the current HARPER'S WEEKLY has so much useful or funny or ooky information that I'm reproducing the whole thing: >>President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and French >>President Nicolas Sarkozy revealed that Iran had a secret uranium-enrichment >>facility. The announcement, based on previously classified intelligence, came >>soon after the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution to limit the >>proliferation of nuclear weapons. “What business is it of yours,” countered >>Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “to tell us what to do or not?” >>Ahmadinejad previously said that he wanted nuclear materials only for >>“medicinal purposes.”
World leaders converged in Pittsburgh for the G-20 summit, as did protesters. City officials freed 300 prisoners so that they would have 1,000 cells available, but ended up arresting only 149 people in two days. The protesters held demonstrations against pollution, global warming, automobiles, homophobia, African debt exploitation, corporate subsidies, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, child labor, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Burmese junta, and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s presence at the summit. Anarchists in black sang, to the tune of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” “We all live in a fascist bully state.” “I feel like it’s real exclusive,” said 15-year-old Rosi Lowe of the summit, “and doesn’t represent the entire world.” A $1,000 reward was on offer in Philadelphia for information leading to the conviction of the person who wrapped a cat’s entire body in duct tape. With 15 minutes allotted to him, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi spoke to the General Assembly of the United Nations for more than an hour. During his address he tore up a copy of the U.N. founding charter, proposed resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by creating a single state called “Isratine,” and stressed that Arabs do not hate the Jews. “You are the ones who burned them,” he said to the Assembly, “not us.” He also suggested that the swine flu virus was a military weapon that escaped from a lab. Marilyn Manson announced that he had swine flu but insisted he never had sex with a pig. Two Asian men stole Rene Magritte’s painting “Olympia” from a Brussels museum during business hours, and Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old British man living on welfare, uncovered with his metal detector a treasure trove of 1,500 gold and silver Anglo-Saxon artifacts worth 1.6 million dollars. California scientists made paralyzed rats walk again. A New Zealand aircraft company auctioned off a chance to test its new jetpack, and a 310-mile-wide dust storm swept through Sydney, Australia, shrouding the city in orange powder, which one tourist described as “a nuclear winter morning.” The last Ottoman, Ertugrul Osman, died, as did Milton Meltzer, the author of nearly 100 non-fiction books for children. “You may ask, what is the relevance of all this history to the young?” Meltzer wrote. “Ours is not a past of sweetness and light, no matter what the textbook tells us.” Roman Polanski was arrested in Zurich for having sex with a thirteen-year-old American girl in 1977. A 26-year-old Filipino man cut off and boiled his father’s head with seasoning, and scientists concluded that 128,000 of Europe’s new cancers were brought on by fatness. An Indonesian woman gave birth to a nineteen-pound baby boy. California firefighters sawed through a dumbbell fastener after a man got his penis stuck in the fastener, where, over several days, it turned black and swelled to five times its original size. A Pennsylvania judge ruled that a police officer who orally violated five calves was not guilty of animal cruelty, pointing out that it was impossible to know whether the young cows were “tormented” or “puzzled,” or even irritated that the policeman’s penis was not actually food. “If the cow had the cognitive ability to form thought and speak,” reflected Judge James Moreley, “Would it say, ‘Where’s the milk? I’m not getting any milk.’“ Germany’s first nudist hiking trail, which will not officially open until May, had its soft opening, and NASA revealed that the mysterious streak of light spotted by onlookers in the night sky above North America was a fortnight’s worth of astronaut urine.<< -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
