the week at a glance

Check out this week's Harper's Weekly Review. I recommend subscribing to this... always puts things into perspective for me about how much is really going on at the same time and how absurd it all is... enjoy.

WEEKLY REVIEW

Research by U.S. epidemiologists and Iraqi physicians found
that 654,965 Iraqis have died as a result of the Iraq war,
though half of households surveyed were unsure of who to
blame for the deaths of their family members. President
George W. Bush said that he did not consider the study
"a credible report." The United States Army was planning
to maintain current troop levels in Iraq through 2010, and
to replace its advertising slogan, "An Army of One," with
a new slogan, "Army Strong." Insurgents in Baghdad fired
a mortar round at an ammunition dump on a U.S. military
base, setting off large explosions that were felt miles
away, and the judge in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial
once again expelled Hussein from the courtroom; one of
Hussein's co-defendants then called the prosecutors
"pimps and traitors" and punched a bailiff. Another
defendant declared, "I wish to be executed and finish
with this court." North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il
was said to be at risk of losing his access to McDonald's
hamburgers and Hennessy cognac if sanctions on luxury goods
are imposed in response to his country's recent nuclear
testing. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld showed
reporters a satellite image of North Korea. "Except for
my wife and family," said Rumsfeld, "that is my favorite
photo." Canadian troops in Afghanistan were finding it
difficult to destroy forests of ten-foot-tall marijuana
plants where the Taliban hide. "That damn marijuana," said
one soldier. Right-wing columnist Christopher Hitchens
confessed that he had eaten a dog.

Two trains collided while traveling in opposite directions
between the French city of Nancy and the grand duchy of
Luxembourg, killing six people. Floods killed 37 people
in Thailand, and Israeli airstrikes in Gaza killed nine
people. Libya announced that it would provide laptop
computers for 1.2 million schoolchildren, and Chinese
Wal-Mart workers unionized. Americans were claiming
political asylum in Britain. In China's Shanxi and Shaanxi
Provinces, families with dead sons complained that corpse
brides were in short supply. A study suggested that an
increasing number of British students are working as
prostitutes in order to pay their university tuition,
and California researchers found that women dress more
fashionably when they are ovulating. A Vietnamese death-row
inmate convicted of possessing heroin worth more than one
billion dong had her sentence commuted to life in prison
when she was discovered to be pregnant. A Virginia couple
were trying to give back their fifteen-year-old adopted
son, who turned out to be a sexual predator. "They just
told me he was hyperactive," said the boy's mother. A
Pennsylvania woman was arrested for beating her baby's
father with the baby. In Bombay, where the city courts
faced a backlog of 16,234,223 cases, police arrested a
drunk three-foot-tall man for extorting money from people
with a meat cleaver. "Everyone pampered him because he
was so small and cute," said the man's brother. "But he
has brought great misfortune for the family." A Minnesota
school principal resigned after shooting two orphaned
kittens on school property.

In Israel, four doctors were arrested for carrying
out illegal, non-consensual medical experiments on
their patients; the U.S. Department of Justice accused
blacks of suppressing the white vote in Mississippi;
and Adam Pearlman, the "American Al Qaeda," was charged
with treason, making him the first U.S. citizen so
indicted since World War II. Dubai's ruling family was
sued for enslaving children as camel jockeys. A family
representative argued that the suit was spurious, since
Dubai has replaced child camel-jockeys with robots. India's
Supreme Court ordered the seizure of 300 macaques who had
terrorized bureaucrats and destroyed top-secret defense
documents, and the Philippines rejected a plan to help
a monkey-infested island by importing monkey-eating
eagles. In Uganda, a mob armed with spears, machetes,
and clubs killed a lioness, mutilated the carcass, and
imprisoned the remains. Thousands of villagers in the
Indian state of Jharkhand fled their homes in order to
avoid a herd of rampaging elephants. "The elephants," said
a forestry official, "are out to avenge." "They destroy our
crops in the field," complained a farmer. "Sometimes they
damage our houses also." Donkeys were increasingly popular
with Mexican farmers. Swiss researchers in Syria discovered
the remains of an extinct species of giant camel, and a
Virginia biology teacher was suspended after compelling
her students to pose with the bones of a century-old corpse
in Pocahontas Cemetery. Walnut-related crimes were on the
rise in the United States, and a pile of jelly left over
from a wedding party's jelly-fight sparked a terrorism
alert near Leipzig, Germany. An Italian sociologist moved
into a cave, where he plans to spend the next three years;
two Indianapolis morticians ran into a burning building
to save three corpses; and fish leapt from the ocean near
Hawaii in anticipation of an earthquake.

-- Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

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