Weekly Review

By Gemma Sieff

President George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, which suspends the right of habeas corpus for terrorism suspects and grants immunity to CIA interrogators and government officials, such as President Bush, for violations of the War Crimes Act. ^{1 2} Domestic security officials notified seven football stadiums of a discredited threat of radiological bomb attacks out of an “abundance of caution,” ³ and the United States Coast Guard announced plans to mount 7.62 mm, M-240B machine guns on official boats in the Great Lakes. Rear Adm. John E. Crowley Jr. said, “I don’t know when or if something might happen on the Great Lakes, but I don’t want to learn the hard way.” ⁴ Furry crabs were found in Chesapeake Bay. ⁵ The mid-month tally for U.S. troops killed in Iraq was 79, making October the deadliest month this year for American soldiers. ⁶ The first Eskimo was killed in the Iraq war; it took 20 men a full day to dig his grave through the permafrost in a town 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle. ⁷ The Maine National Guard has been offering “Flat Daddies” and “Flat Mommies,” life-size cardboard cutouts of deployed service members, to spouses, children, and relatives waiting for them to return. ⁸ A Gypsy pressure group filed suit to stop British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film from being shown in Germany. The group accuses him of antiziganism, or hostility to gypsies; Cohen's fictional alter-ego Borat claimed that Gypsies had molested his horse. ^{9 10} During a debate with his Democratic rival, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana said that President Bush (who this week compared Iraq to Vietnam) has a secret plan for winning the war, but that Bush is not going to share his plan with the world.^{11 12} White House press secretary Tony Snow compared the President to “one of those guys at the gym who plays about 40 chessboards at once.”¹³

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan collapsed from fasting during Ramadan. His security staff rushed him unconscious to the hospital and accidentally locked him in his car; they fought for ten minutes to break the car's reinforced windows with a sledgehammer and chisel. ¹⁴ A Denver woman was ruled criminally insane for stabbing her 21-month-old granddaughter 62 times with a butcher knife after she received “spiritual messages from the geese flying overhead.”¹⁵ A convicted killer on Texas death row committed suicide 15 hours before he was supposed to die by lethal injection by slitting his jugular vein with a makeshift blade; prison authorities found the message “I didn't do it” smeared in blood on the walls of his cell. ¹⁶ An Ohio cult leader who shot and killed a family of five as they stood in a pit dug inside his barn contested his upcoming lethal injection on the grounds that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment to execute a fat man. ^{17 18} Coca-Cola announced plans to market a new calorie-burning green tea beverage called Enviga,¹⁹ and the mayor of Paris auctioned off City Hall's most expensive wines in favor of serving “little democratic wines.” ²⁰ In Panama, 22 people died from ingesting poisoned cough syrup that contained the industrial chemical diethylene glycol, rather than the safe solvent glycerin glycol.²¹ More than 4,500 tons of polluted material, residue from the toxic sludge dumped in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in August, have been collected since a clean-up effort began in September. ²² Scientists identified more than 200 oceanic dead zones. ²³ The king of Spain denied that he had shot and killed a drunken bear.²⁴

Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn elbowed a hole through Picasso's “Le Reve,” a painting he had just sold for a record $139 million. ²⁵ Two subway trains collided at a station in Rome, killing one person and injuring more than 100.²⁶ In Sri Lanka, Tamil rebels drove a truck full of explosives into a convoy of military buses, killing 92 sailors. ²⁷ Nearly four months after the arraignment of PFC Steven D. Green, eight other soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division faced courts-martial in Kentucky for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family in March. ²⁸ In New York a developmentally disabled handyman was hospitalized after two teenagers sodomized him at a bowling alley with a plumbing snake,. ²⁹ and a Catholic priest acknowledged having had an intimate, two-year relationship with Mark Foley when the now-disgraced Republican congressman was a twelve-year-old altar boy. ³⁰ An exhibit at the Oslo Natural History Museum displayed homosexual behavior among giraffes, penguins, parrots, beetles, and whales. Radical Christian critics said organizers of the exhibition should “burn in hell.” ³¹ China insisted that the U.N. request, rather than require, countries to inspect North Korean cargo. An American expert called the sanctions “kabuki theater,” and North Korea called them a “declaration of war.” ³² In South Korea, where scientists announced the development of a new genetically altered strain of adenovirus capable of destroying cancer cells,³³ the government warned that North Korea might be preparing to conduct a second nuclear test. ³⁴ The Boy Scouts introduced a new merit badge for learning how copyright law applies to pirated movies and music. ³⁵ In New York City, CBGB closed, but the Russian Tea Room will reopen. ^{36 37} Scotland Yard and the British Home Office misplaced two “extremely dangerous” terrorism suspects. One escaped from a secure psychiatric unit, and neither can be named for legal reasons. ³⁸ The U.S. Postal Service announced that it would phase out 23,000 stamp vending machines by 2010. ³⁹ A Massachusetts elementary school banned tag.⁴⁰