Weekly Review

In Orlando, Florida, a 29-year-old man entered a gay nightclub with an AR-15 assault rifle and opened fire, killing 49 people.^[1] During the attack, the gunman called 9-1-1 and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.^[2] After a three-hour standoff, a SWAT team breached the wall of the club and killed the shooter. “That,” said Orlando’s police chief, “was the right thing to do.”^[3] The Islamic State claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings that killed about 25 people in Baghdad, and an American Islamic State fighter captured in Iraq returned to the United States. “I found it hard,” he said of his time with the group.^[4][5] The Taliban in Afghanistan skinned alive a 21-year-old before throwing him off a cliff.^[6] In Tel Aviv, police stormed the home of an off-duty police officer after he unknowingly invited a man who had just helped kill four people into his home for a drink.^[7][8] Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan called women who work “half persons,” and Hillary Clinton became the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.^[9][10]

The Russian Communist Party attempted to appeal to millennials by releasing illustrations of Joseph Stalin holding a vape and Vladimir Lenin looking young and athletic. “He is,” said the campaign’s designer, “a sex symbol.”^[11] In the Philippines, president-elect Rodrigo Duterte offered to pay $119,000 to anyone who killed a drug dealer, and a drug lord raised a bounty on Duterte’s head to $1 million.^[12][13] Two men attempting to rob a McDonald’s in France were stopped by 11 members of a counterterrorism division who happened to be dining there, and an Oregon rancher on horseback lassoed a bike thief in a Walmart parking lot.^[14][15] A 25-year-old man announced that he was suing the Chicago Police Department for shooting him in 2014, and then was arrested for murder.^[16] Archaeologists used photographs from satellites and drones to identify a 2,000-year-old monument hidden beneath sand in Petra, Jordan; diamond miners uncovered a 500-year-old shipwreck in the Namibian desert; a floating school in Lagos, Nigeria, sank; and China announced plans to build a sea lab 10,000 feet underwater.^{[17][18][19][20]} Scientists found that salmon caught in Seattle contained cocaine, and bees from 400 hives escaped a truck that crashed on a North Carolina highway. “The bees,” said an apiarist, “will go back in the box.”^[21][22]

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced a new campaign to give chickens to poor African families, and a man in North Carolina slapped a woman in the face with a chicken.^[23][24] Kenya experienced a four-hour-long nationwide blackout after a monkey fell onto a power transformer.^[25] German nudists protested the proposed construction of a refugee shelter near their colony.^[26] An intoxicated man in Russia hacked off his friend’s penis.^[27] The Playboy mansion in California was bought by the heir to the Twinkie fortune, and a New Mexico man set fire to his apartment to protest his neighbors’ loud lovemaking.^[28][29] A fight between Russian and English soccer fans in France left 35 people wounded, and an Iranian soccer star was suspended for wearing SpongeBob-patterned pants.^[30][31] The FDA warned that overdosing on anti-diarrhea drugs could cause death.^[32] In Idaho, a four-year-old who was clinically decapitated in a car accident survived after a woman driving by the wreckage held his head on his neck for half an hour, and in Japan, a six-year-old forgave his parents for abandoning him in a forest for nearly a week. “You are,” the boy reportedly told his father, “a good dad.”^[33][34]

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