From Harper’s Weekly Review:
The mayor of Columbus, Ohio, learned how to fill a pothole; the mayor of New York City announced that the city had filled more than 100,000 potholes since he took office in January; and in Johannesburg, South Africa, a 75-year-old candidate for mayor snorkeled in a giant pothole to highlight city-management failures.
It was reported that the U.S. health secretary once castrated a dead raccoon so that he could “study” its genitalia; a municipal judge in Alabama acquitted a woman of all charges after she was arrested for wearing a penis costume to a “No Kings” rally in October; and nearly 100 naked men ran through the streets of Trondheim, Norway.
A University of Madison researcher confessed to using chemicals from his lab to poison a colleague, citing his “pet peeves,” including the victim’s failure to wear a lab coat and goggles, as motivation; a 25-year-old man in Tennessee pleaded guilty and apologized in court for accessing government systems with stolen credentials and then bragging about the crime online on an account named “ihackedthegovernment”; a Florida doctor was indicted for second-degree manslaughter after accidentally removing a man’s liver instead of his spleen; and during a court hearing in England, a man explained that he had shoved a woman off her bicycle and over a seawall because he “thought it would be funny.”