“Our fingers are on the trigger.”

More than one million Igloo coolers were recalled after reports of fingertip amputations.

A weekly dispatch taking aim at the relentless absurdity of the 24-hour news cycle.

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The Department of Justice ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams.¹ In a memo providing rationale for the decision, the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, wrote that the charges against the mayor have “unduly restricted” his ability to devote his full attention to “illegal immigration and violent crime,” and that accomplishing President Trump’s immigration agenda was “every bit as important” as the Biden Administration’s prisoner exchange of Brittney Griner for arms dealer Viktor Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death.”^{2 3 4} Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, resigned over the directive, writing in a letter of her own that she was “confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged,” and that her office had been preparing to bring further charges against him, including the claim that he “destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence,” provided false information to the FBI, and conducted a fraudulent donor scheme.⁵ Four of Adams’s deputy mayors resigned in the wake of the dropped charges, as did five lawyers involved with the public integrity section of the Department of Justice.^{6 7 8} A few days after the motion was filed for charges to be dropped, Adams met with Tom Homan, the federal border czar, and announced that he would pass an executive order allowing Immigrations Customs Enforcement to operate on Rikers Island, even though a 2014 law prohibits New York’s Department of Correction from working with ICE, barring cases of serious or violent crime.^{9 10} “I just think people are making a lot about nothing,” said Homan.¹¹ Trump, who in the past few weeks has fired at least a dozen government watchdogs, ordered a pause on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that prohibits companies that operate in the United States from paying foreign government officials to secure business.^{12 13} “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” wrote the president on social media, a sentiment expressed by the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik that has been attributed to the French imperial dictator Napoleon Bonaparte.^{14 15 16}

U.S. officials traveled to Germany to participate in the Munich Security Conference, and while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited a U.S. military installation in Germany, two dozen people heckled, booed, and chanted “DEI” at him, and JD Vance met with the leader of Alternative für Deutschland, a neo-Nazi political party, to deliver a speech encouraging Europe to stop shunning far-right parties.^{17 18 19 20 21 22} “Some of the things I say will be incorrect,” said Elon Musk, who had claimed that $50 million worth of condoms were sent to Gaza, Palestine, when they were, in fact, sent to Gaza, Mozambique, to protect people against HIV.²³ It was reported that a man in Miami Beach shot two men whom he thought were Palestinians but were actually Israeli tourists.²⁴ Trump ordered any demining groups that subsisted on U.S. funding to stop their work, and then said “We’ll … be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site” before redeveloping Gaza, a redevelopment plan to which the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “committed.”^{25 26} More than 175 unexploded bombs from the Second World War were found under an English playground, and the ruins of a 2,000-year-old Roman basilica were found under an English office.^{27 28} The University of West England added more than 200 trigger warnings to Shakespeare’s plays, including for such things as “knives,” “extreme weather,” “witchcraft” and “references to wild animal attack.”²⁹ “Our fingers are on the trigger,” said the leader of the Houthis, warning that should the ceasefire in Gaza break down, they would be prepared to launch an attack on Israel.³⁰

More than one million Igloo coolers were recalled after reports of fingertip amputations, a woman in Vero Beach, Florida, allegedly shot two teenagers with a BB gun after they gave her the bird, and in the Finger Lakes, a man was arrested for biting a woman’s fingers.^{31 32 33 34} “I spent a second realizing I was inside the mouth of something, that maybe it had eaten me,” said a Venezuelan kayaker after being swallowed and regurgitated by a whale.³⁵ On a beach in Turks and Caicos, a woman attempted to take a selfie with a shark that proceeded to bite her hands off; a lawsuit was filed against Folly Beach, South Carolina, for using a third party to hand out parking tickets; and in Oxford, England, a United Nations judge was charged with “illegal folly” for effectively enslaving a young Ugandan woman.^{36 37 38} The Buenos Aires government approved plans to sterilize male capybaras and inject female ones with contraceptives in a gated community where the large rodents are breeding rapidly, and a Peruvian police officer pinned down a suspect and helped seize 1,700 bags of cocaine while dressed in a capybara costume.^{39 40} A man in Houston, Texas, was arrested after giving his nine-year-old daughter a chocolate bar laced with THC, and an opossum was hospitalized in Omaha, Nebraska, after eating a Costco tuxedo chocolate cake.^{41 42} It was reported that a woman in Japan was arrested for “criminal damage” after squishing a pack of black sesame buns too hard.⁴³ —Megan Evershed

Read the web version at harpers.org.