Yearly Review

Two thousand seven hundred twenty-two days after U.S. troops crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, U.S. combat operations there officially ended. The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan turned older than the Soviet Union’s 3,339-day campaign in the country. Twenty-one percent of young veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were unemployed, Iraqi government officials said that some 58,000 stray dogs in Baghdad had been poisoned or shot, and Target, a dog rescued from Afghanistan after she alerted troops to a suicide bomber and saved dozens of soldiers, was accidentally euthanized. The Supreme Court upheld the right to record women crushing small animals with their feet and overturned two precedents to rule that the government cannot ban corporations from spending money in political elections. The U.S. House and Senate finalized a watered-down, 2,000-page financial-reform bill. “Not to be funny about it,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the FCIC, “but my daughter asked me… ‘What’s the financial crisis,’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s something that happens every five to seven years.’” The Texas State Board of Education voted to revise its social-studies curriculum, mandating that the U.S. government should not be called “democratic,” and Republicans took control of the House. A Virginia judge voided the provision in Obama’s health-care law requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance. A Texas newborn with a heart defect was denied health insurance because of his pre-existing condition. “It would be hard to argue that we’re going backwards,” said Obama. “I think what you can argue is we’re stuck in neutral.”

An earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter scale hit Haiti. The media questioned whether it was appropriate for journalists in Haiti to be wearing tight T-shirts on air. A 42-year-old man died of stroke after becoming over-excited while watching the film “Avatar,” and video surfaced of an Indonesian two-year-old smoking and propelling himself around on a toy truck because he is too out of shape to toddle. An unemployed security worker won Spain’s first siesta championship. A three-year-old girl in South Korea died of starvation while her parents played a child-rearing game online, a Kentucky man was charged with wanton endangerment after he got drunk and put his five-week-old son to bed in an oven, and a Georgia mother punished her 12-year-old son for his bad grades by forcing him to hammer to death his pet hamster. The body of a registered Japanese centenarian was found in her son’s backpack. A Minnesota couple asked visitors to their website to vote on whether they should keep or abort the wife’s fetus, and a woman in Florida live-tweeted her abortion. “Definitely bleeding now,” read one tweet. The birth-control pill turned 50. J.D. Salinger, Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby, and the world’s ugliest dog died, as did Viva Leroy Nash, the oldest U.S. death-row inmate, of natural causes. PETA proposed replacing Punxsutawney Phil with a robotic stand-in to celebrate Groundhog Day, and the American Kennel Club announced that it will let mutts, or “All Americans,” compete in shows. In advance of a visit from 5′4″ President Dmitry Medvedev, a Russian town, Omsk, took down posters for a children’s theater show that read, “We await you, merry gnome,” and England’s Prince William agreed to blow a young boy’s vuvuzela. New Jersey police forced a woman to put clothes on a Venus de Milo snow sculpture.

BP claimed it may have trouble covering the costs of the Deepwater Horizon spill if it is prevented from further drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The twenty-first winter Olympic Games opened in Vancouver without enough snow, a piece of ice measuring 100 square miles broke off of Greenland, and researchers determined that climate change could make the world more fragrant. The five-story-tall Taylor Glacier in Antarctica was spewing a blood-red waterfall. British researchers said that the G-spot does not exist and concluded that the chicken came before the egg. Scientists learned that the “mustache” worn by the male Molly fish in Mexico attracts females, who are sexually stimulated when the mustache is rubbed against their genitals, and that the erect penis of the giant squid is almost as long as its entire body. Exposure to antidepressants in the ocean was making shrimp suicidal, and female snails exposed to the chemical TBT were growing penises from their heads. A pair of swans stunned staff at a British wildfowl sanctuary by becoming only the second couple in 40 years to divorce. Seventy-five starlings fell from the sky in Somerset, England, and 10,000 birds were trapped in the twin beams of light projected up from the World Trade Center site, dazzled and unable to return to their migratory paths. Russia announced plans to divert the asteroid Apophis, which has a “1-in-250,000” chance of striking Earth in 2036; an Oregon man found a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite on the side of the road; and the Hubble Space Telescope captured images of a sun-like star eating a nearby planet. At a museum in Paris, the cable holding Foucault’s first pendulum snapped, leaving the bob to crash to the marble floor, where it was damaged beyond repair.