Weekly Review

Two suicide car bombs blew up in central Baghdad, killing fifteen and injuring thirty.¹ A bomb in Kirkuk killed twelve Iraqi guards,² an American contractor was kidnapped north of Baghdad,³ and Marla Ruzicka, an activist from California who made it her mission to count the number of civilian casualties in Iraq, was killed in Baghdad by a suicide bomber.⁴ The Iraqi army intervened to end a widely publicized hostage crisis in al-Madain, south of Baghdad, but found no hostages.⁵ In the United States, Eric Rudolph, a Christian terrorist, pleaded guilty to several bombings, including those at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, an abortion-clinic bombing in 1998, and an attack on a gay nightclub in 1997.⁶ Prompted by the credit-card industry, which made $30 billion in profits last year, the House approved new legislation that will make it much harder for families to declare personal bankruptcy.⁷ ⁸ Fewer than half of all Californians approved of the job Arnold Schwarzenegger was doing as governor,⁹ and zoo officials in Johannesburg, South Africa, were pressuring one of their chimps to stop smoking.¹⁰ The president of Brazil visited Senegal, where he apologized for Brazil's role in the slave trade.¹¹ As pilgrims washed away their sins in India's sacred Narmada River, a dam was opened upstream, releasing a wall of water that drowned fifty-two people.¹² Catholic cardinals convened a conclave,¹³ and a Christian radio talk-show host was fired for questioning whether the dead pope would go to heaven.¹⁴ One-foot-tall talking Jesus, David, Mary, and Moses dolls will be sold in June.¹⁵ The United Nations released a video game called “Food Force” that lets players pretend they are feeding the starving,¹⁶ and the International Monetary Fund announced that sub-Saharan Africa's economy had grown 5 percent last year, with inflation at its lowest in twenty-five years.¹⁷ The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 420 points; pharmaceutical stocks, however, continued to rise.¹⁸ A study found that executions by lethal injection carried out in the United States did not meet veterinary standards. ¹⁹ The European Union decided to admit Bulgaria and Romania in 2007.²⁰ Bosnia was exporting snails.²¹

HARPER'S MAGAZINE

IN THE NEWS

A mountain of an issue (Lexington Herald-Leader). Profile of Erik Reece, author of “Death of a Mountain: Radical Strip Mining and the Leveling of Appalachia” in the April Harper's Magazine.

E. E. Cummings Scholar Is Accused of Plagiarism (New York Times). Harper's Magazine Contributing Editor Wyatt Mason takes on Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno's new biography of e. e. cummings in the May Harper's Magazine—and finds Sawyer-Lauçanno guilty of plagiarism. (See also: Boston Herald, Guardian)

Bashing the Rich, Then Celebrating at a Hub of Commerce (New York Times). All about The American Ruling Class, a new documentary film written by Harper's Magazine Editor Lewis H. Lapham.

Subscribe to Harper's for only $14.97 a year!

The Governor of Wisconsin announced that he opposed cat hunting.²² Researchers found that parents tend to take better care of their better-looking children.²³ American and Japanese scientists proclaimed cloned cattle safe to eat,²⁴ a Danish study found no link between cell phones and brain tumors,²⁵ and scientists at Yale University used lasers to control headless fruit flies.²⁶ Britain stopped importing United States corn after discovering that the United States had been sending banned, genetically modified corn to the U.K. for the past four years,²⁷ and brewer Anheuser-Busch, America's number one buyer of rice, announced that it will no longer buy rice from Missouri if that state allows genetically modified rice to be grown within its borders.²⁸ A new species of titi monkey, golden-crowned with a white-tipped tail, was discovered in Bolivia; it will be known as the GoldenPalace.com monkey.²⁹ Scientists used infrared technology to read lost works by Sophocles, Euripides, and Hesiod,³⁰ and a London grandmother coldcocked a burglar with a garden gnome.³¹ A scientist cataloged 395 different species of bacteria in the lower intestines of three healthy humans,³² and entomologists named three newly discovered species of slime-mold beetle after George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.³³ Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refused to answer when asked if he sodomized his wife Maureen.³⁴ Hungary was planning to let prostitutes solicit in shopping malls,³⁵ and Jenna Bush, the president's daughter, got on all fours and did the “butt dance.”³⁶

Samples of the deadly Asian flu were accidentally mailed out to 3,700 labs worldwide. Several samples were missing.³⁷ A garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing at least one hundred people;³⁸ six died when an election rally in Togo turned violent;³⁹ and Indonesian children, traumatized by last December's tsunami, were talking about their feelings with puppets.⁴⁰ Researchers found that keeping pigs cool helps them grow fatter.⁴¹ U.S. marshals arrested more than 10,000 people on outstanding warrants, nearly half of them for minor drug offenses,⁴² and the $90 million Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum opened in Springfield, Illinois. It features special effects created by Stan Winston Studios--which did the effects for Jurassic Park--and a life-sized model of Navy Secretary Gideon Welles with a terrible toupee.⁴³ One hundred thirty-seven million people were overweight in China,⁴⁴ and America's 7 million vending machines were being visited by 100 million people a day.⁴⁵ After returning to Afghanistan from the United States, where he underwent heart surgery, an Afghan toddler died.⁴⁶ In Wales, a drunken man stood before an open window, dropped his trousers, and cried out, “who wants some of this?” before he fell from the window, impaled himself on a railing, and died,⁴⁷ and a Vermont teenager was accused of breaking into a tomb and beheading a corpse. He apparently wanted to use the skull as a bong.⁴⁸

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