Welcome back, snow-drenched readers. The Emerald Editorial Board hopes your holidays were happy and healthy, and relaxing if not rocking. For those of you who left the news programs off and the newspapers on the porch, here’s a primer on the events of recent weeks, coupled with pithy but insightful opinions.
Dec. 14 After extensive questioning of people with family or other ties to Saddam Hussein, soldiers found the ‘haggard’ former Iraqi leader hiding in a so-called spider hole near Tikrit, Iraq. President Bush, in a televised address, said “the former dictator of Iraq will face the justice he denied to millions.” While the news is definitely good for Iraqis and represents an important moral victory for coalition soldiers, Americans (military and civilian alike) shouldn’t forget that the work in Iraq is far from over and that the nation remains a dangerous place.
Dec. 19 VIPs gathered around a muddy runway in Kill Devil Hills, N.C., to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. Despite the replica plane’s failure to fly, the centennial still reminds us of the fantastic capacities of human ingenuity.
Dec. 19 Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi announced that his country would end its weapons of mass destruction programs and admit weapons inspectors to oversee the programs’ elimination.
Dec. 21 The United States cranked up the terror threat level from elevated (yellow) to high (orange), whose recommended measures for government agencies include “preparing to execute contingency procedures, such as moving to an alternate site or dispersing their workforce.” While the “Homeland Security Advisory System” is a convenient way of packaging the current state of security affairs for sound byte digestion, more information that the department has been doling out in recent months would be a psychological and academic boon, whenever security concerns allow for it.
Dec. 23 The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the discovery of the first apparent case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy — mad cow disease — in Mabton, Wash. Several nations, including Japan, immediately halted beef imports from the United States. This is cause for concern, but not gross overreaction: There’s still only one apparent contraction of the disease in this country, and moreover, scientific studies have shown that the BSE infectious agent has never been found in beef muscle meat or milk, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
Jan. 4 Pop princess Britney Spears eschewed the tradition of large Southern weddings and married a childhood friend in a small, 5:30 a.m. ceremony (wherein she was escorted by a limo driver and walked down the aisle in torn jeans and a baseball cap) in Las Vegas. She plans to annul the mockery, er … marriage.