Weekly Review

The United States officially announced its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which revised its COVID-19 guidance to say that the virus can be spread through indoor spaces with poor ventilation such as schools and bars.^{1 2} Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer who was released from prison on a medical furlough, was placed in solitary confinement after it was discovered that he had dined at Le Bilboquet, a restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side whose entrées range from $28 to $55, and later refused to sign paperwork that his lawyers say would prevent him from releasing a tell-all book.^{3 4 5} Donald Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, a longtime political consultant who has a tattoo of Richard Nixon’s face on his back and who was convicted of witness tampering and lying under oath.^{6 7} Joe Arpaio, who was pardoned by the president and is currently seeking his seventh term as Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff, announced that he would travel through the Phoenix metro area and surrounding cities in a mobile campaign unit.^{8 9} “I will go to the people and not be deterred by the virus pandemic or any ungovernable demonstrators. I will not give up and will make Maricopa County great again!” said the former felon. Trump wore a face mask in public for the first time while visiting wounded veterans at a military hospital near Washington, D.C., which will vote on decriminalizing psychedelic mushrooms this fall.^{10 11} It was reported that South Korea’s largest airline, at least six hate groups, several law firms representing Trump, a firm owned in part by Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and the U.S. Catholic Church cumulatively received billions in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, while only 12 percent of Black and Hispanic business owners who applied for the same forgivable, low-interest loans had received the full amount they had requested.^{12 13 14 15 16 17} Seattle’s police department said that at least 50 percent of its BIPOC police officers would be fired if the city followed through with efforts to defund it, and nearly one in five Minneapolis police officers said that they have post-traumatic stress disorder.^{18 19}

Five states set single-day coronavirus death records; officials in Texas and Arizona requested, respectively, that the federal or state government send refrigerated trucks to relieve the states’ morgues, which are reaching maximum capacity; a woman in Florida found a severed human head on the side of the road while jogging; and authorities in France said that they are investigating claims that people who had donated their bodies to science were left to rot and be eaten by rats.^{20 21 22 23} Elon Musk, who recently tweeted that false-positive COVID-19 test results were the cause of rising infection rates and decreasing deaths and hospitalizations, said that his new brain-computer chip startup could be used to help cure addiction and depression.^{24 25} The government watchdog agency responsible for overseeing the conditions at Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers found that 70 percent of all ICE detention centers have not tested any detainees for COVID-19.^{26 27} “They’re going to eat them,” a spokesman for the sheriff’s office said. An oil and gas executive in Colorado pulled a gun on a couple for accidentally turning onto his driveway; later, after denying the incident had taken place, police officers showed him photographs of him holding the gun; and the executive then claimed that painkillers had caused a lapse in his memory.²⁸ In Louisiana, the pastor Lloyd Plumbar said that the state’s cockfighting ban violated the constitutional right to religious freedom.²⁹ Two restaurant employees in Ohio were fired after a couple complained that the pepperoni on their pizza was arranged in the shape of a swastika; four employees at a Jimmy John’s shop were fired after they were caught distributing a video of themselves making a noose out of bread dough; and a woman in Utah was fired after sharing an image on Facebook in which eight KKK members were shown being lynched.^{30 31 32} In Decatur, Georgia, a customer ran into a teenage McDonald’s employee with a car following a dispute over an order.³³ Three people on a boat in Alaska were injured after the boat collided with a humpback whale.³⁴

Scientists identified a glistening dark-green gel that a Chinese rover found on the far side of the moon.³⁵ Loon, a unit of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, launched dozens of tennis-court-size polyethylene balloons to deliver internet service in Kenya.³⁶ A startup space-travel company announced plans to use stadium-size hydrogen balloons to fly customers from Alaska to the highest reaches of the earth’s atmosphere.³⁷  “When you look out the window, when you see the planet below, you don’t see borders. You don’t see this strife. You see this beautiful planet that we need to take care of,” said an astronaut inside the International Space Station.³⁸—Adam Iscoe