Weekly Review

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a two-month eviction moratorium that will not prevent landlords from expelling tenants whose leases are ending.¹ “What am I going to do with my dad’s ashes?” asked Aqui Greadington, a Kansas City, Missouri, resident whose lease is up in September. The United States urged Israel not to evict Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah, a section of occupied East Jerusalem.² “We have encouraged Israeli authorities to avoid evictions and other actions that exacerbate tensions,” said Ned Price, the Biden-appointed State Department spokesman who earlier this year objected to an International Criminal Court investigation into Israeli war crimes in the occupied territories.³ Minnesota law enforcement refused to release records related to the policing of protesters opposed to the Biden-endorsed Enbridge Line 3 oil pipeline, which would pass through both treaty-protected tribal lands and unprotected tribal lands in Minnesota and North Dakota.^{4 5} In Canada, a video surfaced of a Catholic priest giving a sermon in which he claimed that survivors of residential schools lied about sexual abuse in order to get more money from the government.⁶ “It’s kind of hard if you’re poor not to lie,” said the reverend.

Though 20 fossil-fuel firms are together responsible for a third of global carbon emissions, United Nations secretary-general António Guterres called a new climate report “code red for humanity” because it concludes that its member states cannot prevent the earth’s temperatures from rising to newly catastrophic heights over the next 20 years.^{7 8 9} The two nations responsible for releasing the most carbon dioxide, China and the United States, vied for the title of most generous vaccine producer, while the fourth-biggest polluter, Russia, began its list of “undesirable nongovernmental organizations” with Bard College.^{10 11 12} Protesting their country’s 42 percent poverty rate, Argentineans marched outside the Italianate-style Casa Rosada, which houses the office of President Alberto Fernández, who last year announced that he was “relaunching the oil and gas economy” with $5 billion in subsidies.^{13 14} Ten thousand miles away, in Bangkok, where a record 22,000 new COVID-19 cases and 212 deaths were reported in one day, protesters descended upon the Venetian Gothic home of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha.¹⁵ After denying charges of sexual assault in a recorded message set to a slideshow of him touching people of various races, genders, sexual orientations, ages, and levels of acquaintance, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York remained inside his Renaissance Revival executive mansion.^{16 17} Maria Licciardi, the alleged 70-year-old “godmother” of the Camorra, was arrested in Rome for extortion, auction rigging, Mafia-type association, and receiving ill-gotten funds.¹⁸

While mourning their brother who was killed by a passing train the week before, two North Carolina men were killed on the same railroad track.¹⁹ Three people were injured when an iceberg collapsed at Tennessee’s Titanic Museum Attraction.²⁰ Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga’s approval rating reached a record low of 28 percent as the Olympic flag was transported to France, where President Emmanuel Macron’s approval rating dropped to 34 percent.^{21 22 23} “I hope and believe his execution can be avoided even at this late stage,” said Stanley Johnson, father of Boris, the British prime minister, referring to an alpaca with tuberculosis that his son’s government sentenced to death.²⁴ Larry David was among the guests disinvited from former president Barack Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard birthday bash in response to escalating concerns about the Delta variant, and Spanish officials planned to hire “foreign undercover detectives” to pose as revelers at illegal dance parties in Ibiza.^{25 26} A woman who ordered a butterfly-shaped urn necklace from Amazon gave the product a one-star review after it was delivered with cremated remains inside.²⁷—Sam Needleman