Weekly Review

After weeks of pressure, the incumbent president, Joe Biden, stepped down as the Democratic nominee and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement.^{1 2} “Is the platform that Kamala has strong enough to rally people?” asked a Vermont resident.³ “I think she’s fine,” said a voter in Tennessee.⁴ “I mean, I’m sure everyone would love to have the first female president of the country,” said one Wisconsin resident, “but at the same time … I don’t know.”⁵ “I didn’t know who she is,” said a Boston resident, “but I want her to win.”⁶ Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz posted a photo of himself climbing a coconut tree and told the vice president that he was “ready to help.”⁷ “Let Trumpmania run wild, brother!” said the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, ripping off his shirt at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, which Donald Trump once called “a horrible city.”^{8 9} RNC spectators bandaged their ears to match the white covering Trump wore over the wound he sustained during the recent attempt on his life, and Trump’s footwear company sold out of the limited-edition sneakers featuring the post-assassination photograph of the bloodied former president pumping his fist in the air; the shoes retailed for $299.^{10 11} “Violence is not the way to go,” said John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, about the assassination attempt on Trump.¹² At the convention, which Trump described as a “big, beautiful, four-day lovefest,” the former president railed against “illegal aliens,” who he once again compared to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz told former Speaker Kevin McCarthy that he would be booed offstage if he were asked to speak, and multiple speakers made homophobic and transphobic comments.^{13 14 15 16 17} “They literally loaded the wrong speech,” said Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, blaming the teleprompter for the harsh remarks he delivered against Democrats.¹⁸ It was reported that Grindr crashed in Milwaukee on the second day of the convention.¹⁹ “This is easily the worst faux pas, technical faux pas, or glitch of any security software provider ever,” said a cybersecurity industry analyst about the wide-reaching CrowdStrike outage, which affected airports, hospitals, banks, grocery stores, gas stations, media outlets, and millions of other operating systems around the world.^{20 21 22}

The prime minister of Thailand ordered government agencies “to urgently take action to avoid an impact on tourism” after six tourists were found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok, seemingly poisoned with cyanide.^{23 24} Roughly 10,000 people in Mallorca, Spain, protested mass tourism a few weeks after protesters sprayed tourists with tiny water guns in Barcelona.^{25 26} After JD Vance said the UK might be “the first truly Islamist country with nuclear weapons,” the deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom said that Trump’s new VP pick had said “quite a lot of fruity things in the past.”²⁷  In Ecuador, police dogs found over six tons of cocaine in a banana shipment; in Fargo, North Dakota, an angry man uprooted his neighbor’s strawberry plants over a property line dispute; and in Guyana, a man known as the “Grape Boss” claimed that he lost millions of dollars worth of grapes after cows invaded his vineyard and destroyed his vines.^{28 29 30}

In Guernsey, King Charles III awarded an eight-year-old goat called Summerville Tamsin a royal title, and a pet parrot called Jobby escaped his owner’s apartment in Glasgow and was found in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Maternity Unit eating potato chips.^{31 32} “He passed the afternoon quite drunk,” said a Tour de France spectator about a Frenchman who threw chips at two participating cyclists.³³ In Tokyo, more than a dozen high school students were taken to a hospital after they ate extremely spicy chips that were labeled “18+,” Denmark partially lifted a recall on flavors of “Fire Chicken” ramen noodles that the country had previously banned for being too spicy, and a few months after Starbucks started selling its “Spicy Refreshers,” Burger King launched a “Fiery Menu.”^{34 35 36 37} “Something’s brewing,” said a New York resident, about the near-miss fireball that flew over the city.³⁸ In Tacoma, Washington, a human finger was discovered, identified, and returned to the man who had lost it while “messing around with some fireworks.”³⁹ —Megan Evershed