Happy New Year, 5768 (one cent)

From this morning's Washington Post:

1. Raniyah, Iraq. "For four weeks now, Kurdish villagers in this far northeastern corner of Iraq have endured a punishing barrage of rockets and artillery shells from what they say are Iranian troops across the border. The seemingly indiscriminate shelling has burned acres of orchards and grassland, damaged homes, killed livestock and driven about 2,500 people to abandon about two dozen villages."

2. Big Creek, WV. "Police said six people, including three women, held a 20-year old woman captive for at least a week. During that time, the victim, who is black, was beaten, stabbed, raped and tortured, all the while being subject to racial slurs from her white tormentors, police said."

3. San Luis Obispo, CA. "But as Navarro hung on, tension mounted in the operating room...With time slipping away, one of the transplant surgeons ordered repeated doses of the narcotic morphine and the sedative Ativan, jokingly calling the drugs 'candy', according to police reports. Navarro eventually died, but too late for his organs to be transplanted."

4. Corsicana, TX. "A 6 year old girl was found hanged inside her family's garage and had been sexually assaulted before she died, police said."

5. American military dead in Iraq now stands at 3,765.

6. Padang, Indonesia. "On Wednesday, a strong earthquake shook Southeast Asia, collapsing buildings, killing at least five people and injuring dozens in Indonesia."

7. Baghdad. "Two sergeants who helped write a New York Times op-ed article sharply critical of the Pentagon's assessment of the Iraq war were killed in a Baghdad crash this week, and one grieving mother wants the army to explain their deaths."

8. Somalia. "Thousands of children face starvation as attacks continue around southern Somalia, the health minister and UNICEF said Wednesday."

9. Arlington, VA. "For nearly six hours, a senior FBI official terrorized his Arlington County girlfriend, at times holding her at knifepoint in her closet, dragging her around by her hair and forcing a gun into her mouth in a jealous, drunken rage, police allege in court documents."

10. Fairfax Co., VA. "Authorities arrested 17 people in Northern Virginia and Maryland yesterday on charges that included distributing metamphetamine and trafficking in firearms, prosecutors said."

11. Fairfax Co., VA. "Police shot King sometime after 3:30 a.m. in the Dulles Technology Center...where they were responding to a report of a one car accident. Police said King pointed a gun at them, prompting them to fire."

And of course, there are articles about war in Iraq, about Iranian intentions, about bombs in Syria, and you name it.

Can it ever end? Look on page A10, the article entitled "Climate Link to Neanderthal Demise Abates", where a representative from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution says (based on new studies of marine sediment sampling showing that there was no major climatic change at the time the Neanderthals died out) "They survived 20,000 years of very unstable climate. Then when you add humans to the mix, they are gone...." This was 30,000 years ago.

You answer the question.

Shanah tovah