Weekly Review

In the United States’ third school shooting of the year, three children were killed in Nashville.¹ “We’re not gonna fix it,” said Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett, who earlier last month co-sponsored legislation which prevents the government from maintaining a federal firearms registry.^{2 3} “I’m sensitive to the ban and recognize some of the security implications,” a representative said of mounting pressure for more than two dozen congressional Democrats to deactivate their TikTok accounts.⁴ A Minnesota town was evacuated after a derailed train carrying ethanol and corn syrup caught fire, and investigators studying the toxic fallout from the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, started experiencing symptoms that residents, some of whom begged for evacuation, have reported since February.^{5 6 7 8} A Bangladeshi journalist was arrested after reporting on escalating food prices, an American journalist was arrested in Russia on accusations of spying, and a Russian war blogger was blown up inside a café in St. Petersburg after receiving a statue of a soldier that concealed a bomb.^{9 10 11} It was reported that officials at three major South African banks have been working with a money launderer known as “Mo Dollars” to clean gold smugglers’ cash.¹² “Your overconfidence is your weakness,” is among the air raid alerts recorded by Mark Hamill for Ukrainian civilians.¹³ Lawmakers in Kansas passed a bill that requires doctors to tell patients their abortion could be “reversible” even after they take an abortion pill.¹⁴It was revealed that the San Jose police union’s executive director had been importing fentanyl in order to sell it nationwide, a scheme she had partially devised on office computers.¹⁵ 

Humza Yousaf made history as the first person of color and first Muslim to be elected Scotland’s first minister, British prime minister Rishi Sunak made comments defending the detention of child migrants, and King Charles III made cheese infused with carrot juice.^{16 17 18} The United Kingdom banned the public sale of laughing gas, and it was reported that 1 in 10 Brits have performed dentistry on themselves.^{19 20} An undercover FBI agent who had spent years in a Kansas City Proud Boys chapter admitted that he had propped a gate open for other rioters on January 6, 2021, and testified that he entered the U.S. Capitol building because he had hoped to protect “items of historical significance or historical artifacts.”²¹ “When tomatoes are not stressed at all, they are very quiet,” said a researcher who discovered that, when thirsty or in distress, plants make a popping noise undetectable to the human ear.²² It was announced that a “corpse flower” will bloom at New York’s Botanical Garden for the first time in four years, and new research suggests that bees experience emotions, suffer from PTSD, and may even dream.^{23 24} Nine colleges in China encouraged students to use their spring break to “get in touch with nature” and fall in love amid declining birth and marriage rates across the country.²⁵A survey analyzing relationship trends across the United States found that respondents from Utah were the most likely to identify as “hopeless romantics” and that 58 percent of respondents from Louisiana said they had “the best sex lives.”²⁶ “This has been a degraded, tawdry discourse today, with obsessive questioning about public urination,” said the Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin at a House hearing on crime in Washington, D.C.²⁷ 

Amsterdam launched a new campaign aimed at urging young British men looking for a “messy night” to “stay away” from the capital in an attempt to cut down on nuisance tourism.²⁸ “This is not an April Fools’ joke,” said the founder of an Australian startup that exhibited a meatball made by inserting genes from the long-extinct woolly mammoth into a sheep cell.²⁹ “It looks empty and incomplete without that spoon,” said an owner of a Dairy Queen in Phoenix, after two people stole the 15-foot-tall red spoon that stood against the restaurant.³⁰ “I don’t see too many likes on Facebook,” said a member of the Finnish parliament who performs under the name Qruu and released a campaign video in which he raps about welfare, carbon neutrality, and “stopping Putin’s missiles.”³¹ A state senator in North Carolina introduced the “Eliminate Participation Trophies Act.”³² A new study of horse bones validated indigenous histories of when the animals arrived on the continent.³³ Donald Trump was indicted.³⁴ —Megan Evershed