Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

At the third OPEC summit in 47 years, held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that the price of crude oil could reach $200 a barrel. “The basis of all aggression,” said Chavez, “is oil.” During a private meeting that was accidentally televised, the oil minister of Venezuela suggested to the oil minister of Iran that OPEC stop using the crippled dollar for pricing; the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia countered that public discussion of the weak dollar would cause U.S. currency to lose value. “Kill the cable!” shouted a security guard as he ran into the meeting room, “Kill the cable!”^{1 2} An economist with financial services firm UBS AG put the odds of a U.S. recession at 45 percent.³ Iran was still enriching uranium,⁴ and alleged Al Qaeda treasurer Abdelhamid Sadaoui was killed in Tizi Ouzou by the Algerian army.⁵ Cyclone Sidr killed 3,000 Bangladeshis even though the cyclone's fury was dampened by mangrove forests near the coast,⁶ and ships carrying at least 2,000 tons of oil and 6,000 tons of sulfur sank in a storm in the straits between the Black Sea and the Azov Sea, killing at least three sailors and 30,000 birds.⁷ U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte called on President General Pervez Musharraf to end emergency rule in Pakistan. “Emergency rule,” said Negroponte, the ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, “is not compatible with free, fair and credible elections.”⁸ A fire at a gas pipeline south of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killed 28 people,⁹ and 96 Sudanese died of Rift Valley Fever.¹⁰

Former minister Amon Paul Carlock, also known as Klutzo the Clown, who was arrested after photos of naked Filipino orphans were found on his laptop, died in a Springfield, Illinois, prison after he was Tasered by a corrections officer.^{11 12} Monkeys rampaged in New Delhi, injuring 25 people and chewing on a baby's leg,¹³ and Oregon scientists claimed to have cloned a rhesus macaque embryo.¹⁴ An Iceland firm, deCODE Genetics, announced that it would offer personal gene profiling, as did Los Angeles-based 23andMe, which is backed by Google. Included in the $999 profile offered by 23andMe is an estimate of how closely one is related to historical figures and celebrities like Jimmy Buffett.^{15 16 17} Amazon introduced a wireless device designed to replace books.¹⁸ It was reported that Blake Miller, the “Marlboro Marine” made famous when a photo of him smoking in Fallujah was widely published, now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and lives in a trailer behind his father's house with a dog named Mudbone tied in the yard. Miller, unable to discuss certain things that happened in Fallujah (saying only that “to kill the snake, we had to cut off its head”), is recently divorced and remains a heavy smoker.¹⁹ Mr. Whipple died.²⁰

Former San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds was indicted on charges of perjury and obstructing justice for lying about steroid use.²¹ Chinese pork provider Pengcheng held a public pig-carcass-shaving to demonstrate that its meat would be sanitary and safe to eat at next year's Olympic Games; rival meat purveyors Qianxihe Group were raising special organic-fed Olympic pigs that are treated with traditional herbal medicines and given two hours of exercise each day.²² A Japanese whaling fleet, trailed by a Greenpeace vessel, was under sail with orders to kill 1,000 whales, including 50 humpbacks.²³ A man in rural Tennessee was accused of raping his teenage daughters, whom he controlled with wireless electric-shock dog collars;²⁴ an Atlanta wrestler named Hardbody Harrison, who calls his fists “The Pork Chop” and “The Biscuit Cutter,” was on trial for keeping nine women as sex slaves;²⁵ and a Washington man was arrested after he beat his girlfriend for giving him a wet willie.²⁶ British scientists working with negative index metamaterials said that they were developing a technique that could someday be used to capture a rainbow.²⁷ Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary,²⁸ and it was announced that former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband of 55 years, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, was in a romantic relationship with another woman; O'Connor reportedly was happy to visit the new couple as they sat on a porch swing holding hands. “A broken heart,” explained a brain imaging research scientist, “looks different in somebody old.”²⁹