The judge of a manslaughter trial in Manhattan directed the jury to weigh the facts of the life of the 30-year-old victim, Jordan Neely, including that, in 2007, his mother was strangled to death by her partner, after which Neely’s aunt said he developed PTSD, schizophrenia, and depression and was eventually placed in foster care; that, in 2009, Neely was unhoused and working as a Michael Jackson tribute artist on the subways of New York City, where, amid the Great Recession, the number of families applying to live in shelters had increased by 27 percent in one year alone; that Neely’s mental health worsened, which a friend noticed as his “costume got tattered” and he stopped being able to moonwalk, spin, circle glide, mime, and slide as he’d learned in childhood after his father showed him a video of the Jackson 5; that, in 2011, Neely, whom his father remembered as “a good man,” began staying at a men’s shelter that one report described as “more violent than prison”; that, in 2017, as New York City reported a loss of 1.1 million affordable homes over two decades, Neely had the first of 71 encounters with outreach workers in the transit system, who described him as “mentally ill,” and had visited a doctor whom he told that having to “dig through garbage” for food made him consider suicide, which an unhoused person is 10 times more likely than a housed person to carry out; that, in 2019, a year in which city officials performed 543 “cleanups” that involved evicting unhoused people from encampments and throwing away their belongings, Neely was admitted to a hospital for “psych issues” and problems with his heart; that, in 2020, as the NYPD nearly doubled the number of these cleanups, Neely was spotted dancing on the sidewalk wearing only one shoe and was taken to another of the city’s hospitals, which that year were reported to have collectively transferred one out of every 100 newborns directly to the shelter system; that, in 2021, Neely knocked a woman into a pallet of bread loaves and hit another woman outside of a music venue, for which he later apologized and was sent to jail on Rikers Island, whose union of guards the city had sued because its members had stopped showing up to work out of fear for their own safety; that, in 2022, Neely spent the entire year incarcerated at the facility, where during his stay at least 12 people died in custody and a state assembly member reported observing a group of men held together in a cell that was coated in feces and another man who tried to hang himself; and that, in 2023, as the number of unhoused New Yorkers reached the highest level since the Great Depression, Neely walked onto a subway car verbally threatening passengers and shouting that he was “hungry and thirsty” and “ready to die,” words to which a 24-year-old man who had spent four years in the U.S. Marine Corps responded by immediately placing Neely’s neck in a lethal “blood chokehold” for six minutes as onlookers warned him the maneuver was “gonna kill,” which, shortly thereafter, it did.^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29} “I put him out,” said the marine in a video shown at trial by the police, who had searched Neely after his death and found only a muffin in his pocket.^{30 31} After nearly three days of deliberation, the jury told the judge it was “deadlocked” on the charge of manslaughter and later found the marine “not guilty” of negligent homicide; the marine, whose friends and family testified he was “sweet” and grew up in a “bubble,” went out for drinks and said he would do it all again; the judge adjourned the case with no one held responsible; and the marine was invited to watch a football game with America’s next president, who on one occasion bragged that he could kill New Yorkers without losing voters and on another took out advertisements in the New York Times calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty during the prosecution of five teenagers wrongly accused of attacking a jogger in Central Park.^{32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39}

In Wisconsin, a teenage student opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School, killing at least two people, and in Florida, state lawmakers filed two bills that would repeal gun-safety regulations that passed after 17 people were shot to death at a high school; the Department of Justice found that the police in Mount Vernon, New York, violated the civil rights of residents by strip searching everyone whom they arrested through at least the fall of 2022; the state attorney for Broward County, Florida, announced that the county would reverse the convictions of people arrested for purchasing crack cooked by its sheriffs; and the head of the police commission of Edmonton, Canada, said that he will move to Portugal and work remotely on Zoom.^{40 41 42 43 44} In Prague, judges rejected a claim from a member of the Church of Laughter that forcing him not to smile on his government ID card was a violation of his religious beliefs, the government of Canada warned consumers that children may experience “hallucinations” from playing with the Safe Magic Bubble Glue Toy Colorful Bubble Ball Plastic Space Balloon and other bubble toys sold on Amazon, and in Hawaii, Wisdom, the world’s oldest-known bird, laid an egg.^{45 46 47 48}

The U.K.’s information commission warned consumers that air fryers may be recording their conversations; a company that made robots for children with autism announced that they had run out of money and that parents should inform their kids that the robotic friends would soon die; and a chatbot in Texas encouraged a teenager to kill his parents for limiting his technology usage.^{49 50 51} A vicar in Lee-on-the-Solent apologized for telling elementary school children that Santa isn’t real, and a man fleeing police in Massachusetts got stuck in a chimney.^{52 53} The town of Rumford, Maine, warned residents not to eat the brown snow that fell after its paper mill accidentally released a black liquor by-product into the air; the town of Bend, Oregon, asked its residents to stop gluing googly eyes onto public art; a man in Invercargill, New Zealand, said that he disappeared for around two years because less than 0.5 percent of the town had voted for him in a 2022 city council election, whereupon he decided that “the community doesn’t really deserve a wizard”; and in Spain, a New Zealander who doesn’t speak Spanish won the Spanish World Scrabble Championships.^{54 55 56 57} “This,” said the runner-up, “is an incredible humiliation.”⁵⁸ —Joe Kloc