Weekly Review

Donald Trump became the first American president to be impeached for a second time, after a majority of the House of Representatives voted to charge him with “inciting violence against the Government of the United States.”^{1 2} Law-enforcement officials arrested more than 100 individuals in connection with the riot at the U.S. Capitol, including Jon Schaffer, a guitarist for the metal band Iced Earth; Thomas Robertson and Jacob Fracker, two Virginia police officers who had photographed themselves making obscene gestures in front of a statue of a Continental Army general; Klete Keller, an Olympic-gold-medal-winning swimmer who arrived at the Capitol wearing a Team USA jacket; Tim Gionet, a social-media personality known as Baked Alaska who once recorded a hip-hop song entitled “We Love Our Cops”; and Andrew Williams, a Florida firefighter who was captured on film in the Capitol saying, “They can’t arrest everybody.”^{3 4 5 6 7 8} It was reported that the Secret Service was spending $3,000 a month to rent a studio apartment adjacent to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s house in which agents could use the toilet because the couple had not allowed the agents to use any of their six bathrooms.⁹ The Secret Service announced the creation of a “green zone” in Washington ahead of the presidential inauguration, and the western front of the Capitol was evacuated during a rehearsal because of a fire at a nearby encampment of unhoused persons.^{10 11} Some 20,000 National Guard troops were scheduled to be deployed to Washington, most of the bridges over the Potomac River were to be shut down, and a fence was to be constructed around the National Mall.¹² “We want everybody to enjoy it,” said Washington mayor Muriel Bowser of the inauguration, “in their own states, in their own living rooms, and with their own families.”¹³

The Center for Biological Diversity began offering a $5,000 reward for anyone with information about a manatee found in a Florida river with trump carved into its back.¹⁴ “Manatees,” said the center’s Florida director, “aren’t billboards.” Prosecutors in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, requested that the bail conditions for Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two people at a Black Lives Matter protest last year, be modified to prohibit him from consuming alcohol, displaying “white power” signs, and consorting with white supremacists after he was seen making the “OK” gesture while drinking at a Wisconsin bar with a group of Proud Boys and his mother.¹⁵ A woman in Quebec was fined for walking her husband on a leash outside after curfew, and a hacker remotely locked a number of internet-equipped chastity cages, which are designed to prevent wearers from achieving erections.^{16 17} “Your cock is mine now,” the hacker, who demanded a ransom payment in bitcoin, wrote one of the victims. A San Francisco programmer was locked out of a digital wallet containing some $220 million worth of bitcoin after he forgot the password, and a Welsh IT worker unsuccessfully lobbied local authorities for permission to search a garbage dump for a hard drive containing a cryptographic key capable of unlocking $280 million of bitcoin that he had accidentally thrown in the trash.^{18 19}

Concerned that the steep prices for brides and weddings might lead to “corrupt and illegal practices,” the leader of the Taliban, who has two wives, issued a decree advising the organization’s leaders to refrain from polygamy, and an Indian man was arrested on charges of spying for Pakistan after allegedly leaking intelligence on troop movements in the Pokhran firing range in exchange for photos of nude women.^{20 21} A pigeon thought to have been in violation of biosecurity regulations after traveling from Oregon to Melbourne was condemned to death by the Australian government but was then granted a reprieve when its identification band was found to be counterfeit.²² “Following an investigation,” announced the Department of Agriculture, Water, and the Environment, “the department has concluded that Joe the Pigeon is highly likely to be Australian.”²³ Yellow mealworms, which are the larvae of the Tenebrio molitor beetle, were approved for human consumption by the European Union’s food-safety agency, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the British House of Commons, defended new Brexit regulations that have disrupted the Scottish fishing industry.^{24 25} “The key thing is, we’ve got our fish back,” said Rees-Mogg. “They’re now British fish, and they’re better and happier fish for it.”²⁶