Weekly Review

In New York City, federal prosecutors charged Mayor Eric Adams with fraud and bribery for unlawfully accepting more than $10 million in public campaign funds from “straw donors” and engaging in a quid pro quo relationship with the government of Turkey in which the mayor is alleged to have agreed not to mention the Armenian genocide in exchange for receiving from Turkish Airlines “free or discounted travel” to several countries, including Turkey, where in 2017 Adams made a guest appearance in a romantic comedy in which he asked two characters for political favors; to India, at whose flag-raising ceremony he once referred to himself as “Gandhi-like”; and to China, where last year he sent asylum seekers whom he said would “destroy” New York.^{1 2 3 4 5} “That’s what airlines do,” said the mayor’s lawyer.⁶ New York City’s former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who at a live press conference told his second wife that he was divorcing her for a third wife who later divorced him in part for his association with Donald Trump, was permanently disbarred in Washington, D.C., for claiming, with “no evidence,” “massive election fraud” following Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss; in Wisconsin, a district attorney opened an investigation into Doug Diny, the mayor of Wausau, for donning a hard hat and work gloves and removing the town’s only ballot box.^{7 8 9 10 11 12 13} The mayor of New Orleans was implicated in a bribery scheme in which the city inspector gave her football tickets, and a mayoral candidate in Portland, Oregon, was revealed to have accrued 150 traffic tickets.^{14 15} The mayor of Ford Heights, Illinois resigned after a judge found him guilty of stealing more than $10,000 from the village’s funds; a candidate for the mayoralty of the Bosnian town of Kalinovik was fined €10,000 for posting photos and comments online that were sympathetic to a World War II–era Serbian nationalist leader who was executed for collaborating with Nazis; and in Brazil, during a televised debate for the mayoralty of São Paulo, a candidate who worked as a crime-show host walked across the stage and struck a rival with a steel chair.^{16 17 18 19} “Men,” said São Paulo’s leading candidate at the following debate, where a self-help guru punched a rival’s spokesperson in the face.²⁰

In Venezuela, an arrest warrant was issued for the president of Argentina that accused him of stealing a cargo plane; and in Argentina, an arrest warrant was issued for the president of Venezuela that accused him of kidnapping Venezuelans.^{21 22} A Ukrainian human-rights agency reported that, since invading Ukraine, Russia has kidnapped more than 2,000 children and brought them to Belarus; a member of state parliament in Germany was reported to be using Belarusian political prisoners for cheap labor on his onion farm; and a Soyuz spacecraft returned a Russian and a Belarusian to Earth.^{23 24 25} The Danish prime minister told reporters that China had to be “held responsible” for supplying arms to Russia, and European intelligence documents revealed that Russia has been operating a top-secret long-range weapons project in China that has developed drones capable of traversing the entirety of Ukraine while carrying 50 kilograms of explosives.^{26 27} A Kremlin spokesperson told reporters that any attempt to “coerce Russia” into ceasing its invasion of Ukraine would be “fatal”; and a judge in Russia placed a cadet in pretrial detention after he danced and drank with a woman at a St. Petersburg nightclub, brought her home, mistook her hearing aid for a recording device, and beat her to death, explaining to emergency responders that he had believed she was a Ukrainian spy or, he said, “God knows who.”^{28 29} In Mississippi, the Department of Justice found that Lexington’s police “relentlessly violate[d] the law,” issuing arrest warrants for half the town and jailing residents for using profanity or failing to pay when refilling their coffees; a Washington State coroner who had accused his political rival of spiking his energy drink with fentanyl admitted to snorting the drug himself after removing it from a dead body; and paleontologists in the Taklamakan Desert of northern China sequenced the DNA of 3,600-year-old cheese found on Bronze Age corpses.^{30 31 32} In Kentucky, a sheriff denied eating lunch with and then shooting to death a judge in his own chambers, and a police officer at a Texas high school accidentally shot himself in the leg before a football game.^{33 34} “Oh no!” he said to the children who tried to stop the bleeding.³⁵

A flight from Texas to Seoul flew for five hours until flight attendants announced over the Pacific Ocean that the plane would have to turn back because of a malfunctioning toilet, Cathay Pacific Airways banned a couple for kicking the seat of a fellow passenger and flipping her the bird on a flight from Hong Kong to London, and South Korea reported the number of new babies born to its population was at a 12-year high.^{36 37 38} Russia’s chairman of the State Duma drafted legislation that would fine citizens $4,300 for distributing “childlessness propaganda” that promotes “a conscious refusal” to procreate, and a couple in Arkansas was arrested for trying to sell their 2-month-old baby at a campground for $1,000 and a six-pack of beer.^{39 40} A 2-year-old Siamese cat that walked 800 miles in two months after wandering away from a campground in Yellowstone National Park was reunited with its California owners, homeowners in Ohio called the bomb squad after finding their cat batting around a hand grenade, a Welsh cat named Monkey returned home with a winning lottery scratcher, a troop of monkeys in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh rescued a six-year-old-girl from a would-be kidnapper, and in Virginia, an elementary-school photographer was escorted off campus after asking a boy if she could eat his soul.^{41 42 43 44 45} “You,” replied the boy, “can eat noodles.”⁴⁶ —Joe Kloc