Weekly Review

Former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell—who helped cover up the My Lai massacre, armed and trained the Salvadoran military and the Nicaraguan Contras, and knowingly presented false claims about nuclear and biological weapons in Iraq before the United Nations—died from COVID-19.^{1 2 3 4} Newly public documents revealed that Instagram considered a decline in teenagers’ usage an “existential threat” and allocated almost $400 million this year to marketing targeted at them.⁵ After a U.K. judge ruled that Amazon’s camera- and microphone-equipped doorbell breaks data laws, the company asked homeowners to respect their neighbors’ privacy.⁶ “This is a terribly misguided, invasive, and offensive policy,” said Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, regarding British Telecom’s government-supported plan for an app that would track women in order to protect them from violent attacks.^{7 8} Hundreds of anonymous Google and Amazon workers called on their bosses to cut ties with the Israeli military.⁹ “Shit’s about to get real,” said a man in Waterloo, Iowa, when he and 10,000 other workers shut down a John Deere factory in the first strike against the company in 35 years.¹⁰ Kellogg’s advertised non-union factory jobs to “cross the picket line” and replace workers who are currently organizing for health care, retirement, and vacation benefits.¹¹ The Georgia Board of Regents approved a policy allowing colleges to fire tenured professors without faculty input.¹² “There should now be a new word for it in Georgia, because ‘tenure’ will not mean ‘tenure’ there,” said the president of the American Association of University Professors.

“How do you oppose the Holocaust?” a Texas teacher asked an administrator who said that educators should consider “other perspectives” in lessons about the Shoah.¹³ In Lebanon, snipers gunned down seven Muslims, several of whom were calling for the removal of a judge presiding over an investigation into last year’s massive explosion in Beirut; the killings have threatened the alliance between Hezbollah and President Michel Aoun, a Christian.^{14 15 16} Dubai signed an agreement to build infrastructure in Jammu and Kashmir, and thousands of migrant workers were evacuated from the region following a series of murders allegedly carried out by militants.^{17 18} Two years to the day after Mayor Bill de Blasio declared that “New York City is ENDING the era of mass incarceration,” Victor Mercado became the 13th man to die in a New York City jail in 2021, on the same day he was granted emergency release.^{19 20 21 22 23} Police officers in Dayton, Ohio, are under investigation for pulling Clifford Owensby, a paraplegic black man, out of his car by his hair and arms while he screamed “I’m paraplegic.”²⁴ “There really hasn’t been a change in policy,” said the director of the South Texas Human Rights Center, referring to the tripling of migrant deaths in Brooks County, Texas, during Biden’s first year in office.²⁵ Chevron announced plans to power its oil-drilling equipment with solar panels and wind turbines.²⁶

In India, a burglar left a note inside a house he had attempted to rob, asking why the homeowners’ door was locked if there was no money inside.²⁷ A group of Waymo self-driving cars turned incessantly on a dead-end street in San Francisco, and on their fourth attempt, park officials in Colorado removed a tire that had been stuck around a 600-pound elk’s neck for more than two years.^{28 29} Ian Brackenbury Channell was fired from his post as the official wizard of Christchurch, New Zealand.³⁰ Rich Myers, the owner of a bakery in England, agreed to stop selling cookies made with an illegal variety of sprinkles imported from the United States.^{31 32} “Sprinkles you can get in this country are totally shit,” Myers posted on Facebook.³³ “They look wank, they bake wank.” Hundreds of frozen dormice were found when police officers raided buildings used by the Calabrian organized-crime group ‘Ndrangheta, which is rumored to consider them a delicacy.³⁴ After years of hypothesizing about the presence of the word “slut” on the last page of John Steinbeck’s handwritten Grapes of Wrath manuscript, English-speaking scholars were informed that it means “the end” in Swedish.³⁵—Sam Needleman