Commentary: Joe Bob's Week in Review

As a result of the Philadelphia School District's new "zero tolerance" policy, 33 kindergarten students were suspended during the first three months of school, compared to only one the year before. Many of the hardened 5-year-olds showed no remorse.

Kenneth Kaunda, who ruled Zambia for 27 years, was named the first recipient of the Lloyd G. Balfour African Presidents in Residence Program at Boston University, which includes money and a home overlooking the Charles River. The university hopes to entice other African presidents, including Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who is still in office but is rumored to be bored with the constant demands of evicting white farmers, and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, who is also in office but has expressed a craving for Lobster Newburg.

The European Court of Justice was shocked to find out that 25 percent of the so-called "Parmesan cheese" for sale didn't come from Parma at all, so they banned all products using the Parmesan name unless it can be proved that all the cheese comes from the well-known Italian region. Attention Domino's: You're lying.

The New York Legislature passed a law banning drawstrings on hooded sweatshirts that protrude more than 3 inches from the collar. The sponsors of the legislation say too many children are being killed and injured when their drawstrings get caught in playground equipment, cribs, cars and buses. Our question: how many people have ever actually put the hood of a sweatshirt over their head and tied it underneath their chin with the drawstring? Aren't we talking about a vestigial organ here? Little Red Riding Hood, in fashion terms, is dead already.

Animal-rights fanatics are upset that a Beijing safari park is sending two lions, two bears, a wolf and 12 other wild animals to Afghanistan as a goodwill gesture. "To send these animals to Kabul now flies in the face of everything the Chinese government has done for conservation," said John Walsh, international project director for the World Society for the Protection of Animals, in a Los Angeles Times interview. "It's not fair to the animals. It will subject them to a lifetime of cruelty and suffering." Confused Chinese zookeepers noted that Marjan, the lion blinded by a grenade, had become a symbol of the Afghan nation by the time he died in January, and that lions mean a lot to the Afghan people. It's a goodwill gesture, they say, and should hardly be controversial. We would sum it up this way. If you had to choose the countries that have the most experience taking care of wild animals -- going back thousands of years -- the first one would probably be China, and the second one might very well be Afghanistan.

That wacky Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco is at it again. The eminent jurists ruled that the Second Amendment doesn't guarantee the right to bear arms after all. In upholding California's ban on assault weapons, the court said that the Second Amendment is intended only to "maintain effective state militias" and that individuals don't have any right to guns. Of course, since a state militia at the time of the Constitution was a bunch of people who showed up in the town square with their personal guns, this would make all future militias in California a bunch of people who show up in the town square with their surfboards.

Thomas Condon, a Cincinnati photographer, was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for taking pictures of dead bodies for a project on the cycle of life and death. The charge: eight counts of "abuse of a corpse." In pronouncing sentence, Judge Norbert Nadel of the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas said of the photos, "They're not art. They're sick. They're disgusting. They're disrespectful and really the worst invasion of privacy." His decision was presumably issued BEFORE the 29 Emmy nominations for "Six Feet Under."

Michael Meehan and Thomas Dysarz, a gay couple in Lexington, Ky., became the fathers of quadruplets when one of their hair salon clients, a 23-year-old woman, agreed to ... oh hell, who really knows how they do it?

Angelina Jolie gave Billy Bob Thornton five vials of her blood when they got married, and now she wants it back, according to reports in the London Sun. She's afraid Thornton's psychic mom might use it to voodoo her hoodoo now that the marriage is doo-doo.

Environmentalists led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sued the nation's largest pig farmer for producing too much manure, but U.S. District Judge Elizabeth A. Kovachevich in Tampa, Fla., threw the case out and made the plaintiffs reimburse Smithfield Foods Inc., for its legal expenses, calling the case "frivolous" and "a waste of taxpayers money." The legal term for that is "hogwash."

The sprinkler system in Philadelphia's Verizon Hall burst into action while the Philadelphia Orchestra was rehearsing Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," ruining a $75,000 Steinway grand piano and sending musicians scrambling for cover with their instruments tucked under any available covering. Conductor Christoph Eschenbach emerged remarkably dry, leading to suspicions that the prank was staged either by him or by a disgruntled third-chair bassoonist.

Scenes from our secure republic: New York's Pennsylvania Station, busiest train station in the country, was evacuated because of a suspicious package. The package contained garbage. It was really scary-looking garbage, though, the kind you end up with after a Dunkin' Donuts binge.

(Bob Briggs writes several columns for UPI. Contact him at [email protected] or through his Web site, joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.)