Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

Militants in Iraq attacked the Abu Ghraib prison, wounding forty-four American soldiers and twelve prisoners.¹ Britain announced that it will pull 5,500 troops from Iraq and increase its presence in Afghanistan, to help with the hunt for Osama bin Laden.² Syria vowed to be out of Lebanon by the end of April,³ and Canada decided not to deport a flying squirrel.⁴ An earthquake off Sumatra killed at least one thousand people, ⁵ and five American soldiers were arrested for trying to use military aircraft to smuggle cocaine from Colombia into the United States.⁶ A Russian court found a museum director and an artist guilty of creating blasphemous art and fined them $3,600 each. The piece in question depicted Jesus on a Coca-Cola advertisement with the words “this is my blood.”⁷ In France, radical wine producers threw sticks of dynamite at a state agriculture office and demanded that the state take action to stop the depression in French wine prices.⁸ Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's party won a two-thirds majority in a rigged election,⁹ and Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika insisted that he was not afraid of ghosts but did not comment on reports that one of his predecessors had often been visited by mysterious dwarfs.¹⁰ A British sex festival was cancelled because not enough people wanted to go,¹¹ and the European Union placed a 15 percent duty on American trousers and sweet corn.¹² Fifty-nine former American diplomats were planning to send a letter urging the Senate to reject John R. Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the United Nations,¹³ and a Saudi Arabian princess was arrested for keeping slaves in Winchester, Massachusetts.¹⁴

A former scout master in Houston, Texas, resigned from the Lion's Club and turned himself in for sexually abusing a blind nine-year-old boy,^{15 16} and a former policeman was arrested for flying to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, in order to molest boys.¹⁷ Scientists in California developed a scale that can measure the mass of a cluster of xenon atoms. It turns out that they weigh a few zeptograms.¹⁸ Harvard students were upset that the brand-name cereals in their dining halls had been replaced with generic brands,¹⁹ and Terri Schiavo's parents authorized a direct-marketing firm to sell a list of those who contributed to Terri's cause.²⁰ New York State legislators met their budget deadline for the first time in twenty-one years.²¹ Cambodia privatized the Killing Fields at Cheoung Ek; a Japanese firm will plant flowers near the tower of eight thousand skulls and will raise admission rates.²² Laura Bush said that she and President George W. Bush both have living wills, then spent six hours in Afghanistan.^{23 24} A federal judge refused to let the Bush Administration, which opposes torture, send prisoners from Guantánamo Bay to other prisons abroad without granting the prisoners access to the courts.²⁵ The United States announced that it will establish nine new military bases in Afghanistan, bringing the total to twelve; Afghanistan announced that it will once again postpone parliamentary elections.²⁶ Taliban militants killed nine policemen in southern Afghanistan.²⁷

A new report on American intelligence failures concluded that the Bush Administration's evidence of biological weapons in Iraq was almost entirely derived from reports made by an Iraqi defector code-named “Curveball,” who was described by those who knew him as “crazy” and “a congenital liar.”²⁸ An investigation determined that the rate of malnutrition in Iraqi children under five has nearly doubled since the U.S. invaded,²⁹ and the U.S. Army's Psychological Operations group was developing propaganda science fiction comic books for distribution in the Middle East.³⁰ Nearly ten years after the Oklahoma City bombing, an FBI search found explosives in a crawl space in Terry Nichols's former home,³¹ and Pakistan successfully test-fired the Hatf II, a short-range nuclear-capable missile.³² In Mecca, a man stabbed his father to death after the father threatened to tattle on the man for not praying,³³ and in Israel, someone spray-painted the words “murderous dog” on Yitzhak Rabin's grave.³⁴ Noting their mutual hatred of Jews, a neo-Nazi in Florida called on Al Qaeda to join forces with the Aryan Nations,³⁵ and Olga, the first Siberian tiger ever fitted with a radio collar, was killed by poachers.³⁶ Robert Creeley, Terri Schiavo, Johnnie Cochran, Frank Perdue, Mitch Hedberg, and the pope died, as did the man who wrote the theme song to “Gidget.” ^{37 38 39 40 41} Turkeys attacked elementary school students in Indiana,⁴² and the Boy Scouts' Director of Programming was arrested on child pornography charges.⁴³ A Minnesota man threw a toddler at a policeman,⁴⁴ and a huge naked screaming Wisconsin man was shot as he threatened his equally naked children with scissors.⁴⁵ Ms. Wheelchair Wisconsin was stripped of her title after she was caught standing up,⁴⁶ Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced that they would join the PLO,⁴⁷ and a handicapped man used a computer chip implanted in his brain to control a television.⁴⁸ The Marburg virus was still killing people in Angola.⁴⁹ Paul Wolfowitz was confirmed as head of the World Bank,⁵⁰ and a Toronto man attempted to pass a Breathalyzer test by stuffing his mouth full of his own feces.⁵¹ In Shanghai, a man stabbed and killed another man for selling their jointly owned imaginary cyber-sword without sharing the proceeds,⁵² and after four years of hard work, 1,300 researchers in ninety-five countries concluded that humans are destroying the world.⁵³