Weekly Review

By Gemma Sieff

More than 80 French police officers were injured in clashes with youths firing shotguns in the Paris banlieues. Voters in Venezuela narrowly defeated a referendum on changing their constitution to abolish presidential term limits and vastly increase President Hugo Chavez's executive powers. President Pervez Musharraf quit his role as chief of Pakistan's army. Senator Hillary Clinton praised her campaign staff for “their extraordinary courage and coolness under some very difficult pressures and dangerous situations,” after a man wearing a fake bomb made from road flares took several Clinton staffers hostage in New Hampshire. The hostage-taker, Leeland Eisenberg, had seen an ad spot in which a New Hampshire man said Clinton had helped him get health insurance. “He kept expressing he wanted to get help,” Eisenberg's stepson explained. “He wasn't able to get it because he didn't have insurance, he didn't have money.” The Department of Homeland Security was asking firefighters to look for signs of suspicious activity while putting out fires, and Pentagon officials announced that 5,000 U.S. troops would withdraw from Iraq next month. Farmers in Afghanistan were growing fewer poppies and more pot, and the child stars of the movie “The Kite Runner” were sent from Kabul to a luxury hotel in the United Arab Emirates after threats were made to their safety. “The best possible outcome,” said a consultant to Paramount, “would be in 20 years to see a 'Where Are They Now' piece on VH1.” Khaled Hosseini, the author of the novel on which the film is based and a resident of California, implored the United States not to abandon Afghanistan. Without U.S. support, he wrote, “Afghanistan is doomed.”

In Khartoum, thousands of Sudanese protesters armed with clubs and knives called for the execution of Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam after she permitted her students to name their class teddy bear “Muhammad”; Gibbons, pardoned by the president of Sudan, was released from jail and fled to England. A San Diego man was arrested for attempting to purchase black-bear gallbladders, and fears of a bear market forced Bear Stearns to lay off 4 percent of its staff. North of the Arctic Circle, the remote and entirely lightless town of Narvik, Norway, was further depressed by its loss of a $64 million investment in the American subprime-mortgage market. Fears about the American economy had reportedly slowed sales of recreational vehicles, with the exception of the “biggest, baddest” models, which get seven miles to the gallon, cost up to $1.7 million, and include such amenities as Italian marble floors and a lock with an electronic palm reader. A 3.3 pound truffle sold for $330,000 at an auction held simultaneously in Macau, London, and Florence. The winning bidder, Macau casino owner Stanley Ho, outbid the British artist Damien Hirst and Sheikh Bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi. Food banks across the United States, facing critical shortages, were forced to distribute emergency rations intended for disaster relief, and researchers reported that sophisticated neurological scans reveal anorexic brains to show high levels of activity in the caudate, the region of the brain concerned with outcome and planning.

In Angola, an outbreak of acute neurological syndrome was attributed to high levels of sodium bromide, an industrial chemical, in kitchen salt. A physician and amateur historian from Palo Alto contended that Abraham Lincoln suffered from the rare genetic disease MEN 2B, which he believes was responsible for Lincoln's great height, lumpy lips, and the early deaths of three of his four sons. Evel Knievel died, Rodney King bicycled home after being shot in the face, and Susan Bateman, a martial-arts instructor in Virginia, was arrested for kicking an 11-year-old student in the gut more than 200 times as the class counted. Bateman issued a challenge during class to see how many kicks her students could sustain; the boy suffered internal injuries and a broken rib. Rome's traffic and parking chief was fired after he parked his red Alfa Romeo in a no-parking zone and displayed a handicapped permit belonging to an 86-year-old woman. A Chilean prostitute auctioned 27 hours of sex to raise money for a disabled children's charity, saying that she wanted “to contribute with my work to a purpose that touches me deeply,” and serial flasher Michael Carney of Fleetham Grove, England, pleaded unsuccessfully that because his penis was “so much smaller than average,” he could not have committed his crimes. Astronomers discovered a one-billion-light-year-wide pocket full of nothing in the sky.