The Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing report on the CIA’s unfounded, unjustified, and unreasonable claims about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction.
Japan’s defense ministry said that it will issue its annual defense whitepaper as a “manga” comic book. [Reuters]
Federal authorities in the United States were discussing the possibility of postponing the November elections in the event of a terrorist attack. Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security, warned that Al Qaeda might be planning an attack to disrupt the November elections, but he said that he was aware of no specific threat or details about the alleged plan.
The Pentagon revealed that pay records of George W. Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam War, records that might be able to establish whether he met his military obligations, were accidentally destroyed.
The Pentagon announced the creation of military review panels to allow prisoners at Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions, though they will not be permitted to have lawyers present, nor will the hearings be public; critics said that the Pentagon’s plan falls short of the standard set by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the prisoners have a right to an independent hearing.
Confused brown pelicans were crashing into streets in Arizona, because heat waves rising from the pavement look like water.
The British House of Lords voted to limit the right of parents to spank their children.
A federal appeals court ruled that the government’s standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump in Nevada are insufficient because they extend for only 10,000 years. [New York Times]
Federal health officials were thinking about banning the practice of feeding pork, chicken, and other animal parts to cattle; the pigs and chickens eat rendered cattle and thus could transmit mad cow disease prions. There was apparently no plan to stop feeding cattle huge quantities of cattle blood, an obvious vector for the disease, and cattle will continue to enjoy the feathers and excrement of 8.5 billion chickens.
Condom supplies in much of the world were falling short, and [New Scientist] Britain’s Environment Agency said that male fish were being changed to females by hormone-laden sewage dumped into rivers. The EPA announced that it will fine DuPont for failing to report significant test results relating to a chemical used in making Teflon that was found in drinking water near factories and in the fetus of a pregnant employee. [New York Times]
Four organ-transplant recipients died from rabies; all four received tissue from the same infected donor. [New York Times]
The European Court of Human Rights declined to extend full human rights to fetuses, and the [New York Times] French parliament banned human cloning.
[Reuters] People in Canberra, Australia, were warned to beware of mad starving kangaroos; at least one golden retriever has been drowned by a kangaroo, and a woman was attacked while out walking her poodle. [Associated Press] A sinkhole in Louisiana ate a giraffe and an ostrich. [New York Times] Scientists succeeded in reading the mind of a monkey. [New Scientist]