Weekly Review

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and hereditary leadership of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation made a temporary agreement that gives TransCanada’s Coastal GasLink crews access to the site of the planned natural-gas pipeline in northern British Columbia, which would run through Wet’suwet’en lands, in exchange for trapping rights and the protection of a Unist’ot’en Clan healing lodge.^{1 2 3} During a town hall meeting, a member of the Shuswap Nation told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “You can stand up all the elected chiefs that you want and say that you have consent, but you do not have consent from the people on the ground, and you said yourself that these major projects would not be approved without community consent.”⁴ Attorneys from the Justice Department have argued that the government shutdown, which has halted safety inspections of vegetables, fruit, seafood, and other comestibles by the Food and Drug Administration, shouldn’t delay a court hearing on an injunction against TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.^{5 6} At a facility called “Pogo Row,” the Department of Homeland Security discovered that a prototype for President Trump’s proposed $5 billion steel-slat border wall could be sawed through; a spokeswoman for the agency later clarified that the amount of time required to cut through it would give Border Patrol agents “additional response time to affect a successful law enforcement resolution.”⁷ It was reported that Donald Trump—who campaigned on a promise to build an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall” with “above- and below-ground sensors,” described migrants as possessing “stronger, bigger, and faster vehicles than our police have and that ICE has and Border Patrol have,” and gave candy to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, during their most recent meeting—has referred to national security adviser, John Bolton, as “Mike” on multiple occasions.^{8 9 10 11} In Cairo, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, gave a speech in which he vowed to “expel every Iranian boot” from Syria.¹² “America is a force for good in the Middle East,” said Pompeo.

Tens of millions of Indian workers went on a two-day strike to protest Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s laws, which were described by public-sector union leadership as “anti-worker and anti-people,” and demand, among other things, a 692-rupee ($9.78) daily minimum wage.¹³ In Buenos Aires, Argentina, tens of thousands of people marched while carrying torches to protest President Mauricio Macri’s austerity program.¹⁴ The mayor of Gdańsk, Poland, a prominent opposition leader against the ruling Law and Justice party, died after being stabbed in the chest at a charity concert, and a Brazilian Workers’ Party legislator in Rio de Janeiro survived an assassination attempt.^{15 16} Pauline Hanson, the leader of Australia’s One Nation party, who once told an Aboriginal crewmember working on a documentary being made about her, “It’s good to see that you’re actually, you know, taking up this and working,” has suggested that the underemployed or unemployed “put down the iPads” and collect cane toads.^{17 18} “They are not a nice animal and they breed. . . I have written to the prime minister saying, ‘Look, all those people out there Work for the Dole are doing absolutely nothing, or even kids that are on holidays’ . . . get out there, collect the cane toads,” said Hanson. Scientists have analyzed recordings of “sonic attacks” that were initially reported to have caused brain damage, nausea, headaches, fatigue, dizziness, sleep problems, and hearing loss in more than 36 American diplomats and family members in Havana, and now believe the sounds to be the echoes of mating crickets.^{19 20}

Police in California have arrested a man under suspicion for stealing his roommate’s winning lottery ticket while the victim slept and replacing it with a forgery.²¹ The owners of O’naturel, Paris’s first nude restaurant, announced that it would close.²² The 70th governor of Ohio was sworn in on nine Bibles, which were held by his wife.²³ Joe Biden’s brother stated that their family in Pennsylvania voted for Trump “because they felt slighted by Hillary and her campaign.”²⁴ A hacker from Surrey, England, who crashed Lonestar, Liberia’s leading telecom company as part of another company’s sabotage scheme, was jailed.²⁵ In Wichita Falls, Texas, a woman was banned from Walmart after drinking wine from a Pringles can while riding an electric shopping cart; she had been riding the cart for two and a half hours.²⁶—Violet Lucca