Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

The United Nations warned that 2.5 million people will die of hunger in Niger if the country does not receive foreign food aid immediately. President Mamadou Tandja responded that “the people of Niger look well-fed.”^{1 2} Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Mali were also facing major food shortages.³ A study found that the worldwide percentage of land stricken by drought has doubled within the last 30 years.⁴ The Space Shuttle Discovery landed safely in California.⁵ Iran decided to start producing enriched uranium,⁶ and the Environmental Protection Agency was working on ways to limit the radioactivity of the planned Yucca Mountain, Nevada, nuclear-waste dump for the next 1 million years.⁷ Wildfires were burning all across Europe.^{8 9} In the south of France, fire-fighting helicopters woke an eighty-one-year-old man from his nap; the man opened fire on the aircraft with a rifle and, when police came to arrest him, he beat them with saucepans.¹⁰ Jeanine F. Pirro, the wife of Republican fund-raiser and convicted tax evader Albert J. Pirro, Jr., announced that she would run against New York Senator Hillary Clinton in 2006.¹¹ President George W. Bush approved a $286.4 billion transportation bill containing 6,371 separate projects,¹² and 39 people in China died after eating contaminated pork.¹³

A suicide car bombing in Baghdad killed 4 people,¹⁴ and the mayor of Baghdad was ousted by Shiite militants.¹⁵ In Jerusalem the biblical Pool of Siloam, where Jesus cured a blind man, was discovered by sewer workers.¹⁶ Thousands of Israelis rallied against the Gaza pullout in Tel Aviv. “God will hear us,” a rabbi told the crowd. A few days later, Israel began its withdrawal from Gaza, lowering a road barrier at the Kissufim Crossing as 200 people looked on. The barrier didn't work, so Israeli authorities finally rigged it shut with some wire.^{17 18} President Mahmoud Abbas announced that the Palestinian general election will be delayed until January 2006,¹⁹ and Palestinian authorities forced hundreds of volunteers to stop making a 2,460-foot sandwich.²⁰ The U.S. Army fired four-star General Kevin Byrnes, head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command, for adultery.²¹ Cream puffs with 560 calories and 47 grams of fat were selling briskly at the Wisconsin State Fair.²² Pfizer patented a drug that cures premature female orgasm.²³ Twelve headless kangaroos were discovered on a golf course near Melbourne, Australia.²⁴ In Brazil thieves tunneled 656 feet into a bank in order to steal up to $65 million,²⁵ and police in New Hampshire found 10 stolen Segway scooters in a garage; apparently the thieves had been unable to sell them.²⁶

In Baghdad, U.S. troops were being killed or maimed by a sniper they had nicknamed “Juba.”²⁷ A British puppeteer was ordered to stop using a Saddam Hussein puppet as the sausage-stealing villain in his Punch and Judy show,²⁸ and an Air Force colonel in Denver, Colorado, was in trouble for vandalizing cars that sported pro-Bush bumper stickers.²⁹ Approximately 2,000 dolphins gathered off the coast of Wales, but no one knew why.³⁰ A study found that 1 in 25 fathers was unknowingly raising another man's child, a situation referred to as “paternal discrepancy,” ³¹ and a Chinese artist was criticized for grafting the head of a human fetus onto a bird's body. “I thought putting them together like this,” he said, “was a way for them to have another life.”³² Women in Sudan were committing adultery so that they could be arrested and thus obtain a divorce; Sudanese men are often resistant to divorce because it requires them to return a bride's dowry. “He wasn't caring for me,” said Ding Maker, an imprisoned woman whose dowry was 90 cows. “I don't mind staying here.”³³ A Florida man was cited for painting “die you miserable bitch” on the side of his house; the words were directed at his seventy-three-year-old neighbor, who has cancer.³⁴ A South Korean man played video games for 50 straight hours, then died,³⁵ a man in Australia was charged with bestiality with a rabbit,³⁶ and a man wearing an AC/DC T-shirt was criticized for dancing on Ronald Reagan's grave.³⁷