Weekly Review
Israel bombed Rafah repeatedly, killing nearly two dozen people, most of whom were children, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israeli military would “land more and painful blows on Hamas” in the coming days.1 2 3 4 5 One hundred eighty bodies were discovered in a mass grave in the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis.6 The United Nations warned that the killing of thousands of Palestinian students and teachers and the destruction of educational infrastructure in Gaza, where more than 80 percent of schools have been damaged or destroyed, potentially amounted to scholasticide.7 Students at Barnard College and Columbia University erected tents on the university’s campus, protested in solidarity with people in Gaza, and pressured the university to divest from Israel-supporting organizations and entities.8 The university’s president, Nemat Shafik, called in the New York Police Department to dismantle the students’ tents, throw their belongings in an alley, and arrest more than 100 protesters.9 “The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,” said NYPD Chief John Chell.10 Columbia’s administration suspended some 100 students, deactivating their student IDs and evicting them from their dorms.11 At Yale University, 47 people were arrested for participating in their own encampment.12 Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, the New School, New York University, Boston University, Tufts University, Emerson College, MIT, and Harvard University held protests in solidarity with Barnard and Columbia, and students at a few of those schools set up tents on their own campuses, as did students at the University of Southern California, where the administration canceled a speech by the school’s valedictorian, a biomedical engineer who minored in resistance to genocide, out of concern that she might discuss Palestine.13 14 15 16 17 18 “Given the relentless attacks on free speech, I am going to fund a national signature campaign in support of the First Amendment,” Elon Musk wrote on X, which an Australian politician described as a “factory for trolls and misinformation.”19 20 The details of Musk’s plan remain unclear.21
French President Emmanuel Macron met with Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with the chief of Hamas; the prime minister of Belize met with the pope; the prime ministers of the Netherlands, Denmark, and Czechia met with the NATO secretary general; and U.S. President Joe Biden was met with pro-Palestine protests in Philadelphia.22 23 24 25 26 “The spit is traveling with us in the presidential plane,” said a Berlin kebab chef, who traveled to Turkey with the German president.27 The author of the New Cold Wars, David Sanger, said that the international order is “a very different competition than what we had in the Cold War.”28 “It is cold, there’s no question it is cold, but I’d rather be a little cold than sweaty,” said the judge of the courtroom climate of Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial, which commenced in New York.29 30 “Resist the urge to flee the courtroom,” said one of the prosecutors.31 “I find him fascinating and mysterious,” said a potential juror.32 “I DID NOTHING WRONG!” Trump posted on Truth Social.33
Mary Trump made fun of her uncle for seeming to fall asleep on the first day of his trial, and Joe Biden said that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea during World War II, a claim that is unsubstantiated.34 35 A woman in Brazil took the corpse of her dead uncle to a bank, where she used his hand to sign a document that would grant her a loan.36 It was discovered that the human jawbone found in a young boy’s rock collection in Arizona in 2002 had belonged to a Marine who died in 1951, and it was reported that two boys, aged 9 and 10, discovered the remains of ancient elephants in Germany.37 38 In Montana, Viola the elephant escaped the circus for the third time, and in Victoria, British Columbia, Emerson the elephant seal traveled 126 miles back to the city after being relocated to a remote beach because he had become too popular with the human public.39 40 Students walked out at a middle school in Utah, whose slogan is “ROAR,” to protest the presence of their classmates who identify as “furries,” after starting a petition titled “Students for Humans at School.”41 42 43 A student in Ohio was barred from prom for bringing a bag of chips to school, and a student in New York was expelled after pretending to be a principal and announcing their resignation over fax.44 45 A suspicious package sent to the legislature in Ontario was determined to be gravy.46 —Megan Evershed
