Weekly Review

Titan, an amateur submersible whose passengers include the British chairman of Action Aviation and a British billionaire and his son, went missing off the coast of Canada during its tour of the remains of the Titanic and inaugurated a massive search-and-rescue effort.^{1  2} “It seems like this is the worst ever tragedy we’ve ever seen,” an EU official said of the sinking of a migrant boat off the coast of Greece, which killed at least 300 Pakistani citizens trying to escape their nation’s worst economic crisis in decades.^{3 4} In Massachusetts, “DNA Drive Day,” an event organized by law enforcement, who stated they would use the genetic data they collected to solve cold cases, was postponed due to inclement weather and concerns raised by the American Civil Liberties Union.⁵ It was reported that the heir to the Wrigley gum fortune and an American financier who has produced several Adam Sandler movies were among the parties vying to acquire controlling shares of the Israeli company behind Pegasus spyware, which has been used by governments around the world to monitor journalists, including Jamal Khashoggi’s wife.^{6 7} Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who, in 1970, enlisted the aid of his 13-year-old son to xerox 7,000 pages of classified Pentagon documents, died at age 92 surrounded by his loved ones.^{8 9} At the New Jersey golf course where his first wife is buried, Donald Trump railed against his second indictment, which includes 31 violations of the Espionage Act, and praised three of his five children as “serious people.” ^{10 11 12}

The president of Turkmenistan, whose family has ruled the nation for nearly 20 years, announced a massive crackdown on smoking, and the South African Revenue Service announced that it will destroy some 20 million contraband cigarettes, valued at $2.3 million, in a fire that officials said is “likely to last a few days.”^{13 14}  “Operation Regis” halted a shipment to New Zealand of 1,572 pounds of meth that had been hidden inside bottles of maple syrup.¹⁵ California labor department officials imposed fines on a Sacramento taqueria that, while under investigation for wage theft, invited workers to confess to a fake priest, who instead grilled them on matters such as whether they’d ever stolen anything at work.¹⁶ Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who missed a parliamentary debate about sanctioning Boris Johnson because of a scheduling conflict, tweeted that the binary code that appeared across the front door of 10 Downing Street was in honor of London Tech Week.^{17 18} A conservative media pundit and Toronto mayoral candidate, who has stated that “everything I’m campaigning on is authentic to me,” was accused of creating campaign ads with AI after a journalist noticed that a woman in one of the photorealistic images had at least three arms.^{19 20 21} A Belgian psychologist found that most adults suffer from “end-of-history illusion.”^{22 23} 

The manager of a morgue connected to Harvard Medical School was charged by federal prosecutors for stealing and selling body parts from donated cadavers and receiving receipts that read “braiiiiiins” and “head number 7.”²⁴ Polish Christian groups successfully pressured a local bus operator to rename its Bus 666, which formerly ran to the Baltic coastal town of Hel, to Bus 669.²⁵ “There was no nefarious reason behind this,” Louisiana police said of a 28-year-old Honduran woman who illegally falsified her birth certificate in order to enroll at her local high school as a 17-year-old freshman in order to improve her English.²⁶ A Chicago man who, in April, woke himself up from a dream in which someone was breaking into his home by shooting himself in the leg with a .357 Magnum revolver is now being charged for illegal firearm possession.²⁷ “I do it to blow off steam,” said a Pennsylvania State University professor while being arrested for allegedly getting his anus licked by a dog on a state park trail. “What do I have to do to get you to shoot me?”²⁸ —Maya Perry