Weekly Review

By Gemma Sieff

The U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision seized the IndyMac Bank of California, worth an estimated 32 billion dollars, after the bank's closure in the wake of mortgage industry collapse,¹ and the Bush Administration proposed a rescue package for ailing mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would allow the Treasury to buy billions of dollars of their stock and lend them billions more to meet their short-term funding needs. The two companies' total debt is estimated at $1.54 trillion.² Abu Dhabi bought New York City's Chrysler building for $800 million,³ and the Belgian brewer InBev planned to buy Anheuser-Busch for nearly $50 billion.⁴ The Environmental Protection Agency announced that the value of an American's “statistical life” was $6.9 million, $1 million less than 5 years ago.⁵ Republican strategist Karl Rove ignored a subpoena to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, citing “executive privilege,”⁶ and the Green Party selected Cynthia McKinney, the first African-American woman elected to Congress from Georgia, as its 2008 presidential nominee.⁷ President George W. Bush met with other world leaders at the G8 summit to discuss climate change. “Goodbye,” he said as he left, grinning and punching the air, “from the world's biggest polluter.”⁸

Former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow died of cancer,⁹ and Iran released photos of a missile test that had been doctored to make it look as if four missiles were being launched instead of three.¹⁰ Mak Erot, an Indonesian woman who used herbs, Islamic prayer, and supernatural powers to enlarge penises, died at 130.¹¹ A new report revealed that the global population of zooplankton has drastically shrunk in the last forty years,¹² and world space officials announced the launch of a 2018 mission to procure samples of Martian rock and soil.¹³ The British retailer Marks & Spencer defended a policy of charging extra for bras that are bigger than size DD, saying the charge represented “a small premium for [necessary] specialist work,” while the protest group Busts 4 Justice derided the price increase as an unfair tax.¹⁴ A British teenager who assumed that tremors in her bosom were caused by her vibrating mobile phone found a baby bat nestling in the padding of her 34FF bra.¹⁵ The World Health Organization warned people not to go into Ugandan bat caves after a Dutch tourist died from the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola.¹⁶ Scientists discovered a new form of mad cow disease in the United States. ¹⁷

The European Parliament censured Italy for preemptively fingerprinting gypsies in a measure designed to reduce crime.¹⁸ Texas police were searching for a burglar who kicked a two-month-old puppy,¹⁹ and police in Germany were searching for the Rabbit Ripper, who kidnaps rabbits from their hutches, decapitates them, siphons their blood into bottles, and leaves their headless bodies on playgrounds.²⁰ Osama Bin Laden’s teenage son Hamza wrote and posted online a poem asking God for help against Western “gangs of infidels,”²¹ and Senator Barack Obama alienated many supporters by voting to authorize the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expands the government's power to spy on Americans without a search warrant and provides retroactive immunity for telecommunications firms that had cooperated with the government's previously illegal wiretaps. Earlier in the campaign, Obama had promised to filibuster any bill that provided such immunity.²² The Reverend Jesse Jackson apologized for saying of Obama that that he wanted to “cut his nuts out.”²³ Obama admitted that he disliked ice cream,²⁴ lightning struck a New Hampshire woman and exited through her nose ring, leaving her unscathed,²⁵ and Danish scientists found that infants born from once-frozen embryos had a higher birth weight and fewer twin siblings, and were less likely to suffer from abnormalities. “Only the very top quality embryos,” explained Dr. Anja Pinborg, “survive the freezing and thawing process.”²⁶