Weekly Review

By Roger D. Hodge

Peru's dictator Alberto Fujimori stopped in Japan on his way to an economic summit, decided he liked it there, and quit his job, via fax; Peruvians were generally pleased with the development, and within days Fujimori was named in a corruption investigation. Slobodan Milosevic was reelected president of the Socialist Party of Serbia. Madeleine Albright asked to meet with Serbia's new president, Vojislav Kostunica, at a meeting in Vienna; she was snubbed. Jean-Bertrand Aristide (promising “Peace in the Head. Peace in the Belly.”) was reelected president of Haiti in an election boycotted by major opposition parties, who said it was rigged. The United States election continued in Florida: “Pregnancy doesn't count in chads in Palm Beach,” one lawyer told a Palm Beach judge. “Only penetration counts in Palm Beach.” Al Gore's chest was described in the New York Times as an “attractive pectoral mass.” Dick Cheney had an itsy-bitsy heart attack, which was described by his doctors as “the smallest possible heart attack that a person could have that could still be classified as a heart attack”; one of his coronary arteries was “about 90 to 95 percent blocked.” George W. Bush announced Cheney did not in fact have a heart attack. China promised to stop selling missile technology to companies trying to develop nuclear weapons and also to obey the rule of law. Chile's former dictator General Augusto Pinochet took responsibility for the crimes committed by his regime: “As an ex-president, I accept responsibility for all the deeds that the army and armed forces are said to have committed,” he said in a videotaped message played at a celebration of his eighty-fifth birthday. Terrorists bombed a school bus filled with children of Israeli settlers; two adults were killed and several children were dismembered. Israeli defense forces responded with bombs of their own, killing several adults and dismembering at least one child. A car bomb went off in the Israeli coastal city of Hadera, killing two; Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel would “get even.” There were more killings. Germany was busy deporting Albanians from Kosovo who had overstayed their welcome, though the word deportieren, with its Nazi connotations, was avoided carefully; Abschiebung, sending away, was preferred. Queen Elizabeth II was photographed wringing the neck of a wounded pheasant which a hunting dog had dropped at her feet; British animal-rights types were appalled. At church the next day, the Queen wore a red hat accented with pheasant feathers.

The Vatican denounced homosexuality as “a conception of love detached from any responsibility.” Researchers at Harvard Medical School claimed that 44.3 percent of cigarettes smoked in America are smoked by the mentally ill, who make up, they said, 28.3 percent of Americans. Florida's supreme court reinstated a $750,000 award to an ex-smoker; a lower court had said Brown & Williamson did not have to pay. Workers rioted in New Delhi to protest a decision by India's supreme court ordering the closure of 90,000 small factories that pollute air and water and sicken the populace. A federal judge told Quadrtech Corporation that it could not escape to Mexico to avoid the Communications Workers of America, which the company said it would do one day after the union was certified to represent Quadrtech's workers, who are largely female and Mexican and who assemble cheap jewelry for a minimum wage. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, urged his employees to reject the unionization efforts of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a branch of the Communications Workers of America; “Everyone in this company is an owner,” he said, though not every owner makes $7 to $9.50 an hour. The FBI's packet-sniffing computer, Carnivore, can indeed capture and archive all the email that passes through an internet service provider's servers, according to a new report. Teachers in Chicago were issuing report cards judging the quality of the parenting received by schoolchildren. American educators were debating whether to eliminate dodge ball from the physical education curriculum; critics charged that a game involving “human targets” was inappropriate in a modern school. After a court rejected plans to build a new cemetery in the French town of Le Lavandou (the old one was full), Mayor Gil Bernadi made it a crime to die. Starbucks Coffee opened a store in China's Forbidden City, right next to the Palace of Heavenly Purity.

Hippies stormed the climate-treaty talks at the Hague; one managed to hit an American negotiator in the face with a cream pie. The meeting ended without an agreement after the United States, the largest producer of greenhouse gases, insisted on getting extra credit for the anti-greenhouse effect of its forests. Aventis Corporation, which recently got into trouble over its StarLink genetically modified corn, announced that the unapproved StarLink protein Cry9c had shown up in non-genetically modified corn that will soon reach the nation's food supply. The company had no explanation for how the protein, which is the result of genetic engineering, made its way into normal corn; biologists pointed out that it was probably the result of natural hybridization between GM and non-GM corn planted too close together. A group of scientists announced that they had constructed a nano-machine driven by a propeller: “This opens the door to make machines that live inside the cell,” Cornell University's Dr. Carlo Montemagno told reporters. “It allows us to merge engineered devices into living systems.” Spain discovered its first case of mad cow disease, as did Germany. France was trying to figure out what to do with 500,000 tons of meal contaminated with animals parts that can no longer be fed to livestock for fear of spreading mad cow disease; the million tons of animal parts produced each year by the French meat industry will have to be disposed of as well. Rodin Rasoloarison of the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar discovered three new species of mouse lemur. More than a billion people lack a basic supply of clean water, the United Nations reported; it would cost just $10 billion a year to provide them with water and sanitation, which is about what Europe spends each year on ice cream. The people of Tonga sold their genes to an Australian biotechnology company. A newborn baby boy with six fingers on each hand was kidnapped from a Detroit hospital. Mount Everest was shrinking.