Weekly Review

By Roger D. Hodge

The Bush Administration, worried about the political cost of the Iraq war and increasingly plagued by comparisons with Vietnam, decided to speed up its "Iraqification" plan by transferring sovereignty to a provisional native government by June 30.¹ "They are, we believe, ready for it," said Condoleezza Rice. "And they have very strong ideas about how it might be done." President Bush said that he believes the Iraqis "have the capacity to run their own country."² The American-appointed mayor of Sadr City, a suburb of Baghdad, was killed after he drove into a forbidden area and got into a "wrestling match" with an American soldier, whose gun went off.³ Four soldiers just back from Iraq were charged with stabbing another soldier to death, setting his body on fire, and leaving it in the woods.⁴ Twenty-six people were killed in the car bombing of the Italian paramilitary headquarters in Nasiriya; seventeen Italian military policemen died along with nine Iraqis, including three ten-year-old schoolgirls who happened to be driving by in a minibus.⁵ Seventeen U.S. soldiers died when two Black Hawk helicopters collided in Mosul after one of them came under fire.⁶ General John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, said that it was "beyond my imagination" that Saddam Hussein had planned for a guerrilla war prior to the fall of Baghdad.⁷ Wesley Clark came out in favor of a constitutional amendment banning flag desecration, and⁸ Saddam Hussein released a new audiotape calling for jihad against Israel and America. It was noticed that more U.S. soldiers have died so far in Iraq than in the first three years of the Vietnam War.⁹

Four former Israeli security chiefs criticized Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a newspaper interview and said that Israel was headed for a catastrophe if it continues its current policies toward the Palestinians. "We are taking sure, steady steps," said one, "to a place where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people."¹⁰ Al Qaeda suicide bombers blew up two synagogues in Istanbul, and a¹¹ Jewish school was burned in a Paris suburb.¹² The president of the rump Yugoslavia apologized for "any evil or disaster that anyone from Serbia and Montenegro caused to anyone in Bosnia-Herzegovina."¹³ Kenya officially recognized the Mau Maus, and¹⁴ Canaan Sodindo Banana, the first black president of Zimbabwe and a convicted homosexual rapist, died at age 67.¹⁵ Thailand said that it will give amnesty to more than one million illegal foreign workers who perform dirty, dangerous jobs that Thais would rather not do.¹⁶ A judge in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, was in trouble for dressing up in blackface for Halloween.¹⁷ Racists, a new study found, tend to be mentally exhausted by encounters with people from different races.¹⁸ American Roman Catholic bishops embarked on a new campaign against contraception. "The Church teaches us a lot of things we don't practice," said Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver. "But it's the constant of the Roman Catholic Church that contraception is wrong, sinful, and contrary to the meaning of married life." The Food and Drug Administration approved a new chewable contraceptive for women.¹⁹ Newly declassified files from MI5, the British intelligence agency, revealed that in 1940 German saboteurs had planned to attack Buckingham Palace with exploding cans of French peas.²⁰ Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in as governor of California.²¹

American scientists at the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives created an artificial bacteria-eating virus in 14 days using synthetic genes.²² Spencer Abraham, the secretary of energy, suggested that synthetic microbes might someday remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.²³ Environmentalists and consumer groups sued the Department of Agriculture to prevent companies from planting experimental crops that have been engineered to produce pharmaceuticals; they said that planting in open fields risks spreading the modifications to other crops.²⁴ Thirteen million trees were damaged in a freak snowstorm in Beijing, and parts²⁵ of Los Angeles were covered in a foot of hail.²⁶ There was severe flooding in central Vietnam, and people²⁷ were still dying of Ebola fever in the Congo.²⁸ Biologists were trying to exterminate nonnative frogs that have invaded the Galápagos Islands.²⁹ A crocodile was on the run in Hong Kong.³⁰ Cattle prices were up, and one³¹ in seven American schoolchildren was found to be at risk of heart disease.³² Astronomers speculated that Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is spinning.³³ Researchers at MIT and Harvard found that cancer tumors follow a universal law of growth,³⁴ and Australian scientists said they know why animals that live fast die young.³⁵