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Weekly Review

As Libyan forces converged on Muammar Qaddafi's last
redoubts countrywide, documents recovered in Tripoli
showed that the CIA and MI6 had helped Qaddafi persecute
dissidents, including Abdul Hakim Belhaj, military
commander of Libya's national transitional government,
whom the CIA rendered back to the country from Asia in
2004. "I wasn't allowed a bath for three years and I
didn't see the sun for one year," said Belhaj. "They
hung me from the wall and kept me in an isolation
cell. I was regularly tortured." "It can't come as a
surprise," said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood,
"that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign
governments to help protect our country from terrorism
and other deadly threats." Human Rights Watch, which
found the documents, reported that a letter from former
senior operations official Stephen Kappes to then Libyan
intelligence chief Moussa Koussa began "Dear Musa" and
was signed "Steve," and that as Qaddafi began losing his
grip on power he tried to draft 10,000 fighters from the
Somali Salvation Front in Puntland. An Associated Press
investigation concluded that 120,000 people have been
arrested and 35,000 convicted on terrorism-related
charges worldwide since 9/11, U.S. airstrikes helped
kill 30 suspected Al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen, the
U.S. military completed its first month without a
fatality in Iraq since the start of the war there, and
WikiLeaks released a diplomatic cable backing claims
that U.S. troops shot at least ten handcuffed Iraqi
civilians, including five children, in the town of
Ishaqi in 2006, then called in an airstrike to cover up
the act. The document was one of 250,000 published by
WikiLeaks--the organization's entire, unredacted
U.S. diplomatic-cable archive, which contained
informants' names and which reporters learned had been
posted online months earlier, encrypted with a publicly
available password. "If I had a very nervous person, who
had secret documents I wanted to share," said journalism
professor C.W. Anderson, "I would not come near them
with a 10-foot pole." Scientists turned a mouse brain
transparent.

World markets fell after the Labor Department reported
no growth in the number of U.S. jobs in August, while
census data showed that local and state governments cut
more than 200,000 jobs in 2010. President Barack Obama
agreed to delay an address to Congress on employment at
the insistence of House Speaker John Boehner, and
ordered the Environmental Protection Agency not to
enforce new limits on smog emissions. A man in Virginia
beheaded himself with an SUV while towing a burning
trailer. A bodyboarder was torn in half by a shark in
Australia; an LDS missionary returned home to Utah after
losing an arm and part of a leg to two lions at a
Guatemalan zoo; a dismembered foot washed ashore in
Vancouver, the eleventh to turn up on the Pacific
Northwest coast since 2007; and a Colorado logger
amputated the toes from his right foot with a
pocketknife after a trailer fell on him in the
forest. "The three smaller toes were easy, but it took
some work to cut through the tendons on the two big
toes," he said. "Plus, at that point the blade was
getting dull." The U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency
announced that it would sue 17 banks over losses on
mortgage-backed investments, while an Institute of
Policy Studies report claimed that 25 U.S. CEOs made
more money than their companies paid in taxes last year,
and that the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay increased
from 263:1 to 325:1. Canada lifted a ban on "Money for
Nothing," Germany lifted a ban on "Doom," and a
Canadian-German research team hunted Black Death in the
U.K. Transylvanians fought to keep Canadians from
exploiting a massive lode in a historic gold-mining
village. "It's unbelievable that a Canadian company
would have the nerve to come and teach us how to extract
gold," said retired miner Eugen Cornea. "We have been
doing it for 2,700 years. What was Canada in 700 B.C.?"

An Edmonton hair salon defended its ad showing a man
standing between a woman with a black eye and the
tagline "Look good in all you do," and an Indiana man
was charged with child abuse after allegedly beating his
three grandchildren during a Grand Canyon hike, forcing
them to walk on ulcerated blisters and to vomit, and
denying them water despite their lips being sunburned
off. The boys also had severely chafed groins because
they weren't permitted underwear. Researchers determined
that children who experience accelerated puberty are
more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, and
four-year-old Maddy Jackson padded her chest and bum for
"Toddlers and Tiaras," an American reality-television
show about child beauty pageants. "When she wears the
fake boobs and the fake butt it's just like an added
extra bonus," said the girl's mother. "Hopefully the
judges will perceive it in good taste," said her
stylist. The Guinness Book of World Records agreed that
Tajikistan had a longer flagpole than Azerbaijan, and an
Ohio man was caught having sex with an inflatable raft,
nine years after being caught having sex with an
inflatable pumpkin. A Dublin bar where a 15-year-old
girl was allegedly raped in June was found to be hosting
parties where patrons could exchange panties for drinks,
Ohio police puzzled over the origin of 1,700 pairs of
panties strewn along a road outside Columbus, and the
AARP counseled people over 50 never to say the word
"panties." Male MPs in Zimbabwe fulminated against a
call from the country's female deputy prime minister
that they be circumcised to set an example in the fight
against HIV. "It has to be a circumcision of the mind
rather than circumcision of the organ," said MP Nelson
Chamisa. Nepalis' love for "Summer of '69" was
reportedly lasting forever. The Muscular Dystrophy
Association revealed during its first telethon without
Jerry Lewis as host that Jerry quit, Gene Simmons
announced that he was getting married, and UCLA math
student Chris Jeon was discovered far from home,
fighting alongside anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya. "It is
the end of my summer vacation, so I thought it would be
cool to join the rebels," said Jeon. "Whatever you do,
don't tell my parents. They don't know I'm here."



-- Jeremy Keehnhere."


-- Jeremy Keehn