Weekly Review

Seven people died in a suicide car bombing in Iraq,¹ and a Norfolk, Virginia, man changed his name to Kentucky Fried Cruelty.com.² Russia shut down a natural-gas pipeline to Ukraine; as a result, natural-gas supplies were diminished in Hungary, France, Italy, Poland, and Germany.³ U.S. financial giant Citigroup was attempting to purchase about 85 percent of the state-owned Guangdong Development Bank of China.⁴ The U.S. Justice Department opened an investigation into who leaked information about the NSA's domestic wiretapping program to the New York Times. Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Times editor Bill Keller refused to answer any questions about the leak, even though the questions came from their own public editor.^{5 6} A 2-year-old in Patchogue, New York, was found drunk,⁷ and a judge ruled that John Hinckley Jr. could make unsupervised visits to his parents.⁸ In Malaysia people were searching for a 10-foot-tall ape that walks upright.⁹ The New Year was postponed by one second to accommodate for the slowing rotation of the earth.¹⁰ It was flooding in California, and parts of Oklahoma and Texas were on fire.^{11 12}

Twenty Sudanese migrants, protesting their treatment in Egypt, were killed by Egyptian police.¹³ A landslide in Yemen killed 30 people,¹⁴ and a collapsing ice rink in Germany killed 11 people.¹⁵ A police officer in Fremont, California, was attacked by a pack of chihuahuas and was later treated for ankle bites.¹⁶ An airplane flying from England to Spain made an unscheduled stop in Porto Santo, a 10-mile-long, three-mile-wide island, to eject a disruptive passenger.¹⁷ A British woman married an Israeli dolphin after fifteen years of courtship. “I am just waiting for everyone to leave,” said the woman, “so we can have a private moment.” ¹⁸ Wives in China were suing their husbands' mistresses to reclaim gifts the mistresses had received from the husbands.¹⁹ A judge ruled that it was illegal for the Bush Administration to continue to imprison several Chinese Muslims at Guantánamo Bay. Nine months ago a tribunal determined that the prisoners in question were not actually enemy combatants, but U.S. law will not allow them to be sent to China because China persecutes Muslims, and no other country wants the prisoners. The judge also noted that he had no power to enforce his own ruling.²⁰ In Utah a 13-year-old girl who became pregnant by her 12-year-old boyfriend was ruled a sex offender. The 12-year-old boy was also ruled a sex offender. “It's a paradox,” said the girl's attorney.²¹

Nepalese Maoist Pushpa Kamal Dahal announced an end to the four-month truce with King Gyanendra's Royal Nepalese Army.²² It was revealed that Pentagon contractors had hired Iraqi Sunni clerics to help them develop propaganda campaigns.²³ In Florida a 16-year-old named Farris Hassan decided to complete a school project on the Iraq war by going to Iraq; he made it to Baghdad, and was sent back to Florida by United States authorities. “This place,” explained an official, “is incredibly dangerous to individual private American citizens.”²⁴ A U.S. National Guardsman who served in Iraq was sentenced to 25 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to shooting an Iraqi soldier with whom he had had consensual gay sex.²⁵ U.S. school buses were increasingly being plastered with advertisements,²⁶ and the University of Michigan was boycotting Coca-Cola products because of Coca-Cola's human rights policies.²⁷ In West Virginia 13 miners were trapped underground.²⁸ A woman in New York City was under investigation for putting her dead husband in a suitcase and leaving him there until neighbors complained of the smell. “She wanted to take him to Arizona to be buried,” explained a detective.²⁹ Authorities in New Zealand shot and killed 41 stranded pilot whales.³⁰ A study found that Antonin Scalia is the funniest of the Supreme Court justices; in fact Scalia is 19 times funnier than Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A former clerk defended Ginsburg's sense of humor: “Maybe not often, perhaps not loudly or with great vigor and the wild waving of arms,” said the clerk, “but laugh she does.”³¹ Another study found that Americans have a lot of stuff.³² Hunters in Spain were killing 50,000 hunting greyhounds each year by drowning, poisoning, and hanging them; those greyhounds that “humiliate” their owners by failing to win races or catch hares are often hanged in such a way that their paws barely touch the ground, and as they struggle against the noose, the dogs' nails make a clacking noise. This is known as “the typewriting death.”³³