Weekly Review

Donald Trump, the former host of Celebrity Apprentice and president-elect of the United States, referred to Georgia congressman John Lewis, one of the Big Six civil-rights leaders of the 1960s, who was once assaulted as a Freedom Rider testing a federal law banning segregation on public transportation, and who, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to push for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or sex, as “talk—no action.”^[1][2][3] Trump called NATO “obsolete,” referred to Brexit as “a great thing,” and said it was a “catastrophic mistake” for German chancellor Angela Merkel to accept refugees from the five-year civil war in Syria that has killed at least 400,000 people.^[4][5][6][7] Trump denied a leaked and unverified report from a former British intelligence officer that claimed that the Russian government had secretly filmed Trump in a hotel room in Moscow with prostitutes whom he paid to urinate on one another while on a bed formerly slept in by current U.S. president Barack Obama; and it was reported that a man in Lebanon, New Hampshire, admitted to masturbating into a dirty diaper while watching child gymnastics in a church rectory school and then lighting an American flag on fire, which caused the church to go up in flames.^[8][9] In San Antonio, a 150-pound pet tortoise knocked over a lamp, igniting a mattress fire that spread to a neighbor’s home. “The fact that it’s a giant tortoise makes it extremely unusual,” said a fire-department spokesperson.^[10]

Mike Peinovich, the creator of a neo-Nazi website on which he jokes about the Holocaust and talks about killing Jewish people, resigned after rival neo-Nazis revealed that he was married to a Jewish woman.^[11] Pope Francis said in Italy that at times his faith has “diminished a lot” but that he “found it again,” and a 600-year-old statue of Buddha emerged from a reservoir in China.^[12][13] Beijing set its air-quality target for 2017 at twice the amount deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization, 90 percent of Australians living in the country’s rural areas said climate change was affecting their lives, and a woman in Buffalo, New York, called the police and asked them to stop the wind from blowing.^[14][15][16] A dead whale was found on board a Japanese ship in Australian waters, and Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, announced that he has ordered the country’s navy and coast guard to bomb the ships of kidnappers even if civilian hostages are on board. “So, really,” said Duterte, “don’t allow yourself to be kidnapped.”^[17][18]

A woman abducted as a newborn from a hospital in Florida was found 18 years later in South Carolina, and a man in San Francisco returned a library book called Forty Minutes Late, which had been overdue for 100 years.^[19][20] In New York City, a 12-year-old boy was accused of pulling a gun on a girl in a subway station and demanding one of her chicken nuggets, which she refused to give him.^[21] At the University of California, Martin Shkreli, a former pharmaceutical executive who was responsible for raising the price of an anti-malarial drug fiftyfold and who was recently banned from Twitter for photoshopping a journalist into his own pictures and referring to her as his girlfriend, was reportedly hit in the face with a handful of dog feces. “Piece of shit,” a member of the crowd yelled.^[22] It was reported that a California startup conducted a trial in which subjects received a transfusion of two liters of plasma from teenagers and young adults.^[23] Yale University researchers genetically engineered the brain circuitry of mice so that the animals will hunt and kill prey when exposed to certain light, and a Russian app launched that allows users to plan funerals on their smartphones. “We’ve automated everything except death,” said the company’s project manager. “I want to fix this.”^[24][25]