Weekly Review
A woman in Turkey filed for divorce after her husband sued her for swearing at a television broadcast of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Saudi man who divorced his four wives and attempted to marry four new wives was ordered to remarry his original wives and pay them a new dowry of about $43,000, a hairdresser in Lancashire stabbed her boyfriend to death for adding “loads of girls” on Facebook, a woman in Germany choked to death after her lover left the room to feed his dog and smoke a cigarette after placing in her mouth a cucumber that the two had been using as a sex toy, and psychologists found that people in relationships rarely change their behaviors over time. Read more...
India announced it would send at least 44 tons of medicine, food, and tents to assist citizens of Fiji who were hit by a cyclone last week, and researchers in Britain found that U.K. households waste more than 37,000 tons of beef every year.[1][2] The United Nations reported that a 21-ton airdrop over Syria of vegetable oil, lentils, rice, and salt may have landed in an area covered with landmines, and NASA said that a meteor recently exploded over the Atlantic ocean with a force of 13,000 tons of TNT, roughly equal to that of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.[3][4] U.S. president Barack Obama signed a bill banning the importation of gold mined by African children, garments sewed by abused Indian women, and other goods produced by slaves; and Tory ministers in the United Kingdom announced that they would publish plans to repeal the country’s Human Rights Act.[5][6] A judge in Ontario struck down a provision in a recently deceased 80-year-old radiologist’s will that directed funds toward the creation of a scholarship for “hard-working, single, Caucasian” girls who are “not feminist or lesbian.”[7] Indonesian scientists decided to label being LGBT as a mental disorder, and an Israeli court ruled that a man who burned alive a 16-year-old boy was sane.[8][9] A man arrested in Utah for failing to pay $2,376.92 in medical bills died in jail, and a nurse in Virginia was arrested for assisting in a surgery while intoxicated. “Rick,” a colleague recalled asking the nurse during the surgery, “are you drunk or something?”[10][11]
Three men in Virginia were charged with assaulting an Uber driver with a beer bottle when he asked them to stop drinking in his car, and a new Uber driver in Michigan was charged with murdering six people during his shift.[12][13] An Egyptian court mistakenly convicted a three-year-old boy of four counts of murder, eight counts of attempted murder, and multiple other counts of vandalizing government property.[14] A former pro–gun control California state senator was sentenced to five years in prison for plotting to smuggle weapons into the United States from the Philippines, and Russia donated 10,000 Kalashnikovs and 1 million rounds of ammunition to Afghanistan. [15][16] Former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke said it was “treason” not to vote for Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump because Trump has “meant a lot for the human rights of European Americans,” the governor of Mississippi proclaimed April Confederate Heritage Month, and the Southern Poverty Law Center reported a 14 percent rise in the number of hate groups across the United States. [17][18][19] In Georgia, the International Keystone Knights of the KKK argued before the state supreme court that it was a violation of their right to free speech for the Department of Transportation to deny their request to adopt a one-mile stretch of highway. “Today it’s the KKK. Tomorrow,” said the executive director of the ACLU in Georgia, “Black Lives Matter.”[20]
Puerto Rico froze the price of condoms, and the pope suggested that Catholics could use condoms to prevent the Zika virus. “Avoiding pregnancy is not,” the pope said, “absolute evil.”[21][22] Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf again became a best-seller in Germany, and the memoir of Robert Pickton, a former pig farmer and millionaire who in 2007 was convicted of killing six women in Canada, was pulled from the Amazon store.[23][24] A couple in Thailand stabbed their newborn at least 12 times and buried him alive, a mother in Oregon pleaded guilty to throwing her six-year-old off a bridge, and a male polar bear was filmed chasing down and eating a cub. “The footage itself is quite rare,” said a scientist, “but the event probably isn’t.”[25][26][27] A 23-year-old Ukrainian man was arrested for pretending to be an 18-year-old Pennsylvania high-school senior.[28] A couple in West Yorkshire were jailed for stealing projection equipment and laptops from a cancer ward and then blaming their terminally ill ten-year-old son.[29] An unidentified bald man in Ohio stole $847 worth of Rogaine and memory supplements from a local Walgreens.[30] A woman in Turkey filed for divorce after her husband sued her for swearing at a television broadcast of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Saudi man who divorced his four wives and attempted to marry four new wives was ordered to remarry his original wives and pay them a new dowry of about $43,000, a hairdresser in Lancashire stabbed her boyfriend to death for adding “loads of girls” on Facebook, a woman in Germany choked to death after her lover left the room to feed his dog and smoke a cigarette after placing in her mouth a cucumber that the two had been using as a sex toy, and psychologists found that people in relationships rarely change their behaviors over time.[31][32][33][34][35] A 16-year-old-boy in Russia won an online contest to live for a month in a hotel with a porn star. “When I meet the girl, I’ll say, ‘Hi, I am that very boy, I’ve won you,’” said the boy. “I have told my mother and she has taken it badly.”[36]
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