Weekly Review

The new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency put more than 160 staffers on administrative leave, warned some 1,000 more that they could be fired at any time, and shut down an online service that was designed, in part, to prevent construction projects from exposing communities to toxic waste and pollution; and a man in Sydney discovered more than one hundred venomous snakes in his garden.^{1 2 3} The National Institute of Health announced that it would cut $4 billion in indirect medical funding intended for building and maintaining facilities and administrative staff, the U.S. president issued a stop order to USAID that initially left thousands of participants in clinical trials with unmonitored experimental medical devices inside their bodies, and a jury ruled that the state of New Jersey must pay almost $12 million in damages after a police officer arrested a woman while she was having a stroke.^{4 5 6} A New Hampshire organ transplant recipient became the second known person living with a genetically modified pig kidney, and an Italian radiologist was placed under investigation for giving his cat a CAT scan.^{7 8} Lithuania reported that it is maintaining a stable supply of power after disconnecting its energy grid from Russia and Belarus, and Sri Lanka said that its entire population of 22 million people was cut off from power by a monkey who broke into a power station.^{9 10} A man in the South Korean city of Busan was arrested for attempting to rob a bank with a toy dinosaur, and the Czech government said that it saved $1 million when a dam project that it had spent 7 years developing was completed in two days by beavers.^{11 12}

The prime minister of Canada warned Canadian business and labor leaders that the president of the United States was serious about annexing their country, and the president of the United States said he was also serious about “buying” Gaza, where Israel in the past year and a half has killed at least 48,000 people and destroyed 66 percent of buildings using thousands of 2,000-plus pound American bombs.^{13 14 15 16 17 18} Russian drone operators reported receiving a shipment of first-person-view goggles that were booby-trapped to explode when switched on, a large Ukrainian drone filmed a smaller Ukrainian drone attacking a Russian surveillance drone, and Google’s parent company dropped its promise not to use its artificial intelligence technology for military weapons.^{19 20 21} France announced that it would invest more than $100 billion in artificial intelligence; more than 100 artificial intelligence experts signed an open letter warning that, if the technology is irresponsibly developed, it could lead to new forms of consciousness that experience suffering; a study found that arguments generated by artificial intelligence are more persuasive than those of 82 percent of users on Reddit; and a company that uses artificial intelligence to help its customers with their writing asked job applicants to promise not to use artificial intelligence to help them fill out their applications.^{22 23 24 25}

A study at the University of Reading found that the mean temperature of the ocean’s surface is increasing 400 percent faster than it had in the 1980s, and Russia held a demonstration in the Arctic Circle of two of its all-terrain rescue vehicles, which subsequently fell through the ice.^{26 27 28} A nurse’s aide in Iowa was fired for flossing her teeth while standing over a patient, and one Minnesota senator said beavers were “nature’s chicken nuggets” while another proposed overturning a recent state ban on eating them.^{29 30} Police in Pennsylvania valued 100,000 eggs stolen from a refrigerated truck at 40 cents each, and Waffle House announced that it would add a 50-cent-per-egg surcharge to compensate for rising egg prices amid a national shortage.^{31 32 33} A female shark held in a Louisiana aquarium gave birth despite having not encountered a male in three years, the rate of marriages dropped 20 percent in China since 2023, and in South Korea, the city of Seoul began offering couples $930 to get married this year.^{34 35 36} South Korea’s Incheon International Airport confiscated 10.7 tons of kimchi being smuggled in bottles or plastic bags last year, and an airplane flying over Alaska vanished.^{37 38} Iowa’s Supreme Court reduced the advance notice landlords must give when evicting tenants who fall behind on rent payments from 30 days to 3, the Central Intelligence Agency offered to pay all of its employees to quit their jobs, the Federal Communications Commission blocked robocallers who called FCC employees’s personal and work phone numbers pretending to be FCC agents, and Tennessee lawmakers introduced a bill that would allow parents without high school diplomas to homeschool high schoolers.^{39 40 41 42} —Joe Kloc