Periscope

Can't spend enough on your pet? There's a new way to unload a fortune. For $50,000, Genetic Savings & Clone, a California-based company, will offer cat owners a genetic replica of their pet later this year. (Dog cloning won't be available until 2005 at the earliest.) The company, which claims that five paying customers have signed on to receive cloned kittens in November, caused a stir two years ago. Its first clone, a lab cat named CC (for carbon copy), didn't resemble its DNA donor. That, company officials now say, happened because the donor, a calico, had a genetic quirk blocking duplication. For all noncalico cats, says CEO Lou Hawthorne, owners can expect clones to look like "an identical twin" of their pet. They'll also be "very similar in temperament and intelligence." (And cheaper, eventually: as technology matures, the price is expected to drop to about $10,000 for cats and $12,000 for dogs. Gene banking is available for about $900 a year.) The company says its work is ethical, but critics disagree. Says Stephanie Shain of the Humane Society: "It's irresponsible to duplicate an animal when we are euthanizing happy, healthy animals because there aren't homes for them."
--Karen Breslau

DIETS
The Good (Food) Book

What would Jesus eat? You can find out in the new "Maker's Diet," a "Biblically correct" health plan. "In the Bible, people didn't eat the garbage we eat," says American author Jordan Rubin. Instead they noshed on the Creator's unrefined and unprocessed provisions: figs, goat's milk, cold-water fish, grass-fed meat. Rubin's 40-day plan, which cuts down on sugars and starches, allows red meat and saturated fats--but not pork or shellfish. Some of his culinary prescriptions, like wild Alaskan salmon with pecan pesto, sound delectable. Others, like a nightly tablespoon of Icelandic cod-liver oil, don't.

But the book's about more than eating your way to a Samson- or Delilah-like bod. There are also daily prayers ("You are the God that heals, my Great Physician") and hygiene regimens (no antiperspirants or antibacterial soaps). Though skeptics might think Rubin's capitalizing on the Christian-media craze currently taking hold in the United States, he says his timing's "totally by the grace of God."
--Arian Campo-Flores

Q&A: PIERCE BROSNAN

Pierce (007) Brosnan is putting the tuxedo in mothballs for a while to play a divorce lawyer in the new film "Laws of Attraction." He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Nicki Gostin from his limo.