President George W. Bush dismissed growing complaints that he exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq in the buildup to the invasion and invited Iraqis who remain loyal to Saddam Hussein to attack American troops: “There are some who feel like that if they attack us, that we may decide to leave prematurely,” he said.”My answer is: bring them on.We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”Orlando SentinelResistance to the occupation continued to escalate; in one incident, a man walked up to an American soldier who was waiting in line to buy a drink at Baghdad University, said …

The Supreme Court of the United States decided that it was no longer okay to execute retarded people, because a “national consensus” has emerged that such judicial killings are cruel and unusual punishment and are thus, in light of “evolving standards of decency,” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. The Court offered little guidance for determining what constitutes “retarded.” After a series of Palestinian suicide attacks, including an attack on a home in Itamar, a Jewish settlement near Nablus, in which a mother and her three children were murdered, Israel’s security cabinet voted to seize the entire West …

Attorney General John Ashcroft approved a new emergency policy that will allow the government to monitor conversations between federal prisoners and their lawyers and to read such mail. The president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers denounced the policy as “an abomination” that violates the Sixth Amendment right to an attorney. The government said it would no longer issue a running tally of the number of people arrested in its investigation of the September 11attacks. At last count, 1,182 people had been detained; the Justice Department has refused to say who is being held, under what charges, or …

Serbia‘s prime minister gave Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague to be tried for war crimes even though doing so was technically illegal; the prime minister of Yugoslavia resigned in protest. The International Court of Justice rebuked the United States for executing two German brothers in 1999 without following established international law, which required the German consulate to be notified of the men’s arrest and conviction. American and British warplanes bombed Iraq again, killing three people. Dissidents from the Ivory Coast filed suit against President Laurent Gbagbo in Belgium, whose courts, oddly enough, have universal jurisdiction in crimes against humanity. Ethnic …

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus tried unsuccessfully to block the acceptance of Florida’s electoral votes during a joint session of Congress. Federal law requires at least one senator and one member of the House to sign a formal objection questioning a state’s electoral votes; no senator was willing to sign. Black congressmen repeatedly interrupted the proceedings and were repeatedly “gaveled down” by Vice President Al Gore, who presided cheerfully over his own electoral demise.Hillary Rodham Clinton was sworn in as the junior senator from New York; Strom Thurmond, the oldest senator in history, rose up and asked, “Can I …

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 …

Bethlehem was empty this Christmas, devoid of lights or trees or public celebrations, having been sealed off by the Israeli army.Jerusalem’sChristian churches endorsed Palestinian demands for sovereignty in East Jerusalem; they condemned Israeli violence against demonstrators and noted that an oppressed people living under a military occupation has the moral right to resist its overlords.The United Nations Security Council rejected Palestine’s request for U.N. peacekeepers; United States Ambassador Richard Holbrooke commented that “this is a resolution that will never be adopted.” The Supreme Court of Zimbabwe ordered President Robert Mugabe to come up with a viable land-reform program, declaring his …

Pentagon investigators acknowledged that American troops had massacred unarmed Korean civilians near No Gun Ri at the beginning of the Korean War, but claimed there was no evidence of direct orders from superiors to kill the Koreans, which would constitute a war crime.Former Congressman Pete McCloskey, a member of the civilian advisory panel to the investigation, pointed out that in fact one officer and nine enlisted men said they had received such orders.Many countries were trying unsuccessfully to get the United States to join the International Criminal Court; Henry Kissinger and other former U.S. government officials, who perhaps had good …

Data from the Galileo spacecraft yielded evidence that Europa, Jupiter’s second moon, may have salty liquid oceans beneath its icy shell, increasing the likelihood of finding life there. Austrian scientists discovered bacteria living among the clouds. The National Institutes of Health issued rules allowing researchers who receive federal funds to use human embryonic stem cells in their studies. Richard Hatch won the Survivor game show. Three men beat a Gypsy woman, a mother of eight, to death in Slovakia. Experts urged the United Nations to improve its peacekeeping department by adding an intelligence unit. Against the advice of senior Justice …