by SCOTT SAXON
January
Tony Blair warned Britons to brace themselves for a very dangerous and terrible year • A fireworks stand exploded in Mexico and led to an inferno that killed 28 people • A sunken oil tanker was leaking about 80,000 litres of oil a day into waters off the Spanish coast • U.S. officials were spamming Iraqi computers with messages encouraging citizens to rise up against Saddam Hussein • An Islamic court in Nigeria ordered a man's leg cut off as punishment for his cutting off his wife's leg • Weapons inspectors found 11 empty chemical warheads in Iraq; the U.S. tried to make a big deal of it. "I have only one thing to say," commented a French diplomat. "Empty." • The International Red Cross asked the U.S. to either prosecute or free hundreds of prisoners being held without charge at Camp X-Ray • Russia was destroying stockpiled chemical weapons • Nelson Mandela warned that Bush would "plunge the world into a holocaust."
February
Space shuttle Columbia broke up in the skies over northern Texas • Thirty people were killed when a building blew up in Nigeria • Colin Powell presented muffled audio tape, cartoon renditions of what a chemical lab might look like and satellite photos of trucks to the UN Security Council and accused Iraq of working with al-Qaeda, hiding WMDs and other assorted horrors. "This is fact," Powell assured. • Britain was forced to admit the dossier they'd presented as proof of Iraqi weapons violations, which Colin Powell cited during his UN address, was actually mostly plagiarized and out-dated, while a group labelled as go-betweens for Iraq and al-Qaeda gave tours of the decrepit buildings Powell had identified as "poison factories." • Donald Rumsfeld told American troops the Iraq war would be over very quickly • North Korea bragged to a French news agency that their missiles could hit any target in the world • Dolly the cloned sheep was euthanized • Millions worldwide gathered to protest the war. "Evidently," Bush commented, "some of the world don't view Saddam as a risk to peace."
March
A train full of tourists overturned in Taiwan, killing 17 and injuring hundreds • A bomb in a backpack killed 21 people at an airport in the Philippines • A man was arrested for refusing to take off a T-shirt that said "Give Peace a Chance" in a mall near Albany, New York • President Bush refused to give a speech to the European Parliament after MEPs wouldn't guarantee him a standing ovation • The prime minister of Serbia was assassinated • An American peace activist in Gaza was killed by an Israeli soldier as she tried to prevent him from bulldozing Palestinian homes. The soldier claimed he didn't see activist Rachel Corrie, who was dressed in a bright orange jacket and talking through a megaphone. Israel called her being run over - twice - a "regrettable accident." • George W. Bush went on television to announce the war on Iraq had begun. "We enter this conflict reluctantly," he said in his address • Prior to air, the president pumped his fist and said, "Feels good."
April
Saddam Hussein warned that the war in Baghdad was about to see some "unconventional" tactics, causing thousands of citizens to flee the city • North Americans were avoiding Chinese people, in case they had SARS, and Jean Chrétien hunkered down for dinner in Toronto's Chinatown to show he wasn't afraid • American troops said they tried to make a grand entrance to Baghdad, which left up to 3,000 people dead, most of them civilians. "We just wanted to let them know that we're here," explained Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount • Retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the Bush-appointed overseer of the new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, arrived in Iraq • Libya said they'd pay close to $3-billion (U.S.) to families of those killed on Pan Am flight 103, if the U.S. and UN lifted sanctions against them • Rumsfeld promised the U.S had no plans to impose "our government" on post-war Iraq • U.S. administrators held a meeting with Iraqi political leaders to discuss a future government, but refused to invite Iraq's Communist party to the talks
May
President Bush dressed up like a fighter pilot, landed on a ship in the Persian Gulf and declared America the winners in the war on Iraq • Almost 130 people were sucked out of an airplane over the Congo when one the plane's doors opened • Iraqi farmers were milking their cows into emptied nuclear waste containers that had been looted from a nuclear research centre • Twenty-nine people were killed in car bomb attacks in Saudi Arabia • Oregon's Department of Human Services was trying to hire people who speak Klingon to act as interpreters for psychiatric patients • Jay Gardner was replaced by Paul Bremer, another U.S. appointee, who quickly signed an order banning any member of Saddam Hussein's Baathist party from ever holding office again • Donald Rumsfeld told the press Iraq had destroyed all their WMDs before the war started • Ariel Sharon said he would support a U.S.-presented "road map" to peace as long as it didn't "state that Israel must halt violence or incitement against the Palestinians."
June
Over 1,700 Toronto teens were put under home quarantine after a student at their high school came down with SARS. Many of the teens used the time off to hang at the mall • Ariel Sharon and Palestinian PM Mahmoud Abbas met with George W. Bush at King Abdullah of Jordan's summer palace. Bush felt the meeting had accomplished what he'd wanted it to. "I'm the master of low expectations," he said • The U.S.-led occupation administration of Iraq helped democracy reign by banning any open dislike of American and British troops • UN peacekeepers arrived in the Congo • President Bush fell off a Segway in the driveway of his mommy's house • Arizona caught fire, as did northern Ontario, as well as a number of Iranians, who torched themselves to protest the arrests of 165 members of an Iranian opposition group • Things blew up in Nigeria, Turkey, Iraq and Chechnya • Strom Thurmond finally died • A study discovered a link between sugary soft drinks and fat kids
July
Growing resistance attacks in Iraq started drawing comparisons between America's latest war and Vietnam • The White House admitted that their pre-war claims of Iraq having bought enriched uranium from Niger weren't exactly true • Canadian researchers theorized Stonehenge was actually a giant vagina • President Bush went to Africa, watched two elephants mate, and promised to help take care of the problem with AIDS • Jewish groups were trying to prevent al-Jazeera from broadcasting in Canada • Canadian geese were rounded up and sent to gas chambers in New Jersey • David Kelly, the weapons expert who'd accused the British government of falsifying information on Iraq, turned up dead • U.S. troops killed Saddam Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, along with his 14-year-old grandson and a body guard • Police in Iran beat an unarmed Canadian photojournalist to death, and a cop in Port Moody shot a machete-wielding Iranian teen. • The Bush administration quietly dissolved the committee that kept an eye on America's development of nuclear weapons
August
A truck loaded with explosives destroyed a military hospital in southern Russia • Saddam Hussein's daughters were missing their dad • A car bomb killed 16 people at a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. Another killed 17 people at the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad • The U.S. appointed a man who openly hates Arabs to head the U.S. Institute of Peace • Fifty million people lost electricity in parts of Ontario and the eastern U.S. • Idi Amin died • The combined number of American forces killed in Iraq since Bush declared the "end of major conflict" finally exceeded the number killed in the period leading up to that announcement • Conservationists in Brazil found 10 new kinds of fish • Nine Russian sailors died when their submarine sank • Street gangs in Honduras, responding to new anti-gang laws, were killing people at random
September
New Zealand's government was considering taxing sheep flatulence • Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas resigned over not having the power to do his job properly. Yasser Arafat replaced Abbas with Ahmed Qureia, who said Israel must change the way it deals with Arafat. Israel suggested they might send Arafat into exile, or just kill him • Donald Rumsfeld toured Iraq and Afghanistan and complained that the media had been ignoring America's "success and accomplishment in the two regions." • A videotape was released of Osama bin Laden strolling in the mountains • Maoist rebels were setting off bombs around Nepal • The UN lifted sanctions against Libya • Democracy continued to thrive in Iraq with the governing council's ban on two Arab news networks • Australian health authorities issued a statement warning about the safety risks of shoving ice cubes up someone's ass
October
The bodies of 629 Muslims were found in a mass grave in Bosnia • A Muslim cleric was elected president of Chechnya after an election many complained had been rigged • Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California in the state's recall election. • Senior Palestinian and Israeli representatives completed an unofficial peace deal and announced they'd sign their Geneva Accord in Switzerland. Ariel Sharon dismissed the pact as harmful to Israel's national interests • Britain gave prosthetic limbs to a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who'd had his arms blown off in an American raid on Baghdad • A Texas appeals court ruled that flipping the bird doesn't qualify as disorderly conduct • The Staten Island Ferry crashed • The prime minister of Jordan quit • The UN General Assembly passed a motion ordering Israel to stop building its "security fence." Israel ignored them • The U.S Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, described the U.S. war on terror as a fight between a "Christian nation" and "a guy named Satan," and claimed Bush had been handed the presidency by God
November
The Bush administration was being criticized for trying to keep the nation's war-dead out of the public eye • The Australian government ordered a boatload of asylum-seekers towed back out to sea • The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency concluded there was no evidence to suggest Iran has nuclear weapons, and asked if Israel wouldn't mind doing something about theirs • Twenty-three people were killed in car bomb attacks on two synagogues in Turkey, and a Jewish school was set on fire in Paris • President Bush visited Tony Blair in the U.K., where he explained that sometimes the "use of force is all that protects us from a chaotic world ruled by force" • Iraqi citizens dragged the corpses of two U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mosul • Germany halted shipment of two submarines to Israel after learning Israel had fit three prior subs with nuclear warheads • President Bush snuck into Iraq and presented American troops with a tray of fake food
December
The Geneva Accord was signed. Ariel Sharon called the act "traitorous" and asked Colin Powell not to meet the plan's signatories. • U.S. forces bulldozed Iraqi homes and crops to encourage people to reveal information on guerilla fighters • A retired Israeli intelligence official admitted Israel was a "full partner" in putting together false WMD intelligence that Britain and the U.S. used to sell the war • Britain's National Audit Office revealed that nobody had thought it necessary to equip troops sent to Iraq with chemical or biological weapons defences • The Pentagon announced countries critical of the war were barred from bidding on Iraqi reconstruction contracts. When asked about the decision's violation of international law, Bush responded, "International law? I'd better call my lawyer." • Zambia's first democratically elected president went on trial for corruption, abuse of power and theft • It was discovered that Halliburton was overpaid $81-million for trucking oil around Iraq, and inspectors found that Bechtel, contracted with the task of repairing Iraq's schools, was mostly just painting over damaged walls • Paul Martin was crowned Prime Minister • Saddam Hussein was caught hiding in a hole in the ground in Tikrit
