Weekly Review

By Miriam Markowitz

The Cloaca Maxima, 1872

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a timetable for ending the Iraq war by a six-vote margin. The bill mandates American withdrawal in September 2008 if the Bush Administration meets certain benchmarks, earlier if it does not. Several Democrats voted against the timetable because it was not sufficiently antiwar, and Republicans derided the inclusion of domestic provisions benefiting spinach growers, citrus farmers, salmon fishermen, and peanut storers. “What does throwing money at Bubba Gump, Popeye the sailor man, and Mr. Peanut have to do with winning a war?” asked Representative Sam Johnson of Texas. “I will veto it,” said President George W. Bush, "if it comes to my desk.”^{1 2} British troops pulled out of Basra; two days later, rival Shiite factions began battling over a government building that had been been evacuated by the military.³ In the Green Zone, a press conference held by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was interrupted by a nearby rocket attack. Ban, frightened, ducked behind a podium,⁴ and the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to impose new sanctions on Iran. Iranian officials claimed that American authorities had prevented President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from attending the Council meeting by delaying his visa,^{5 6} and in the Iraqi territory of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, Iranian forces captured and detained 15 members of the British Royal Navy. ⁷ Oil reached $62 per barrel.⁸ John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, discussing last summer's conflict in Lebanon, said that he was “damned proud” of U.S. efforts to delay a cease-fire,⁹ and White House press secretary Tony Snow announced that he would soon undergo surgery to remove a growth from his lower abdomen.¹⁰

Al Gore returned to Capitol Hill to testify that global warming is a planetary emergency. Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts called Gore a prophet, and Rep. John Dingell of Michigan addressed him as “Mr. President.” Joe Barton of Texas, the leading Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Gore he was “totally wrong” and that, if need be, Republican lawmakers would stay late for an “all-out cat fight” with Democrats. Ralph Hall, also of Texas, speculated that Gore's attack on the energy industry could result in war “when and if OPEC nations abandon the U.S.A.,” and Roscoe Bartlett (R., Md.) said that he thought it was “probably possible to be a conservative without appearing to be an idiot.”^{11 12} Czech President Vaclav Klaus said that a new “anti-greenhouse religion” had replaced Communism as the paramount threat to global freedom. “This ideology preaches earth and nature, and under the slogans of their protection--similarly to the old Marxists--wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world.”¹³ In Beijing, weather officials were now using the word “mai,” meaning “haze,” to denote a denser concentration of pollutants than “wu,” which means “fog,”¹⁴ and Taiwan's freeway bureau closed 600 yards of highway in Yunlin County in preparation for a massive migration of milkweed butterflies.¹⁵ After two black Labrador retrievers sniffed out a shipment of nearly a million black-market DVDs in Johor, Malaysian disc pirates offered a bounty to anyone who kills the dogs, which were on loan from the Motion Picture Association of America. Lucky and Flo were subsequently moved to a safe house.¹⁶ Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck announced that his restaurants would no longer serve foie gras, but that he would continue to slice lobsters in half without first stunning them.¹⁷

Jamaican police continued to search for the murderer of Bob Woolmer, the coach of Pakistan's cricket team, who, hours after Pakistan lost to Ireland in the cricket World Cup, was strangled in his room at the Pegasus Hotel in Kingston.¹⁸ In her denial of an application for divorce filed by a battered Muslim woman, a female judge in Frankfurt, Germany, quoted a verse of the Koran that suggests husbands may beat unchaste wives. “It's a religious thing,” she explained.¹⁹ A study sponsored by Kleenex facial tissues found that Americans do not let their feelings out often enough,²⁰ and a Florida man who pleaded guilty to homicide was ordered to exhibit a two-foot-wide picture of his victim in his home. The judge specified that the image should be displayed prominently and include the phrase “I'm sorry I killed you.”²¹ After it was discovered that he was drinking the blood and eating the flesh of their young women, a man named Black Jesus was captured by villagers in Papua New Guinea.²² Four teachers in Xhyre, Albania, were censured after their students caught them drinking and having sex behind a blackboard. “I saw them acting shamefully,” said fourth-grader Elton Cuka to the Shqip daily. “Would you call someone a teacher,” asked Xhevahir Hohxa, a father, “who drinks raki at ten in the morning and gets drunk and chases the schoolgirls?”²³ Gay policemen in Manila were ordered not to swing their hips while on duty,²⁴ and to test the integrity of ten local hospitals, journalists in Hangzhou, China, replaced their urine samples with tea; six of the hospitals diagnosed the reporters with urinary tract infections.²⁵ Russian peasants were refusing to collect their pensions because the payment slip barcodes contained Satanic symbols,²⁶ and in the Mojave Desert, a wandering photographer in search of a striptease museum stumbled across an estimated acre of rotting food discarded by a food bank, including cases of eggnog and tooth whitener. “Creepy, spooky, gross, disgusting,” he said. “Filled with animals and bugs.”²⁷ Families of victims of the World Trade Center attacks filed an affidavit that accused New York City of using the remains of the dead to pave roads and fill potholes.²⁸