Weekly Review
Across Africa, authorities arrested more than 1,000 people suspected of running online scams, including a Ponzi scheme in Senegal, credit card crimes in Kenya, a fraudulent virtual casino in Angola, a cryptocurrency investment hoax in Nigeria, and a multi-level marketing human trafficking ring in Cameroon.1 In Uganda, offshore hackers stole 62 billion shillings from the country’s central bank; Vietnamese prosecutors said a real estate tycoon found guilty of embezzling billions from Saigon Commercial Bank could avoid death by lethal injection only by paying the government $11 billion; the government of Iran hanged to death 12 people and then hours later asked the government of Singapore not to execute one of its citizens for drug possession; and in Japan, an eleventh-generation yakuza crime family issued a statement voicing concern about rising crime in their territory.2 3 4 5 “We will,” said the family, “take strict action.”6 The Colombian Navy seized a semisubmersible vessel carrying cocaine to Australia, where the drug is 6 times more valuable than it is in the United States; a man was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport for attempting to travel to Australia with dozens of items of clothes, including a cow onesie, soaked with 2 pounds of methamphetamine; and a bag seized at an airport in Zurich, Switzerland, was found to contain children’s books with cocaine between their pages.7 8 9 A Georgian woman who was taken from her birth parents as part of a child-trafficking ring four decades ago learned that her birth father was a man she’d been friends with for three years on Facebook, and Australia banned children under the age of 16 from using Facebook.10 11 Belgium’s parliament granted sex workers maternity leave, paid vacation, and a pension; and Poland’s Sejm unanimously approved extended leave for parents whose babies are born prematurely. A British woman was sentenced to seven years in prison after it was discovered that she kept her baby in a dresser drawer for three years, and a woman reported to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s daughter from a brief affair with a former cleaner was found in Paris living under an assumed name and working as a DJ.12 13 14
Putin apologized for scaring former German chancellor Angela Merkel with his pet Labrador almost two decades ago and launched missile and drone strikes against critical energy infrastructure in at least 15 Ukrainian regions including Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa, and Kyiv, causing a total of 1 million Ukrainian homes to lose power; and downtown Springfield, Tennessee, lost power when one of its former mayors drove his car into a utility pole while reaching for his breakfast biscuit.15 16 17 The Anchorage, Alaska, fire department asked local residents not to explode frozen turkeys in boiling grease; a wild turkey smashed through the window of a Montana home and roosted on the homeowner’s bar; and, at a Thanksgiving dinner in Memphis, Tennessee, a grandmother stabbed both her daughter and her grandson in their left hands.18 19 20 A 12-year-old boy was apprehended by a police officer in Washington State after stealing his grandfather’s car, driving 160 miles, and engaging in a high-speed chase; in Georgia, a former Bibb County Deputy of the Year was reportedly charged with DUI for drunkenly directing nonexistent traffic outside an elementary school; and the mayor of McColl, South Carolina, died in a car crash while being pursued on the highway by a county deputy sheriff for unknown reasons only days after his entire police force resigned.21 22 23 24 In California, a pastor fought off a knife-wielding man who broke into his church; and in Iowa, a pastor added to his nativity scene a cardboard cutout of King Herod attempting to kill baby Jesus.25 26
NATO opened an amphibious warfare center in a small Norwegian village to challenge Russia’s position in the Arctic, and a group of Russian passengers on a luxury cruise went on a hunger strike when trouble with the ship’s propeller forced the crew to cancel its final stop in Antarctica.27 28 A study of a 1.77-million-year-old prehistoric 12 year old’s teeth in what is now Dmanisi, Georgia, suggests that prolonged childhood was related to growing a larger brain; and Georgia’s prime minister delayed talks of joining the European Union until 2028.29 30 It was reported that a financial services company in Montreal, Canada, played the children’s song “Baby Shark” on loop for a year in its emergency exit stairwell in an attempt to keep unhoused people from seeking shelter there, a woman at an IHOP in Florida was fired for buying an unhoused man a stack of pancakes, and a federal criminal complaint was filed against a former Walt Disney World employee for hacking into the park’s menu system and falsely indicating that certain dishes were safe for those with peanut allergies.31 32 33 The Japanese convenience store Lawson began selling cans of drinkable mayonnaise across its 56,000 locations, and a South Korean observatory near the DMZ opened a Starbucks where customers can sip coffee while viewing a village in North Korea.34 35 The Greek city of Thessaloniki opened its subway system after a decade of delays caused in part by the discovery of over 300,000 archeological objects during digging, an almost two-century-old 100-mon Japanese coin was unearthed in a field in Poland, and the largest gold ore reservoir ever discovered was reportedly identified in central China.36 37 38 The chairman of tourism in the Malaysian state of Kelantan announced plans to promote the suitability for surfing of the area’s large waves during the monsoon season, an Irish politician advertised his campaign by projecting a laser display onto the exterior of a cancer ward, and it was reported that, this fall, Hawaii received more snowfall than New York City.39 40 41 —Joe Kloc
