Weekly Review

President Donald Trump removed top Department of Homeland Security officials amid their move to a new headquarters (in a building formerly called the Government Hospital for the Insane) because, it was reported this week, the department did not pursue his calls for shutting down the U.S.–Mexico border, reinstating the policy of separating migrant children from their families, and releasing detained immigrants into “small- and mid-sized” sanctuary cities.^{1 2 3} A former DHS official called the latter aim, which was intended as retaliation against Democratic-majority states, “so illegal,” and the president appointed an ICE employee who said that detention centers for children were “more like a summer camp” director of the agency.^{4 5} “I told you so,” Julian Assange reportedly said to his lawyer from jail after he was arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London; Assange’s Ecuadorian citizenship had been suspended several months after he had threatened to sue Ecuador for “violating his fundamental rights” following the embassy staff’s request that, among other things, he clean his bathroom and properly care for his pet cat.^{6 7 8} Maryanne Trump Barry, a federal judge and the president’s sister, stepped down from the bench, and a new investigation revealed that she and her family engaged in schemes to avoid paying taxes on millions of dollars funneled from her father’s real estate empire, for which she received $182.5 million in payment when it was sold; in retirement, she will be paid between $184,500 and $217,600 annually.⁹ A father and son in Michigan were charged with selling infected body parts for as much as $100,000 each.¹⁰

Following three decades of ruling Sudan after coming to power in a military coup, Omar al-Bashir, who was indicted in June 2008 by the International Criminal Court for his role in an ethnic cleansing of non-Arabs in Darfur, was overthrown in a military coup.^{11 12} The pope emeritus blamed sexual abuse in the Catholic Church on the sexual revolution of the Sixties; a Florida politician wants to name a bridge after an energy lobbyist; and in India, voting began in a six-week-long presidential election with up to 900 million eligible voters.^{13 14 15} “Quit with the attitude,” said a Louisville police officer to a black teen he pulled over for making a wide turn, and YouTube shut down the comments of a livestream of a House Judiciary Committee hearing on white nationalism because the comments section was filled with white nationalists.^{16 17} A report estimated it would cost $12.7 billion to permanently house the homeless in the Bay Area; Uber released its financial papers ahead of what it hopes is a $100 billion valuation at its initial public offering; and a judge ruled that the paranormal investigator Kade Jones will not go to jail for abusing Virgin Airlines workers—his fourth offense of this nature—because of his “excessive weight” but would, no matter his weight, go to jail if he did it again.^{18 19 20} “I couldn’t face her to tell her,” said Magic Johnson during an extempore news conference in which he announced he was stepping down as the president of basketball operations of the Los Angeles Lakers and had failed to notify owner Jeanie Buss.²² The United States struck Somalia with an air strike the day before its prime minister visited Washington.²³

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s party won him a fifth term as prime minister despite his three pending indictments; Jewish settlers filmed in the West Bank throwing rocks at a Palestinian family were not arrested; and an aerospace company tried to figure out why its spacecraft crashed on the surface of the moon.^{24 25 26} Astronomers published the first-ever image of a black hole.²⁷ Researchers from the Minor Planet Center asked the public to vote on whether the largest unnamed planet in our solar system—currently called 2007 OR10—should be called Gonggong, Holle, or Vili.²⁸ “We know enough about it now,” said the center’s workers, “where we think we can give it a fitting name.” In Taiwan, doctors removed from the swollen eye of a woman four small “sweat bees” that had been eating her tears, and the Cairo, New York, police department advised drivers to “overcome the fear” after a woman crashed her car when she saw a spider.^{29 30} “The evolution of our evolutionary group, Homo,” a scientist said after hearing that had someone discovered a new species of upright ape in a cave in the Philippines, “is getting weirder and weirder.”³¹—Jacob Rosenberg