Weekly Review

U.S. president Donald Trump, who once told reporters during his campaign that he wouldn’t take “off the table” the possibility of dropping a nuclear bomb on Europe or the Middle East, departed for a 17-day trip to his New Jersey golf course, where he tweeted that he was on a “working vacation” and then threatened to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un, whom Trump has called a “madman,” said Trump was acting “senile” on the golf course and that North Korea would fire missiles at the U.S. territory of Guam to create a “historic enveloping fire”; Trump said that he felt his initial threat of “fire and fury” was still not “tough enough” and said that if Kim “does something” to Guam then “what will happen in North Korea” will be “an event the likes of which nobody’s seen before”; a spokesperson for North Korea said Trump had “nuclear war hysteria” and then threatened to “burn up Seoul”; Trump said “things will happen” to North Korea “like they never thought possible”; the North Korean spokesperson said their country would “turn the U.S. mainland into the theater of a nuclear war”; Trump’s secretary of defense suggested the United States could bring about the “destruction” of the people of North Korea; the North Korean spokesperson said the country would deploy 3 million children to help “smash to pieces” the plans of the “helter-skelter” United States and bring about “the tragic end of the American empire”; and Trump tweeted that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded.”^{[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]} Australia’s prime minister said his country would join sides with the United States if North Korea struck first, the Chinese government defended its military maneuvers in the Sea of Japan and said it would side with North Korea if the United States struck first, Japan said it would protect Guam, and New Zealand said it couldn’t make a commitment.^{[16][17][18][19][20]} U.S. secretary of state Rex Tillerson said Americans should “sleep well,” and Guam Homeland Security warned residents not to “look at the flash or fireball” of a nuclear explosion.^[21][22] A  Guamanian man said nothing “other than God” would make him leave his home, and Trump’s religious adviser said God had given Trump permission to attack North Korea.^[23][24] An unexplained fire broke out in Greenland, a downpour flooded New Orleans, a 122-degree heat wave caused fires, blackouts, and sickness in Iraq, a chronic shortage of gas used to cook food was reported in Venezuela, a 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck the Philippines, aid workers warned that a cholera epidemic is about to break out in Sudan, and an editorial in a state-run newspaper in China said the “countdown” to a war with India “had begun.”^{[25][26][27][28][29][30]} In Egypt, two trains collided head-on, for unknown reasons.^[31]

Sign up to have the Weekly Review delivered to your inbox.