Weekly Review

An extended drought pushed 400,000 people to the brink of starvation in Madagascar, where severe child malnutrition has nearly doubled since January.¹ Police officers in Delhi used water cannons to disperse hundreds of people protesting the government’s management of a water shortage.^{2 3} Scientists confirmed that the Amazon rainforest now emits more greenhouse gases than it captures, largely because of fires set intentionally to clear land for beef and soybean production.⁴ In Oregon, the Bootleg Fire, the first megafire of the season, grew larger than New York City and will require a “season-ending weather event” to completely contain it; after a 38-year-old man died in last month’s heat wave, a temporary emergency rule mandated that farmworkers be given 10 minutes in the shade every two hours; and a rare, 100-pound tropical fish washed ashore.^{5 6 7 8} Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources began artificially cooling permafrost, and Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would no longer sell its products in the occupied Palestinian territories.^{9 10} Ford unveiled a “high-end fragrance” that smells of petroleum in an effort to sell more electric cars, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s testimony in a case about a $2.6 billion merger was halted when an attorney vomited.^{11 12} The built-in weather app of some iPhones will not display a temperature of 69 degrees, rendering it as either 68 or 70 degrees.¹³

A federal judge declared Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals unlawful, halting the program’s ability to accept new applicants but not immediately affecting the 600,000 existing recipients.¹⁴ Reporting a new all-time high for a single month, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol encountered more than 188,000 migrants at the southern border in June, 34 percent of whom had crossed before.¹⁵ Health providers in Texas sued the state to halt a law prohibiting nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.¹⁶ The law also offers a minimum $10,000 reward to anyone who successfully sues a person who “aids or abets” abortion care. Months after a number of women unveiled a culture of sexual assault in the Australian parliament, lawmakers there were informed that sexual-harassment training would take just one hour and attendance be optional; a rule was proposed in the United Kingdom that would ban hymenoplasty surgery, sometimes marketed as “virginity repair”; and a pair of knickers believed to have belonged to Eva Braun fetched $5,000 at auction.^{17 18 19} Illinois became the first state to bar police officers from lying to minors during interrogations, citing a high rate of cases that were eventually overturned as false confessions.²⁰ Arguing that words such as “attack” and “bite” have created a culture of fear, shark researchers are trying to introduce the terms “interactions” and “negative encounters” in Australia, where there were eight negative encounters with sharks last year.²¹

A new book reported that Facebook, a descendant of a website on which college students rated whether women they went to school with were “hot or not,” has fired dozens of employees for abusing access to private data; in one case, an engineer accessed years of private messages and photos of a woman he had gone on a date with but who had stopped responding to him.²² President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil was hospitalized after having the hiccups for 10 consecutive days and was released after he was treated for a blocked bowel.^{23 24} “We just call it the variant,” said the CEO of Delta Air Lines, speaking of the Delta strain of the coronavirus.²⁵ “Lord, we didn’t want to be in the news,” prayed a pastor whose megachurch runs a student-ministry camp where at least 125 people were believed to have been infected with the variant.²⁶ “Maybe for serving or some extreme generosity, but not this.” In his first public appearance after an 11-day hospital stay, Pope Francis encouraged people to turn off their phones and take a break from the stresses of modern life.²⁷ —Cameron French