Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

President George W. Bush said that allegations made by Amnesty International, claiming that the prison at Guantánamo Bay is a “gulag,” were absurd. Bush accused Amnesty of listening to “people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble--that means not tell the truth.” ¹ U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said that HIV and AIDS were spreading at an accelerating rate around the world,² New Jersey was planning to try six animal-rights activists on “animal enterprise terrorism” charges,³ and an Australian woman was arrested for attempting to bring fifty-one tropical fish into the country hidden in her skirt.⁴ Several prisoners at Guantánamo Bay said they were sold to the United States by Pakistani tribesmen who wanted a bounty. ⁵ The Maldives decided to become a democracy,⁶ and Donald Rumsfeld said that he did not know how foreign suicide bombers were getting into Iraq.⁷ It was revealed that the aviator Charles Lindbergh had seven illegitimate German children by three German mistresses.⁸ Seven hundred thousand chickens expired during a power blackout in Moscow that cut off their ventilation; not long afterward the dead chickens started exploding.⁹ Thousands of hungry people demonstrated in Niger.¹⁰ The CIA was running its own fleet of twenty-six airplanes, owned by seven shell companies,¹¹ and Deep Throat turned out to be a ninety-one-year-old former FBI official named W. Mark Felt.¹²

A fire in Watertown, South Dakota, killed thirteen thousand turkeys.¹³ Berlin police, acting on a kidnapping tip, stopped a car and pulled a man from the car's trunk; it turned out the man, wearing only a thong and collar, was a voluntary sex slave.¹⁴ Zoo officials in Japan were worried that Futa, the red panda that became famous when it stood up on two legs, would be worn out by all of the attention. “His primary purpose here,” said an official, “is to mate.”¹⁵ Saudi Arabia was considering whether women should be allowed to drive.¹⁶ In New York City, a nine-year-old girl stabbed an eleven-year-old girl named Queen Washington to death. The girls were fighting over a pink rubber ball.¹⁷ A jet-skiing man was decapitated off Long Island when he ran through a boat's anchor line,¹⁸ and a man in Narrogin, Australia, died when he fell into a meat grinder.¹⁹ Switzerland gave gay couples tax and inheritance rights, but will not allow them to adopt children,²⁰ and the American Family Association called on its members to boycott Ford, saying that the auto-maker promotes the homosexual lifestyle. They suspended the boycott a few days later.²¹ Scientists found that a single “switch gene” determined whether a fruit fly turned out gay or not.²² An Illinois man burned down his house in order to clear it of crackheads,²³ and a woman in Pennsylvania offered her newborn baby's clothes as a billboard for advertising. “Everyone looks at babies,” she said.²⁴ Ralph Nader called for the impeachment of George W. Bush based on reports of the Bush Administration “fixing” the intelligence over Iraq. John Kerry wondered why the intelligence-fixing, which came to light in a leaked British memo, has received so little attention in the United States. “Is there a way for this to break through,” he asked, “ever?”^{25 26} A young colobus monkey escaped from the Belfast Zoo after having an an argument with his dad. ²⁷ Five Buddhist monks in Nong Khai, Thailand, were defrocked for brawling with other monks from a rival temple. “When an ordinary person is given a middle-finger sign he will be mad; so am I,” said monk Boonlert Boonpan.²⁸

In Spain, a quarter of a million people protested against the government's plan to negotiate with Basque separatists,²⁹ and in Beirut, a bomb killed Samir Kassir, a Lebanese journalist who opposed the Syrian occupation. Hundreds of people attended his funeral.³⁰ A bomb in Kandahar, Afghanistan, killed twenty people,³¹ and unidentified men attacked two villages in Ivory Coast, killing at least forty-one people.³² A group of men in the Philippines, naked save for head scarves and caps, protested cuts in education funding.³³ Latvia ratified the European Union Constitution.³⁴ A grizzly bear killed a woman near a golf course in Canada.³⁵ Stanislaw Dziwisz, the longtime aide and confidant of Pope John Paul II, revealed that he had refused to obey the dead pope's request that all his papers be burned.³⁶ Haim Yavin, one of the founders of Israel's state television channel and the country's most respected news presenter, broadcast a documentary showing Israel's occupation of Palestine as brutal. “I cannot really do anything to relieve this misery,” he said, “other than document it.”³⁷ Two Israeli soldiers said that they were ordered to take part in revenge killings of Palestinians. “It doesn't matter,” one of the soldiers said he was told. “They took six of ours, and we are going to take six of theirs.” His unit went on to kill three Palestinians in an ambush. “And we acted flawlessly,” said the soldier. “We performed superbly.”³⁸ Israel released three hundred ninety-eight Palestinian prisoners,³⁹ and announced that it would build twenty-two more homes in the West Bank.⁴⁰ Mahmoud Abbas postponed Palestinian elections until an unspecified date.⁴¹ The Supreme Court made it impossible to obtain medical marijuana.⁴² A care worker at a Japanese mental home was arrested for unleashing feral dogs to keep patients in their rooms,⁴³ and the British children's home Strawberry Field, which inspired the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” closed.⁴⁴ A British man, happily married for eighty years, was asked for the secret to marital bliss. “'Yes, dear',” he explained.⁴⁵ Seventy-four false killer whales (which are less aggressive than true killer whales, but, like true killer whales, are not whales but dolphins) beached themselves in Australia. One thousand five hundred volunteers worked to return seventy-three of the whales to the sea; one whale died. A volunteer described the whales as “very heavy.”^{46 47} Scientists began work on a complete, molecule-level computer simulation of the human brain. The project will take at least ten years.⁴⁸