Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

In Iraq, the bodies of fifty Shiite hostages, some mutilated or headless, were pulled from the Tigris river, and the bodies of nineteen Iraqi soldiers were found in a soccer stadium in the city of Haditha. A suicide bomber tried to assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi,¹ and Iraqi militants shot down a commercial helicopter, killing ten passengers; they then shot the sole survivor, the helicopter's Bulgarian pilot, and distributed a video of the shooting on the Internet.² In Tehran, around 400 Iranians signed up to become suicide bombers. “As a Muslim, it is my duty,” said a mother of two, “to sacrifice my life for oppressed Palestinian children.”³ Fifty-one people died in a mine explosion in Zambia.⁴ One million people marched to support the mayor of Mexico City,⁵ and Lucio Gutierrez, the recently ousted president of Ecuador, fled to Brazil to avoid arrest.⁶ Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi publicly apologized for the “tremendous damage and suffering” caused by Japan's actions prior to and during World War II,⁷ and a study by the Union Hospital in Hong Kong found that Chinese men have normal-sized penises.⁸ The zookeepers in Ramat Gan, Israel, fed their gorillas kosher matzo crackers for Passover.⁹ Scientists discovered the remains of a previously unknown Tyrannosaurus Rex-like dinosaur, Appalachiosaurus montgomeriensis, that roamed through the American South 77 million years ago,¹⁰ and Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee asked Christian conservatives to help him end filibusters.¹¹ Texas legislators were considering a bill that would ban gay people from taking in foster children,¹² and Ken Ferree, the new president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, said that he wanted to make PBS appealing to conservatives.¹³ Walter Cronkite was planning to start a blog.¹⁴

Many people thought that a stain on a wall in Chicago was actually a miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary,¹⁵ and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who belonged to the Hitler Youth before he became a priest, won the papacy by a landslide and styled himself Benedict XVI. The new pope dislikes homosexuality (he moved quickly to condemn a Spanish bill that would permit gays to marry), abortion, and the death penalty, but he loves little kittens. In 2001, he ordered Catholic bishops to hide allegations against pedophile priests from the public.^{16 17 18} A woman in Afghanistan was stoned to death for adultery.¹⁹ It was revealed that Condoleezza Rice ordered a German citizen released from an American-supervised prison in Afghanistan after it was determined that the man had been wrongly detained and tortured.²⁰ Rice also ordered a State Department report on terrorism be stripped of statistics that showed that terrorist attacks were on the rise.²¹ The Yankees sucked.²² A rabbi had a fistfight with a man wearing a swastika T-shirt in the Kansas City, Missouri, airport,²³ and a Vietnam veteran spit tobacco juice in Jane Fonda's face.²⁴ The Mesa, Arizona, police department applied for funding to buy and train a tiny monkey that they can dress in a kevlar vest and send into dangerous situations.²⁵ Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez and his top three aides were cleared of all wrongdoing in the Abu Ghraib case,²⁶ and a United Nations investigator in Afghanistan who criticized the abuse of prisoners by United States Army personnel was forced out of his role under pressure from the United States.²⁷ Former president George Bush and Bill Clinton were becoming even better friends. “I'm enjoying the relationship,” said the President, “and to be honest with you I didn't think I would.”²⁸

The Transportation Security Agency was in trouble for furnishing an operations office, intended for seventy-nine employees, with expensive kitchen equipment, a fitness center with towel service, and tens of thousands of dollars in silk flowers.²⁹ Venezuela ended military operations and exchanges with the United States,³⁰ and the Venezuelan government announced “Operation Dulcinea,” which will distribute one million copies of the novel Don Quixote to the public. “We're still oppressed by giants,” said the Venezuelan minister of culture.³¹ In Japan, a commuter train derailed and smashed into an apartment building, killing at least seventy-one people and injuring hundreds.³² An American businessman spent $802,600 over the Internet to buy a house in India; when he arrived in New Delhi, he found that the house he was promised was actually the Prime Minister's residence.³³ Elections were held in Togo, followed by street battles and at least three deaths.³⁴ Connecticut voted to allow gay civil unions,³⁵ and the Navajo Nation banned both uranium mining and gay marriage from its reservation.^{36 37} A Fresno, California, man was standing trial for killing nine of his children, seven of whom he fathered with his own daughters and nieces. “Jesus was a womanizer,” he explained.³⁸ Soot was darkening China's skies,³⁹ and in the Antarctic, iceberg B15A, the largest moving object on earth, crashed into the Drygalski ice tongue, breaking off three square miles of ice.⁴⁰ A woman in Burma was breastfeeding three tiger cubs,⁴¹ Zimbabweans barbecued nine elephants,⁴² and German toads were exploding for unknown reasons.⁴³