Weekly Review

Six-term senator and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain died, aged 81, hours after Kelli Ward, a Republican Senate candidate from his home state of Arizona, suggested that McCain’s decision to stop seeking treatment for brain cancer was timed to hurt her campaign.^1 2 McCain, who once almost got into a physical fight with Strom Thurmond on the floor of the Senate, justified his use of the slur “gook” by stating it only referred to his Vietnamese captors, and was one of five senators who tried to block the investigation of Charles Keating, was remembered by Tran Trong Duyet, the former director of the Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi, who said he was “sad” to hear of McCain’s passing.^{3 4 5} Henry A. Kissinger, who assisted in the sabotage of Lyndon B. Johnson’s peace talks to stop the Vietnam War in 1968, gave a eulogy at the former prisoner of war’s funeral at the Washington National Cathedral, as did George W. Bush, whose campaign made robocalls during the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary claiming McCain’s then-eight-year-old adopted daughter from Bangladesh was actually his “illegitimate black child,” and Barack Obama, who criticized McCain during the 2008 presidential race for voting with George W. Bush “90 percent of the time.”^{6 7 8 9} Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, criticized the “excesses” of Romania’s anti-corruption program, a stance contradicted by the State Department’s official position, and then announced that he was paid by the Freeh Group, a global consulting firm, to take that position.^{10 11} Israel praised Trump for cutting funding to a UN agency that assists Palestinian refugees and welcomed Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, who once favorably compared his treatment of drug dealers to Hitler, to Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial.^{12 13} Duterte, who has presided over an anti-drug campaign resulting in the deaths of an estimated 20,000 Filipino citizens, said that Israel shares his “passion for human beings”; he addressed the high rate of sexual assault in his hometown of Davao by explaining, “As long as there are many beautiful women, there will be more rape cases.”^{14 15 16} A district attorney in Pennsylvania found that police were justified in chasing and running over a suspect with a bulldozer, the 11th inmate died in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections in the month of August, and protesters appeared outside a Tulsa courthouse after a former officer who was acquitted for killing an unarmed black man held a class on “surviving officer-involved shootings.”^{17 18 19} California announced that it will end the cash bail system, and Missouri became the first state in the country to regulate use of the word “meat.”^20 21

China culled over 38,000 hogs after the country’s seventh outbreak of African swine fever in August.²² Saudi officials concurred with the Joint Incident Assessment Team, an investigative unit that the kingdom had helped set up, that an air attack that killed dozens of Yemenis, including children traveling on a bus, was unjustified, and announced plans to dig a canal that would turn Qatar into an island.^{23 24} Kuwait’s Ministry of Commerce closed a fishmonger’s that was caught sticking plastic googly eyes on fish to make them appear fresher than they were.²⁵ Fishing boats collided and stones were thrown when 40 French boats tried to stop five British boats from legally fishing for shellfish off the Normandy coast.²⁶ Officials in Paraguay found that a cache of dozens of automatic rifles in a police station had been replaced with replicas made of plastic and wood.²⁷ Chilean prosecutors announced that investigations into abuse within the Catholic Church had tripled, and Australia’s Catholic Church stated that they would not implement a recommendation made by a royal commission to mandate that priests who are told about acts of child abuse and pedophilia during confession share that information with police.^{28 29} Bishop Charles H. Ellis III apologized for being “too friendly” with performer Ariana Grande during the funeral service for Aretha Franklin, who died aged 76. “It would never be my intention to touch any woman’s breast,” Ellis said.³⁰

Bottles of blood pressure medication were recalled following concerns that they contained different, unrelated drugs, and the US Food and Drug Administration warned that a popular diabetes medication could cause a flesh-eating bacterial infection of the genitals.^{31 32} A South Carolina woman was charged with murder after killing her husband by putting eye drops into his water, and the internet search history of a 23-year-old Alaskan woman charged with murder included “Ways to kill human with no proof,” “16 steps to kill someone and not get caught,” and “How to: Commit the Perfect Murder.”^{33 34} An unmanned ship ran aground on the coast of Myanmar; a dozen passengers and three flight attendants required medical attention after a can of pepper spray went off inside the cabin of a Hawaiian Airlines plane; and a Hawaii-bound flight from Oakland was delayed when crime-scene photos from a teenaged passenger’s forensics science project were accidentally shared to the phones of other passengers.^{35 36 37} Russian authorities confiscated a World War II–era tank from a military historian after he ran himself and two children over with it, Deutsche Bahn dropped plans to use atonal music to drive out homeless people from stations in Berlin, and an astronaut plugged a hole in the International Space Station with his thumb.^{38 39 40} New studies found that female monkeys were reluctant to follow the example of males even when the males were right, and that goats prefer happy people.^{41 42}—Matt Hickey