etc...

AND SHE LOVES BALLS OF YARN

The cat is out of the bag on a pet project to clone furry felines at Texas A&M University. At two months old, a calico-and-white shorthair dubbed "Cc" is "as cute as a button," said a spokeswoman for the College Station, Texas, school. The kitten is the first success out of 188 attempts to clone a domestic house cat. The aptly named CopyCat research program was funded by - and note the name - Genetic Savings & Clone, a company set up by financier and philanthropist John Sperling with an eye toward replicating beloved household pets ... for a fee.

In Lisbon, Portugal, a producer of beverages - OK, it's wine - has recalled 300,000 bottles of its top-selling brand, many of them destined for the US market. Not because of anything that's inside, mind you, but because of what's on the outside. It seems the label, designed many months ago, features a bearded, turban-wearing man whose image easily could be mistaken for Osama bin Laden. "After the events of Sept. 11, anybody who looked at the label would be reminded of him," a company spokeswoman said. "[It] could hurt sensibilities."

The furor over the gold medal in pairs figure skating at Salt Lake City has some critics calling for the sport, with its seemingly subjective judging, to be dropped from the Winter Olympics. But a survey by the Gallup organization just before the games began found figure skating to be the biggest draw for TV viewers (particularly women), 58 percent of whom said they planned to watch "a fair amount" to "a great deal" of Olympic coverage. The Winter Olympic favorites, by percentage, according to Gallup:

1. Figure skating 32%

2. Downhill skiing 23

3. Bobsledding 8

4. Hockey 7

5. Luge 3

(tie) Ski jumping 3