Weekly Review

Hope Hicks, a 29-year-old former model who is among the highest-paid White House staffers, announced her resignation from her role as communications director a day after she stated, in a more-than-eight-hour testimony to a House committee investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, that she sometimes told “white lies” while working for Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, who reportedly made 2,436 false or misleading claims since he took office.^[1][2][3][4] “She is strategic, poised, and wise beyond her years,” said chief of staff John Kelly of Hicks, who was once featured on the cover of a young-adult novel about wealthy children who time travel.^[5][6][7]

The government of Russia, which for four days in February bombarded Syria’s Eastern Ghouta at least 20 times a day, announced a daily “humanitarian pause” of five hours to allow the area’s 400,000 civilians to escape.^[8][9] In China, after facing criticism for proposing a change to the constitution that would allow President Xi Jinping to remain in power indefinitely, the Communist Party banned citizens from searching for the terms “my emperor,” “lifelong,” “shameless,” and “I don’t agree”; for the letter n, which it reportedly feared people would use to represent the number of terms with the equation n > 2; and for images of Winnie the Pooh, to whom Xi has been likened.^[10][11] “Maybe we’ll give that a shot,” said Trump.^[12]

A survey put out by Trump’s reelection campaign asked whether English should be made the official language of the United States, South Korea banned English language classes for its first- and second-grade students in an attempt to “minimize negative effects of early English education practices,” and the Nigerian government began offering families $41 a year to keep their daughters in school.^[13][14][15] In India, an MRI machine at a Mumbai hospital killed a 32-year-old man who walked into the room carrying an oxygen cylinder that activated the machine’s magnetic field.^[16] Almost all passengers aboard a United Airlines flight to Washington, DC, threw up when the plane was hit by severe turbulence due to strong winds.^[17] Researchers claimed that up to 60 percent of prisoners have suffered head injuries, and a study found a positive association between disgust of body odor and a person’s support for authoritarianism.^[18][19] It was confirmed that the moon would get its own mobile phone network next year.^[20]

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