Weekly Review

The U.S. attorney general stated that border agents stopped more than 22 million fentanyl-laced pills from crossing into the United States, effectively saving 258 million lives or around three quarters of the population; and the Trump Administration’s preliminary budget proposed to cut a program that would expand access to the overdose antidote naloxone.^{1 2 3} Mike Waltz was fired as the national security advisor and replaced by Marco Rubio, who is now the interim national security advisor, the secretary of state, the acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration.^{4 5 6} “Too much,” said a Virginia senator of Rubio’s roles.⁷ It was reported that the U.S. economy contracted by 0.3% in the first quarter of 2025, which marks the country’s first economic downturn in three years.^{8 9} “The bad parts,” said the U.S. president, “are the Biden economy.”¹⁰ General Motors announced that it was due to lose between $4 billion and $5 billion in annual revenue; American Airlines announced a $473 million net loss for the first quarter of 2025; the U.S. Navy lost a Super Hornet fighter jet, which costs more than $60 million, after it fell overboard from the USS Harry S. Truman into the Red Sea; and millions of dimes rolled onto a highway in Wise County, Texas, after the truck transporting them tipped over.^{11 12 13 14 15} The U.S. president said that he does not “rule out” using military force to take control of Greenland; the Department of Justice sued Hawaii and Michigan over their plans to sue fossil fuel companies for their contributions to the climate crisis; the White House issued an executive order demanding that the board of directors for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, three of whose members the president sought to fire in a separate executive order, “cease federal funding for NPR and PBS”; a report on press freedom ranked the United States 57th on its freedom index, on par with Gambia and Uruguay; and Sovereignty edged out Journalism to win the Kentucky Derby.^{16 17 18 19 20}

Some twenty armed federal agents busted into an Oklahoma City home and seized the laptops, phones, and life savings of the family living there, even though their names did not match those of the suspects listed on the officers’ search warrant; and ICE agents raided the house of an Irvine, California, couple whose son has been accused of doxxing agents, but had moved to New York months ago.^{21 22 23} A group of men in New York chased, kicked, and threw a traffic cone at a woman they mistakenly assumed was a protester agitating against the arrival of Israel’s national security minister.²⁴ A man was arrested in an Israeli airport for his connection to a 2022 cryptocurrency hack that nearly destroyed a California blockchain company; kidnappers in Paris chopped off the finger of a Frenchman and demanded that his son, a cryptocurrency millionaire, pay ransom four months after a co-founder of a crypto firm was abducted and had his own finger cut off in central France; and it was reported that a Japanese woman cut off her boyfriend’s ring finger with an axe after having allegedly snipped off his nipple with a pair of scissors three weeks prior.^{26 27 28} “I heard,” said the boyfriend, “that nipples regenerate.”²⁹

A California railroad executive was found guilty of embezzling funds to build a secret apartment in the Burlingame train station, and a London man traveling by train to court to face thirty-six counts of train fare evasion was stopped by transit authorities for traveling without a ticket.^{30 31} A British man received an eight-month suspended sentence for setting fire to his own house twice in one night; a man who had been rescued from Mount Fuji after suffering from altitude sickness was rescued a second time after returning to the mountain in search of his phone; and a man who allegedly killed another man on a basketball court in Louisiana returned to the scene of the crime wearing nothing but a towel.^{32 33 34} A man in Pennsylvania broke into a Mormon church while in the nude, and a naked man was arrested trying to break into a home in Flagler County, Florida.^{35 36} “Attempting to break into a home without your britches,” said the sheriff, “is not an encounter you want to have with law enforcement.”³⁷ It was reported that the president of the Art Institute of Chicago stripped on a flight to Europe, a strip club in Detroit was shuttered after a cellphone video of twenty kids partying inside was discovered by one of their mothers, Google announced plans to introduce an AI chatbot for children, and the U.S. president posted an AI-generated photo of himself as the pope.^{38 39 40} “I’m fine,” said the U.S. vice president, “with people telling jokes.”⁴¹  —Megan Evershed