SYDNEY – Australian koalas are being struck down by a version of AIDS, and may soon become extinct!

Koalas are being infected by a version of AIDS called KIDS, or Koala Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It strikes more quickly than the human strain, and is leaving koalas open to a number of deadly diseases, including chlamydia.

It is believed that the national population of koalas has dropped from 100,000 to 43,000 in only a matter of six years. If the decline continues, koalas could be gone by 2040!

See the devastating report below:

The thunder of Zeus be upon you, O mortals!  Australia, the Great Desert, burns!

For I am Poseidon, master of the seas, lord of all things wet, and I have returned to claim my rightful place as a famous god.

I have been patient these past millennia, mortals.  I have awaited your worship, your prayers, your goodly sacrifices.  I have activated a Facebook account and long expected your friend requests.  And yet it appears that you have chosen to forget me: great, godly, terrible Poseidon.

Your ignorance has sparked my anger, your insolence has kindled it, and your arrogance has set it all ablaze!  The wildfires of Australia are merely emblematic of the awesome metaphorical heat of my rage.

I once believed my celebrity was assured.  You knew that the triremes sailed only at my pleasure.  You sensed how the smooth passage of your trade or the glorious victories of your wars were the gifts of my benevolence.  I was some deity.

And now I am all but forgotten.  Admired perhaps, but never loved.  Along came all those younger, next-best-thing gods, with their fresh visages and hip new centers of geopolitical power, and you fickle worshippers tossed me out like so much omnipotent garbage.

A few thousands years pass, and now look at me.  Look at me, mortals!  I’ve gained weight.  All that ice I fought so hard to keep on in the early days is turning into water.  I feel warm all the time.  There’s a patch of garbage the size of Texas on my back that I should really get looked at.  I’ve got higher mercury than Jeremy Piven—but he’s the one David Mamet makes a joke about.

Not worth a joke, no, alas, no!  Certainly not worth a sacrifice.  And it turns out, not even worth a decent movie.  (If you ask me, Wolfgang Peterson has just been phoning it in since Das Boot.)

At one point, I caught myself thinking: What happened?  I used to be such a big god.

And then I understood.  I’m still big.  It’s the religions that got small.

Mark me now, all; sailors, potters, philosophers, dramatists all: I, Poseidon, immortal Olympian and architect of fate, will no longer suffer your betrayal.  I will see my horse sacrifices performed with all due ceremonial ritual—in ancient Greek—or the fury of my comeback will know no bounds on this earth.

Australia is beginning to understand what you will all know soon enough: the inconvenient truth that I, Poseidon, have returned!

I’m madder than Larry Craig with a broken leg about the latest environmental craziness!

Everybody knows Australians are crazy. They’re the spawn of criminals who got kicked out of England with their hooker girlfriends and had to go live with God’s weirdest animals on a desert island. No wonder they drink so much.

I guess all that beer is causing a big problem: toilet flushing.

The Australian government, which I didn’t even know they had, is now charging folks a tax every time they flush the toilet!

Never mind the Boston Tea Party – if the British tried that on us red, white and blue-blooded Americans, the you-know-what would’ve hit the fan! Ben Franklin and Paul Revere would’ve strung toilet paper all over the city. A man’s latrine is his castle – why do you think they call the toilet the “throne”?

These greenies say water is scarce, but the whole world is covered in it, and it falls from the sky for free. Hell, the Aussies are plum surrounded by the wet stuff. They also say toilet paper’s made of trees, and you know how these hippies feel about trees. But doesn’t that just make toilet paper “natural”? Would they rather we made it out of plastic? I just don’t get it.

I’m pretty sure a country whose water goes down the drain backwards has no business in my crapper, and is probably Communist.

Give our restrooms a rest and stay out of my outhouse, you crazy dirty panda-loving hippies! You’ll have to pry my privy chain out of my cold dead hands!

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – Australia has been advertising a coveted island caretaker position, but applicants don’t know about one very important job responsibility.

The tourism department of Australia’s Queensland state has heavily advertised for a position they have dubbed “Best Job in the World”. The employee will be paid 150,000 Australian dollars to spend six months living on an island in the Great Barrier Reef. The very few  responsibilities listed include feeding the fish and picking up mail.

So what’s the catch? The tourism department states there is none, but Weekly World News has discovered the truth: the caretaker will be sharing the island with a monster!

4 Weekly World News reporters interviewed 8 past visitors of the island, who had some tales to tell. Mary Smith, 15, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, explained, “My family was on a two-week trip around the Reef in 2006 when we stopped at Hamilton Island to explore. Let me tell you, it was not as desolate as they are saying! This dark, smoky thing came roaring out of those trees, my 16 year old brother screamed and took off running! We jumped right back on that plane and got the heck out of there.”

Kizawa Etsuko, 23, and Tadanobu Ryuichi, 42, of Osaka, Japan, verified Smith’s claim, stating, “We only caught a glimpse, but we heard it. It was deafiningly loud, very mechanical sounding. Possibly a machine? We didn’t stick around to find out.”

What is this mysterious monster? Where did it come from? Is it man-made? Weekly World News will continue to investigate through 2010.

NEW YORK, NY – The View’s resident Republican was snubbed by the White House, and she isn’t going down without a fight!

Elisabeth Hasselbeck is one of four female hosts of ABC’s “The View”. Previously a contestant on “Survivor: The Australian Outback”, Hasselbeck fought her way onto the daytime talk show to become the conservative voice.

Yet after spending the past year heavily lobbying for the GOP and the McCain-Palin campaign, Hasselbeck was not invited to any of the White House’s Christmas parties. Hasselbeck took it to the stage and lashed out in a big way.

Hasselbeck fumed, “I did more than enough for the Republican Party this year and this is the thanks I get? Well let me tell you something! I didn’t go all the way to Australia to not learn something.”

She then whipped out a George W. Bush voodoo doll and attempted to curse it, which merely consisted of her shouting “Curse! Curse! Curse!” and sticking a pin in its behind. Hasselbeck pointed into the camera and snarled, “Now I expect an invitation by tomorrow or this doll’s getting hurt!”

It appears Hasselbeck confused Australian Aboriginal traditions with American voodoo, but the effect was still the same. She received a phone call immediately following the broadcast, with Laura Bush apologizing profusely while President Bush yelped in pain in the background.

Whoopi Goldberg is now planning on using the same tactic for President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration ball.

OSCEOLA, FL – Manigator, the half-man half-alligator mutant, was outraged this week that his debut movie was passed over by the Golden Globes.

Last week, Golden Globe officials received a mud-stained package containing a VHS tape that smelled of stale beer. The tape contained Manigator’s first foray into the film world: Manigator Dundee.

Officials were baffled by the submission, which came in late and without any accompanying paperwork. When they finally found a VCR, the tape proved to be only a sequence of shots of the mutant leaping out and tackling horrified Australians. He then laughs drunkenly into the camera and shouts, “Criiiiiiikey!” before passing out cold.

Manigator’s anger stems mostly from his ignorance that films have to be theatrically distributed in order to qualify. Upon further investigation, Weekly World News uncovered that the “film” had only been shown a few times, when he had broken into theaters playing the movie “Australia” and swapped it out.

At a movie theater in Osceola, Florida, Manigator snuck in and held a projectionist hostage. The high school junior eventually found a way to project the VHS tape and the movie was shown to a shocked crowd of middle-aged women and one very excited twelve year old boy.

“He didn’t even have a title card or nothing. So I said ‘Dude, there’s no title card.’ He just looked at me, then leaned out of the booth and screamed ‘It’s called Manigator Dundee! MANIGATOR DUNDEEEE!’ That’s when he fell out and landed in this old lady’s lap.”

The audience quickly fled the theater.

To order a copy of the film, send $20 and some Marlboros (“whatever you’ve got”) to
Manigator
Broken down trailer next to Exit 36
Hicona, FL

ATLANTA, GA – Following a trip to Australia where Anderson Cooper taped a shark special, he was treated to a surprise guest in the studio.

Cooper traveled to the coast of Australia to investigate the tourism destination increasingly popular for boat trips that offer the opportunity to swim with sharks without the aid of cages.

Argued to be both educational and entertaining, the pastime has been under critical review for many years.

What Cooper expected to be a routine trip turned out to be much more when one of the sharks, a seven-year old female named Lorna, became infatuated with the silver-haired bachelor.

“Lorna is usually one of the less friendly sharks out there,” Captain Argul Sherman of the Swim With Sharks Boat Tour told reporters. “We were surprised at how playful she became after Anderson went for his swim. She kept swimming along side the boat, continually turning over to show her underside, a common mating practice in dolphins but rarely seen in sharks.”

Cooper, who planned to leave the smitten shark in Australia, never expected to see Lorna on the set of Anderson Cooper 360, especially not with a bouquet of flowers.

“The whole thing was very flattering,” Cooper said with a blush on CNN’s Morning Show. “During a commercial break I took Lorna aside and told her that she is very sweet and I enjoyed swimming with her.”

“I thanked her for the flowers but said that I didn’t see a future for us. I’m not looking for a relationship at the moment, and to be honest, she just isn’t my type.”

When asked what his type is, he tactfully dodged the question while slowly turning over a portrait of a very lovely wildebeest.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In one of the most shocking moves of his candidacy run, John McCain has proposed selling Hawaii to Japan to help repair the economy, a leading Washington insider has informed Weekly World News.

“Basically, Senator McCain sees this as a quick and easy way to generate a huge bundle of cash,” stated the source, an upper-echelon State Department official with close ties to McCain’s inner circle.

“As everyone knows, the U.S. economy is hurting real bad. McCain figures that by selling Hawaii, he’ll be able to pay off a sizeable portion of the recent bailout of AIG while also generating funding for continuing military operations in Iraq, and quite possibly, a full-scale invasion of Iran.”

Initially, McCain considered putting up Massachusetts for sale, along with several other “blue” states. But after Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin pointed out such an action might trigger a massive popular revolt on the U.S. mainland, he decided to hang a “For Sale” sign on remote, isolated Hawaii.

“It’s so far away, that it doesn’t even seem like part of America anyway,” the Senator is alleged to have said at a campaign strategy meeting.

The campaign’s spokesman has been sure to point out that this has nothing to do with Hawaii being Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s home state. “It never occurred to Senator McCain, and frankly, we find it offensive that that is even being suggested.”

It is widely believed that Japan would outbid any other countries, including Canada, China and Australia, for ownership of the “Aloha state.”

According to a telephone poll of Hawaiian residents conducted last week, 98 percent described themselves as “extremely pissed” after being told about the Senator’s alleged plan.

“He’s so lolo!*” fumed Roy Kaena, a Honolulu native. When asked if he would be voting for McCain, he proclaimed “Not! I nevah.**”

*= “He’s an idiot”
**= ““Of course not! That is inconceivable.”