Weekly Review

Italy’s highest court ruled that keeping lobsters on ice before they are boiled alive inflicts unjustifiable suffering, and Republican senators released their secretly drafted health-care-reform bill, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would cause 22 million Americans to lose their health insurance in the next decade and allow insurance companies to charge their oldest customers five times more than their youngest.^[1][2] White House press secretary Sean Spicer, Department of Health and Human Services director Tom Price, and Republican senator Pat Toomey each said the bill would not affect Americans currently on Medicaid, and it was reported that the bill would cut Medicaid spending by almost $800 billion over ten years.^[4][5][6] White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said that “able-bodied” adults should find jobs if they lose their coverage, and senior White House adviser Steve Bannon said Spicer, who was reported to be searching for candidates to take his job, “got fatter.”^[7][8][9] President Donald Trump, who once sold multivitamins that he claimed were tailored to customers based on the chemical profile of their urine, said that Americans were “not standing on the rooftop screaming” over the health-care bill, and police pulled a disabled woman from her wheelchair outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office as she screamed, “No cuts to Medicaid!”^[10][11][12] McConnell refused to meet about the health-care bill with the March of Dimes, a charity organization that once funded his own treatment for polio, and a woman in Australia bit a waiter whom she had failed to pay.^[13][14] A poll found that 16 percent of Americans approve of the G.O.P. health-care bill passed by the House of Representatives, and a study found that seven percent of American adults think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.^[15][16] It was estimated that farmers in Santa Barbara, California, plowed under $13 million in crops last year because of a shortage of laborers from Mexico; that a deal Trump had negotiated to save the jobs of workers at an Indiana air-conditioning plant would not prevent about 600 employees from being laid off; and that Trump was once sold an undeveloped quarter-acre plot of Florida swampland by a lingerie photographer.^[17][18][19] A Czech nuclear power plant held a bikini contest in a cooling tower to select its next intern, and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who when he was appointed by Trump to oversee the U.S. nuclear arsenal thought that his agency regulated the oil and gas industries, said that climate change was most likely caused by the ocean.^[20][21][22] Fishermen in the Bering Sea reported that loud noises no longer scare away killer whales, which have begun hunting them; and Trump admitted that he did not have incriminating audio recordings of conversations with former FBI director James Comey, who had been investigating his administration’s ties to Russia.^[23][24] Bill Clinton warned that drug use would “eat us all alive,” and a man in Australia was presumed dead after smoking meth and attempting sex with a crocodile.^[25][26] The New Hampshire Senate accidentally passed a bill allowing pregnant women to commit murder, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that ethnic slurs can be trademarked, and Trump appointed as head of the Office of Indian Energy William Bradford, a lawyer who has previously said that former president Barack Obama is a “Kenyan creampuff,” that “it was necessary” for the United States to intern Japanese Americans during World War II, and that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a “self-hating Jew.”^{[27][28][29][30]} A group of white nationalists waved Confederate flags during a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, and seismologists in California mistakenly sent out a warning for a 6.8-magnitude earthquake that occurred in 1925. “The quake,” said a geophysicist, “did happen.”^[31][32]

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