Weekly Review
In the Gazan city of Rafah, where Israel’s military has destroyed over 40 percent of buildings in the past year, a patrol unit of Israeli commanders in training cut off the finger from the corpse of a man who had been struck by both a tank shell and a bullet and sent it to a crime laboratory, where technicians matched its print to the decades-old prison record of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas; an Israeli prison dentist, to whom Sinwar once said he owed his life for his having helped to remove a potentially fatal brain abscess, responded to news of the assassination by quoting a line from the Torah that translates to “Don’t rejoice when your enemy falls”; Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had “settled its account” with Sinwar for his having, a year earlier, overseen the attacks that left some 1,200 people dead, including dozens of children and the prison dentist’s own nephew; and Israel bombed a school in northern Gaza, killing least 28, including children, as well as bombed a municipal building in the Lebanese city of Nabatieh, killing 16 and driving nearby schoolchildren screaming into the streets.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 In Lebanon, where ongoing Israeli strikes have killed at least 2,350 people and displaced 400,000 children, the country’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, said that Iran, which reportedly provides Hezbollah with $700 million a year, was engaging in “blatant interference in Lebanese affairs” when it said it would “negotiate” a resolution between Israel and Hezbollah; and Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has deployed thousands of Iranian-made drones against Ukrainians, said he was available to “do everything” to find “compromises” between Iran and Israel.12 13 14 15 16 17 18 A deputy chair of Russia’s State Duma announced that the country, which has lost about 115,000 soldiers in its invasion of Ukraine, is running out of cemeteries; Ukraine’s president said that North Korea, by planning to supply Russia with 10,000 additional troops, had become the “second state” in the war against his country; North Korea’s supreme leader said 1.4 million of the country’s children had a “burning hatred” for South Korea and were mobilized for war; it was reported in South Korea that the defense minister of Armenia, which increased its defense budget by more than 40 percent last year, had visited to discuss the potential purchase of Hyundai-built battle tanks; a deputy chairman of Armenia’s ruling party accused Azerbaijan of “torpedoing” a peace treaty as a means of “preparing the ground” for an attack; and archeologists working on the Ararat Plain in Armenia unearthed the ruins of one of the world’s oldest Christian churches, built less than a century after Gregory the Illuminator converted to Christianity King Tiridates III, who then began attacking Zoroastrians and destroying their temples, until, in roughly 320 AD, members of the nobility poisoned him and the Armenian church declared him a saint.19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles spent $880 million to settle sexual abuse claims made against its priests by more than 1,350 victims since the Forties, and the lawyer for a man suing the city of Philadelphia for his wrongful rape conviction was ordered by a judge to apologize for blaring a looped recording of a woman screaming at 122 decibels through the city’s streets for an hour at 5:30 in the morning.33 34 35 In the United Kingdom, a judge ruled that a supervisor was guilty of sexual harassment for calling a male employee “bald,” and a tribunal found that a supervisor shouldn’t have fired a female employee for returning from her maternity leave pregnant again.36 37 In Japan, a 36-year-old man who has 10 children born to two girlfriends and four wives declared his intent to become the “god of marriage” by breaking the country’s record for total number of children fathered, which is currently held by an Edo-period shogun who had 53 children with 27 concubines; and on Long Island, four men, including a high school health teacher and a police officer, were charged with operating a brothel out of the so-called American Girls Spa and the Tunnel of Love sex shop, where they compelled impoverished women who in some cases did not speak English to sign contracts committing them to paying “rent” by performing sex acts.38 39 The number of people reported to be living in poverty in the Netherlands decreased from 820,000 to 540,000 after the government narrowed its definition of poverty, and officials in Hong Kong cut liquor taxes to increase nightlife turnout in the city, where birthrates have fallen almost 40 percent over the past four years.40 41 42 Medical students in the United Kingdom examining the corpse of a 78-year-old man identified the second known case of a human’s having three penises, it was reported that nurses in Kentucky who were preparing a body for organ harvesting halted the procedure when the supposedly deceased man woke up, and a company that was sued by a British woman for “failure to acknowledge her existence” by not giving her a farewell card revealed that it had attempted to do so but balked when only three of her colleagues wanted to sign it.43 44 45
A two-year-old bear suffering from a buildup of spinal fluid survived the first ursine brain surgery in the United Kingdom; attendees at a bear meat-eating party in North Carolina contracted worms that, in at least nine cases, planted larvae in their faces; and in Wyoming, the US Forest Service paused its practice of blowing up dead horses to ward off bears until wildfire risks subside.46 47 48 A 10-month-old fire station in Stadtallendorf burned to the ground after flames in the building went undetected because no one had installed a fire alarm, and Wales-based grocer Iceland Foods appealed an EU court decision that ruled that its name infringed on the trademark rights of the government of Iceland.49 50 51 “Our name,” said the plaintiff, simply means “land of ice.”52 Coca-Cola recalled its zero sugar lemonade because it contained sugar, and a sheriff in Georgia who found he had received the wrong order from a Cobb County Burger King radioed for backup.53 54 A shark in an aquarium in China was discovered to be a robot, it was reported that robot vacuum cleaners across the United States were commanded by hackers to pursue housepets and yell slurs, and Microsoft signed a deal to power its artificial intelligence with nuclear energy by reopening part of the Three Mile Island plant, which partially melted down in 1979 less than 300 miles from New York City.55 56 57 A woman eating an apple outside a temple in India where she had just made a contribution was unharmed after a water tank fell directly on top of her, and an Indonesian crew extracting the body of a teenager who fell into a ravine on Mount Rinjani happened across an Irishman who had tumbled 650 feet down the side of the active volcano.58 59 60 “You boys saved my life,” he said, smoking a cigarette.61 —Joe Kloc
