The ALWAYS Great Weekly Review from Harpers.org

WEEKLY REVIEW

Militants in Iraq attacked the Abu Ghraib prison, wounding
forty-four American soldiers and twelve prisoners. Britain
announced that it will pull 5,500 troops from Iraq and
increase its presence in Afghanistan, to help with the
hunt for Osama bin Laden. Syria vowed to be out of Lebanon
by the end of April, and Canada decided not to deport a
flying squirrel. An earthquake off Sumatra killed at least
one thousand people, and five American soldiers were
arrested for trying to use military aircraft to smuggle
cocaine from Colombia into the United States. A Russian
court found a museum director and an artist guilty of
creating blasphemous art and fined them $3,600 each. The
piece in question depicted Jesus on a Coca-Cola
advertisement with the words "this is my blood." In
France, radical wine producers threw sticks of dynamite at
a state agriculture office and demanded that the state
take action to stop the depression in French wine
prices. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's party won a
two-thirds majority in a rigged election, and Malawian
President Bingu wa Mutharika insisted that he was not
afraid of ghosts but did not comment on reports that one
of his predecessors had often been visited by mysterious
dwarfs. A British sex festival was cancelled because not
enough people wanted to go, and the European Union placed
a 15 percent duty on American trousers and sweet
corn. Fifty-nine former American diplomats were planning
to send a letter urging the Senate to reject John
R. Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the United
Nations, and a Saudi Arabian princess was arrested for
keeping slaves in Winchester, Massachusetts.

A former scout master in Houston, Texas, resigned from the
Lion's Club and turned himself in for sexually abusing a
blind nine-year-old boy, and a former policeman was
arrested for flying to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, in order to
molest boys. Scientists in California developed a scale
that can measure the mass of a cluster of xenon atoms. It
turns out that they weigh a few zeptograms. Harvard
students were upset that the brand-name cereals in their
dining halls had been replaced with generic brands, and
Terri Schiavo's parents authorized a direct-marketing firm
to sell a list of those who contributed to Terri's
cause. New York State legislators met their budget
deadline for the first time in twenty-one years. Cambodia
privatized the Killing Fields at Cheoung Ek; a Japanese
firm will plant flowers near the tower of eight thousand
skulls and will raise admission rates. Laura Bush spent
six hours in Afghanistan and said that she and President
George W. Bush both have living wills. A federal judge
refused to let the Bush Administration, which opposes
torture, send prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to other
prisons abroad without granting the prisoners access to
the courts. The United States announced that it will
establish nine new military bases in Afghanistan, bringing
the total to twelve; Afghanistan announced that it will
once again postpone parliamentary elections. Taliban
militants killed nine policemen in southern Afghanistan.

A new report on American intelligence failures concluded
that the Bush Administration's evidence of biological
weapons in Iraq was almost entirely derived from reports
made by an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," who was
described by those who knew him as "crazy" and "a
congenital liar." An investigation determined that the
rate of malnutrition in Iraqi children under five has
nearly doubled since the U.S. invaded, and the U.S. Army's
Psychological Operations group was developing propaganda
science fiction comic books for distribution in the Middle
East. Nearly ten years after the Oklahoma City bombing, an
FBI search found explosives in a crawl space in Terry
Nichols's former home, and Pakistan successfully
test-fired the Hatf II, a short-range nuclear-capable
missile. In Mecca, a man stabbed his father to death after
the father threatened to tattle on the man for not
praying, and in Israel, someone spray-painted the words
"murderous dog" on Yitzhak Rabin's grave. Noting their
mutual hatred of Jews, a neo-Nazi in Florida called on Al
Qaeda to join forces with the Aryan Nations, and Olga, the
first Siberian tiger ever fitted with a radio collar, was
believed to have been killed by poachers. Robert Creeley,
Terri Schiavo, Johnnie Cochran, Frank Perdue, Mitch
Hedberg, and the pope died, as did the man who wrote the
theme song to "Gidget." Turkeys attacked elementary school
students in Indiana, and the Boy Scouts' Director of
Programming was arrested on child pornography charges. A
Minnesota man threw a toddler at a policeman, and a huge
naked screaming Wisconsin man was shot as he threatened
his equally naked children with scissors. Ms. Wheelchair
Wisconsin was stripped of her title after she was caught
standing up, Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced that they
would join the PLO, and a handicapped man used a computer
chip implanted in his brain to control a television. The
Marburg virus was still killing people in Angola. Paul
Wolfowitz was confirmed as head of the World Bank, and a
Toronto man attempted to pass a Breathalyzer test by
stuffing his mouth full of his own feces. In Shanghai, a
man stabbed and killed another man for selling their
jointly owned imaginary cyber-sword without sharing the
proceeds, and after four years of hard work, 1,300
researchers in ninety-five countries concluded that humans
are destroying the world.

--Paul Ford