Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

The Conservative Party won a plurality of seats in Canada's federal election, making Stephen Harper Canada's next prime minister.¹ The Islamic group Hamas won 76 of 132 parliamentary seats in Palestine's parliamentary elections, unseating the Fatah party. U.S. President George W. Bush, whose administration supported open democratic elections in Palestine, said that the United States would not negotiate with Hamas until the organization renounced its chartered goal of destroying Israel,² and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that the United States would cut off aid to Palestine if Hamas assumed power without changing its policies. "I've asked why nobody saw it coming," said Rice, even though publications like The Guardian and the The New York Times had, since at least 2003, published regular reports on the increasing popularity of Hamas in Palestine. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse." ^{3 4 5 6} Senator Joseph Biden (D., Del.) said Hamas would have to change its stripes.⁷ In Iraq, the United States was negotiating with Sunni insurgents.⁸ A new judge took over the Saddam Hussein trial and had Hussein and co-defendant Barzan Ibrahim removed from the courtroom after Hussein began shouting and Ibrahim called the court "a bastard."⁹ Hussein also Saddam Hussein said through a lawyer that he wanted to sue President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for authorizing the use of weapons of mass destruction, such as white phosphorus, in Iraq.¹⁰ U.S. auditors found that of $120 million in Iraqi oil revenue allocated to fund reconstruction $97 million had gone missing. ¹¹ Eleven people died in a bombing at an Iraqi sweets shop, and at least 17 people died in other attacks. Four Christian churches were bombed.^{12 13} ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt were severely injured in an explosion in Taji,¹⁴ and a teenage girl in northern Iraq was reported to have died of bird flu.¹⁵ In Gary, Indiana, an Iraq war veteran killed a 79-year-old man when the man refused to give him money for crack.¹⁶ Marine James Blake Miller, whose face became emblematic of the Iraq war after he was photographed smoking a cigarette during the November 2004 attack on Fallujah, was at home in Kentucky, where he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and had cut back to a pack and a half a day.¹⁷ Halliburton announced that 2005 was its best year ever.¹⁸

The White House refused to release photographs of President Bush with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, despite requests from Senate and House Republicans,¹⁹ and a Senate committee investigating the government response to Hurricane Katrina criticized the Bush Administration for ignoring the findings of a hurricane-preparedness exercise called "Hurricane Pam," which had warned that New Orleans would be flooded. "It is apparent that a more appropriate name for Pam should have been 'Cassandra,'" said Senator Susan Collins (R., Maine). ²⁰ Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez vowed to jail anyone who spies for the United States,²¹ and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi promised not to have sex until elections were held on April 9.²² The UPN and WB television networks were slated to merge, ²³ Disney announced it would buy Pixar,²⁴ and Google agreed to censor its Chinese search results to please the Chinese government.²⁵ With support from the ACLU, a boy in New Jersey won the right to wear a skirt to school; the boy wears the skirt to protest the school's policy banning shorts.²⁶ A grandfather in Florida died of a heart attack after all seven of his grandchildren were killed in an automobile accident,²⁷ and a starving woman in Kangundo, Kenya, placed a curse on God as she hit a cooking pot with a stick, then died in her sleep. ²⁸ In southern Poland, 66 people were crushed to death when an exhibition hall collapsed during an international pigeon fanciers' fair.²⁹

James E. Hansen, a director at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that NASA had ordered its public-affairs staff to review and possibly censor his upcoming speeches and papers after he called for reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.³⁰ Massachusetts Junior Senator John Kerry, in Switzerland for the Davos economic forum, called for a filibuster to stop the nomination of Samuel Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court.³¹ Representative Marty Meehan's staff was caught removing unfavorable facts about Meehan from his Wikipedia entry; in the past the entire House has been banned from editing Wikipedia due to rampant abuse of the online public encyclopedia's editing policies by House staffers.³² It was revealed that Senator Bill Frist's AIDS charity had paid almost a half-million dollars in consulting fees to Frist's political friends,³³ and it was reported that one quarter of the Bush Administration's $15 billion in AIDS-fighting money had been given to religious groups.³⁴ President Bush said that he had not yet seen the film "Brokeback Mountain."³⁵ French police realized that they had spent the last two years trying to identify a female murder victim--whose skeleton was found during a low tide in Plouezoc'h--who actually died in the 15th century. "We reckon it was pirates," said a policeman.³⁶ U.S. murderers were learning how to cover their tracks by watching television crime shows.³⁷ Authorities in Mexico City arrested a woman named Juana Barraza, a 48-year-old former wrestler who is thought to be the serial killer known as Mataviejitas, or "the Killer of Little Old Ladies," and who may be responsible for strangling up to 30 of them.³⁸ Hawaiians were attempting to have the humuhumunukunukuapuaa (HOO-moo-HOO-moo- NOO-koo-NOO-koo- AH-poo-AH-ah) appointed as Hawaii's state fish on a permanent basis after its five-year term expired. "It kind of looks like a pig and it squawks and everything," said a humuhumunukunukuapuaa advocate.³⁹ A substitute teacher in Santa Cruz, California, was sentenced to a year in jail for filming young boys licking whipped cream off each other's toes. "I used very poor judgment," said the teacher.⁴⁰ Mozart turned 250,⁴¹ the FBI was spying on vegans in Georgia,⁴² and several women in Missouri were sick with infections after receiving tattoos from a door-to-door tattoo salesman.⁴³ A firecracker explosion killed 16 people during a New Year celebration in China,⁴⁴ and the year of the dog began.⁴⁵