Harper's Weekly Review

As a subscriber to the ever venerable Harper's Magazine, I get this weekly update via email. Here it is for your perusal...

President George W. Bush unveiled a $3.1 trillion spending package that would increase military funding while protecting tax cuts, and Wal-Mart announced an economic "stimulus plan" that offers steep discounts on thousands of items, including a five-pound bag of Tyson frozen chicken wings ($8.88) and two Hillshire Farms Cocktail Smokies or Ropes ($5). Mississippi lawmakers introduced a bill that would make it illegal for restaurants in the state to serve obese people, and an unidentified robber killed five women in a Chicago-area branch of the plus-sized clothing store Lane Bryant. A camping-goods website was selling a cheeseburger in a can.

Police in India uncovered a kidney-napping ring that preyed upon impoverished laborers, farmers, and rickshaw drivers. "I had no idea about kidney transplants," said Shakeel Ahmed, a laborer from Uttar Pradesh state. "I knew that these people meant to do evil to me. When I woke up, a doctor said I would be shot if I ever told anyone what happened."

An unidentified donor gave $130 million to Bangladesh to repair cyclone damage, and hungry Haitians were eating cookies made of mud.

Abu Laith al Libi, alleged to be a high-ranking Libyan member of Al Qaeda, was killed in a missile strike in Pakistan. An Indonesian housewife became the 103rd person to die from bird flu in that country, and an Iowa outbreak of the rare lung disease histoplasmosis, a fungal infection often spread by bird or bat droppings, was traced back to a November 29 2007 American Lung Association event at the governor's mansion.

Two earthquakes killed 30 people in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thousands of Chadians fleeing skirmishes in the capital N'Djamena sought refuge in Cameroon, and UN peacekeepers in the disputed African territory of Western Sahara were reprimanded for defacing ancient rock paintings on Devil Mountain. Remnants of a 7,000-year-old city were found in Egypt's Fayyum oasis. Egypt and India were afflicted with limited Internet service, and power failures in South Africa closed mines and shopping centers for several days.

In China, where hundreds of thousands of people traveling for the Lunar New Year remained stranded by winter storms, a woman was trampled to death in a stampede to board a train. Groundhog Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, signalling six more weeks of winter, and John Edwards pulled out of the presidential race, saying he would step aside "so that history can blaze its path." California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed Republican candidate John McCain, while Schwarzenegger's wife, Maria Shriver, the niece of John F. Kennedy, endorsed Barack Obama.

The Pentagon said that nine Iraqi civilians had been killed in a strike intended for militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. West Virginia was considering a bill that would require gym classes to teach middle-schoolers how to handle a gun. In Pennsylvania a woman locked her ten-year-old grandson in a dog crate and threatened to bury him alive in the backyard after he disclosed that he had been spiking his family's drinks with lamp oil and household cleaner, and in Britain retail chain Woolworths withdrew from sale a bed for six-year-old girls called the Lolita Midsleeper Combi after receiving complaints from parents. "We had to look it up on Wikipedia," said a store spokesman. "But we certainly know who she is now."

It was reported that a sedentary lifestyle speeds aging, and new pictures of Mercury revealed the elderly planet's spider-shaped birthmark, shrinkage, wrinkles, and scars. The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots to win Superbowl XLII, while the NFL refused to allow churches to show the game on big-screen televisions.

Seventeen Russian tourists visiting a spa in the Caucasus were hospitalized after a nurse accidentally administered hydrogen-peroxide enemas, and a Japanese urologist noted an increase in "vaginal ejaculation disorder, or an inability to ejaculate inside the vagina," among Japanese men, crediting it to "incredible progress made in masturbation goods." British scientists announced that it would soon be possible to convert female bone marrow into viable sperm cells, hastening the obsolescence of men.