HARPERS WEEKLY REVIEW

[Kire]

WEEKLY REVIEW

At least 42,000 people died in an earthquake in Pakistan,
and hundreds of people in Mexico, Guatemala, and El
Salvador were buried alive in mudslides caused by
Hurricane Stan. Britain accused the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard of providing Iraqi Shiite groups with the technology
to carry out bombing attacks. A suicide bomber in Iraq
blew himself up on a bus, killing ten people, and the
Supreme Court of Israel ordered the Israeli Army to stop
using Palestinians as human shields. The CIA announced
that it would not punish any of its employees for
intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, and the FBI was thinking it might
start hiring people who have admitted to using illegal
drugs. The U.S. Senate passed a $440 billion
defense-spending bill; the bill includes an amendment that
places limits on the torture of military
prisoners. President George W. Bush promised to veto the
bill if it was passed containing the amendment. Between
470,000 and one million French workers demonstrated in
support of labor rights, and two New Orleans policemen
were arrested for severely beating a 64-year-old man. Both
Democratic and Republican senators were questioning the
qualifications of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, who
has never argued a case before the Supreme Court but has
been often referred to as President Bush's "work wife."
UNICEF released a short film that shows an airstrike
attack on a village of Smurfs.

President Bush expressed concern over bird flu and asked
Congress to consider legislation that would allow the
U.S. Army to enforce quarantines in case of a
pandemic. The Church of England confirmed Dr. John
Sentamu, who was born in Uganda, as the 97th Archbishop of
York, and the Catholic Church of Scotland published a
guide to the Bible stating that the account of creation in
the book of Genesis is "symbolic." The virgin birth of
Jesus, however, is still considered to be fact. It was
claimed that President Bush had told a group of
Palestinian ministers in 2003 that he acted on divine
orders. "God would tell me," Bush said, "'George, go and
fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and
then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in
Iraq...' And I did." The White House described these
claims as "absurd." Al Gore gave a speech in New York
City. "Something," he said, "has gone basically and badly
wrong in the way America's fabled 'marketplace of ideas'
now functions." Country music star Chris Cagle announced
the birth of a new child and asked for privacy. "Both
mother and child are in good health," he wrote on his
website. "Since the birth, however, we have discovered
that biologically, the child is not mine." It was
announced that Tom Cruise had impregnated Katie Holmes,
and it was also announced that a great white shark named
for Nicole Kidman had been tracked as it swam from South
Africa to Australia and back. "We suspect," said a
scientist, "that she went for reproductive reasons." An
Indiana lawmaker proposed a bill that would require women
who want to be artificially inseminated to prove both that
they are married to someone of the opposite sex and that
they have participated in faith-based activities. An
Oregon woman was suing her doctor for trying to heal her
lower back pain by having sex with her. The doctor was
also in trouble for charging the state $5,000 for giving
the woman the treatment. A British reverend told a group
of 12-year-olds that Harry Potter was gay.

It was revealed that during the Hurricane Katrina disaster
no one actually shot at a helicopter outside of the
Louisiana Superdome, and that reports of homicides and
rapes at the Superdome were mostly false. The repetition
of rumors by the media, it is believed, slowed the
official response to the disaster. Dick Cheney's chief of
staff I. "Scooter" Libby wrote a letter to New York Times
journalist Judith Miller, giving Miller permission to
testify about their confidential conversations. "Out
West," wrote Libby, "where you vacation, the aspens will
already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their
roots connect them. Come back to work--and life." Many
felt that Libby was writing in some kind of code. A
Sicilian man woke from a more-than-two-year coma and said
that he had heard everything that happened around him
while he was unconscious, and the Vatican was expected to
announce that it will allow gay men to become priests if
the men have lived chastely for three years. A new vaccine
that prevents cervical cancer was found to be 100 percent
effective. A registered sex offender in Medford, Oregon,
was arrested after he asked a group of four girls for a
ride to the mall. The police said that the suspect was
covered in feces, but the man insisted he had just been
rolling in tomato paste. A Florida teacher was fired after
he mistook a ninth-grade student's beeping insulin pump
for a ringing cell phone and ripped it from the boy's
body, and two Oklahoma teens were arrested for shooting
eight cows and videotaping the massacre. "Cows," said one
of the teens in the video. "I hate cows more than
coppers." A Cambodian couple was in trouble for biting
their 12-year-old daughter so that they might drink her
blood, and in Australia a worker at a forensics laboratory
was under investigation for stealing parts of human brains
so that they could be injected into racehorses in order to
make the horses run faster. In Kent, Washington, a man
named Neelesh Phadnis, accused of shooting his mother and
father, defended himself by claiming that the murder was
carried out by a gang of obese Samoans and their
girlfriends. New York City was bracing for a terrorist
attack on its subways, possibly by terrorists wielding
bomb-filled strollers, and Londoners were concerned about
crack-addicted squirrels. Americans celebrated Columbus
Day, except in Berkeley, California, where they celebrated
Indigenous People's Day.

-- Paul Ford

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