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August 7, 2012
A
gunman with a semiautomatic pistol attacked a Sikh gurdwara in Oak
Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people and seriously injuring three more.
The shooter, Wade Michael Page, entered the temple before a Sunday
morning service and began firing on priests as others ran for cover.
Police killed Page in a firefight in the parking lot, moments after he
wounded the first officer on the scene. The Southern Poverty Law Center
reported that Page, a former U.S. Army psychological-operations
specialist who was demoted in 1998 for being drunk on duty, had been a
member of the white-supremacist band End Apathy, and that it had been
tracking him since 2000, when he attempted to purchase goods from the
National Alliance, a hate group. “I can’t imagine what made him do
this,” said Page’s stepmother. The Los Angeles Times reported
that Jared Lee Loughner would be declared competent to stand trial for
the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, that killed six people and
wounded 13, and that he would plead guilty as a result. Major Nidal
Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 people in the 2009 shooting at an
Army base in Fort Hood, Texas, was fined $1,000 for attending a military
hearing unshaven. Masked gunmen killed 16 Egyptian soldiers at a
checkpoint along the Israeli border. In Syria, a mortar attack killed 21
people at a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, and government forces
continued to shell Aleppo in preparation for a ground invasion. “What
is happening now is just the appetizer,” said one officer. “The main
course will come later.” The White House reportedly authorized the CIA
to provide support to antigovernment forces in Syria, who kidnapped
forty-eight bus passengers they claimed were members of Iran’s elite
Revolutionary Guard. Syria’s prime minister defected, and Kofi Annan
resigned as the United Nations’ and Arab League’s special envoy to the
country. Ultra-Orthodox Jews vowed to go to jail en masse after Israel’s
defense minister announced that they would no longer be exempt from the
country’s military draft. “Religious elders will sit together,” said
activist Shmuel Poppenheim, “and declare war.”
At the Summer
Olympic games in London, American swimmer Michael Phelps won his
twenty-second career medal and became the most decorated Olympian of all
time, while American gymnast Gabby Douglas became the first black woman
to win the gold medal in the individual all-around event. “I have an
advantage,” said Douglas, “because I’m the underdog and I’m black and no
one thinks I’d ever win.” Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt won the men’s
100-meter dash in 9.63 seconds, and it was reported that Sarah, an
eleven-year-old cheetah, had run the same distance in 5.95 seconds on a
track outside Cincinnati. The website Ancestry.com claimed that U.S.
president Barack Obama is a direct descendant of John Punch, the first
documented slave in colonial America. The Democratic National Committee
named Julián Castro, the Mexican-American mayor of San Antonio, the
keynote speaker of next month’s party convention, and announced that its
platform would endorse marriage equality. Republican presidential
candidate Mitt Romney visited the site of the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier in Poland, where one of his aides scolded reporters for shouting
out questions. “Kiss my ass,” said traveling press secretary Rick
Gorka. “This is a holy site for the Polish people.” Former adult-film
star Jenna Jameson endorsed Romney, and a rogue algorithm in an
automated stock-trading program caused financial markets to fall when it
repeatedly bought and sold millions of shares in such companies as Best
Buy and RadioShack. “The machines,” said a market expert, “have taken
over.” India’s minister of power was promoted to home minister during a
blackout that left some 670 million people without electricity.
NASA celebrated the Mars landing of its plutonium-powered rover, Curiosity.
Lawyers for Pussy Riot, a punk band on trial for hooliganism after an
anti-Putin performance at a Moscow church in February, accused the trial
judge of appearing bored. “Are you drawing circles?” asked one defense
lawyer. “Are you forbidding me to do so?” asked the judge. Former U.S.
senator Larry Craig (R., Idaho) refused to return campaign funds he
spent on legal fees associated with his 2007 arrest for soliciting sex
from a man in an airport washroom. “Senate rules,” wrote his lawyer,
“sanction reimbursement for any cost relating to a senator's use of a
bathroom.” Police in China’s Zhejiang province were searching for a
man’s penis after he reported that it had been stolen while he was
sleeping. “I was so shocked I didn’t feel a thing,” said the man.
Italy’s supreme court ruled it a crime to tell a man he has no balls. A
Vermont farmer destroyed seven police vehicles by driving over them with
his tractor. Police in St. Louis tasered a 12-year-old girl while
arresting her mother for outstanding traffic tickets, and a Virginia
woman who was arrested for letting her four-year-old daughter draw on
rocks with chalk at a city park claimed that the girl had been
traumatized by the incident. “She’s very scared of chalk,” said the
woman. “And she’s very nervous around cops.”
—Jacob Z. Gross |
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