Weekly Review

Russia fired an experimental nuclear-capable hypersonic Oreshnik missile at a military facility in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.¹ Following the strike, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that no defense technology currently existed to thwart the Oreshnik, that the Russian military would begin manufacturing large quantities of the projectiles, and that the country was “entitled” to use them “against military facilities”; and the mayor of Dnipro announced that the Oreshnik’s blast had destroyed a rehabilitation center for people with disabilities.^{2 3 4} A Russian deputy foreign minister accused the United States of attempting to draw the Taiwanese and Chinese governments into “a crisis in Asia”; it was reported that Russia’s military recruiters were offering citizenship and high salaries to Yemeni men; and it was estimated that one in three of the ballistic missiles Russia fired at Ukraine this year were purchased from North Korea, which to date has provided Russian invasion forces with some 11,000 auxiliary troops.^{5 6 7 8} The U.S. deputy secretary of state said that intelligence indicated that China had grown worried that Russia’s increasingly strong relationship with North Korea could strengthen America’s alliances with South Korea and Japan, and Australia’s Office of National Intelligence said that the U.S. deputy secretary’s assessment was “fanciful” after the commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said he thought China had provided Russia with some 70 percent of the tools it used to build up its war machine.^{9 10} Australia and Canada pledged to collaborate on missile-defense research to fend off hypersonic weapons, Japan and the United States said they would deploy missiles to Japanese islands should China encroach on Taiwan, and China told the people of Japan they could now visit without visas.^{11 12 13} In low earth orbit, cosmonauts on the International Space Station, which is jointly operated by Russia, the United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada, reported a foul odor.¹⁴

Ukrainian intelligence said that Russia had, prior to its invasion, compiled “execution lists” that included the names of Ukrainian language teachers and religious leaders; the ayatollah of Iran called for the execution of the prime minister of Israel for the latter’s leading the invasion of Gaza, where the Israeli Defense Forces were reported to have killed at least their 44,235th person since October of last year; Ukraine’s president accused Russia of “testing” the efficacy of Iranian-made drones on the population of Ukraine, where it was estimated that as many as 400,000 people have been killed since February of 2022; and the vice president of the Philippines announced that she had made arrangements to have the president and his wife executed by a hitman should she herself be killed.^{15 16 17 18 19 20} “I said, ‘Do not stop until you kill them,’” she said.²¹ The leader of Japan’s Conservative Party proposed banning women from getting married after the age of 25 and administering forced hysterectomies at the age of 30; an Indiana police officer was charged with voyeurism, official misconduct, and unlawful proposition for using a department-issued laptop to film himself having sex at massage parlors while undercover investigating human smuggling; and two British men pleaded guilty to running a human smuggling operation out of their car wash business that was modeled after the Tripadvisor rating site and posted reviews from trafficked people, including one that asked, “How was the route, lads?”^{21 22 23 24}

A DHL cargo plane flying from Germany to Lithuania crashed into a house and burst into flames one kilometer from the runway where it was supposed to land, and a Russian superjet burst into flames moments after landing on its runway in Turkey.^{25 26} 132 hamsters broke free of their cages in the cargo hull of a Portuguese commercial airplane and stormed the cabin, grounding the craft for four days; about 200 monkeys in Thailand who had been caged by Lopburi police escaped and attacked the station, forcing officers to barricade themselves inside; and three men in Michigan were reported to have died in a 48-hour period from heart attacks suffered while deer-hunting, two of which occurred while trying to haul away the bodies of animals they killed.^{27 28 29} Denmark announced that it would return 15 percent of all farmland to nature as part of its plan to cut emissions by 70 percent by 2030, it was reported that the companies that make up the Alliance To End Plastic Waste produced 1,000 times more plastic than they cleaned up, and a professor of misinformation at Stanford University was accused of lying to a Minnesota court about the psychological impact of deepfakes by citing nonexistent research papers.^{30 31} Artificial-intelligence data center developers estimated that individual facilities may soon demand more than twice the energy of Pittsburgh, and a robot in Shanghai activated 12 larger robots, discussed working long hours with no break to go home, and then led them out of their designer’s building in the middle of the night.^{32 33} A GPS directed a car in India off an unfinished bridge, killing three people; a school bus driver in Colorado was fired after his GPS stopped working and he let 40 students deboard at an intersection miles from their school in freezing temperatures; and a child in the United Kingdom brought a bomb to show-and-tell.^{34 35} —Joe Kloc