Harper's Weekly Review

Cyclone Nargis tore off roofs, shredded trees, overturned cars, and killed more than 10,000 people in Myanmar. Tens of thousands of Somalis rioted in Mogadishu over the high cost of food, President Bush pledged $770 million in international food aid, and an inmate awaiting trial for murder sued an Arkansas county jail for underfeeding him after he shed 105 pounds from his 413-pound frame. "About an hour after each meal," he stated in a complaint, "my stomach starts to hurt and growl [and] I feel hungry again. We are literally being starved to death." The sister-in-law of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian electrician accused of locking his daughter in a basement dungeon for 24 years and fathering seven children with her, told the Associated Press that Fritzl hadn't had sex with his wife in many years: "I believe it was because my sister had been getting bigger," she said. "He never liked fat women." Police in Germany discovered the bodies of three dead babies stored in a freezer in the cellar of a family home, after two of the family's older children went rummaging for a frozen pizza, and a former Mr. Gay UK charged with murder was accused of carving up, dicing, cooking, and eating his victim's leg. Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last surviving member of the circle of plotters who attempted to kill Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb, died at the age of 90.

 

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