Weekly Review
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for a bombing that killed 84 people in Iran.1 Israel carried out an air strike in a zone in southern Gaza that it had previously declared safe, killing 12 people, two of whom were journalists, bringing the total number of journalists killed in the region since October 7 to 79.2 3 4 5 A drone attack on the West Bank killed at least seven Palestinians, and Israeli border guards killed a four-year-old girl in East Jerusalem.6 7 Save the Children said that at least 10 children per day have lost a limb in Gaza since the conflict began.8 Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said that “the migration of Gaza residents” could be a “solution,” days after Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Palestinians should leave Gaza so Israelis could move there and “make the desert bloom.”9 Screens in Lebanon’s airport were hacked to display an anti-Hezbollah message.10 A military attack in Myanmar killed 17 people.11 A second member of the Biden Administration resigned over the president’s support for Israel, and it was reported that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was hospitalized for a week without informing President Biden or other members of the administration.12 13 State houses in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Montana were evacuated or briefly closed after receiving false bomb threats via email.14
Congressional leaders came to an agreement on the 2024 budget in an attempt to avoid a government shutdown.15 New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who recently pleaded not guilty to charges that he accepted bribes from Egypt, was accused in a new federal indictment of accepting bribes from Qatar.16 The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case to determine whether Donald Trump’s role in the January 6 riot disqualifies him from running for president.17 “We have to get over it, we have to move forward,” Trump said to a group of Iowans in reference to a school shooting the day before, during which an 11-year-old boy was killed and several others were injured.18 19 Wayne LaPierre, who once claimed that rap music and video games were responsible for the Sandy Hook shooting and that the threat of “Latin American gangs” necessitated gun ownership in the United States, resigned as the head of the National Rifle Association days before his corruption trial was set to begin in New York.20 21 22 Queen Margrethe II of Denmark announced that she will abdicate the throne next week.23 Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, resigned after being accused of academic plagiarism, and it was reported that the MIT professor Neri Oxman, whose billionaire Harvard-donor husband had advocated for Gay’s resignation, had plagiarized parts of her own dissertation.24 Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s official plane broke down, and an Alaska Airlines flight made an emergency landing after a door-size section of the plane blew off 10 minutes after takeoff.25 26
Scientists located the enzyme that makes urine yellow, a man filed a lawsuit against Dunkin’ Donuts after a toilet in one of the chain’s Florida stores exploded on him, and a venomous snake was found in a toilet in Australia.27 28 29 A man in Leeds, Alabama, crashed his car outside a Bass Pro Shop, stripped naked, and then cannonballed into the store’s indoor aquarium.30 A man in Memphis, Tennessee, stole an Amazon truck after the driver left the vehicle to make a delivery.31 After a truckers’ strike resulted in fuel shortages in India, a food delivery driver completed his deliveries on horseback.32 “It’s been a bit of an experiment,” said a retired postal worker in Wales, who captured footage of a mouse tidying up a workbench in his garden shed.33 A dog in Pittsburgh ate $4,000 worth of cash his owners left out in an envelope, and a pair of dogs caused more than a quarter million dollars worth of damage to a car dealership in Houston.34 35 “I saw seven of them smashing into a car the other day,” said a Houston resident of peacocks causing damage in her neighborhood.36 Moose have been caught licking cars in Canada.37 —Megan Evershed
