Things that happened in April 2005 (but not to me)

Five American soldiers were arrested for trying to use military aircraft to smuggle cocaine from Colombia into the US. A Russian court found a museum director and an artist guilty of creating blasphemous art and fined them $3,600 each. a Saudi Arabian princess was arrested for keeping slaves in Winchester, Massachusetts. Terri Schiavo’s parents authorized a direct-marketing firm to sell a list of those who contributed to Terri’s cause. The United States announced that it will establish nine new military bases in Afghanistan, bringing the total to twelve; An investigation determined that the rate of malnutrition in Iraqi children under five has nearly doubled since the U.S. invaded, and the U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations group was developing propaganda science fiction comic books for distribution in the Middle East. In Mecca, a man stabbed his father to death after the father threatened to tattle on the man for not praying, and after four years of hard work, 1,300 researchers in ninety-five countries concluded that humans are destroying the world.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis held a nonviolent march in Baghdad to protest the American occupation. Transcripts of legal proceedings at Guantanamo Bay were released. “I don’t care about international law,” said the president of a military tribunal in one transcript. “I don’t want to hear the words ‘international law’ again. We are not concerned with international law.”[AP] Scottish soccer fans booed during a moment of silence to honor the pope [I like their style]. Geneticists bred blue roses. It was revealed that Interior Department scientists studying the environmental effects of a proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, had made things up and deleted findings they did not understand so that the development of the dump could go forward. a nine-foot-long eel with a head as big as a soccer ball was swimming loose in Australia. It was announced that Cookie Monster would cut back on cookies. A study found that store clerks are more respectful to slender shoppers than to obese ones, a Virginia judge sentenced a spammer to nine years in jail, a Georgia man died after police shot him with nonlethal beanbags. Many conservative American pharmacists were refusing to dispense birth control.

A study found that executions by lethal injection carried out in the United States did not meet veterinary standards. Researchers found that parents tend to take better care of their better-looking children. Britain stopped importing United States corn after discovering that the United States had been sending banned, genetically modified corn to the U.K. for the past four years. A scientist cataloged 395 different species of bacteria in the lower intestines of three healthy humans, and entomologists named three newly discovered species of slime-mold beetle after George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. In Wales, a drunken man stood before an open window, dropped his trousers, and cried out, “who wants some of this?” before he fell from the window, impaled himself on a railing, and died, and a Vermont teenager was accused of breaking into a tomb and beheading a corpse. He apparently wanted to use the skull as a bong.