Weekly Review
The Malian army and Russian mercenaries were reported to have executed 25 Fulani people during a raid on a village in central Mali.1 2 Iran hanged four Kurdish men accused of spying for Israel, and the U.S. accused a drug dealer in Canada backed by the Iranian government of a botched murder-for-hire plot to pay $350,000 to the Hell’s Angels to assassinate two defectors.3 4 In Gaza, Israel’s campaign of bombings, flooding, and bulldozing has damaged or destroyed half of all buildings and caused Palestinians with no access to food to eat grass and drink contaminated water.5 6 7 The state of Alabama executed a man by nitrogen hypoxia whom it had tried and failed to execute last year by lethal injection.8 “It causes unconsciousness in seconds,” the state said of the execution method, which caused the man to writhe and gasp for several minutes.9 Lawmakers in Iowa, where the death penalty is currently banned, debated reinstating it; Idaho’s commission on pardons and paroles denied a commutation to a life sentence for a 73-year-old man who has been on death row for 40 years; Louisiana’s Supreme Court granted a new trial to a death row prisoner, concluding that the prosecutor in his case lied to the court and suppressed DNA, blood, eyewitness, and ballistic evidence during trial; and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider a new trial for an Oklahoma man who has been on death row for nearly three decades, been given nine different execution dates, been fed three last meals, and been spared execution most recently because the state realized hours before it was to kill him that it had ordered the wrong lethal drug.10 11 12 13 14 15
In Pennsylvania, a 32-year-old self-published author of dystopian science fiction who recently sued the United States over his student-loan debt used a machete to behead his father, who had been a federal employee for 20 years, and then posted a video of himself holding the head in a clear plastic grocery bag as he called for the execution of all government workers.16 17 18 The former leader of Germany’s agency responsible for monitoring neo-Nazis was reportedly being monitored under suspicion of being a neo-Nazi.19 Japan’s prime minister said he wanted to sign a peace treaty with Russia over the Kuril Islands, a territory claimed by both countries; Russia said it would deploy “new weapons” on the islands; and Japan signed a military agreement with Germany to exchange food, fuel, and ammunition.20 21 22 23 24 The U.S. agreed to sell 40 F-16 fighters to Turkey, Turkey reportedly sold more than 1,800 metric tons of a key gunpowder component to Russia, and a Russian plane accidentally dropped bombs on its own territory for the fourth time this year.25 26 27 In the Philippines, the current president accused the former president of fentanyl addiction, and the former president predicted the current president would be exiled like his father.28 A fight broke out on the floor of the Maldives parliament, a state senator in Missouri proposed a resolution allowing legislators to challenge one another to duels to “gain satisfaction” if one’s “honor is impugned,” and a Walmart employee found a Confederate revolver from 1851 in a dumpster in Gettysburg.29 30 31 In Michigan, a 76-year-old former mobster dying of a chronic lung condition was sentenced to “time served” for stealing a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz. “One last score,” his former partner in crime told him.32
A 21-year-old man in Brazil was reported to have partied for four days before realizing he had been shot in the head, and a study found that high school students who use alcohol, weed, or cigarettes are more likely to think about killing themselves.33 34 Sixty school children in the Irish county of Kerry were identified by police as “money mules” who laundered 1.3 million euros through their personal bank accounts, and South Dakota voted not to expand school meals to children from low-income families.35 36 “There is no free lunch,” said the Bureau of Finance and Management commissioner. A father from Scotland hiked 17,598 feet up Mount Everest with his two-year-old son on his back, and a 38-year-old mother in Malaysia was sentenced to three years in prison for dumping boiling water on her son as punishment for using her phone data to watch porn.37 38 The Japanese government ceased requiring that floppy disks be used when submitting applications pertaining to aircraft regulations, and Toyota warned 50,000 Corolla and RAV4 owners that the cars’ airbag inflators are prone to exploding and blasting metal shrapnel into the driver.39 40 41 Mexico City held its first bullfight in two years, a bull shark bit the leg of a swimmer in Australia, and the first ever sighting of a newborn great white shark was reported off the coast of Santa Barbara.42 43 44 The Indian government released a pigeon it had held for eight months on suspicion of spying for China, and the Catholic Church in Panama tracked down a lost cardinal.45 46 The Italian government returned the first Ethiopian-manufactured plane nine decades after Benito Mussolini’s regime stole it from Haile Selassie’s regime; an ocean exploration company claimed to have discovered Amelia Earhart’s 1937 Lockheed Electra at the bottom of the Pacific; a king penguin from the South Pacific emerged on a beach in South Australia; researchers identified an unexplained uptick in bottlenose dolphins attempting to kill baby manatees off the coast of Belize; a muntjac deer in England was found wedged upside-down between two buildings; and on the moon, a stranded upside-down Japanese lander charged itself in the light of the sun and reestablished contact with Earth.47 48 49 50 51 52 —Joe Kloc
