Weekly Review

Israel’s Knesset moved by a single-vote margin to end the 12-year premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu, installing Naftali Bennett as the new prime minister at the head of a coalition including, among others, the right-wing party Yamina, the social-democratic party Meretz, and the conservative Islamist party Raam.^{1 2} At the 47th annual G7 summit, in Cornwall, England, President Emmanuel Macron of France, who had earlier that week been slapped at a protest in the town of Tain-l’Hermitage by a medieval-weapons enthusiast, welcomed the United States back into the “club”; the leaders attended an “entirely COVID-secure” beachfront barbecue; Macron and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom quarreled over Northern Ireland and the trade in sausages and other chilled meats; a group of protesters dressed as Pikachu demanded that Japan stop burning coal; and Biden met Queen Elizabeth II, whom he likened to his mother.^{3 4 5 6 7} A White House press corps flight to the summit was delayed because one of the plane’s engines was filled with cicadas.⁸ “We apologize to our charter customers,” read a statement from Delta, “for this rarest of entomological delays.” On her first trip to a foreign country as vice president, Kamala Harris, the daughter of two immigrants, addressed potential Guatemalan immigrants to the United States and told them, “Do not come.”^{9 10}

Alberto Fernández, the president of Argentina, apologized after relating a version of an apocryphal quotation while speaking with the Spanish prime minister: “The Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came from the jungle, but we Argentines came from boats, and they were boats that came from Europe.”¹¹ President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil led a motorcycle procession of some 12,000 riders through São Paulo to a public park, where he sharply criticized rules requiring the vaccinated to wear masks; Bolsonaro was subsequently fined $110 for violating the city’s mask mandate.¹² In Russia, where 12 percent of the population has received only a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, the mayor of Moscow announced that the city would be raffling off new cars for those electing to get the shot, and Washington State launched a program that would provide free joints, but not edibles, to those who receive the vaccine at marijuana dispensaries.^{13 14} A nursing student delivered testimony to the Ohio state legislature in support of a proposed law limiting vaccine mandates in which she claimed that the shot had made her “magnetic,” and attempted to stick both a bobby pin and a key to her skin, neither of which adhered.¹⁵

A report from ProPublica revealed that the 25 richest Americans paid an average income-tax rate of 15.8 percent from 2014 to 2018, lower than the average rate of an American making $45,000 a year.¹⁶ Jeff Bezos announced that he would be aboard the first human spaceflight of the New Shepard, a suborbital rocket produced by his company Blue Origin, along with his brother and an unnamed individual who paid $28 million for a ticket at auction.¹⁷ “The more you pay for it, the more you enjoy it,” said the auctioneer.¹⁸ El Salvador, where 70 percent of people do not have a bank account, became the first country to recognize bitcoin as legal tender.¹⁹ “This is going to evolve fast!” said the president regarding further plans to use geothermal energy from the country’s volcanoes to mine more bitcoin.²⁰ Louie Gohmert, a Republican member of the House from Texas, asked a U.S. Forest Service official during a hearing whether the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management would be able to alter the orbit of the moon or the earth to help mitigate climate-change efforts; the official replied that he would “have to follow up with you.”²¹ Amid widespread drought, the state of Nevada enacted a ban on watering roughly one third of the grass in the Las Vegas metropolitan area.²² A study of the oral traditions of the Māori determined that they may have traveled to Antarctica as early as the seventh century; the National Geographic Society announced the existence of a fifth ocean; and a fisherman on Cape Cod claimed to have escaped from the mouth of a whale after being trapped for almost a full minute.^{23 24 25} “I was lobster diving and a humpback whale tried to eat me,” the fisherman wrote of his experience. The results of a clinical trial suggested that laughing-gas therapy might be an effective treatment for depression.²⁶