The U.S. State Department issued a report criticizing human rights abuses in China, North Korea, Iran, and Cuba. It also criticized the rights records of Jordan and Egypt, two countries where the United States has sent detainees to be interrogated. The report noted that the United States’ “own journey towards liberty and justice for all has been long and difficult,” and is “far from complete.”The New York TimesThe IndependentA bombing at a Shiite market in Sadr City, Iraq, killed at least 50 people; Shiite vigilantes responded by abducting four men, beating and executing them, and hanging them from lampposts.The New …

President George W. Bush said that allegations made by Amnesty International, claiming that the prison at Guant�namo Bay is a “gulag,” were absurd. Bush accused Amnesty of listening to “people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble–that means not tell the truth.” Whitehouse.govU.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said that HIV and AIDS were spreading at an accelerating rate around the world,ReutersNew Jersey was planning to try six animal-rights activists on “animal enterprise terrorism” charges,Reutersand an Australian woman was arrested for attempting to bring fifty-one tropical fish into the country hidden in her skirt.APSeveral prisoners at Guant�namo Bay said …

Martin Luther controlled by the Devil, 1875. The interim Iraqi government officially notified the International Atomic Energy Agency that 380 tons of extremely powerful HMX and RDX explosives that American forces simply failed to secure have disappeared from a former military facility called Al Qaqaa. The explosives can be used to destroy buildings, arm missile warheads, and detonate nuclear devices, and it was generally conceded that the Al Qaqaa cache, which was under seal by the IAEA prior to the U.S. invasion, is the most likely source of the explosives used in the extremely effective roadside and suicide bombs that …

A federal appeals court ordered President Bush to release Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was arrested last year in Chicago and has been held since then as an enemy combatant. The court ruled that “the president, acting alone, possesses no inherent constitutional authority to detain American citizens seized within the United States, away from the zone of combat, as enemy combatants.”New York TimesA class-action lawsuit was filed against the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security accusing the agencies of illegally using a national crime database to enforce civil immigration laws.New York TimesFederal investigators found videotapes of guards …

Federal authorities placed the United States on “orange alert” and American embassies in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia were closed after an Al Qaeda prisoner claimed that terror attacks were scheduled for the September 11 anniversary. The New York Lottery’s evening number came up 9-1-1 on September 11, and President Bush shed a tear during a speech on Ellis Island. Police shut down a large section of Interstate 75 after a woman named Eunice Stone thought she heard four young Arab men “laughing about 9/11″ in a Shoney’s restaurant in Calhoun, Georgia. The men, who were detained in Florida for …

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to withhold $244 million in United Nations dues if American did not regain its seat on the Human Rights Commission. “This is an affront,” sputtered Dick Armey, the House majority leader, “more to the whole notion of international human rights than it is to us as a nation.” Argentina recalled its ambassador to Cuba after Fidel Castro denounced the current Argentine government as “bootlickers of the Yankees.” Attorney General John Ashcroft delayed the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh after it was discovered that the F.B.I had failed to turn over 3,000 pages …

After a heavy lobbying campaign by the electric industry, President George W. Bush broke a campaign promise and decided not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, humiliating Christie Whitman, his EPA administrator, and effectively killing the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. The President said that he was worried about an energy crisis and that he wasn’t entirely convinced that global warming was real. OPEC decided to cut production by 4 percent in order to keep oil prices high. North and South Korea exchanged mail for the first time since the Korean War. Apparently offended by President Bush’s comments last week …

President George W. Bush, whose approval rating was at an historic low for a new president, unveiled his budget and his tax-cut proposal, and made it through his first major speech with only one minor Bushism. Agriculture Department bureaucrats announced that the government would continue to promote pork. Secretary of State Colin Powell traveled to the Middle East and proposed easing the ten-year-old sanctions on Iraq that disproportionately harm innocent civilians. The Pentagon announced a new “active denial system” that fires electromagnetic energy at people and creates a burning sensation on the surface of their skin. The weapon is meant …