Weekly Review

One year after Hamas killed or captured at least 1,200 Israelis during raids on 21 kibbutzim and other sites and Israel responded by invading Gaza and eventually dropping more than 70,000 tons of explosives that destroyed at least 163,000 buildings and killed at least 41,000 people in the region, it was reported that Israel’s prime minister rejected a ceasefire deal with Hamas because he worried he’d lose his job, and that Hamas’s leader rejected terms for a ceasefire with Israel because he was hoping for the conflict to draw more countries into war.^{1 2 3 4 5} In Lebanon, where two weeks of what Israel referred to as “precise strikes” on the Iranian-backed paramilitary group Hezbollah killed more than 1,200 people and displaced at least 1.2 million others, Hezbollah’s leader agreed to a 21-day ceasefire with Israel; Israeli commanders ordered a bombing in southern Beirut that killed him and then days later ordered another bombing of Beirut that is believed to have killed his successor; and in the United States, where officials publicly urged Israel to stop striking Lebanon, it was reported that U.S. military leaders privately offered Israel support for continued strikes.^{6 7 8 9 10 11 12} The Lebanese Armed Forces, which since 2006 has received more than $3 billion in funding from the United States, for the first time this year opened fire on the Israeli Defense Forces, to which the U.S. agreed to give at least $3.8 billion per annum over the next four years; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that at least 162 people killed during Israeli strikes in Lebanon were refugees from the ongoing civil war in Syria, where a CIA-funded militia group in the country’s northwest fought a Pentagon-funded militia group that was at times also backed by Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Iraq; and the United States warned Iraq, which it had publicly supplied with weapons during the Iran–Iraq War, that it would carry out strikes inside the country if Iraqi leaders didn’t put a stop to attacks on Israeli troops by militia groups funded by Iran, to which country the CIA had secretly sent weapons during the Iran–Iraq War.^{13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28} Iran, which has sold Russia more than 6,000 drones since the latter’s invasion of Ukraine, responded to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon by launching almost 200 missiles at central and southern Israel; the United States acknowledged that Israel was considering bombing Iran’s oil fields; global crude-oil prices increased by 3 percent; profits in the S&P 500 energy sector increased by 1.4 percent; and the CIA launched a spy recruitment drive in Iran.^{29 30 31 32 33 34} “We’re open,” said an agency spokesperson, “for business.”³⁵

U.S. defense contractors were reported to have received at least $68 billion of the aid issued to Ukraine since April, a French-German arms manufacturer announced that it opened a subsidiary in Ukraine to service its tanks and self-propelled antiaircraft guns, a German arms manufacturer moved forward with its construction of a Ukrainian air-defense facility, a Ukrainian missile strike near Russian-occupied Donetsk killed six North Korean officers, North Korea published a statement to the effect that the country wouldn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons if foreign soldiers breached its border, footage was published showing Russian soldiers in the streets of Ukraine executing prisoners of war, and Russian-operated drones were filmed chasing and attacking Ukrainians who were at an outdoor fruit stand selecting watermelons.^{36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44} “A human safari,” said a local resident of the attacks.⁴⁵ An English court found that 16 Czechoslovakians were forced by human traffickers to work for four years in conditions of “modern slavery” that included serving food at a Cambridgeshire McDonalds, Russia agreed to export 35,000 tons of chickpeas and 10,000 tons of lentils to Pakistan in exchange for 15,000 tons of mandarins and 10,000 tons of potatoes, and researchers in Manchester, England, found that potatoes are a better bonding agent than human blood for manufacturing bricks to build structures on the moon and Mars.^{46 47 48} Astrophysicists announced that an asteroid captured by Earth’s orbit had officially become a temporary second moon, researchers found that not one but two asteroids had collided with Earth to extinguish all dinosaur life, and a woman in northwestern China gave birth to two babies from two separate uteruses.^{49 50 51}

A mother in Chiayi, Taiwan, was ordered by a judge to pay her son NT$5,000 for throwing out his manga collection, and a woman in a convenience store in the Japanese city of Yokohama subdued a shoplifter with a headlock she’d learned from watching anime.^{52 53} At an English hospital accused in April of having a “Mafia-like” management that fostered a “gang culture” among surgeons, a doctor used the Swiss Army knife with which he normally cut fruit for his lunches to slice open the chest of a patient, and a 37-year-old man ate four or five dried mushrooms and used an axe to perform on himself the first known psilocybin-triggered self-amputation of a penis, which doctors then partially reattached and rehabilitated.^{54 55 56 57} “Psychiatric care,” wrote the researchers, was “crucial.”⁵⁸ An 81-year-old man in Montana who cloned a giant Kyrgyz Marco Polo sheep from illegally obtained testicle tissue to create giant chimeric animals to be hunted for sport in Minnesota and Texas told a judge he’d work until he died to “repair” the damage he’d done, legislators in Wyoming drafted a change to a bill that would make it legal to intentionally run over a wolf with a vehicle, provided that the wolf died quickly, and a family in Rio de Janeiro found their pet tortoise alive in a box in their attic 30 years after he went missing.^{59 60 61}  Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve postponed its Fat Bear Week after Bear #469 killed Bear #402, and three pit bulls in British Columbia that attacked and killed a neighboring dog tested positive for methamphetamine and cocaine.^{62 63} At the US–Mexico border, a woman was fined for attempting to traffic 748 pounds of bologna; in Oklahoma, a man was arrested for stealing the pickup truck that he drove to the courthouse to answer auto-theft charges; and in Gainesville, Florida, a woman was released from jail after lab analysts determined that police officers had mistaken the residue on a spoon in her purse for methamphetamine.^{64 65 66} “I had,” she said, “SpaghettiOs.”⁶⁷ —Joe Kloc