The president of the United States was reported to have told the prime minister of Canada last month that he wanted the two countries to renegotiate their 117-year-old boundary; the Canadian prime minister warned citizens that Canada’s existence was “not a given”; Canada’s Liberal Party elected a new prime minister, who then said Canada would never become “part of America”; the premier of Ontario asked people to stop waking him in the middle of the night with text messages and said he would suspend electricity exports to the United States to make Americans “feel the pain”; and a photographer in Ontario captured footage of a bald eagle attacking a Canada goose.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 “That’s the way nature works,” he said.9 The U.S. president said he was considering deporting some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the special advisor to the U.S. president said the country should leave NATO because it “doesn’t make sense” for the United States to defend Europe; the president of France joined the prime minister of England in calling on the countries of Europe to militarize; Poland announced a plan to offer combat training to all adult males and announced that it would raise an army of 500,000 soldiers and seek access to nuclear weapons; France announced that it was considering extending the protection of its nuclear arsenal to other European nations; China responded to new U.S. tariffs by announcing it was prepared to fight “any type of war” to “the end” with the United States; and a group of Swedish citizens announced that they would protest U.S. policy shifts against Europe by boycotting Netflix.10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 “I had to,” said the organizer, “do something.”18
Disney announced it would include an avowedly Christian character in its series about a middle school softball team, a substitute teacher in Florida was arrested for encouraging students to fight one another in her classroom, and a man in St. Louis, Missouri, was found guilty of shooting his son’s recreational football coach for not giving him enough playing time.19 20 21 Biologists published the first ever photograph of humpback whales having sex, and a man in Missouri was arrested for the second time for sexual misconduct while trying to have sex with a train seat.22 23 An intoxicated man in Peru received only minor injuries after being struck by a cargo train, and a flying car company in California successfully tested an electric two-seater.24 25 Denmark announced that its postal service will stop delivering letters, a man on his way to Amsterdam was arrested at an airport in Colombia for stowing bags of cocaine under his toupee, and a Texas man pretending to be an NBA player on the Orlando Magic was arrested for swallowing $769,000 worth of jewelry at a Tiffany store in Orlando.26 27 28 The corporate headquarters of hot-sauce brand Texas Pete in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, caught fire; a pet crematorium and incineration facility in Calgary, Canada, burst into flames; and members of Serbia’s parliament threw smoke grenades at one another.29 30 31
Amid a worldwide avian flu outbreak, Brazil was projected to nearly double its egg exports to the United States; the U.S. Customs and Border Control reported a 36 percent year-over-year increase in seizures of smuggled eggs at the Canadian and Mexican borders; chicken rentals in New Hampshire reportedly increased; and a chicken in Devon, England, laid an egg three times the usual size, inside of which there was a second egg.32 33 34 35 36 Police in Copenhagen announced the theft of three piglets who were being starved to death as part of an art installation, scientists in the United Kingdom identified a gene mutation that causes overeating in humans and labradors, and a 72-year-old convicted serial killer in the United Kingdom who was falsely accused of eating a prisoner’s brain went on a hunger strike when his PlayStation was confiscated from his cell.37 38 39 40 An 88-year-old man whose rare blood plasma saved 2.4 million babies’s lives died in Australia, and researchers at Harvard and MIT proposed injecting tardigrade DNA into astronauts to protect them from space radiation.41 42 A biotechnology company in the United States announced that it genetically engineered a mouse with the hair of a woolly mammoth, a California assemblyman introduced a bill to make Bigfoot the state’s official cryptid, a man in Detroit accidentally shot himself in the foot while attempting to kill a cockroach, a man in Xianyang, China, ruptured a facial artery while picking his nose, and in Tennessee, a dog climbed into a man’s bed and shot him in the leg.43 44 45 46 47 —Joe Kloc
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