TW3

That Was The Week That Was … just plain mean. There are demon geese flying everywhere, I guess.

Jude

HARPERS WEEKLY REVIEW

President George W. Bush signed the Military
Commissions Act, which suspends the right of habeas
corpus for terrorism suspects and grants immunity to CIA
interrogators and government officials, such as President
Bush, for violations of the War Crimes Act. Domestic
security officials notified seven football stadiums of a
discredited threat of radiological bomb attacks out of
an “abundance of caution,” and the United States Coast
Guard announced plans to mount 7.62 mm, M-240B machine
guns on official boats in the Great Lakes. Rear Adm. John
E. Crowley Jr. said, “I don’t know when or if something
might happen on the Great Lakes, but I don’t want to
learn the hard way.” Furry crabs were found in Chesapeake
Bay. The mid-month tally for U.S. troops killed in Iraq
was 79, making October the deadliest month this year for
American soldiers. The first Eskimo was killed in the Iraq
war; it took 20 men a full day to dig his grave through
the permafrost in a town 350 miles north of the Arctic
Circle. The Maine National Guard has been offering “Flat
Daddies” and “Flat Mommies,” life-size cardboard cutouts
of deployed service members, to spouses, children, and
relatives waiting for them to return. A Gypsy pressure
group filed suit to stop British comedian Sacha Baron
Cohen’s latest film from being shown in Germany. The group
accuses him of antiziganism, or hostility to gypsies;
Cohen’s fictional alter-ego Borat claimed that Gypsies had
molested his horse. During a debate with his Democratic
rival, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana said that President
Bush (who this week compared Iraq to Vietnam) has a secret
plan for winning the war, but that Bush is not going to
share his plan with the world. White House press secretary
Tony Snow compared the President to “one of those guys at
the gym who plays about 40 chessboards at once.”

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan collapsed
from fasting during Ramadan. His security staff rushed
him unconscious to the hospital and accidentally locked
him in his car; they fought for ten minutes to break
the car’s reinforced windows with a sledgehammer and
chisel. A Denver woman was ruled criminally insane for
stabbing her 21-month-old granddaughter 62 times with
a butcher knife after she received “spiritual messages
from the geese flying overhead.” A convicted killer on
Texas death row committed suicide 15 hours before he
was supposed to die by lethal injection by slitting his
jugular vein with a makeshift blade; prison authorities
found the message “I didn’t do it” smeared in blood on
the walls of his cell. An Ohio cult leader who shot and
killed a family of five as they stood in a pit dug inside
his barn contested his upcoming lethal injection on the
grounds that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment
to execute a fat man. Coca-Cola announced plans to market
a new calorie-burning green tea beverage called Enviga, and
the mayor of Paris auctioned off City Hall’s most expensive
wines in favor of serving “little democratic wines.” In
Panama, 22 people died from ingesting poisoned cough
syrup that contained the industrial chemical diethylene
glycol, rather than the safe solvent glycerin glycol. More
than 4,500 tons of polluted material, residue from the
toxic sludge dumped in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in August,
have been collected since a clean-up effort began in
September. Scientists identified more than 200 oceanic
dead zones. The king of Spain denied that he had shot and
killed a drunken bear.

Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn elbowed a hole through
Picasso’s “Le Reve,” a painting he had just sold for
a record $139 million. Two subway trains collided at a
station in Rome, killing one person and injuring more
than 100. In Sri Lanka, Tamil rebels drove a truck full
of explosives into a convoy of military buses, killing
92 sailors. Nearly four months after the arraignment
of PFC Steven D. Green, eight other soldiers from the
101st Airborne Division faced courts-martial in Kentucky
for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl
and the killing of her family in March. In New York a
developmentally disabled handyman was hospitalized after
two teenagers sodomized him at a bowling alley with
a plumbing snake, and a Catholic priest acknowledged
having had an intimate, two-year relationship with Mark
Foley when the now-disgraced Republican congressman
was a twelve-year-old altar boy. An exhibit at the Oslo
Natural History Museum displayed homosexual behavior among
giraffes, penguins, parrots, beetles, and whales. Radical
Christian critics said organizers of the exhibition should
“burn in hell.” China insisted that the U.N. request,
rather than require, countries to inspect North Korean
cargo. An American expert called the sanctions “kabuki
theater,” and North Korea called them a “declaration
of war.” In South Korea, where scientists announced
the development of a new genetically altered strain
of adenovirus capable of destroying cancer cells, the
government warned that North Korea might be preparing to
conduct a second nuclear test. The Boy Scouts introduced a
new merit badge for learning how copyright law applies to
pirated movies and music. In New York City, CBGB closed,
but the Russian Tea Room will reopen. Scotland Yard and
the British Home Office misplaced two “extremely dangerous”
terrorism suspects. One escaped from a secure psychiatric
unit, and neither can be named for legal reasons. The
U.S. Postal Service announced that it would phase out
23,000 stamp vending machines by 2010. A Massachusetts
elementary school banned tag.

– Gemma Sieff
http://www.harpers.org/WeeklyReview2006-10-24.html

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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