Weekly Review

The Senate approved President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package after the 628-page bill was read aloud in its entirety at the request of Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson.¹ “Good thing we have time during a national emergency to do this,” said Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.² Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a former social worker and one of eight Democratic senators who voted against Sanders’s bill to increase the minimum wage, brought a large chocolate cake into the chamber for staff who had been forced to work through the night.³ Shaun Bailey, the Conservative candidate in London’s mayoral election, decried the concept of a universal basic income because recipients would spend it on “lots of drugs.”⁴ “I’ve been a youth worker for over 20 years,” said Bailey. “I know some people would absolutely fly if you gave them a lump sum to deal with every week.” “We’re also going to work in heaven,” said the megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress on The Jim Bakker Show.⁵ “God created us to be workers.” A Dutch entrepreneur created a new method to test for the coronavirus in which subjects enter a soundproof cabin and scream.⁶ The country music star Dolly Parton, who helped fund research for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, got vaccinated.⁷ “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine,” she sang to the tune of “Jolene.” “Because once you’re dead, then that’s a bit too late.”

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, which has the second-highest death toll from COVID-19 after the United States, told his constituents to stop “fussing and whining” about the pandemic.⁸ In Myanmar, soldiers and police have sent hundreds of death threats via TikTok to protesters of last month’s coup.⁹ The Department of Homeland Security deported hundreds of Haitian asylum-seekers, acknowledging that they “may face harm” upon their return.¹⁰ The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that makes it illegal for federal law-enforcement officers to have sex with detainees, and a judge in India advised an accused rapist to marry his school-age victim or else be jailed.^{11 12} An Idaho state representative voted against funding for early education because he disapproved of “any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child.”¹³ In Texas, a high school assignment about chivalry instructed girls to “dress in a feminine manner” to please men, and in Missouri, a Baptist pastor stepped down after delivering a sermon that pilloried women who gain weight after marriage and described Melania Trump as “the epic trophy wife of all time.”^{14 15} A California man was accused of killing his wife, propping her up on a living room couch, and telling their children that she was hungover as they opened presents in front of her on Christmas Day.¹⁶ “You will hear about a relationship that was full of arguing and yelling, but also a lot of love,” said his attorney, Heather Moorhead, who argued that the deceased got drunk and fell onto a glass table.

In Mexico, 81 people were injured during International Women’s Day protests against femicide and violence against women.¹⁷ It was reported that structural problems that led to worker injuries during the construction of the bridge named after Andrew Cuomo’s father were concealed; it remains unclear whether the bridge has been properly repaired.¹⁸ The man who put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk during the January 6 Capitol riot interrupted his virtual hearing by screaming that it wasn’t fair that he was still in jail.¹⁹ A man was arrested for carving wwg1wga, an abbreviation of the QAnon slogan “Where We Go One, We Go All,” and iammark, his Twitter handle, into a large stone table at an archeological site called America’s Stonehenge.²⁰ The Queen of England said that she was sad.²¹—Annie Geng