Weekly Review

“[W]e are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” said the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni Thomas, repeatedly texted Trump’s White House chief of staff to negate the results of the 2020 election, regarding protests against overturning Roe v. Wade.^{1 2 3} Canada’s public safety minister said that border agents would be instructed to welcome Americans across the border to obtain abortions; it was reported that Henry Cuellar, the only Democrat to oppose legislation that would codify Roe v. Wade, refused a staff member parental leave and fired her in her third trimester, after which she suffered a stillbirth; and a leaked memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee encouraged Republicans to display “compassion and kindness toward all people” by supporting restrictive abortion laws, which are correlated with increased maternal mortality rates.^{4 5 6 7} Former President Donald Trump was reported to have said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” to his defense secretary in response to anti–police brutality protesters who were demonstrating in June 2020.⁸ A psychologist employed by the CIA testified that he had stopped waterboarding a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay because he was too thin to withstand the torture.⁹ The City of David Foundation, in partnership with Israeli governmental organizations, announced plans for a zip line extending from what some Christians believe is the Hill of Evil Counsel to Jerusalem’s Peace Forest.¹⁰

Iraq experienced its seventh sandstorm in the past month, which hospitalized more than 5,000 and killed one person.¹¹ Two bodies were discovered in Lake Mead, at least one of whom is likely a homicide victim from the 1970s or 1980s, as a megadrought continued to reduce the reservoir’s water levels.¹² A British army veteran told an inquest that, shortly before a 17-year-old was fatally shot in West Belfast in 1975, a member of the Black Watch regiment, which alleged the teenager fired at them, said that he wanted to “waste somebody tonight,” and Sinn Féin became the largest party in Northern Ireland’s Assembly.^{13 14} An Indiana man charged with murdering his wife by striking her with a flowerpot and dumping her body in a creek won a township-wide Republican primary while being held in jail without bond.¹⁵ Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator of the Philippines, and his running mate Sara Duterte, daughter of its current president, won the country’s presidential election by a wide majority.¹⁶ Peruvian prosecutors said they would investigate the president and his wife after a television program found evidence that they had plagiarized 54 percent of their co-written master’s thesis, and Canada’s deputy House speaker said that the House proceedings were too noisy to determine whether prime minister Justin Trudeau had uttered an expletive during a debate.^{17 18} “Okay, you were a nice comedian. But let us not make war for you to show up on TV,” said Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former Brazilian president and current presidential front-runner, of Volodymyr Zelensky.¹⁹

A white seventh-grade teacher in Rochester, New York, was suspended after he referred to himself as “massah” and instructed students to pick seeds out of balls of cotton, then told black students to continue picking the seeds after he had given white students the option to stop.²⁰ Nestlé assured customers that its Nespresso coffee had not been tainted with cocaine after $50 million worth of the drug was discovered in a factory shipment, and a Thai naval sergeant was jailed after video of him forcing recruits to drink semen with fish sauce went viral.^{21 22} A man died after he was stabbed in the chest in the prize area of a Dave & Busters arcade in Times Square, and a Georgia man was found guilty of aggravated assault after he shot another man during a game of Uno.^{23 24} It was reported that a Roman-era marble bust currently on display in a museum in Texas was purchased at a Goodwill in Austin four years ago for $34.99, and the discovery of a misprinted Bible from 1631 that reads “thou shalt commit adultery” at a garage sale in New Zealand six years ago was made public.^{25 26} It was revealed that the pope secretly approved payments to Islamist militants who kidnapped a Colombian nun in Mali in 2017, and the Vatican said it would be “entering the metaverse.”^{27 28} —Sara Krolewski