to play the game.

A Yale student named Aliza Shvarts, who is set to graduate this year, has undertaken a strange and disturbing project that involves artificially inseminating herself, repeatedly, and then dosing herself with abortifacient drugs and herbs to induce miscarriages. The finished piece includes videos of the miscarriages and samples of blood collected in the process. Or does it? When we received this story a few days ago, we were skeptical, and now it turns out that Yale is not standing by the truth of the exhibit as insisted upon by the artist. Is it a hoax? Is it a piece of performance art? Can't it be both?

In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that rape was not a capital offense-in other words, that a convicted rapist could not be executed by a state government. Now, though, the Court is looking at a particularly pernicious variation on the crime, child rape, and whether or not a convicted child rapist can fairly and constitutionally be put to death? A number of states have laws that sentence child rapists to death; only Louisiana, at the moment, has a case pending. What do you think? Is it a tough moral question? An obvious one? Is there a substantive difference when the victim is an adult or a child?

A new bill introduced in France seeks to punish companies that emphasize extreme skinniness or otherwise promote unhealthy living. While it's nominally aimed a Websites that teach young women how to starve, the bill could also be used against fashion companies that use especially gaunt models. Penalties vary, but the maximum imposed under the bill include three years in prison and a $70,000 fine. Not answered by the news account is exactly how lawmakers would link media campaigns or "pro-ana" blogs, as they're called-here's an example of one such message board-with the deaths of individuals. Presumably, they'd have to place the victim at the site, or have definitive proof that the suggestible non-eater was influenced by online advice or community pressure.

Last week, the news was full of the tragic story of a man who received another man's heart in a transplant procedure -- and then committed suicide, just like that first man. The story raised all kinds of questions about medical ethics, depression, and coincidence. None of these questions are answered by this Daily Mail piece about Claire Sylvia, a divorced mother of one who received the heart of an 18-year-old boy and immediately began manifesting "male" characteristics: she started craving beer and fried chicken. "Maybe the donor of my new organs...had been a beer drinker. Was it possible that my new heart had reached me with its own set of tastes and preferences?" She assumed a masculine walk and then even had a dream about her donor's name, which had previously been unknown to her, and which she was able to imagine accurately. This led her to take a pilgrimage to find the family of her donor, where she learns to her amazement that he liked beer.

Do you think that personality traits can be passed between people during an organ transplant?

Strange happenings are affot down in Tennessee, where the state's Cash 3 lottery has coughed up the exact same numbers three days in a row. The computer that generates the numbers was checked for malfunctions and anomalies; none were found. A professor at Vandebilt's Owen School of Management estimates that the chance of this occurring is less than 1 in 10,0000. Which, frankly, doesn't sound that bad when you're talking about the world of lotteries.

Are there ghosts in Homestead, Pennsylvania? The people who work at the town's police department think so--they have heard strange noises, seen doors open and close, and even witnessed typewriter keys moving by themselves (though they didn't get a piece of paper into the machine fast enough to see what the ghost might have been typing). The Greater Pittsburgh Paranormal Society has even been called in to investigate the matter, though there are not yet any plans to reunite the original Ghostbusters. We will update as the story develops.

Remember Farfour, the mouse, from Hamas TV? Sure you do: he spoke against the West and was eventually beaten to death by an actor posing as an Israel official inquiring into the purchase of Farfour's land. Well, Farfour is still dead, but now the network has scored another publicity coup by airing a skit about a child who attacks President Bush after the White House is turned into a mosque.

Last week, Indian black magic was comic, more or less -- a self-proclaimed rationalist invited a black magician to try to kill him with spells on television. The rationalist survived unharmed. This week, Indian black magic is tragic. A woman accused of being a witch was tied to a tree and tortured by a mob, and footage of the incident was aired on television. The mob wasn't beating the woman because they were afraid of magic, but rather because her magic wasn't accurate enough. Ram Ayodhya, one of the men involved in the attack, had hired the woman as a magician to heal his ailing wife, and when her condition did not improve, he decided that the woman must be a black magician.

Back in the twenties, the great magician Harry Houdini embarked on a second career as a psychic investigator, debunking mediums and psychics. The work continued after his death-for years, the Houdini estate offered a reward to any paranormal communicator who could extract a secret message from Houdini's spirit and communicate it to Houdini's widow. No one ever did.

Recently, in India, a different but related series of events unfolded when a self-proclaimed rationalist challenged one of the nation's premier black magicians to use his dark arts and kill him. The rationalist, Sanal Edamaruku, who has spent years battling the nation's superstititions, dared the tantrik, or black magician, Pandit Surinder Sharma, to do his worst. Sharma did. Edamaruku was unharmed. The battle between reason and black magic was televised; several hundred million people watched as Pandit Surinder Sharma unleashed his dark arts upon Sanal Edamaruku-writing Sanal's name on a sheet of paper and ripping it up, waving peacock feathers over Sanal's head, and finally making a kind of voodoo doll out of dough. Nothing had any effect on the rationalist.

Up in Nova Scotia, there's a contest where participants can find out if they have won prizes by rolling up the rim of their coffee cups. And now, there's a controversy in that contest: coffee drinkers are reporting that their cups are coming pre-rolled, suggesting that employees at the coffee company are testing cups for prizes before they are released to the market. Other cups seem to have the prize tab cut off. The contest is being run by the Tim Hortons chain, and prizes this year have included three cars, four speedboats, 52 GPS units and 106 $50 gift cards. The company denies any problems, citing a minor manufacturing error that makes it appear as if cups have been rolled up.