“Have a beer.”
The U.S. health secretary admitted to snorting cocaine off of a toilet seat.
A weekly dispatch written by Harper’s staff members taking aim at the relentless absurdity of the 24-hour news cycle.
The mayor of Minneapolis announced that Operation Metro Surge, during the course of which federal immigration agents killed two civilians, each of whom was denied medical assistance immediately after being shot, had cost Minnesota more than $47 million in lost wages and left more than 8,700 children needing mental-health support.1 2 3 4 The invasion yielded “successful results,” the U.S. border czar said of the operation.5 “We are leaving Minnesota safer.”6 An internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo called for the designation of eight detention centers with a capacity of ten thousand people and sixteen regional processing centers better able to “effectuate mass deportations.”7 A federal judge ordered the Trump Administration to bring back to the United States a college freshman who had been mistakenly expelled to Honduras in spite of a court order barring her deportation, and it was reported that nine people had been secretly deported to Cameroon in January despite none of them hailing from the country.8 9 At the Munich Security Conference, a former secretary of state and onetime Democratic presidential nominee claimed that migration to the United States had gone “too far,” becoming “disruptive and destabilizing”; a congresswoman from New York mistakenly claimed that Venezuela lies below the equator; and a senator from South Carolina who had appeared onstage at an anti-Iranian regime rally where he hoisted a prerevolutionary Iranian flag and sported a cap that read MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN participated in a conference panel during which he told European officials to stop worrying about the U.S. president’s desire to own Greenland and to instead “have a beer.”10 11 12 13 14 It was reported that the governor of California’s trip to the German conference was funded by a nonprofit that is headed by his former employees and funded by various private-sector firms, including a pharmaceutical giant and an Amazon-owned self-driving vehicle company.15 16 17 While in Munich, the prime minister of Spain gave the governor of the state a copy of Don Quixote, a seventeenth-century Spanish novel about a self-proclaimed knight’s fool’s errand.18
The Israeli education minister announced that the U.S. president would receive the Israel Prize for Lifetime Special Contribution to the State of Israel and the Jewish People, and the Washington Coal Club bestowed the president with the inaugural Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal award.19 20 21 It was reported that a U.S. billionaire who had previously called for the revival of domestic manufacturing would move the remainder of his Ohio-based brass and orchestra instrument-manufacturing plant to China.22 The secretary of war celebrated the prowess of American-made vessels at a shipyard in Bath, Maine, where workers were offered overtime pay if they stayed for his visit.23 24 The U.S. health secretary admitted to snorting cocaine off of a toilet seat, and the forty-fourth U.S. president said that he believes aliens are real.25 26 It was reported that a Norwegian scientist gave himself brain damage after self-testing a device invented to disprove the existence of Havana Syndrome.27 The governments of five European countries announced their conclusion that the political prisoner Alexei Navalny was killed in the Polar Wolf penal colony by a toxin found in a South American dart frog that causes suffocation through the paralysis of the respiratory system.28 29 30 Fireworks lit up the sky behind the North Korean leader as he held a ceremony to celebrate the completed construction of new housing units built for the families of the thousands of troops killed in action while supporting Russian forces in Ukraine.31
At the Olympic Games, where winners’ medals have been falling from their ribbons and breaking within hours of being awarded, a Ukrainian skeleton racer was banned from competition for wearing a helmet that commemorates his fallen countrymen.32 33 A man who had evaded arrest for sixteen years was detained by the Italian police after showing up in Milan to support the Slovakian ice-hockey team.34 Italy’s anti-doping organization upheld the appeal of an Italian biathlete who claimed that traces of letrozole had entered her system after she ate Nutella off a spoon she shared with her mother, who had been taking the substance; the International Olympic Committee was criticized for selling T-shirts depicting art from the 1936 Games, which is largely seen as a testament to the consolidation of Nazi power under the Third Reich; a supply of ten thousand condoms provided to competing athletes by the organizers of this year’s Winter Games was exhausted in three days; and in a televised broadcast, a Norwegian biathlon bronze medalist tearfully admitted to cheating on his girlfriend.35 36 37 38 “It’s like a funeral,” said the tourism councilor for a Puglian town whose famed natural rock formation, nicknamed Lovers’ Arch, collapsed into a pile of rubble on Valentine’s Day.39 —Megan Evershed
