Weekly Review

In Houston, the Green Party nominated Jill Stein for president and Ajamu Baraka as her running mate.^[1] Florida senator Marco Rubio said that women infected with the Zika virus should not have the right to an abortion, a brain-eating amoeba killed an 11-year-old girl in South Carolina, and the National Institutes of Health announced plans to lift a moratorium on animal–human chimera research.^[2][3][4] It was reported that 40 people in Mexico had been killed by landslides in the wake of Hurricane Earl, and that 60 percent of coral reefs in the Maldives had fallen victim to bleaching because of rising sea temperatures.^[5][6][7] Russian athletes were banned from participating in the Rio Paralympic Games for violating anti-doping rules, Oregon police arrested two men who concealed drugs inside of footballs, two parents attempted to smuggle seven pounds of methamphetamine from Mexico to the United States under the clothes of their 19-month-old son, and New York City firefighters rescued a drunk woman who got stuck in a chimney.^{[8][9][10][11][12]} As many as 60,000 bees escaped from a seller’s hive in the parking lot of an Oklahoma City Walmart, and a group of monkeys in Kuala Lumpur overpowered a postman and stole confidential documents from his mailbag.^[13][14][15]

A bomb blast at a hospital in Quetta, Pakistan, killed at least 70 people, five German tourists in Spain were arrested when their flash-mob performance was mistaken for a terrorist attack, and police in Toronto responded to reports of an armed man who turned out to be a cardboard cutout of the Terminator.^[16][17][18] A man in Seattle was held on charges of felony assault after he attacked a police car with a throwing star, and the Atheist Foundation of Australia discouraged Star Wars fans from listing “Jedi” as their religion in Australia’s upcoming national census.^[19][20] One thousand and forty robots in China danced in unison for over a minute, surpassing the previous world record of 540 dancing robots; a California sex-toy company built the world’s largest dildo; and a study at the University of Dundee found that women without tonsils or an appendix may be more fertile.^{[21][22][23][24]}

The National Gallery of Victoria, in Australia, used a particle accelerator to reveal a portrait of another woman beneath Edgar Degas’s Portrait of a Woman.^[25] A grandmother in New Mexico was arrested for allowing her drunk 13-year-old grandson to drive, the start-up company Ambrosia announced plans to start clinical trials in which older adults seeking “rejuvenation” would receive blood transfusions from people between the ages of 16 and 25, and alumni contributions to colleges and universities nationwide dropped because of protests over racial equality on campuses. “I feel that I have been lied to, patronized, and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot,” wrote an Amherst alumnus.^{[26][27][28][29]} A 23-year-old Michigan man drowned in a vat of molasses; a woman allegedly murdered her infant daughter by feeding her a teaspoon of salt; a “McDonald’s of the Future” with all-you-can-eat french fries opened in Missouri; a Harvard doctor reminded patients that double-dipping increases the risk of disease transmission; and a teenager in California was fired by Jack in the Box for giving free food to a veteran. “Rules and good deeds on company time,” said Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, “don’t always mix.”^{[30][31][32][33][34][35]}

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