Even with the civil (or not civil) war still going on in the Irag, the dispute among pundits about that issue, and the other inanities and insanities spinning this planet toward even more political disasters, Harper’s Weekly Review managed to ferret out the bits you might have missed.

• a federal judge ruled that American paper currency discriminates against blind people
• Barry Diller, at one time the highest paid CEO in the world, said corporate compensation consultants should be “flushed into the East River”
• a yearlong rash of nut robberies” ended when police recovered 136,000 pounds of stolen nuts with a street value of $400,000 from a warehouse in Sacramento
• the Department of Health and Human Services refused to ensure that its reports on abstinence for young people were factually and scientifically accurate
• the Center for the Digital Future announced that the average Internet user will make 4.6 “virtual pals” this year
• experts warned people with pacemakers that refrigerator magnets “can be a killer”
• a herd of domesticated pigs attacked and ate a three-year-old boy in Delhi, India
• scientists said that humpback whales may be every bit as intelligent as humans, dolphins, and great apes, and that women speak three times as much as men
• Danny Devito called the president a “numbnuts.”

You can read it all, with links, at http://www.harpers.org/WeeklyReview2006-12-05.html