Weekly Review

In Indianapolis, a 19-year-old killed eight people and wounded several others at a FedEx warehouse where employees were unable to call the police or family members because of a company policy forbidding workers from carrying cell phones.^{1 2} A police department in Minnesota released body-cam footage of an officer killing an unarmed 20-year-old named Daunte Wright, some 10 miles away from the courthouse in which another officer, Derek Chauvin, is on trial for the death of George Floyd; the City of Chicago released a video recording of an officer killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo after he had lifted his hands in the air; Kenosha, Wisconsin, law enforcement announced that the officer who shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake would not face disciplinary action; and one of the police officers who shot Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, was given a book deal.^{3 4 5 6} Federal health officials called for a temporarily halt to distribution of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine after six people out of the more than 7 million who have received the shot fell ill.⁷ President Joe Biden announced that the United States will withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by September 11, and Republican members of Congress announced, and then subsequently canceled, plans for an America First caucus that would work to foster “common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.”^{8 9}

The assistant defense minister of Australia reminded the nation’s armed forces that their chief mission remained the “application of lethal violence” after a controversial commissioning ceremony for the HMAS Supply that featured a dance troupe twerking in front of the 21,500-pound replenishment oiler.¹⁰ A Czech man turned over to authorities a T-34 tank and a SD-100 tank destroyer as part of a nationwide weapon-amnesty program, and a Yorkshire, England, woman whose partner was killed with a crossbow issued a call for British legislation regulating access to “medieval weapons.”^{11 12} The city council in Placerville, California—whose nickname, “Hangtown,” derives from a series of 19th-century lynchings—decided to remove the noose that had been featured on its seal, and Facebook apologized for removing the official page of the French town of Bitche after it was mistakenly flagged for containing offensive language.^{13 14 15} “The name of our town seems to suffer from a bad interpretation,” said Bitche’s mayor. The Florida House of Representatives passed a bill forbidding transgender students from participating in women’s high school and college sports, and authorizing genital inspections in cases in which a student’s gender is disputed.¹⁶ “This is about giving women and girls an equal chance to succeed,” said one Florida Republican who supported the bill. “It’s simple.” A Republican state senator in Missouri introduced legislation to designate January 12 as Rush Limbaugh Day, and Tennessee lawmakers proposed naming the ladder as the official state tool.^{17 18} An Austrian court ruled that intentional flatulence contains no “communicative content” and thus is not protected by the freedom of expression.¹⁹

Japan announced plans to release into the Pacific Ocean more than 1 million tons of treated wastewater that was contaminated in the Fukushima nuclear disaster, prompting a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry to urge Japan’s deputy prime minister to drink it himself.^{20 21} “The ocean is not Japan’s trash can,” said the spokesperson. The islanders of Tanna, who view the late Prince Philip as a “recycled descendant of a very powerful spirit or god that lives on one of their mountains,” mourned the royal’s passing.²² Darius, the world’s largest rabbit, was reported missing; a mysterious creature spotted in a tree in Kraków was revealed by animal-welfare workers to be a croissant; and a group of scientists created chimeric embryos consisting of both human and monkey cells.^{23 24 25} “My first question is, why?” asked one researcher who was not involved in the project. A study determined that the total number of Tyrannosaurus rexes that ever existed was roughly 2.5 billion, though only about 20,000 adults were alive at any given time.²⁶