Weekly Review

Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter of George Floyd, and at least six people were killed in the United States by police officers in the 24 hours following the conviction.^{1 2} Days before Philadelphia’s first official day of remembrance for the 1985 police bombing of the MOVE organization, it was revealed that the bones of black children murdered in the siege had been used without permission for an online course titled Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology.³ In Des Moines, Iowa, a woman who ran over two children with her 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee because of their ethnicities pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted murder, and in Oklahoma, Governor Kevin Stitt signed a bill that protects drivers who run over protesters.^{4 5} “I remain unequivocally committed to protecting every Oklahoman’s First Amendment right to peacefully protest as well as their right to feel safe in their community,” Stitt said. A bill to combat anti-Asian hate crimes passed in the Senate, 94–1; the single nay vote came from Senator Josh Hawley, who tweeted that it “turns the federal government into the speech police.”^{6 7} President Biden officially acknowledged the Armenian genocide, and a White House official said that the United States, whose current and previous presidential administrations have both asserted that there is an ongoing genocide of Uighur Muslims, will pressure China at a G7 meeting in June about its use of forced labor in Xinjiang.^{8 9}  “Is it enough? No,” said John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy for climate, of the president’s commitment to halve U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030.¹⁰

In India, which is currently facing the largest COVID-19 surge on record, a thief returned a bag stolen from a hospital after realizing that it contained vaccine vials, attaching an apology note that read, “Sorry, didn’t know they were Covid vaccines,” and in Catanzaro, Italy, a civil servant assigned to a hospital was accused of collecting his full salary despite skipping work since 2005.^{11 12 13} Before it was announced that he would host an upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live, Elon Musk tweeted “Autopilot was not enabled” in response to news reports that a Tesla Model S car had crashed, killing two people, and that an initial investigation of the wreck suggested that the driver’s seat was vacant at the time of impact.^{14 15} After SpaceX and NASA successfully launched the spacecraft Crew Dragon Endeavour, its crew was warned of a possible collision with a flying object that, according to NASA, was classified as “unknown,” before arriving safely at the International Space Station, which no longer has enough beds for all the astronauts on board; a new study by MIT found that, in settings with mixed air, even masked individuals who spend significant time in such a space are as likely to contract COVID-19 as unmasked people, whether they are six or 60 feet apart; and a NASA executive pleaded guilty to using pandemic relief loans to pay off his Disney Vacation Club membership fees.^{16 17 18 19} Reflecting on his time in the White House, Donald Trump told fellow Palm Beach Billionaire’s Row resident Sean Hannity that what he misses the most is “helping people.”^{20 21 22} George W. Bush, who withdrew the United States from the Rome Statute and therefore shielded Americans from prosecution in the International Criminal Court, said that he wrote in the name of Condoleezza Rice when he voted in the 2020 presidential election.^{20 21}

A renowned tyrannosaur expert studying a mass-death site said that the “synchronous death event” suggests that these dinosaurs, formerly thought to have been solitary, may have in fact been “capable of interacting as gregarious packs.”²² American honey made in the recent past was found to contain radioactive fallout from nuclear-weapons testing in the Fifties and Sixties.²³ A rioter who bragged about his illegal actions at the U.S. Capitol to someone he chatted with on the dating app Bumble was arrested after his match provided screenshots of their conversation to law enforcement, a man in Japan was arrested for defrauding at least 35 women he was dating after he received “birthday” gifts valued at 100,000 yen, and a Taiwanese couple got married four times and divorced three times over a period of 37 days in order to take advantage of the country’s eight days of paid marriage leave.^{24 25 26} A psychologist at a Minnesota sex-offender treatment center was charged with sexually assaulting two of her patients, a British teacher who brought students to a strip club while intoxicated was banned from teaching for three years, and a French mayor convicted of rape received criticism from feminist groups for continuing to run the town from his prison cell.^{27 28 29} President Jair Bolsonaro offered to reduce Brazil’s deforestation of the Amazon by 40 percent in exchange for $1 billion from the Biden Administration, and two fishermen who recovered a buoy owned by the U.S. government asked for $13,000 in exchange for its return.^{30 31} “If you lose something in the ocean, it doesn’t stay yours forever,” said their attorney, who is also the father of one of the fishermen. “It becomes salvaged.”—Clara Olshansky