The Week in Review

WEEKLY REVIEW

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing report
on the CIA's unfounded, unjustified, and unreasonable claims
about Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction; the
report was oddly silent, however, about the Bush
Administration's well-documented and apparently successful
campaign to intimidate the CIA into coming up with
justifications for the President's fraudulent case for the
invasion. Senator Trent Lott was outraged by the CIA's
"totally ridiculous, uncalled for, and counterproductive"
redactions of the report and called for an independent
commission to oversee the classification of government
information. Japan's defense ministry said that it will
issue its annual defense whitepaper as a "manga" comic book.
Iyad Allawi, the prime minister of Iraq's new puppet
government, signed a law giving him the power to declare
martial law and ban seditious groups. Allawi hinted recently
that national elections, which are scheduled for January
2005, might be delayed. President Hamid Karzai of
Afghanistan was planning to delay parliamentary elections
once again, and federal authorities in the United States
were discussing the possibility of postponing the November
elections in the event of a terrorist attack. Tom Ridge, the
secretary of homeland security, warned that Al Qaeda might
be planning an attack to disrupt the November elections, but
he said that he was aware of no specific threat or details
about the alleged plan. The color-coded threat level
remained unchanged, and many observers suspected the
announcement was made to distract attention from Senator
John Kerry and his new running mate, Senator John Edwards,
whom President Bush accused of being too inexperienced. The
Pentagon revealed that pay records of George W. Bush's
National Guard service during the Vietnam War, records that
might be able to establish whether he met his military
obligations, were accidentally destroyed. A new study
concluded that children of fat people are more likely
to be fat.

The Pentagon announced the creation of military review
panels to allow prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to challenge
their detentions, though they will not be permitted to have
lawyers present, nor will the hearings be public; critics
said that the Pentagon's plan falls short of the standard
set by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the prisoners
have a right to an independent hearing. Confused brown
pelicans were crashing into streets in Arizona, because heat
waves rising from the pavement look like water. The World
Court declared that Israel's West Bank wall is illegal
because it effectively seizes Palestinian land, and Israel's
public-security minister warned that Jewish extremists might
try to assassinate Israeli leaders to prevent the planned
withdrawal from Gaza. Slobodan Milosevic wasn't feeling
well, and Kenneth Lay, the former chairman and CEO of Enron,
was finally indicted. The British House of Lords voted to
limit the right of parents to spank their children. Prime
Minister Tony Blair of Britain admitted that weapons of mass
destruction might never be found in Iraq but continued to
maintain that "we know" Saddam had such weapons: "I do not
believe there was not a threat in relation to weapons of
mass destruction." A federal appeals court ruled that the
government's standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain
nuclear-waste dump in Nevada are insufficient because they
extend for only 10,000 years. Algerian police admitted that
a June 21 explosion at a power plant was a terrorist attack
by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. A Tamil
Tiger suicide bomber killed four policemen in Colombo, Sri
Lanka, and an Israeli soldier was killed by a bomb in Tel
Aviv. Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen rebel leader, claimed to
be able to fight the Russians for another twenty years if
necessary, and he threatened to kill the next president of
Chechnya. "Whoever occupies this puppet's chair --" his days
are numbered." Jeb Bush was asked to list the angles on a
three-four-five triangle, a question that appears on the
Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which high school
students must pass to graduate. Bush replied: "I don't know,
125, 90, and whatever remains of 180?"

Federal health officials were thinking about banning the
practice of feeding pork, chicken, and other animal parts to
cattle; the pigs and chickens eat rendered cattle and thus
could transmit mad cow disease prions. There was apparently
no plan to stop feeding cattle huge quantities of cattle
blood, an obvious vector for the disease, and cattle will
continue to enjoy the feathers and excrement of 8.5 billion
chickens. The mayor of Nyahururu, Kenya, ordered the
slaughter of 500 pigs because they were mating with stray
dogs. Ireland was said to be short of priests, and the Roman
Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon, filed for
bankruptcy. In Shreveport, Louisiana, police arrested a man
in a wheelchair for shooting a man on crutches who
apparently hit the accused over the head with a crutch.
Condom supplies in much of the world were falling short.
Britain's Environment Agency said that male fish were being
changed to females by hormone-laden sewage dumped into
rivers. The EPA announced that it will fine DuPont for
failing to report significant test results relating to a
chemical used in making Teflon that was found in drinking
water near factories and in the fetus of a pregnant
employee. One hundred fifty million pieces of toy jewelry
were recalled because of high lead content. Peat bogs around
the world were releasing carbon dioxide, which is speeding
up global warming, and avian flu reappeared in Thailand and
China and Vietnam. Four organ-transplant recipients died
from rabies; all four received tissue from the same infected
donor. The European Court of Human Rights declined to extend
full human rights to fetuses, and the French parliament
banned human cloning. People in Canberra, Australia, were
warned to beware of mad starving kangaroos; at least one
golden retriever has been drowned by a kangaroo, and a woman
was attacked while out walking her poodle. A sinkhole in
Louisiana ate a giraffe and an ostrich. Scientists succeeded
in reading the mind of a monkey.

--Roger D. Hodge