Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

Barack Obama announced Joe Biden, the senior senator from Delaware, as his running mate, even though Biden voted for the war in Iraq and for NAFTA and once said that Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”^{1 2} The Obama campaign denied that there was anything wrong with Biden's signing a 2005 bill that eliminated many bankruptcy protections for consumers after Biden's lobbyist son Hunter was retained for $100,000 a year by the financial-services giant MBNA, employees of which have donated $214,000 to Biden over the years.³ The Democratic National Convention opened at the Pepsi Center in Denver, with later events to be held at Invesco Field. “I have a lot of doubts that this convention is going to be as persuasive as it should be,” said former national Democratic chairman Donald Fowler, “because they've got this damn thing with Hillary.” The major news networks agreed to share the $100,000 cost of a “flying” wire-guided overhead camera intended to capture such dramatic moments as Obama's acceptance of the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech, and hundreds of protesters marched on the Pepsi Center. “The Democrats,” said one graduate student, “are an imperialist party too.”^{4 5}

John McCain, who does not know how many houses he owns, was expected to choose a running mate who opposes abortion, most likely either former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney or Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty,^{6 7} and the United States agreed to an “aspirational timetable” that calls for troops to be removed from Iraq by December 31, 2011; west of Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed 25 people at a neighborhood celebration.⁸ North Korean hunger scientists announced a new noodle.⁹ The Russian army was looting Poti, Georgia;¹⁰ planes crashed in Spain, Kyrgyzstan, and Guatemala,^{11 12 13} and eight climbers were killed in an avalanche on Mont Blanc.¹⁴ Suicide bombers blew up a munitions factory in Wah, Pakistan, killing at least 63 people.¹⁵ Three Ghanaian men, one a butcher, were arrested for the ritual murder of a hunchback,¹⁶ Someone was torturing feral cats in the Bronx,¹⁷ and police in Brooklyn were looking for a man who, after he was serviced by a one-legged prostitute in the hallway of a housing project, knocked the woman out of her wheelchair, thereby killing her.¹⁸ Scientists found that dogs can develop a sense of right and wrong, that elephants can do basic math, and that Australian Aboriginal children can count even if their local language has no words for numbers.^{19 20 21} Researchers found that women do not have a higher threshold for pain than men do, but actually suffer more,²² and an elephant in Portland, Oregon, named Rose-Tu gave birth to a 286-pound calf and immediately began to kick it.²³ France banned TV shows for babies.²⁴

Due to water shortages and rising fertilizer costs, 49 million acres of cropland were being treated with human sewage.²⁵ The Beijing Olympics ended.²⁶ The National Guard was still patrolling New Orleans,²⁷ and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) acknowledged that its voting machines, used in 34 states, were programmed with a logic error that loses votes, and that the error has been in place for ten years.²⁸ Margaret Thatcher, revealed her daughter, has dementia and often forgets that she is no longer the British prime minister. “Oh,” she said in a lucid moment, “how I wish I could do it all again.”²⁹ In Kashmir, protests that began two months ago, when 100 acres were granted to a Hindu shrine to build toilets for pilgrims, continued as hundreds of thousands of Muslims rallied against India and demanded independence;³⁰ in Singur, India, 40,000 people rallied to demand that farmers be returned the land taken from them to build a new Tata Motors factory, where the world's cheapest car is to be manufactured.³¹ Dr. Hugh R. Butt, the coagulation expert who showed that vitamin K could help halt internal bleeding, died at age 98,³² and Japanese scientists created human stem cells from a little girl's teeth.³³ Microbiologists found a virus named Sputnik that can infect larger viruses,³⁴ astronomers suggested that black holes might come in only small and large sizes, not medium,³⁵ and physicists in Geneva found that quantum entanglement travels over 10,000 times the speed of light.³⁶