Weekly Review

By Theodore Ross

The Iraqi parliament voted unanimously to extend the country's state of emergency, and President George W. Bush, who declared himself a “realist,” disavowed a leaked White House memo that suggested that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was either dumb, weak, or a liar. Maliki responded by canceling a dinner date with the president.^{1 2 3} Iran's supreme spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that “the continuation of Iraq's occupation is not a mouthful that Americans can swallow.”⁴ Marine Corps intelligence in the Sunni Triangle determined that U.S. forces were “no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency,”⁵ and Matt Lauer, host of the Today Show, declared the onset of civil war in Iraq. Lauer's former co-host and current CBS anchor Katie Couric refused to agree with Lauer, insisting instead that Iraq had only slipped “ever closer” to civil war; ABC's Charles Gibson, another former morning television host, said, “You can call it anarchy, you can call it chaos, you can call it civil war . . . "⁶ The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness team issued a “situational awareness report” warning of an Al Qaeda “cyber threat,”⁷ and Technical Mujahid, a magazine designed to “break the siege placed upon [Muslims] by the media of the Crusaders and their followers,” released its first issue.⁸ Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to the American people claiming that Jews have inordinate control over international finance, media, and culture. ⁹ In Mexico, “donnybrooks and yelling matches” preceded the four-minute swearing-in ceremony of President Felipe Calderon,¹⁰ and the Mexican Committee for the Study of Kimilsungism hosted a seminar on the deceased North Korean dictator's seminal academic tome, “The Workers' Party of Korea Is the Party of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung.”¹¹ South Korea's Agriculture Ministry announced plans to kill all the cats and dogs in Iksan, Korea. Minister Kim Chang-sup defended the action, undertaken in response to an outbreak of avian flu, by saying, “Other countries do it. They just don't talk about it.”¹² A “bizarrely festive” atmosphere was noted on the streets of Beirut, where one million Hezbollah supporters rallied for the ouster of Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora.¹³ Poisons were felling Russians around the globe.¹⁴

Revised fiscal estimates from the Department of Commerce showed that the economy was “gently slowing” and not in a “crash dive”; ¹⁵ a federal judge ruled that American paper currency discriminates against blind people;¹⁶ and Barry Diller, at one time the highest paid CEO in the world, said corporate compensation consultants should be “flushed into the East River.” ¹⁷ A North Carolina judge ruled that Guy T. LeGrande, a convicted murderer who wore a Superman costume to his trial, might be too crazy to execute,¹⁸ and a lawyer representing five policemen who shot and killed an unarmed black man in Queens, New York, said he was “confident” his clients would go unpunished.¹⁹ In California, former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis successfully led a fight against parking scofflaws, ²⁰ and a “yearlong rash of nut robberies” ended when police recovered 136,000 pounds of stolen nuts with a street value of $400,000 from a warehouse in Sacramento. ²¹ Conservative rabbis in Beverly Hills called for an end to the religious edict forbidding oral sex between men; anal congress, however, would still be forbidden.²² Republican congressmen were attempting to define a twenty-week-old fetus as a “pain-capable unborn child,”²³ and the Department of Health and Human Services refused to ensure that its reports on abstinence for young people were factually and scientifically accurate.²⁴ The Center for the Digital Future announced that the average Internet user will make 4.6 “virtual pals” this year.²⁵ The Department of Homeland Security was ranking the terrorist potential of American air travelers,²⁶ a serial foot fetishist was stalking women in Philadelphia,²⁷ and the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that electronic voting machines “cannot be made secure.”²⁸ Experts warned people with pacemakers that refrigerator magnets “can be a killer.”²⁹ A herd of domesticated pigs attacked and ate a three-year-old boy in Delhi, India.³⁰

Researchers at the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory announced that they had developed explosive-sniffing bees.³¹ The Sundance Film Festival announced it would air a documentary on the perils of man/horse love,³² hunters in Michigan, North Dakota, shot a female deer with a “well-developed rack” of antlers,³³ and sheriff's deputies in Polk County, Florida, rescued a naked, drug-addled man from the jaws of an attacking alligator.³⁴ Mel Gibson was addressing his demons.³⁵ Scientists said that a “primordial meteorite” may hold clues about the “raw organic molecules needed for life,” that humpback whales may be every bit as intelligent as humans, dolphins, and great apes, and that women speak three times as much as men.^{36 37 38} Danny Devito called the president a “numbnuts.”³⁹