From Harper's Magazine, week in review;
Hello World, I love you too!
A car bomb killed 10 people at a
Shiite shrine in Najaf,
Iraq, and a
suicide bombing killed 85 people at a Shiite mosque in Baghdad. [
BBC News]
The
U.S. military announced that 1,313
Iraqi civilians had been killed in the
sectarian violence of March. "Civil war," said
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, "has almost started among Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and those who are coming from Asia."[
BBC News][
Chron.com]
The case against Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, an
Iraqi cameraman for
CBS who was arrested in April 2005 after filming the wreckage of a
car bomb, was finally
dismissed for lack of evidence.[
ABC News]
The
Bush Administration continued to plan a major air attack on
Iran; a highly placed government consultant said that President
George W. Bush believes that "
saving Iran is going to be his legacy."[
The New Yorker]
Doctors in
London reported that a man who has taken 40,000 doses of
Ecstasy was having trouble with his short-term memory.[
The Guardian]
A
physicist in
Connecticut was looking for funding for time-travel experiments. His proposed machine, he said, "uses light in the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time."[
PhysOrg.com]
A
chiropractor in
Ohio was in trouble for telling his patients that he could cure their ills by
traveling back in time to when the injury occurred (a practice he calls "Bahlaqeem"), [
MSNBC]
and a
Swedish doctor in
Norway was fired for using an "
anal massage" technique to cure different kinds of pain, such as headaches. "I am different," explained the doctor.[
The Local]
Doctors reattached a section of
Ariel Sharon's skull.[
The New York Times]
The
Massachusetts legislature voted to make
health insurance mandatory for all state residents by July 2007.[
The New York Times]
Australia agreed to sell uranium to
China,[
The Australian]
and an
Australian nudist, attempting to kill a
spider, suffered burns over 18 percent of his body after he poured gasoline into the spider's hole and lit a match.[
The Sydney Morning Herald]
A translation of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas was released. In the text, originally written in Greek and translated into Coptic around 300 A.D.,
Jesus Christ asks his favorite disciple Judas Iscariot to turn him over to the
Romans for sacrifice.[
The New York Times]
It emerged that
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told a grand jury that when he leaked classified information favorable to the case for war in
Iraq to
New York Times reporter Judith Miller, he was acting under the specific authorization of
President Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney. Bush authorized the leak even though the intelligence in question (regarding
Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions) was considered unreliable by key administration members such as then Secretary of State
Colin Powell.[
The New York Times]
An independent study of
AIDS in
Africa, funded by an international consortium and performed in partnership with Johns Hopkins University, found that 3 percent of
Rwandans age 15 to 49 are infected with HIV, a much lower figure than the 30 percent estimated by some researchers or the 13 percent estimated by the
United Nations. Infection rates, the study found, were similarly overstated throughout East and West Africa, although in southern Africa the rate of infection remained extremely high: for example, 34.9 percent of
Botswanans in the 15 to 49 age group are infected with HIV. "From a research point of view," a British economist said of UNAIDS, "they've done a pathetic job."[
The Washington Post]
The 7,000-man
African Union peacekeeping force in
Darfur was under investigation for
raping and abusing local women and girls.[
The New York Times]
A whistleblower accused
AT&T of providing the
NSA with full access to customer phone calls and Internet usage records.[
Wired News]
German scientists announced that cells from mice testes can act like embryonic stem cells; a private company in
California said that it had achieved similar results with cells from human testes, and that it had grown new brain, heart, and bone cells from the human testes cells.[
CBS News][
Reuters]
First Lady Laura Bush welcomed 51
egg artists to the
White House for the annual egg display.[
New Kerala]
Katie Couric announced that she would leave
NBC's "Today" show to become the anchor of "The CBS Evening News,"[
The New York Times]
and a dead, noseless, cyclops
kitten was sold to a
creationist museum in
New York.[
KSAT.com]
Paleontologists announced that they had discovered a 375-million-year-old fossil in
Canada that they believe is the "
missing link" between water-dwelling and land-dwelling animals.[
Practical fishkeeping]
Scientists in
Brazil discovered a new species of tube-snouted ghost
knifefish.[
Practical fishkeeping]
In
China a woman was selected from 70 volunteers to live for seven days in a cage with
Internet access and 300
birds,[
All Headline News]
and three
New York women were suing a plastic surgeon for making their
breasts too large.[
All Headline News]
It was announced that
Slobodan Milosevic had died of natural causes.[
The New York Times]
In
North Carolina, Duke University canceled its lacrosse season after an
African-American stripper was allegedly
gang-raped by white
lacrosse-team members. Soon after the allegations emerged, Duke lacrosse player Ryan McFadyen sent an email to fellow team members inviting them to another party featuring strippers. "i plan on killing the bitches as soon as the walk in," he wrote, "and proceding to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex."[
The Smoking Gun]
California legislators were considering a law that would make it a significant crime for a
murderer to rape a victim's
corpse; corpse rapists currently receive only 16 months of prison time for that portion of their crimes.[
RecordNet.com]
Someone was mutilating and killing the
dogs of Superior Township,
Michigan,[
WHIO-TV]
and former House Majority Leader
Tom DeLay (
R.,
Tex.) announced that he would not run for reelection to
Congress. "I've never done anything in my political career," said DeLay, "for my own personal gain."[
Time]
Researchers in
Connecticut said that
global warming has led to a massive decline in the
lobster population of the Long Island Sound; however, if the polar ice caps melt and sea levels rise 30 feet, colder water might bring the lobsters back.[
The Stamford Advocate][
CTV.ca][
Chicago Sun-Times]
Polls found that while only 36 percent of Americans worry a great deal about
global warming, 90 percent were prepared to fight its effects by caulking.[
Jurnalo.com]
Many
scientists said that it was too late to stop
climate change and that the earth was "past the point of no return." "We are looking for the
devil," said a geochemist, "and we have found ourselves."[
Jurnalo.com][
The Stamford Advocate][
The Connecticut Post]
Well this is interesting and serendipitous, while assisting one of the house keepers in the resort I work for I came across some things in the trash. Normally I am not a dumpster diver, aside from all those times my dad sent me in looking for Fred Sanford’s treasure, but this looked interesting. Evidently the famous Director/producer David Barrett http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0057110/ stayed with the resort. David has made a load of movies and TV. Well David left some things behind. Evidently he was reading scripts from the Endeavor Talent Agency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endeavor_Agency and has created a little DVD showcasing his talents for the up coming CHiPs movie. (upload later) There were ten scripts total including the one for the new Dallas movie. Cool stuff. Well I am hoping to promote my own scripts/stories someday and maybe this will give me some insight.
