Weekly Review

By Claire Gutierrez

After more than a week of fighting and one failed cease-fire, Russia and Georgia signed a revised cease-fire agreement, but Russian troops remained within 25 miles of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev promised French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who negotiated the agreement, that Russian forces would soon withdraw from Georgia. He also insisted that troops would remain in the breakaway Georgian territory South Ossetia. “The superpower showed that she was able to defend her people,” said Marina Katayeva, a 30-year-old Russian doctor. “Now we will be more respected.” Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said Russians were “twenty-first-century barbarians” who had essentially raped his country; “Can you say that, you know the victim of a rape is to be blamed for the rape because she wore a short skirt?”^{1 2} While reporting live from Gori, Tamara Urushadze, a 32-year-old Georgian TV reporter, was shot in the arm by a sniper. Urushadze looked down at the bloody scratch, then collapsed onto the ground, then, moments later, resumed her broadcast.^{3 4 5 6} In response to the crisis, President George W. Bush postponed a vacation trip to his Texas ranch by one day.⁷ Vesti FM, a Russian state-run radio station, reported that the South Ossetia conflict was part of a plot by Vice President Dick Cheney to prevent Barack Obama from being elected president of the United States,. ⁸ while in the United States it was suggested that John McCain's speech on Georgia was partly cribbed from Wikipedia. Aides to McCain said there are only so many ways to state historical facts. ⁹

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf resigned.¹⁰ The United States and Poland finalized a deal that would allow the United States to build a missile-interceptor base on Polish territory, and Ukraine offered the U.S. use of its missile-warning system. Poland, said Russian general Anatoly Nogovitsyn, “is exposing itself to a strike--100 percent.”^{11 12} The musical designer for the Beijing Olympics admitted that Lin Miaoke, the nine-year-old Chinese schoolgirl who, suspended on wires, performed “Hymn to the Motherland” at the games' opening ceremony, lip-synched the song after Chinese officials decided that the actual singer, seven-year-old Yang Peiyi, was too ugly and buck-toothed to perform before billions.¹³ Michael Phelps, the American swimmer who won eight gold medals in Beijing, revealed that he consumes more than 12,000 calories a day by eating three egg sandwiches with fried onions, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast, three chocolate-chip pancakes, two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, two pounds of pasta, and an entire pizza. ¹⁴ It was reported that few of the 9 million overweight or obese children in the U.S. could afford weight-loss summer camp.¹⁵ In a joint statement, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced that her name would be included in a state-by-state roll-call vote at the Democratic Convention,¹⁶ and economists at the University of Maryland found that more than one million votes for Obama in the Democratic primaries could be attributed to Oprah Winfrey's endorsement.¹⁷ At a forum for the presidential candidates hosted by Reverend Rick Warren, Barack Obama and John McCain were asked to define “rich.” Anyone making $250,000 or more, said Obama. “If you're just talking about income,” said McCain, “how about 5 million?”¹⁸ British scientists unveiled Gordon, the world's first robot controlled by living brain tissue.¹⁹

Trustees for a north Texas school district approved a policy change that will allow teachers to carry concealed handguns to class,²⁰ and data released by the U.S. Census Bureau showed that minorities will become the majority by 2042. “It's important to recognize that this is a choice we're making,” said Steven Camarota, a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies. “This is not weather that we have no control over.” ²¹ German researchers raised a giant reflective screen in the middle of the Swiss Alps in an effort to slow the melting of the Rhône glacier,²² and Australian scientist George Wilson called on people to eat kangaroo instead of beef to reduce global warming. ²³ Penguin Nils Olav, the Norwegian King's Guard mascot since 1972, was knighted in front of a crowd of several hundred people and 130 guardsmen. Nils, who shat himself during the ceremony, was, read the proclamation from King Harald the Fifth, “in every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood.”²⁴ Two Bigfoot hunters said they had killed one such animal and were storing its carcass in a freezer; analysts found that of the two DNA samples that the hunters provided to prove Bigfoot's existence, one was from a human and the other was 96 percent opossum.^{25 26} Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, developed a material for use in invisibility cloaks,²⁷ and a community of Welsh Cistercian monks who had been relying on a dial-up Internet connection opted to get a broadband connection. “Patience is one of the characteristics of monastic life,” said Father Daniel van Santvoort, “but even the patience of the Brothers was tested by our slow Internet.”²⁸