Weekly Review
The Republican Party’s new platform said pornography was a “public-health crisis” and marriage was between a man and a woman, the porn-aggregation site PornHub reported that Cleveland-area searches for “Trump” had increased 648 percent, and, according to some male escorts near the convention, the number of married men using their services went up by a factor of six. “I haven’t been getting any calls,” said a female escort. Read more...
In Iraq, a man detonated explosives at the entrance to Baghdad’s Kadhimiyah neighborhood, killing himself and at least 14 other people.[1] The following day, a man killed at least 15 people when he set off a car bomb at a security checkpoint outside the town of Khalis, destroying multiple vehicles, including a minivan carrying children.[2] Iraqi officials said they suspected the Islamic State of carrying out both attacks, as well as a third bombing that killed three people in the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, and the country’s prime minister banned soldiers stationed at checkpoints from using fake bomb-detection wands that were discovered years earlier to be devices used to find golf balls.[3][4] The U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State dropped its 50,000th bomb, and it was reported that an airstrike in Syria intended for the Islamic State had killed as many as 212 civilians.[5][6] In Mexico, the mayor of Pungarabato was ambushed on the highway and shot and killed by members of a drug cartel, the mayor of San Juan Chamula was shot and killed in the town square by members of another drug cartel, and the attorney general of Chiapas posted a statement online urging “dialogue.”[7] The police department of Somerville, Massachusetts, wrote a letter to the mayor demanding he take down a Black Lives Matter banner from city hall, and a North Miami police officer who shot an unarmed black man lying on the ground with his hands up later explained that he was attempting to shoot the autistic white man sitting next to him playing with a toy truck.[8][9] A TSA agent in Seattle was arrested for taking up-skirt photos of women in the airport, a Maryland police officer was arrested for taking up-skirt photos of an off-duty colleague, and the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that taking up-skirt photos is legal in the state. “It is,” said one of the judges, “regrettable.”[10][11][12]
A trove of leaked emails revealed that Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was biased against Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the party’s nomination, prompting her to resign, and a man outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland attempted to burn an American flag and lit himself on fire.[13][14] During the convention, Trump promised that the “crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” and his adviser Al Baldasaro said Clinton should be “put in the firing line and shot.”[15][16] Trump accused President Barack Obama of using his position “to divide us by race and color,” and a Republican representative told convention reporters no “subgroup” of people “contribute more to civilization” than whites.[17][18] Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke registered for Louisiana’s G.O.P. Senate race.[19] The Republican Party’s new platform said pornography was a “public-health crisis” and marriage was between a man and a woman, the porn-aggregation site PornHub reported that Cleveland-area searches for “Trump” had increased 648 percent, and, according to some male escorts near the convention, the number of married men using their services went up by a factor of six. “I haven’t been getting any calls,” said a female escort.[20][21][22]
Bank robberies committed by women were reported to have increased 25 percent between 2005 and 2015, and New York governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill repealing the state’s 51-year-old luxury tax on tampons.[23][24] Pope Francis announced that nuns could use social media, and a priest flew a hot-air balloon around the world.[25][26] Tanzania banned sexual lubricants, and a Dutch designer made a suit out of SKYN condom material.[27][28] The number on the back of Maine’s government-issued food-stamp cards was found to belong to a sex line offering “America’s hottest talk,” undercover police in Seattle opened a sex spa to lure offenders, and it was reported that an officer in Colorado fired a bullet directly into the barrel of a suspect’s gun.[29][30][31] Russian plumbers unclogging the pipes of a Soviet-era apartment building discovered the body parts of a married couple whom a 64-year-old tenant had killed, cut into pieces, and flushed down the toilet.[32] The body of a man was discovered in the bathroom of an Australian Hungry Jack’s fast-food restaurant, where it had gone unnoticed for three days because of a lax cleaning policy.[33] A 30-year-old man in Largo, Florida, head-butted his mother because she brought home Chick-fil-A for dinner; a 37-year-old woman in New Albany, Indiana, stabbed her husband in the chest with a grill fork because he returned home from his errands without her favorite type of doughnuts; and in Reno, Nevada, a drone completed the first FAA-approved home delivery of consumable goods, which included doughnuts and a chicken sandwich. [34][35][36]
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