Weekly Review

By Christian Lorentzen

Hezbollah declared victory in its 34-day war with Israel. “I guess,” said President George W. Bush, “I would have done the same thing if I were them.” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged that Israel would “do better” in what Defense Minister Amir Peretz referred to as “the next round.” An official said killing Hezbollah leader Sheikh Nasrallah was a top priority.¹ Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, was under fire for selling all of his stocks in the hours before the war began.^{2 3 4 5 6} Israeli troops detained a Hamas legislator in the West Bank and engaged Hezbollah guerillas in a shootout near Boudai, Lebanon.⁷ In South Africa, Shlomo Goldwasser, father of an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hezbollah on July 12, urged the world to defeat his son's captors. “If Israel won't finish the job, you will find them here,” he said. “They will kidnap your sons.”⁸ People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced that it was willing to work with Hezbollah to aid suffering Lebanese animals. ⁹ Syrian President Bashar Assad called those who doubted Hezbollah “half men,” an Arab newspaper called Assad a rose that failed to bloom, ¹⁰ and Virginia Senator George Allen called an Indian-American man with a mullet a “macaca.”¹¹

Snipers killed 20 pilgrims at a Shiite festival in Baghdad; a government employee noted that it was an improvement over last year, when nearly a thousand died in stampedes. ¹² Senator Barack Obama called the Iraq war “dumb.” ¹³ Russia sent text messages to Chechen rebels telling them to stop fighting,¹⁴ and Rwanda announced plans to end the death penalty for genocidiers.¹⁵ The Sri Lankan air force bombed an orphanage and killed dozens of schoolgirls, and the Tamil Tigers failed to kill the High Commissioner of Pakistan with an exploding rickshaw.¹⁶ Iran was launching missiles at Kurds and cracking down on “decadent” satellite dishes. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed the country would continue to pursue its nuclear program “forcefully,” and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the United States “should be disarmed.” ¹⁷ Shimon Peres had dinner with Connecticut Democratic Senate nominee Ned Lamont, ^{18 19 20} and Republicans were, in general, neglecting their party's candidate in favor of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who said that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign. ²¹ Pacifist ex-Nazi Günther Grass got to keep his Nobel Prize, ^{22 23} and Pluto retained its status as a planet. ²⁴ An epidemic of bird flu among geese in northern China was driving up the price of badminton shuttlecocks,²⁵ and two wild swans in Lake Erie contracted a low-grade strain of the virus.²⁶ Colombia began exporting its big-butt queen ants (Hormiga culona), which taste like juicy popcorn when toasted.²⁷ An empty submarine suspected of cocaine smuggling was found floating off the coast of Spain,²⁸ Venezuelans were spending their oil money on Scotch whiskey, ²⁹ and American guitars were dominating Japan. ³⁰ Five Uighurs found life in Albania “better than Guantánamo” but longed to move to Toronto.³¹

In Thailand, a preoperative transsexual named John M. Karr claimed to have been present for JonBenet Ramsey's 1996 death, which he called “an accident.” ³² Benedict XVI complained that being pope is “really tiring” and emphasized that “seeing the funny side of life” is crucial to his ministry. ³³ It was reported that U.S. military recruiting violations rose in 2005, as did the number of troops discharged for homosexuality.³⁴ Houston's rising crime rate was blamed on refugees from New Orleans, which has been gripped by a baby boom.^{35 36} Officials in Canton, Ohio, decided that a 13 percent pregnancy rate among its high schools' females justified moving beyond an abstinence-only approach to sex education, ^{37 38} and a secretly pregnant 21-year-old in Florida went into labor, sneaked out of her parents' house, crashed her car into a canal, then delivered standing up in the wreckage. She named the baby Myracle.³⁹ Doctors in India speculated that the birth of a one-eyed girl might be attributable to her mother's exposure to Cyclopamine, a cancer drug derived from wild corn lily that causes cyclopia in sheep.⁴⁰ South Korean DNA tests on tissues obtained during a 2003 hysterectomy indicated that a Frenchwoman was the mother of two rotting infant corpses found in a freezer at her home in Seoul, but she and her husband denied any relationship to the dead babies.⁴¹ In Germany a man was struck on the back of the neck by projectile human feces, then robbed of $9,554 by three people who offered to clean him off.⁴² Sir Mick Jagger lost his voice, ⁴³ a Chicago ice-cream-truck driver was shot dead behind the wheel,⁴⁴ and a tree in Texas was mysteriously spouting water from its bark.⁴⁵