Weekly Review
Vice President Mike Pence, who during the election implied that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton broke the law when she used a private email server as secretary of state, confirmed that he conducted official business as governor of Indiana using a private AOL email account, which had been hacked. Trump suggested that a series of recent bomb threats against Jewish community centers and acts of vandalism against Jewish cemeteries could have been an effort by his opponents to make his supporters “look bad,” gave a speech before a joint session of Congress in which he condemned hate crimes, and rejected the notion that his senior staff should take an ethics-training course. “This is,” Trump tweeted of his wiretap allegations, “Watergate.” Read more...
U.S. president Donald Trump tweeted that former president Barack Obama was a “bad (or sick) guy” who tapped his phone during the election.[1] House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz said he had “not seen anything” that would support Trump’s accusation, Republican congressman Trey Gowdy said he had no evidence of a wiretap, and FBI director James Comey called on the Justice Department to publicly reject Trump’s claim, which the department did not do.[2][3][4] Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the department’s head, recused himself from any investigations of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election after it was reported that he had twice met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign, despite swearing under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he “did not have communications with the Russians.”[5][6] Vice President Mike Pence, who during the election implied that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton broke the law when she used a private email server as secretary of state, confirmed that he conducted official business as governor of Indiana using a private AOL email account, which had been hacked.[7] Trump suggested that a series of recent bomb threats against Jewish community centers and acts of vandalism against Jewish cemeteries could have been an effort by his opponents to make his supporters “look bad,” gave a speech before a joint session of Congress in which he condemned hate crimes, and rejected the notion that his senior staff should take an ethics-training course.[8][9][10] “This is,” Trump tweeted of his wiretap allegations, “Watergate.”[11]
Snap, Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, went public at $17 a share, making it the largest offering since Alibaba in 2014; Lyft reportedly sought $500 million from investors; and Travis Kalanick, the 40-year-old CEO of Uber, who is worth an estimated $6.3 billion, said he needed to “grow up” after a video surfaced of him telling a driver who complained that he had lost almost $100,000 working for the company that “some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit.”[12][13][14] Millions of viewers spent what equates to more than a thousand years watching a live stream of a pregnant giraffe, which has not yet given birth, and the Belvedere Zoo in Tunisia announced it would close temporarily after visitors stoned a crocodile to death.[15][16] A blizzard struck Hawaii, Chicago recorded its first January and February without snow in 146 years, and landslides and rainstorms contaminated the drinking water of at least 4 million people in Santiago, Chile.[17][18][19] The World Health Organization reported that pollution kills 1.7 million children annually.[20] In Canada’s Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt, scientists found fossils that may be as much as 3.77 billion years old, and in New Mexico a 99-year-old man beat a 92-year-old man in a 60-meter dash.[21][22]
An intoxicated man in Austin, Texas, was arrested for allegedly “having sex with a fence” while a woman filmed him, three men at a bazaar in Pakistan were caught masturbating to the rhythm of a beating drum, and the body of a Japanese man was discovered on top of his six-ton porn-magazine collection, which he had fallen on after suffering a heart attack.[23][24][25] A woman in Fort Pierce, Florida, found marijuana inside a couch set she bought online, the owner of a charity store in Wales discovered plans for a British nuclear sub in the briefcase of an anonymous donor, and veterinarians in Bangkok removed 915 coins from the stomach of a turtle named Piggy Bank.[26][27][28] In the Chinese province of Jiangsu, villagers divorced en masse after discovering that they could claim more money from a government buyout of their homes if they were single.[29]
