Weekly Review

In Turkey, the opposition party’s supporters accused the government of orchestrating the arrest of their party’s presidential candidate; judges in South Korea overturned the impeachment of their prime minister, making him the country’s acting leader in lieu of the currently impeached president, who is under investigation for leading an insurrection; the president of the United States, who was impeached for incitement of insurrection four years ago, revoked his predecessor’s security clearance and his predecessor’s children’s Secret Service protection; Iceland’s minister for children resigned after it was revealed that she had a child with a teenager 35 years ago; and it was announced that the pope would return to Vatican City to take a two-month rest.^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11} Police shut down the day care at a Methodist church in Georgia for administering toddlers Benadryl before nap time, a bill filed in the Florida state legislature proposed removing the high school graduation requirement of passing an algebra test, and a study found that billions of humans living in rural areas may have been overlooked in the widely cited global population estimate of 8.2 billion people.^{12 13 14} The U.S. commerce secretary claimed that elderly people would not protest if the Social Security Administration overlooked them when mailing out checks; a bill was introduced in Colorado to stop counties from claiming the social security survivor’s benefits from orphans; and in Norway, a man lodged a complaint against OpenAI after its chatbot claimed he murdered his children.^{15 16 17}

In Philadelphia, a mother was arrested for allegedly using a canine shock collar to control her child; and in Germany, a professional soccer match was canceled when a player’s child bit the referee.^{18 19} London’s Metropolitan Police were sued for reinstating an emergency phone operator who once called a rape victim a “slut,” and a cargo airline hired a pilot who was dismissed by British Airways in 2023 for snorting cocaine off a woman’s breasts in a South African nightclub.^{20 21} At a sports bar in Clearwater, Florida, a man fired off a 9mm handgun after discovering that the karaoke machine was broken; and a judge in California was criticized by his colleagues for releasing an 18-minute video of himself disassembling guns with large-capacity magazines in his chambers.^{22 23} The number of civilian-owned guns in Poland was reported to have doubled since 2017, the number of people who contracted measles in Texas this year surpassed the total number of infected Americans in 2024, and the Rikers Island jail population in New York City passed 7,000 for the first time in 6 years.^{24 25 26} On Long Island, a New Yorker was cured of sickle cell anemia for the first time, a woman was accused of pretending to be a dentist; and the founder of Pirate’s Booty, a puffed-corn and rice snack company, attempted to overthrow his village’s government, citing as precedent the election of Pope Gregory X in Viterbo some 750 years ago.^{27 28 29 30}

A woman in Indonesia was sentenced to almost three years in prison for telling her online followers that Jesus should “cut his hair,” and residents of Ontario, Canada, were found to be the most likely Canadians to report being abducted by aliens.^{31 32} An 83-year-old man in British Columbia returned to his library a camping guide that was 60 years overdue, and four people in Tennessee allegedly robbed a convenience store while armed with pythons.^{33 34} Tokyo restaurateurs apologized to customers who found a rat in their miso soup, and an animal shelter employee in Australia pleaded guilty to attempting to sell online two human toes she found in dog vomit.^{35 36} In Florida, Miami drivers were reported to have paid as much as $250 for DMV appointments sold online, and 25,000 acres of tropical swamp and marsh caught fire.^{37 38} The CEO of a U.S. fraud-detection company was arrested for fraud, a South Korean man was arrested for unlawfully entering the Chinese Embassy in Seoul while dressed as Captain America, a paleontologist sued a university in New Jersey alleging that its unpaid UPS invoices caused his shipments of 300-million-year-old fossils to be dumped into a landfill and buried, and, in Bulgaria, two professional soccer clubs observed a minute of silence to mourn the death of a 78-year-old former player.^{39 40 41 42} “I poured myself a small brandy,” said the former player, who returned home from work to hear the news of his own passing.⁴³ —Joe Kloc