Weekly Review

Members of the Turkish military, calling themselves the Peace at Home Council, sealed two bridges on the Bosphorus and attempted to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.^[1] “This move is a great favor from God,” said Erdogan.^[2] In the days of protests that followed, at least 260 people died, about 3,000 soldiers were arrested, and nearly 2,700 judges were fired.^[3][4][5] “The worst democracy,” said a fitness trainer, “is better than the best coup.”^[6] In Nice, a 31-year-old man rammed a 19-ton refrigerated truck into a crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks on the Promenade des Anglais, killing 84 people and wounding hundreds more.^[7] In Baton Rouge, a gunman fatally shot three law-enforcement officers and wounded three others.^[8] “I love this city,” one of the slain officers wrote on Facebook a week before he died. “But I wonder if this city loves me.”^[9] In preparation for the Republican National Convention, the city of Cleveland purchased groin protectors, recruited the homeless to report suspicious behavior, and kept courts running 20 hours a day in anticipation of mass arrests. “I’d rather be going to Fallujah,” a Marine was overheard to say.^[10][11][12]

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police pulled over a black man who had been reading Mere Christianity in a parked car, and a woman in Mary Esther, Florida, crashed after driving through a stop sign while praying with her eyes closed.^[13][14] A 19-year-old stripper in Connecticut was arrested for arson after police found her boyfriend’s DNA on a potato, which she had allegedly shoved in the tailpipe of a van owned by the man whose business she set on fire; and inmates at a jail in El Dorado, Kansas, rioted in protest of a mashed-potato lunch.^[15][16] A former U.S. intelligence official said pornography constituted 80 percent of the material on jihadists’ seized laptops, and Starbucks and McDonald’s made porn inaccessible from their Wi-Fi networks.^[17][18] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first documented female-to-male sexual transmission of the Zika virus.^[19] It was revealed that French president François Hollande’s personal hairdresser was paid 9,895 euros a month.^[20] Japan’s Emperor Akihito announced that he would abdicate the Chrysanthemum Throne, and outgoing British prime minister David Cameron vacated 10 Downing Street, leaving behind a cat named Larry.^[21][22]

Ecologists published the first comprehensive catalogue of 11,676 Amazonian tree species, including members of the Melastomataceae, Myrtaceae, and Malvaceae families.^[23][24] A multimillionaire who dressed in gold was bludgeoned to death by a gang of twelve in Pune, India; a Pakistani Instagram star was strangled by her brother in Muzaffarabad; and a toddler was attacked by squirrels in a park in the United Kingdom.^[25][26][27] Nuremberg’s Neues Museum filed a criminal complaint against a 91-year-old woman who completed a crossword puzzle that was in fact a $116,000 piece of avant-garde Danish art.^[28] Deputies in Jasper County, Missouri, arrested a couple for riding a stolen lawnmower naked down Pleasant View Lane, Tennessee firefighters found a woman barbecuing a brisket in her bathtub, and a burglary suspect was found to be getting high off a human brain he stashed in a Walmart bag beneath his porch.^[29][30][31] In South Korea, angry melon farmers hurled eggs and water bottles at the prime minister to protest a planned missile site, online commenters suggested the Ministry of Education change its name to the Ministry of Livestock, and the government launched a task force to combat the rampant mistranslation of menu items, including “roast grandmother,” “lifestyle meat,” and “chicken asshole house.”^{[32][33][34][35]}

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