Weekly Review

Septuagenarian Donald Trump and octogenarian Joe Biden faced off in the first debate of the 2024 presidential election, whose questions the independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. contemporaneously answered in a livestream on X.^{1 2} “He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one,” said the former president of his opponent.³ “We have a thousand trillionaires in America—I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raise 500 million dollars—billion dollars, I should say—in a 10-year period. We’d be able to right—wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that—all those things we need to do—childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health-care system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the—with, with, with the COVID. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with—look, if—we finally beat Medicare,” said the sitting president; “I’m not a young man … I don’t walk as easy as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to,” he conceded the next day to a crowd in North Carolina.^{4 5} The hour after the debate, during which prominent Democrats pondered replacements for the presumptive nominee, saw the most grassroots fundraising for Biden’s campaign since its launch.^{6 7} “I am the true unity candidate; everyone chose not to vote for me,” said a Canadian man after becoming the first candidate in the country’s history to win zero votes in a federal election.⁸ France’s far-right National Rally won decisively in the first round of its parliamentary elections, the Iranian presidential election is heading to a runoff after a snap election following the death of the president in a helicopter crash, and the president of Bolivia was accused of orchestrating a three-hour coup against himself in an attempt to regain popular favor.^{9 10 11 12}

The Supreme Court decreed that former presidents are entitled to a degree of immunity from prosecution; overturned a 1984 precedent that deferred to federal agencies to interpret the laws they administered; backed the right of cities to criminalize sleeping in public spaces; ruled that a defendant in the January 6 case had been improperly charged with obstruction; and blocked Purdue Pharma from a bankruptcy settlement that would have sent billions of dollars to victims of the nation’s opioid epidemic but would have insulated the Sackler family from future lawsuits.^{13 14 15 16 17 18} Israel’s military, which must start drafting Orthodox Jews per a new ruling from its Supreme Court, advanced farther into northern and southern Gaza, destroyed 11 homes in the West Bank, and killed 10 relatives of the Hamas political bureau chief in an air strike.^{19 20 21 22} More than 20,000 children are estimated to be missing in Gaza, and the United States has sent at least 27,000 bombs to Israel since October 7.^{23 24} Protests in Kenya, where at least 23 were killed, prompted the retraction of a bill bearing $2.7 billion in tax hikes; Kenyan troops arrived in Haiti for a U.N.-backed security mission to curb gang violence; and at least 30 people were killed in Nigeria in a series of suicide bombings.^{25 26 27 28 29} Amid Sudan’s civil war, 750,000 people are on the precipice of famine and facing conditions “beyond imagination,” and Delhi’s water minister was brought to the hospital five days into her hunger strike protesting the city’s water shortage.^{30 31} The ICC issued arrest warrants for Russia’s military chief and its former defense minister, and North Korea condemned joint military drills by Japan, South Korea, and the United States, dubbing their collective activity “the Asian version of NATO.”^{32 33}

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who spent the past 14 years dodging extradition to the United States, touched down in his native Australia after pleading guilty in U.S. court to obtaining and disclosing national security documents; “Julian plans to swim in the ocean every day,” said his wife of his newfound freedom.^{34 35 36} A man in China inadvertently purchased four books containing confidential military documents for less than $1 at a neighborhood recycling station, the country’s ministry of state security reported.³⁷ Court documents revealed that Michael Jackson died in 2009 with more than $500 million in debt, Paris Hilton detailed her experiences of childhood abuse in congressional testimony, and Princess Anne was discharged from the hospital following treatment for a concussion that may have been caused by a horse.^{38 39 40} A 30-foot-deep and 100-foot-wide sinkhole opened up beneath a soccer field in Illinois.⁴¹ In Hong Kong, inspectors found that students at two schools were singing the national anthem too softly, and the city’s chief executive invited residents to “smile more” to help bolster declining tourism.^{42 43} The Rubik’s Cube, which contains 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible permutations, turned 50.⁴⁴ Flatulent cows will face a carbon tax in Denmark beginning in 2035, and macaque monkeys were found to live in greater harmony after weathering a hurricane together.^{45 46} Russian scientists performed an autopsy on a 44,000-year-old wolf carcass, and Japanese scientists unveiled a robot face made of human collagen.^{47 48} —Becky Zhang