Weekly Review

The Democratic Party held caucuses in Nevada and a primary election in South Carolina, leaving Vermont senator Bernie Sanders with the most pledged delegates, followed by Joe Biden, who won his first-ever state in his third presidential run.^{1 2} The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who spent an undisclosed, seven-figure sum on television ads in 12 of the 14 Super Tuesday states, dropped out of the race, as did Amy Klobuchar, whose campaign spent $4.2 million on ads in Super Tuesday states; both endorsed the former vice president, who mistakenly said at a campaign rally that he was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate and who then told the same crowd that if voters don’t like him they should “vote for the other Biden.”^{3 4 5 6 7} Michael Bloomberg—a former mayor of New York City worth $65 billion who has referred to Mexican clients as “jumping beans,” called women “horse-faced lesbians,” said an employee was “a real Jap,” and bragged that his daughter was “tall and busty”—vowed to continue his campaign to “unite America,” and then told an audience in Texas that if he did not win the nomination he might not support Sanders.^{8 9 10 11 12} Tom Steyer, a former fossil-fuel investor worth $1.6 billion who pledged to use his fortune to “stop climate change” and “realize full equality for women,” ended his campaign; the day before, Steyer had stiffly moved his arms as Juvenile performed “Back That Azz Up” at a campaign rally.^{13 14 15 16 17} At a press conference, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who was encouraged by the Democratic megadonor Bernard Schwartz to stop Sanders by announcing support for another candidate, acknowledged that, between 2009 and 2016, his PAC had spent $8,638.85 on Junior’s cheesecakes for donors.^{18 19}

The number of coronavirus infections increased to an estimated 90,000 across six continents, so far killing 3,000 people and prompting the World Health Organization to elevate its danger assessment of the outbreak to the highest threat level; and Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who has called for an end to programs that feed low-income children, accused the U.S. media of exaggerating the danger of the outbreak in order to hurt Trump’s approval rating by driving down the stock market.^{20 21 22 23} The president, who claimed that the virus would disappear because of warmer weather, appointed Vice President Mike Pence, who as governor of Indiana failed to prevent an HIV outbreak because he initially refused to authorize a needle-exchange program, to lead the United States’ response to COVID-19.^{24 25} The Trump Administration expanded its ban on travelers from Iran, citing the coronavirus outbreak in that country.²⁶ “And I say here and now, if we can help the Iranians—we’re doing certain things for them now—and if we can help the Iranians—we have the greatest health-care professionals in the world—and if we can help the Iranians with this problem, we are certainly willing to do so,” Trump said at the CPAC conference. “We would love to be able to help them.”²⁷ Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion to overturn a decision that he had authored.²⁸

A police officer in Indiana was charged with two felonies after he had handcuffed his 15-year-old son twice in an attempt to scare him straight, and a police officer in Florida who claimed that he had arrested over 6,000 people, including a 7-year-old, was fired after he handcuffed a 6-year-old girl and lifted her into the back of his squad car.^{29 30} A man in Australia woke up 90 minutes after he had been declared dead, and doctors in Pittsburgh reported the first known case of a person who naturally urinates alcohol.^{31 32} Police in New Zealand arrested a man in a grocery store for throwing bananas at the store’s owner; police in Maryland arrested a man they believe went to a grocery store and stabbed a woman in the buttocks with a syringe full of semen; an official in Indonesia warned of “a certain kind of sperm that is very strong” that can impregnate women in swimming pools; and a male baboon in Australia escaped captivity during a vasectomy operation and fled the facility in the company of two females.^{33 34 35 36} Thieves in England left behind a duck at a store they had robbed; it was reported that China planned to send at least 100,000 ducks to Pakistan to combat swarms of crop-attacking locusts; 40,000 Africanized bees living in the eaves of a Howard Johnson’s swarmed the hotel’s patrons, according to a Los Angeles County beekeeper, after they were “set off” by “some activity, noise, vibration”; and studies reported that Mars was vibrating.^{37 38 39 40} —Joe Kloc