HARPER'S WEEKLY REVIEW

[Kire]

WEEKLY REVIEW

The United Nations warned that 2.5 million people will die
of hunger in Niger if the country does not receive foreign
food aid immediately. President Mamadou Tandja responded
that "the people of Niger look well-fed." Mauritania,
Burkina Faso, and Mali were also facing major food
shortages. A study found that the worldwide percentage of
land stricken by drought has doubled within the last 30
years. The Space Shuttle Discovery landed safely in
California. Iran decided to start producing enriched
uranium, and the Environmental Protection Agency was
working on ways to limit the radioactivity of the planned
Yucca Mountain, Nevada, nuclear-waste dump for the next 1
million years. Wildfires were burning all across Europe.
In the south of France, fire-fighting helicopters woke an
eighty-one-year-old man from his nap; the man opened fire
on the aircraft with a rifle and, when police came to
arrest him, he beat them with saucepans. Jeanine F. Pirro,
the wife of Republican fund-raiser and convicted tax
evader Albert J. Pirro, Jr., announced that she would run
against New York Senator Hillary Clinton in
2006. President George W. Bush approved a $286.4 billion
transportation bill containing 6,371 separate projects,
and 39 people in China died after eating contaminated
pork.

A suicide car bombing in Baghdad killed 4 people, and the
mayor of Baghdad was ousted by Shiite militants. In
Jerusalem the biblical Pool of Siloam, where Jesus cured a
blind man, was discovered by sewer workers. Thousands of
Israelis rallied against the Gaza pullout in Tel
Aviv. "God will hear us," a rabbi told the crowd. A few
days later, Israel began its withdrawal from Gaza,
lowering a road barrier at the Kissufim Crossing as 200
people looked on. The barrier didn't work, so Israeli
authorities finally rigged it shut with some wire.
President Mahmoud Abbas announced that the Palestinian
general election will be delayed until January 2006, and
Palestinian authorities forced hundreds of volunteers to
stop making a 2,460-foot sandwich. The U.S. Army fired
four-star General Kevin Byrnes, head of the Army Training
and Doctrine Command, for adultery. Cream puffs with 560
calories and 47 grams of fat were selling briskly at the
Wisconsin State Fair. Pfizer patented a drug that cures
premature female orgasm. Twelve headless kangaroos were
discovered on a golf course near Melbourne, Australia. In
Brazil thieves tunneled 656 feet into a bank in order to
steal up to $65 million, and police in New Hampshire found
10 stolen Segway scooters in a garage; apparently the
thieves had been unable to sell them.

In Baghdad, U.S. troops were being killed or maimed by a
sniper they had nicknamed "Juba." A British puppeteer was
ordered to stop using a Saddam Hussein puppet as the
sausage-stealing villain in his Punch and Judy show, and
an Air Force colonel in Denver, Colorado, was in trouble
for vandalizing cars that sported pro-Bush bumper
stickers. Up to 2,000 dolphins gathered off the coast of
Wales, but no one knew why. A study found that 1 in 25
fathers was unknowingly raising another man's child, a
situation referred to as "paternal discrepancy," and a
Chinese artist was criticized for grafting the head of a
human fetus onto a bird's body. "I thought putting them
together like this," he said, "was a way for them to have
another life." Women in Sudan were committing adultery so
that they could be arrested and thus obtain a divorce;
Sudanese men are often resistant to divorce because it
requires them to return a bride's dowry. "He wasn't caring
for me," said Ding Maker, an imprisoned woman whose dowry
was 90 cows. "I don't mind staying here." A Florida man
was cited for painting "die you miserable bitch" on the
side of his house; the words were directed at his
seventy-three-year-old neighbor, who has cancer. A South
Korean man played a video game for 50 straight hours, then
died, a man in Australia was charged with bestiality with
a rabbit, and a man wearing an AC/DC T-shirt was
criticized for dancing on Ronald Reagan's grave.

-- Paul Ford

Permanent URL for this column:
http://harpers.org/WeeklyReview2005-08-16.html

[dweller]

1. Pfizer

patented a drug that cures
premature female orgasm. ???

i, but, what, huh??

dp