Weekly Review

Vice President Mike Pence, who during the election implied that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton broke the law when she used a private email server as secretary of state, confirmed that he conducted official business as governor of Indiana using a private AOL email account, which had been hacked. Trump suggested that a series of recent bomb threats against Jewish community centers and acts of vandalism against Jewish cemeteries could have been an effort by his opponents to make his supporters “look bad,” gave a speech before a joint session of Congress in which he condemned hate crimes, and rejected the notion that his senior staff should take an ethics-training course. “This is,” Trump tweeted of his wiretap allegations, “Watergate.” Read more... Read More

Fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, who was Trump’s first choice for secretary of labor, withdrew himself from consideration after a video surfaced of his ex-wife accusing him of domestic abuse; and Trump nominated as Puzder’s replacement R. Alexander Acosta, a former U.S. attorney in Miami who was criticized for not pressing federal charges against Jeffery Epstein, a billionaire and former Trump associate who was accused of having sex with dozens of underage girls and who pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution.The White House announced Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as its second nominee for national-security adviser, after Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the former adviser, was asked to resign and Vice Admiral Robert Harward turned down the job, allegedly calling it a “shit sandwich.” Read More

The White House released a list of 78 terrorist attacks it claimed were underreported on by the media, including the December 2015 attack in “San Bernadino [sic]”; the Department of Education tweeted a quotation attributed to “W.E.B. DeBois [sic],” then tweeted its “deepest apologizes [sic]”; and the Library of Congress began and then stopped selling an official inauguration portrait of Trump that includes the quotation “no challenge is to [sic] great.” Read More

Trump’s national-security adviser said that the nation of Iran was “on notice” after it tested a ballistic missile, and Iran responded by noting that “only seven minutes is needed for the Iranian missile to hit Tel Aviv.” Trump hung up on Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and warned Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto that he might send U.S. troops across the border to deal with “bad hombres.” At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump, who was introduced by the producer of the TV show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, gave a speech asking the audience to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s television ratings. Read more... Read More

Trump declared that he would initiate an investigation of widespread voter fraud, which a five-year Bush Administration investigation found not to exist, and then claimed that the fraud was perpetuated by “illegals,” “dead people,” and people registered to vote in more than one state, a category that includes several members of his Cabinet, his son-in-law, at least one of his children, and the man who alerted him to the purported fraud in the first place. Trump released a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day that did not mention Jewish people, and Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s secretary, who claimed she “knew nothing” about the Holocaust until after the war, died at the age of 106. Read more... Read More

At an inaugural ball attended by the bounty hunter and reality-television star Duane “Dog” Chapman, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway punched a man in the face. In demonstrations across Washington, groups of protesters lit a limousine on fire and broke the windows of a Bank of America, a white supremacist who said “sure” when asked whether he liked black people was punched in the face, a man marched with two alpacas and a llama to demand better trade policies, and at least 10 journalists simultaneously photographed a trash-can fire. Read more... Read More

Trump denied a leaked and unverified report from a former British intelligence officer that claimed that the Russian government had secretly filmed Trump in a hotel room in Moscow with prostitutes whom he paid to urinate on one another while on a bed formerly slept in by current U.S. president Barack Obama; and it was reported that a man in Lebanon, New Hampshire, admitted to masturbating into a dirty diaper while watching child gymnastics in a church rectory school and then lighting an American flag on fire, which caused the church to go up in flames. Read more... Read More

A Brazilian priest was stabbed in the back of the neck by a man he was trying to embrace during a televised mass; a 48-year-old Catholic priest was accused of advertising 15 of his lovers on a wife-swapping site, organizing orgies in his home, and concealing pornographic home videos in cases labeled with the names of popes; and, in Vatican City, cardinals protested the opening of a McDonald’s. “It’s,” said a cardinal, “perverse.” Read more... Read More

An Indian court told airlines to stop dumping feces during flights, and a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York stopped in Ireland so passengers could use the bathroom. U.S. Customs and Border Protection began asking certain foreign travelers for lists of their social-media accounts, and Korean Air said crew members are now permitted to use stun guns. Scientists said the discovery of a fossilized wing bone belonging to the prehistoric Tingmiatornis arctica suggests the North Pole was once as warm as Florida, and snow fell in the Saharan town of Ain Sefra for the first time in 40 years. Read more... Read More

In Austin, a woman was arrested for attempting to set fire to her home because her roommate was planning a party to which she was not invited, and in Achram, Nepal, a 15-year-old girl suffocated to death after she lit a fire in the small hut to which she had been banished for menstruating.[29][30] A 66-year-old albatross named Wisdom laid an egg.[31] Two female employees at a sex shop in San Bernardino fought off an armed robber by hurling dildos at him; an algebra teacher in Middleburg Heights, Ohio, was reprimanded for requiring that his 14-year-old students solve for the time it would take to send a nude photo; and two high-school freshmen in Omaha were charged with lewd conduct for giving their teacher turnovers frosted with their semen, which she then unknowingly ate. Read more... Read More

A woman in Tampa, Florida, was charged with transmitting threats in interstate commerce after she sent messages such as “You gonna die” to the parent of one of the 20 children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting, which she believed was a hoax created by the Obama Administration to promote gun control. Read More

The Presidential Inaugural Committee advertised two tickets to an “intimate policy discussion” with Cabinet members for between $100,000 and $249,000, and, for more than a million dollars, eight tickets to a “candlelight” dinner with an appearance by the president-elect. Trump met over dinner with Mitt Romney, who is under consideration for secretary of state, at Jean Georges in Manhattan, where they ate sautéed frogs’ legs, diver scallops with caramelized cauliflower and caper-raisin emulsion, a prime sirloin with citrus glazed carrots, and a chocolate cake. “What I’ve seen through these discussions I’ve had with President-elect Trump,” said Romney, who during the election was a member of the Never Trump movement, “gives me increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us.” In Long Island, Trump attended a “villains and heroes”-themed costume party dressed as himself. Read more... Read More

Concrete barriers and metal barricades were installed around Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York Police Department officials reported that the city is spending more than a million dollars a day to protect Trump and his family, and it was announced that the Secret Service may have to rent a floor of Trump Tower to create a command post for its agents. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed a petition to begin a recount of votes in Wisconsin, and said she would file similar petitions in Michigan and Pennsylvania, a move that Trump described as a “scam.” “I won the popular vote,” said the president-elect, who did not win the popular vote. Read more... Read More

Trump used his Twitter account to attack negative coverage in the New York Times, to criticize the television program Saturday Night Live for being biased and unfunny, to complain about audience members booing vice president-elect Mike Pence at a performance of the historical hip-hop musical Hamilton, and to promote a story about how he saved a Ford automotive plant that was, in fact, never in jeopardy of closing. An analysis found that “fake news,” or propaganda, websites generate more traffic on Facebook than major news outlets, and Oxford Dictionaries announced that the word of the year was “post-truth.” Read more... Read More

Donald Trump, a real-estate developer endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, was elected president of the United States. Following the election, the Canadian government’s immigration website crashed, the Dow Jones temporarily plummeted, two LGBT suicide hotlines reported a spike in call volume, and more than 4.3 million Americans signed a petition asking state electors to pick as president former candidate Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote by a margin of at least a million but failed to win a majority in the Electoral College. “The Electoral College is a disaster for democracy,” Trump tweeted in 2012. Trump appointed the editor of an alt-right news site as his chief strategist, and more than 400 hate crimes were reported across the country. Read more... Read More

At New York’s Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, where students have correctly predicted the outcome of every presidential race since 1968, Hillary Clinton won a mock election with 52 percent of the vote. Parents in Spain asked their children’s teachers not to assign homework, and more than 1,800 public primary schools were closed in New Delhi, where exposure to air pollution was said to be equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes a day. Read more... Read More

A 20-year-old woman in Texas was arrested after she rear-ended a police car while trying to take a topless selfie, a man in Arizona stopped to order food at an In-N-Out Burger drive-through window while being chased by police, and a 28-year-old man in Florida fell out of and then had his leg run over by his pickup truck on his way home from a strip club. Read more... Read More

Tens of thousands of people signed a petition calling for the impeachment of a judge in Montana who sentenced a man to 60 days in jail for raping his 12-year-old daughter, and a man in California was sentenced to 1,503 years in prison for raping his teenage daughter. A couple at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina, left their waitress a note telling her “the woman’s place is in the home,” in lieu of a tip. Hundreds of women in yoga pants marched through Barrington, Rhode Island, to defend their right to wear the garment, and Trump vowed to sue every woman accusing him of sexual assault. “I look so forward to doing that,” he said. Read more... Read More

Accusations surfaced that Trump had kissed a former Miss USA contestant, a makeup artist, and a Trump Tower receptionist without their consent; groped a People magazine reporter, a former contestant on his television show, a stranger he was sitting next to at a nightclub, and a stranger sitting next to him in first class on a flight; told a group of 14-year-old girls he would be dating them in “a couple of years”; and entered the dressing rooms of Miss Teen USA contestants while they were changing. Read more... Read More

The Shiyan Lake Ecologic Park in China unveiled its “exciting and adventurous” glass-walled bathrooms, and a public restroom in Virginia was consumed by a sinkhole.Officials in Indiana asked motorists for heightened caution during deer-mating season, and snake catchers in Australia observed a rare snake orgy in an empty pool. In Germany, the seven-year hunt for a man responsible for slashing inflatable backyard pools ended with the arrest of a 27-year-old man, whose apartment also contained multiple inflatable mattresses. “We cannot rule out that the man has some kind of fetish,” said a police spokesman. Read more... Read More

Hackers took control of a digital billboard in Jakarta and played a pornographic film, a church in Western Australia had its windows broken by a gang of children between the ages of four and eight who were armed with small rocks, and a Pittsburgh man was given 30 days to catch a wild rooster on his property before being penalized by the city. “I called the zoo,” the man said in court, “but they said they didn’t have the capabilities to catch a rooster.” Read more... Read More

The president of a Crime Stoppers chapter in Canada was fired for allegedly participating in the cultivation of cannabis, police in Mexico found a van outfitted with a ten-foot-long air cannon used to fire 60-pound bales of marijuana over the U.S. border, and an employee of the Royal Canadian Mint was suspected of having smuggled out an estimated $179,015 in “cookie-sized nuggets” of gold by coating them in Vaseline and hiding them in his rectum. Read more... Read More

In Minnesota, an Islamic State militant dressed as a private security guard stabbed nine people at a shopping mall, before being shot and killed in a Macy’s by an off-duty police officer. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump conceded that U.S. president Barack Obama was born in America, Jane Goodall compared Trump’s behavior to that of male chimpanzees performing dominance rituals, a dead Republican won his primary race for a seat in the New York State Assembly, and a deceased Siamese cat was sent a California voter-registration application in the mail. Read more... Read More

A tractor-trailer crashed on I-95 in Delaware, spilling 8 million blank pennies; a tractor-trailer caught fire on I-68 in Maryland, burning bacon and ribs; and a new ATM in Ohio was dispensing pizzas rather than money. New York mayor Bill de Blasio announced that 50,000 oysters were being distributed on beds made of porcelain from recycled toilets. “This oyster bed,” said the mayor, “will serve multiple purposes.” Read more... Read More

North Korea fired three ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan. JetBlue put an unaccompanied five-year-old boy on the wrong plane, sending him to Boston instead of New York; the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a satellite leased by Facebook exploded on the launchpad in Cape Canaveral; and police in Florida arrested a man who posted his own “Wanted of the Week” mugshot on Facebook.A two-year-old girl was cited for littering by the Washington, D.C., Department of Public Works, a public library in Alabama announced plans to enforce jail sentences for overdue books, and convicted rapist Brock Turner was released from prison after serving three months of his six-month sentence. Read more... Read More

In New Jersey, a newspaper published two obituaries of the same man, one by his wife and one by a woman claiming to be his girlfriend. A minor-league baseball player hit a grand slam, smashing the windshield of his own truck, which was parked outside the stadium. KFC released an “Extra Crispy” sunscreen that smells like fried chicken, and Colonel Sanders’s nephew may have accidentally leaked the company’s secret spice blend to a reporter. A family in Turkey got food poisoning at a dinner they organized to celebrate their recovery from food poisoning. Read more... Read More

A 12-year-old boy was placed in charge of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Jefferson County, Colorado, by his mother, an official campaign coordinator. “You have a responsibility to your children,” she said, “to teach them.” Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort resigned after it was reported that he received $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, for whom Manafort consulted, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation removed a statue of a naked Trump from Union Square. “NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection,” said a spokesperson, “no matter how small.” Read more... Read More

A Filipino congressman called for banning Trump from the Philippines after the candidate referred to the country as a “terrorist nation” and called its denizens “animals,” and a Trump supporter from Virginia traveled to New York City and climbed 16 stories of Trump Tower with suction cups to demand an audience with the candidate, who was campaigning in Virginia at the time. It was reported that Trump’s campaign manager received $12.7 million in “undisclosed cash payments” from a pro-Russian political party in 2012, and Clinton’s tax returns revealed that 96 percent of her charitable donations last year were made to the Clinton Family Foundation. A black coating of biofilm was found growing on monuments across Washington, D.C. Read more... Read More

A grandmother in New Mexico was arrested for allowing her drunk 13-year-old grandson to drive, the start-up company Ambrosia announced plans to start clinical trials in which older adults seeking “rejuvenation” would receive blood transfusions from people between the ages of 16 and 25, and alumni contributions to colleges and universities nationwide dropped because of protests over racial equality on campuses. “I feel that I have been lied to, patronized, and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot,” wrote an Amherst alumnus. Read more... Read More

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced that he wouldn’t endorse Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan for reelection, kicked a crying baby out of a rally in Virginia, asked Russia to steal U.S. State Department emails, reportedly asked three times during a national-security briefing why the United States shouldn’t use nuclear weapons, and said he wanted to hit a “little guy” so hard “his head would spin.” Researchers in the United Kingdom discovered an orangutan that mimics human conversations. Read more... Read More