Weekly Review

A 19-year-old stripper in Connecticut was arrested for arson after police found her boyfriend’s DNA on a potato, which she had allegedly shoved in the tailpipe of a van owned by the man whose business she set on fire; and inmates at a jail in El Dorado, Kansas, rioted in protest of a mashed-potato lunch. A former U.S. intelligence official said pornography constituted 80 percent of the material on jihadists’ seized laptops, and Starbucks and McDonald’s made porn inaccessible from their Wi-Fi networks. Read more... Read More

A 36-year-old man in San Diego was arrested for setting four homeless men on fire, killing three of them. A husband and wife from North Carolina were arrested after attacking each other with pizza rolls, a Kentucky woman was charged with assault after hitting her husband over the head with a burrito and stabbing him, and a Florida woman was accused of hitting her boyfriend with her baby, which, a witness said, she “swung like a bat.” Read more... Read More

A British court awarded a 60-year-old woman the right to use her daughter’s frozen eggs to bear her own grandchild, and identical twin sisters in Colorado and California delivered babies at 1:18 a.m. on the same day. In a town in Long Island, where there have been no reported Zika cases, officials approved the construction of bat houses to ward off the virus. OFF! was announced as the official insect-repellent supplier for the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. Read more... Read More

Police in La Joya, Texas, offered a woman a taco after she reported being sexually assaulted by an officer, and it was revealed that the city of Chicago has spent at least $210 million on 600 police-misconduct lawsuits since 2012. A former prison in Philadelphia that has served as a horror-movie set was being prepared as a detention center for protesters arrested at the upcoming Democratic National Convention, and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump fired his campaign manager. “Ding dong the witch is dead,” tweeted a Trump adviser, shortly before resigning. Read more... Read More

German nudists protested the proposed construction of a refugee shelter near their colony. An intoxicated man in Russia hacked off his friend’s penis. The Playboy mansion in California was bought by the heir to the Twinkie fortune, and a New Mexico man set fire to his apartment to protest his neighbors’ loud lovemaking. A fight between Russian and English soccer fans in France left 35 people wounded, and an Iranian soccer star was suspended for wearing SpongeBob-patterned pants. Read more... Read More

In Pennsylvania, a man crashed his Mercedes into a church, and in California, a man broke into a church, smashed furniture and bottles of sacramental wine for two hours, and set the building on fire. An Anglican vicar who was arrested for punching a paramedic and spitting at a police officer claimed that he had diplomatic immunity from the Vatican, and a man in Pennsylvania gave a group of Amish boys cans of beer and then rammed their horse and buggy with his car. “Rumspringa!” said the man. Read more... Read More

At a retirement home in Ohio, Henry Heimlich, the 96-year-old inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, performed his procedure for the first time, dislodging a piece of hamburger from an 87-year-old woman’s airway. Merriam-Webster defined the hot dog as a sandwich. A judge in Italy dismissed a criminal complaint filed against a 50-year-old man who paid his child support in pizza and calzones, and a man in Texas paid a speeding ticket with 22,000 pennies. Read more... Read More

Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto proposed legalizing same-sex marriage, Canadian parliament members introduced legislation that would ban discrimination against transgender people, and teenagers in Chester, Vermont, wore “Straight Pride” T-shirts to protest a new policy at their high school that allows transgender students to use whatever bathroom accords with their gender identity. A Louisiana lawmaker proposed and then withdrew legislation that would have required dancers at strip clubs to weigh less than 161 pounds. “I can’t strip, either,” said the representative. “I’m a little overweight.” Read more... Read More

Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao City, who called the pope a “son of a whore” and has been accused of running vigilante death squads that have killed 1,000 people, was elected president of the Philippines, promising to end crime in six months by “killing five criminals a week” and by restoring the “death penalty by hanging in public.” “If I fail,” he said during his campaign, “kill me.” Read more... Read More

Indian scientists attempted to curb carbon emissions by making cows less flatulent, and the Tunisian champions of the cattle-herding mobile game Bagra were given an adult cow. A 10-year-old Finnish hacker was awarded $10,000 after discovering a bug in Instagram. “I could have deleted anyone’s comments,” he said. “Like Justin Bieber’s.” Justin Bieber was sued for destroying the iPhone of a man who took photos of him failing to complete a beer bong. Read more... Read More

A New Jersey judge reduced to simple assault the charge of aggravated assault filed against a man who while dressed as the Easter Bunny dropped a 15-month-old girl during a photo shoot and then began to fight her mother. A daughter and mother in Georgia were charged with animal abuse for keeping 38 cats in their van, a man in Iowa was charged with animal neglect for keeping 62 ducks in a U-Haul, an elephant in Cambodia that was forced to carry tourists on a 104-degree day had a heart attack and died, a man in Hawaii was filmed punching a pregnant monk seal, and researchers found that dogs experience anxiety when hugged by humans. Read more... Read More

The United Kingdom issued an advisory against North Carolina in response to the state’s passing of a law in March that requires transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificates. A 30-year-old man in Philadelphia accidentally killed his four-year-old daughter while waving a gun around a room full of children, then attempted to frame his nearby five-year-old daughter by wiping the blood from his hand onto her shirt. A man in India cut off the hands of a teenager accused of raping his then-seven-month-old daughter. Read more... Read More

A Washington State woman who had eaten Ruffles potato chips every day for 20 years discovered she had throat cancer after a chip injured her tonsil. It was reported that a seal in Ireland was scared away from a seafood restaurant by a photo of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, a gorilla was filmed dancing at a British zoo, and employees of an aquarium in New Zealand revealed that an octopus named Inky escaped into a nearby bay, leaving behind his tank mate Blotchy. "He managed to make his way to one of the drain holes,” the aquarium’s manager, “and off he went.” Read more... Read More

The Tokyo Fire Department announced that 104 people had been hospitalized for acute alcohol intoxication during this season’s cherry-blossom viewing parties. Sweden’s tourism agency installed a phone line for anyone in the world to call “a random Swede,” and suggested discussing the northern lights, darkness, meatballs, and suicide rates. In California, two men began stabbing one another in the head and neck after one defecated on the other’s lawn. Read more... Read More

Lawmakers in California and New York announced they would raise their states’ minimum wages to $15 per hour, and an assemblywoman in New Jersey proposed a law that would impose jail sentences of up to 15 days on pedestrians caught sending text messages while walking. A 72-year-old man was arrested on a plane in Hawaii for trying to bite and head-butt fellow passengers after being told he wasn't allowed to do yoga, and a 59-year-old man on an EgyptAir flight traveling from Alexandria to Cairo claimed to be wearing an explosive vest and forced the crew to redirect the plane to Cyprus, where his ex-wife lives. "Always there is," said the president of Cyprus, "a woman." Read more... Read More

In Sweden, postal workers discovered a package containing 300 live cockroaches; and in England, a cat was accidentally sealed into a box full of DVDs and mailed 250 miles, from Cornwall to West Sussex. In South Carolina, a woman was arrested on charges of buggery after she shared videos online of herself performing sexual acts with a dog; and in Florida, a woman was charged with three counts of engaging in sexual conduct with an animal after a man who was suspected of sexually battering her showed police officers videos she had sent him of her having oral sex with two dogs. Read more... Read More

A man in Euclid, Ohio, was arrested for egging a neighbor’s house more than 100 times and pelting it with grapefruits and onions. Authorities in Florence, Italy, tried to discourage graffiti by allowing tourists to leave messages on digital tablets located at historical sites. A North Carolina man sentenced in 2006 to 30 years in prison for conspiracy and racketeering had his conviction overturned because his lawyer had slept during the trial “almost every day,” and a Michigan man who was convicted of unlawful imprisonment and carrying a concealed weapon sang Adele’s “Hello” at his sentencing hearing. “I love Adele’s music,” said the judge before sentencing the man to 17 years in prison. Read More

A waiter at a Brooklyn IHOP was accused of giving away $3,000 worth of free soda. “I am,” he said, “Robin Hood.” A fallen tree derailed a commuter train in California, a man in Oregon was killed when an alder tree fell on his car, and it was reported than an Ohio woman was arrested for driving with a 15-foot tree stuck in her hood. A six-year-old boy was shot at a birthday party in Georgia, and a gun advocate in Florida was shot in the back by her four-year-old son. "Even my 4 year old gets jacked up,” she had posted online shortly before the shooting, “to target shoot with the .22.” Read more... Read More

A police dog in Contra Costa County located a burglary suspect hiding in a doghouse. In China, a maintenance crew discovered the body of a woman in an elevator they had disabled a month earlier, and an American man in Mozambique found a piece of debris that may be a fragment of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean two years ago. In Dallas, a man riding a hoverboard shot and wounded driver who offered him a ride. “The suspect then fled the location,” wrote the police in a press release, “on foot.” Read more... Read More

A woman in Turkey filed for divorce after her husband sued her for swearing at a television broadcast of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Saudi man who divorced his four wives and attempted to marry four new wives was ordered to remarry his original wives and pay them a new dowry of about $43,000, a hairdresser in Lancashire stabbed her boyfriend to death for adding “loads of girls” on Facebook, a woman in Germany choked to death after her lover left the room to feed his dog and smoke a cigarette after placing in her mouth a cucumber that the two had been using as a sex toy, and psychologists found that people in relationships rarely change their behaviors over time. Read more... Read More

In Utah, a Mormon youth-group leader found the decapitated head of a snake inside a can of green beans, and in Brazil a capuchin monkey was captured by a local fire department after video emerged in which it drinks alcohol from glasses around a bar and then chases patrons with a foot-long knife. In New Jersey, a mail carrier called his postmaster for help after several wild turkeys trapped him in his truck. “I got a carrier that’s being attacked by wild turkeys,” said the postmaster in a 911 call, “and won’t let him deliver the mail.” Read more... Read More

Seventeen member states of the International Syria Support Group agreed to a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria, and, following the announcement, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad promised to keep fighting, Turkey stepped up its bombing campaign against the Kurds in Syria, and Russia continued flying sorties. Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev described Russia’s relationship with the West as “a new Cold War,” and a noted opponent of President Vladimir Putin had cake thrown in his face by a gang of men at a Moscow restaurant. Read more... Read More

Egypt banned a German tourist from the country for climbing the Giza pyramid, and the body of an Italian student was discovered with signs of torture in a Cairo suburb. A New York City police officer testified in court that he was unable to perform CPR on a gunshot victim because the academy had helped him cheat on his certification test, and an officer in Chicago who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager sued the boy’s family for $10 million, claiming emotional trauma. In Peru, a 51-year-old activist became the first former sex worker to run for the national legislature. “I’m going to put order,” she said, “in that big brothel which is Congress.” Read more... Read More

A teenager in Melbourne was charged with conspiring to prepare for a terrorist attack after he was recorded discussing plans to paint the Islamic State flag on a kangaroo, pack the animal full of explosives, and release it in the vicinity of police officers. Two 71-year-old Americans sailing from Norway to the United States were rescued, for the ninth time, after their boat caught fire from a candle they left burning while they were out buying groceries. “This fire is definitely not typical,” said one of the men. Read more... Read More

Saudi Arabia’s highest-ranking cleric issued a fatwa condemning the game of chess, claiming it causes “enmity and hatred.” The Danish town of Randers voted to require pork in school lunches. A ten-year-old Muslim student in Lancashire, England, was questioned by police after he misspelled the word “terraced” and wrote instead that he lived in a “terrorist house”; and the U.K. Home Office misspelled the word “language” in an announcement of new English tests for immigrants. Read more... Read More

The city of Portland unveiled the Poopmaster 6000, which will clean crow droppings from city sidewalks. Researchers in Germany developed tiny bionic “spermbots” that escort slow-swimming sperm to eggs, and a man in Britain claimed to have fathered at least 800 children by selling his sperm on Facebook. "They’re just the ones I know of," he said. Read more... Read More

Marines in Mexico captured Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the fugitive leader of the drug cartel responsible for supplying the United States with the majority of its cocaine and heroin. Read More

In Italy, where more than 30,000 people die annually because of air pollution, the town of San Vitaliano banned the use of wood-burning pizza ovens. A British man in Kyrgyzstan was arrested on suspicion of racial hatred after he compared a sausage dish to a horse’s penis, and a priest in the Philippines was suspended by the Catholic Church for using a hoverboard during Christmas Eve Mass. China’s Communist Party released an official rap song featuring President Xi Jinping. “Corruption,” he rapped, “must be punished.” Read more... Read More

Christmas was banned in Somalia, and a ban on wearing "hats or clothes that resemble Santa Claus" continued in Brunei. Canada experienced a shortage of peppermint candy canes. A man in England dressed as Santa climbed through the window of a KFC wielding a knife, and it was reported that the number of people giving guns as Christmas gifts had increased since last year. "It is a significant gift," said a gun-shop owner, "to arm the people that you love." Read More

France’s National Front party, whose president, Marine Le Pen, recently compared Muslims praying in public to Nazi occupiers and was acquitted of hate-speech charges, won a record 6.8 million votes in regional elections. Danish legislators considered a measure that would allow authorities to seize jewelry, cash, and other valuables from refugees. Public schools in Los Angeles and Nashua, New Hampshire, were closed because of bomb threats, and a poll found that 30 percent of Republican primary voters support bombing Agrabah, the fictional city from Disney’s Aladdin. Continue reading... Read More