Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

A Christian martyr.

In Iraq, the director of the al-Furat hospital in Baghdad was shot dead. A roadside bomb went off in Basra, killing a policeman, and two Sudanese drivers who work with U.S. forces were taken hostage.¹ A gunman opened fire on a minibus filled with people working for a Kuwaiti company, killing one and wounding three, and a garbage-truck suicide bomb killed three people and injured more than twenty.² Thirty-nine dead bodies were found west and south of Baghdad; some had been beheaded, and others had been handcuffed before they were shot. Many were members of the Iraqi Interior Ministry's specially trained rapid-response team. ³ A suicide bomber killed forty-seven at a Shiite funeral in Mosul.⁴ “We are all waiting for death,” said an Iraqi soldier, “like the moon waiting for sunset.”⁵ In Beirut, at least five hundred thousand rallied to show their support for Syria;⁶ hundreds of thousands of Lebanese then came out to rally against Syria,⁷ and two hundred rallied against Syria in Minneapolis.⁸ According to a confidential government report, the American aviation system was still vulnerable to terrorist attacks,⁹ and President George W. Bush reaffirmed his vow to fix Social Security. “You will get your checks,” he said.¹⁰ The President nominated John Bolton, a man who strongly dislikes multinational institutions, to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.¹¹ He also nominated Karen Hughes as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy; her job will be to improve the image of the United States abroad.¹² Twenty U.S. federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, were found to have prepared hundreds of video news releases favorable to the government, many of which were inserted into local television news broadcasts without attribution.¹³ The world held China in ever-higher esteem.¹⁴ An Oregon high-school teacher was under investigation for licking the bleeding wounds of his students,¹⁵ and ninety Danish master bakers were working to improve the flavor of communion wafers.¹⁶ The pope relinquished most of his Easter duties.¹⁷ NASA considered ending the mission of Voyager 1, which is thirteen light-hours from the sun,¹⁸ and a new service, Talktoaliens.com, allowed people to send messages directly into space via telephone for $3.99 a minute.¹⁹ The United Nations gave up trying to stop human cloning.²⁰

Paul Schaefer, a former member of the Luftwaffe who emigrated to Chile, founded a cult, provided torture facilities for Pinochet, and molested many children, was captured in Argentina.²¹ In Atlanta, a defendant on trial for rape grabbed a deputy's gun and went on a shooting spree, wounding the deputy and killing the judge presiding over his case, a court reporter, and a different deputy. He stole several vehicles²² and took a woman hostage. The woman won his trust, made him pancakes, and turned him in.²³ Online gamers were outsourcing the hard parts of video-game playing to Romania.²⁴ An Arizona ice-cream-truck driver who raped and impregnated a nine-year-old girl was sentenced to life in prison,²⁵ as was a twelve-year-old British boy who raped his special-needs teacher.²⁶ It was revealed that the United States had held children as young as eleven years old at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq,²⁷ and a badly prepared snack killed twenty-seven children in the Philippines.²⁸ The mayor of Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico, ordered the entire 1,100-member Nezahualcoyotl police force to read one book a month and to control its cholesterol.²⁹ A New York judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and several other chemical companies on behalf of 4 million Vietnamese who were poisoned by the 80 million liters of Agent Orange sprayed during the Vietnam War. The judge said that there was no clear link between Agent Orange and the illnesses of the Vietnamese plaintiffs, even though the U.S. government currently pays compensation to ten thousand U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War impaired by Agent Orange.³⁰ It was likely that half a billion people had malaria.³¹ Russian forces assassinated Aslan Maskhadov, the elected, internationally recognized leader of the Chechen movement,³² and Gary Kasparov decided to retire.³³ The president of Malawi refused to sleep in his palace because it is haunted with evil ghosts,³⁴ and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, addressing a Tennessee celebration honoring Abraham Lincoln, said that South Carolina did not “do Lincoln Day Dinners” because “it takes awhile to get over things.”³⁵

In India, several hundred people reenacted Gandhi's 1930 twenty-four-day march to the Arabian Sea to make salt. Nearly half of India's cabinet marched, although many returned to their hotels after walking a short distance.³⁶ A Georgia man was arrested for setting up a methamphetamine lab in a Kmart bathroom,³⁷ and a New Jersey man was arrested for a string of burglaries. “He defecated in at least four residences,” said a prosecutor. “When he was taken into custody, he also defecated, and that was in his pants.”³⁸ Panda breeding season began. In Atlanta, zookeepers were watching Lun Lun the panda for signs of ovulation; when she is ready to mate they will reintroduce her to Yang Yang.³⁹ A plume of smoke thousands of feet tall spewed from Mount St. Helens,⁴⁰ and an Idaho teenager was in trouble for frosting brownies with his semen.⁴¹ Bubba, the 22-pound lobster caught off the Nantucket shore, died, most likely from stress,⁴² and a rubbery, plaque-like substance was removed from Bill Clinton.⁴³ Prince Charles visited New Zealand, where he was met by a woman with the words “GET YOUR COLONIAL SHAME OFF MY BREASTS” written across her bare chest. The Prince smiled. ⁴⁴ The state of Washington declared a drought,⁴⁵ and a falling tree crushed the legs of Edgar Killen, a Mississippi Baptist minister and Ku Klux Klansman currently facing trial for the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers.⁴⁶ A study showed that African-American men die at nearly twice the rate of white men of a similar age.⁴⁷ Other studies showed that thousands might die of the avian flu in New Zealand,⁴⁸ the Pentagon was not to blame for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib,⁴⁹ and soap and water are effective in cleaning your hands.⁵⁰ The United States announced plans to reduce the number of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay by freeing some and sending others to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Yemen,⁵¹ and the Army was testing a new environmentally friendly, hydrogen-powered vehicle called The Aggressor.⁵² Humans could still beat robots at arm wrestling.⁵³ A woman's head was found in a bowling bag in New Jersey,⁵⁴ a San Diego woman died when her building was fumigated to kill termites,⁵⁵ and Dan Rather left the CBS Evening News. “Courage,” he said.⁵⁶