Cyclone Nargis tore off roofs, shredded trees, overturned cars, and killed more than 10,000 people in Myanmar.Local 6Tens of thousands of Somalis rioted in Mogadishu over the high cost of food,CNNPresident Bush pledged $770 million in international food aid,BBCand an inmate awaiting trial for murder sued an Arkansas county jail for underfeeding him after he shed 105 pounds from his 413-pound frame. “About an hour after each meal,” he stated in a complaint, “my stomach starts to hurt and growl [and] I feel hungry again. We are literally being starved to death.”CBSThe sister-in-law of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian electrician accused …

In Iraq, the bodies of fifty Shiite hostages, some mutilated or headless, were pulled from the Tigris river, and the bodies of nineteen Iraqi soldiers were found in a soccer stadium in the city of Haditha. A suicide bomber tried to assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi,Los Angeles Timesand Iraqi militants shot down a commercial helicopter, killing ten passengers; they then shot the sole survivor, the helicopter’s Bulgarian pilot, and distributed a video of the shooting on the Internet.ABC NewsIn Tehran, around 400 Iranians signed up to become suicide bombers. “As a Muslim, it is my duty,” said a mother …

CIA Director Porter J. Goss claimed that the war in Iraq is making it easier for terrorist organizations to find new recruits,Washington Postand Sunni Arab tribal chiefs insisted that they be given a role in the new Iraqi government. “We made a big mistake,” said a sheik, “when we didn’t vote.”The AgeNew York TimesAn Episcopal priest who fought in Vietnam, distraught over the war in Iraq, killed himself in Wenatchee, Washington,Seattle Post-Intelligencerand President George W. Bush nominated John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as the first director of national intelligence. Negroponte was ambassador to the U.N. from 2001-2004 and …

The Bush Administration rejected calls for an independent counsel in the matter of Valerie Plame, whose identity as an undercover CIA operative was revealed by at least one senior White House official, possibly Karl Rove, in retribution for her husband’s skeptical remarks about the president’s case against Iraq.New York TimesRove, the president’s political adviser, denied being the source of the leak, though he was reportedly fired from George H.W. Bush’s 1992 reelection campaign for leaking damaging information about a rival to Bob Novak, the very columnist who exposed Plame in July.TalkingpointsMemo.comPlame and Rove, it was reported, attend the same Episcopal …

United Nations weapons inspectors discovered 11 empty chemical warheads in southern Iraq; the inspectors said that the warheads were not included in Iraq’s weapons declaration, but Iraqi officials said that they were. Inspectors also searched the private homes of two Iraqiscientists, one of whom was upset that his clothing and his wife’s medical Xrays were examined. The inspectors later expressed surprise that the Bush Administration was making such a big deal out of the empty warheads, which have a range of 12 miles; Hans Blix, the head of the U.N. team, said the warheads were not important, and a French …

Ariel Sharon, a known war criminal, was elected prime minister of Israel; Sharon declared that the peace process was dead and that the Palestinians must submit to Israeli domination before negotiations could resume. Palestinians set off a car bomb in Jerusalem; Israeli soldiers shot and killed a teenage Palestinian goatherd. United States Secretary of State Colin Powell defended President George W. Bush’s plans to deploy the national missile defense system despite its technical and political flaws: “I don’t consider it as being an arrogant position,” he said. “Or one where we are trying to force anything on the rest of …

Dot-com stocks continued their long slide into the dustbin of history.A large man with a bushy beard ran amok and shot dead seven co-workers at an Internet consulting company near Boston.A hacker named “prime suspectz” cracked the Nasdaq’s web server and left an offensive message; he also mentioned how easy it was to penetrate a Microsoft server.There were bombings in Pakistan and Indonesia and Israel.President Andr�s Pastrana of Colombia was considering setting up an autonomous zone for the National Liberation Army, Colombia’s second-largest rebel group, that would be roughly the same size as the zone controlled by Colombia’s largest rebel …