Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

Lost Souls in Hell, 1875.

Emergency officials in Louisiana requested 25,000 body bags for victims of Hurricane Katrina, and a total evacuation of New Orleans was ordered. Much of the city was still underwater, though several people who lived on high ground objected to the evacuation. "I haven't even run out of weed yet," said one woman.^{1 2} Houston, Texas, the headquarters of contractors Halliburton and Baker Hughes, was preparing for a boom; one real-estate firm was offering special financing deals "for hurricane survivors only."³ Wealthy residents of New Orleans were devising ways to rebuild the city with a minimum of poor people.⁴ Barbara Bush visited the Astrodome and said that, given that the evacuees were "underprivileged anyway," things were "working out very well" for them,⁵ and Representative Richard Baker gave the hurricane credit for finally cleaning up public housing in New Orleans.⁶ The government began to award no-bid contracts for the reconstruction,⁷ and President George W. Bush signed an executive order to allow federal contractors working in the wake of Katrina to pay their workers less than the prevailing wage.⁸ When questioned by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi over his administration's response to the storm, Bush asked, "What didn't go right?"⁹ He also declared September 16 to be a national day of prayer.¹⁰ Dick Cheney toured the South. "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney," yelled Ben Marble, a Mississippi physician who lost his home in the hurricane. "Go fuck yourself." Marble was handcuffed and later released.¹¹ Republicans promised to probe themselves.¹²

It was revealed that evacuees from the hurricane had been flown to Charleston, West Virginia, where no one expected them, instead of Charleston, South Carolina, where accommodations and doctors were waiting.¹³ Doctors in New Orleans admitted that they had euthanized critically ill patients rather than leaving them to suffer. "Those who had no chance of making it," said an emergency official, "were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."¹⁴ Bob Denver, best known for his role as the hapless, incompetent, shipwrecked Gilligan, died.¹⁵ Michael Brown, director of FEMA, was found to have lied on his resume and was removed from the Hurricane Katrina relief effort and sent back to Washington, D.C., to administer FEMA at a national level. "I'm going to go home," he said, "and walk my dog and hug my wife, and maybe get a good Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night's sleep." He later resigned.^{16 17 18 19} FEMA officials asked journalists not to take pictures of dead bodies,²⁰ and China announced that the death tolls from natural disasters would no longer be classified as state secrets.²¹ Germany surpassed the United States to become the world's number-one exporter,²² and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he would veto a bill legalizing same-sex marriage.²³ A large bulge appeared in Oregon.²⁴

Up to 3.7 million gallons of crude oil leaked into the lower Mississippi River.²⁵ A car bomb in Iraq killed 16 people,²⁶ the last Israeli troops left Gaza,²⁷ and 32 police officers were injured during riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland.²⁸ Russia announced that it will build a small floating nuclear power station in the White Sea.²⁹ The Pentagon held a "Freedom Walk." Walkers were forced to register online ahead of time, to march along a fenced-in route, and to listen to Clint Black perform his song "Iraq and Roll." ³⁰ Oracle was buying Siebel, and eBay was buying Skype.^{31 32} Yahoo! admitted that it had helped China track down a journalist, Shi Tao, who had anonymously redistributed a message from the Chinese government suggesting journalists be careful about what they write. Shi is serving a 10-year sentence for revealing "state secrets."³³ It was revealed that, several months before it issued a warning, the FDA had been aware that the Guidant Ventak Prizm 2 DR heart defibrillator had a tendency to short-circuit.³⁴ Passport applicants in Britain were being told not to smile for their pictures, because smiles confuse security equipment.³⁵ Encephalitis had killed at least 600 people in India,³⁶ and a typhoon killed at least 21 people in southern Japan.³⁷ Saparmurat Niyazov, President for Life of Turkmenistan, declared that a zoo for penguins would be built where the Kara Kum desert begins.³⁸ A Brussels woman urinating in a graveyard was crushed to death by a falling gravestone,³⁹ a woman in India was freed from the outhouse where she had been confined for more than 25 years,⁴⁰ and a British man died when he fell into a giant blender.⁴¹