Weekly Review

After securing support for natural gas pipelines in West Virginia, Senator Joe Manchin voted for a sweeping bill that, if enacted, would represent the federal government’s largest ever investment in renewable energy and could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the end of the decade.^{1 2} Lightning struck a park abutting the White House, killing three.³ Save for a lone nay vote from Josh Hawley, the author of Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, the U.S. Senate admitted Sweden and Finland to NATO.⁴ Marco Rubio, a sitting member of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, tweeted out information that could allow anyone to log in to his airline account, and a man in Australia was fined over $1,800 for failing to declare a pair of egg and sausage McMuffins in his carry-on, an oversight that was deemed a biosecurity risk.^{5 6} More than 1,000 people were stranded after Death Valley National Park received, in 24 hours, 90 percent of its average annual rainfall.⁷ “I told her that was the least of her concern,” said a library director in Kentucky after a woman apologized, crying, that historic flooding had carried off her checked-out books; a retired police lieutenant shot and killed a woman during a special police training at a library in Washington, D.C.; a library system in Montana closed temporarily after a stack of books, including Act of Betrayal and The Armageddon File, were returned riddled with bullet holes; and residents of Jamestown, Michigan, voted to defund their library after its board refused to censor books by queer authors.^{8 9 10 11} Marine biologists said that, because warmer climates have warmed incubation temperature, almost every sea turtle born in Florida in the past few years has been female.¹² French authorities remain uncertain of how to assist a beluga whale in the Seine.¹³

“The globalists can all go to hell; I have come to Texas,” said the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, garnering a standing ovation, as did his pronouncement that “a Christian politician cannot be racist.”¹⁴ Vincent, Alabama, disbanded its police department after one of the officers texted a racist joke about a pregnant slave, and the U.S. Justice Department announced charges against four officers involved in the no-knock raid in which police killed Breonna Taylor, accusing the officers of lying to justify the raid.^{15 16 17} Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who sparked the kidnapping and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, was spotted in public for the first time in over 20 years, less than a month after her unpublished memoir, I Am More Than a Wolf Whistle, was leaked; in it, she writes, “I always felt like a victim as well as Emmett.… Did we both pay a price for it, yes, we did.”^{18 19} The CDC warned of diarrheal outbreaks linked to shitty splash pads.²⁰ After testing waste water, New York state warned that hundreds of people may be unknowingly infected with poliovirus; the White House declared monkeypox a national health emergency; and a cooling tower in Napa, California, was shut down after it was found to be aerosolizing water containing bacteria, leading to a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.^{21 22 23} In the final days of a trial assessing whether Alex Jones had defamed the families of children murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Jones’s legal team sent an unprivileged digital copy of Jones’s phone to the prosecution, and, in their closing arguments, quoted from Martin Niemöller’s post-Holocaust poem “First They Came.”^{24 25}

A man who has spray-painted no shoot zone hundreds of times on sidewalks and buildings in Baltimore was shot.²⁶ Scientists marked the shortest day in recorded history, 1.59 milliseconds less than the typical 24-hour cycle; some horologists called for a negative leap second to keep clocks aligned, though the social media company Meta fretted that such a correction could wreak havoc on tech systems.²⁷ During the shareholder meeting for Tesla, one person said, “I became a Marine to protect your base on Mars,” and Elon Musk’s system for identifying fake accounts on Twitter—which he has pointed to as evidence for why he should be allowed to renege on his deal to buy the company—flagged Musk’s own account as a likely bot.^{28 29} In Utah, a man was arrested for threatening a couple with a bedazzled handgun because he thought they had taken his pet raccoon, and in North Carolina a couple were indicted for murdering a hotel clerk because their rabbit was missing.^{30 31} A director at France’s Atomic Energy Commission apologized for tweeting what he said was a James Webb Telescope picture of Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun, but which he later admitted to be a cross section of chorizo.³² “This level of detail … a new world is revealed every day,” he said. —Cameron French