Gates Takes His Life; bin Laden Captured

The state of TIAH

August 4th, 2006

in 2002, Bill Gates, once one of the richest men in the world, takes his own life after his wife leaves him to pursue her former career in marketing. The penniless former software giant had been ruined in anti-trust suit after anti-trust suit, and the final straw that broke his company, Microsoft, was the success of the open-source operating system Linux, which, along with Apple's Macintosh systems, had taken over virtually all of the world's computers. Only the occasional hobbyist still used Gates' operating system, Windows, and the company was forced into bankruptcy in 1999. For a brief period of time, Gates was able to keep his fortune afloat on the stock market, but the crash after 9/11 completely wiped him out. Although mourned by the nerdiest of the nerd set, Gates' funeral was sparsely attended. Today, his gravesite resembles a computer geek's equivalent of Jim Morrison's Paris grave - graffiti bearing slogans such Windows Forever and I Love Clippy festoons the small concrete slab marking Gates' final resting place.

in 2004, agents of the United States' CIA capture terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and spirit him to the United States. The leader of Al Qaeda was wanted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center as well as attacks on Western interests in the decade since. Although President Al Gore announced a press conference to declare this a major victory in the world's struggle against terrorism, Republicans in Congress denounced the attention President Gore paid to terrorism, a relatively minor problem to Americans, and used the opportunity to insist again that the huge surplus the US Government was enjoying should be used to give tax cuts to the America people.

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