Happy Monday y’all. The Olympics are over, which means we need to now get back to our regularly scheduled lives. Sigh. A lot happened around the world over the weekend. Here’s what you need to know to Get Up to Speed and Out the Door.
1. Turkey attack
Even in a country numbed by terror attacks, this was particularly horrific: a suicide bombing at a wedding — apparently carried out by someone who wasn’t even 15! The weekend attack in a Kurdish neighborhood in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep killed at least 51 people. Turkey’s president blames ISIS, which makes sense because the Kurdish militia has played a key role in defeating the terrorists on the battlefield in northern Syria.
2. Campaign 2016
So is Donald Trump going to have a deportation force or not? Being tough on immigrants is what shot wall-builder Trump to the top of the GOP charts. But Buzzfeed reports that at a Hispanic advisory council meeting, Trump suggested he might be looking for a way to legalize some and let them stay. Trump’s new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway cleared it all up in a clear-as-mud-answer to CNN: “To be determined.”
3. Philippines
Prisoners live cheek by jowl in Manila’s Quezon City Jail, one of the most densely populated corners of the Philippines. And it’s getting worse, thanks to President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. CNN’s Euan McKirdy’s look at life inside the jail is well worth a read.
More than 4,000
The number of inmates at Quezon City Jail
800
The number of inmates the jail was meant to hold when it was built in 1953
30,000
The jail’s total square footage
20
The total number of guards
4. Lou Pearlman
The man who gave us all those cheesy 1990s boybands has died. Lou Pearlman was the brains behind *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys (and many other copy-and-paste acts). The 62-year-old producer died in prison where he was serving a 25-year sentence for running Ponzi schemes.
5. Prince
There’s a new twist in the Purple One’s mysterious death. Pills taken from Prince’s Paisley Park compound were labeled as hydrocodone but actually contained fentanyl — a drug 50 times more potent than heroin. And the amount of fentanyl in Prince’s system was so high it would have killed anyone, no matter their size. There are two likely possibilities: Either the pills were mislabeled or illegally obtained. That’s where the investigation’s headed now.
BREAKFAST BROWSE (Olympics edition)
The flame is out, but the memories. Oh the memories! Rio’s closing ceremony ended the Olympics with, what else, a big party, and no one cared that it rained. We’ll remember the good — Michael Phelphs’ unprecedented gold rush (and his “death stare”), Usain Bolt’s “triple-triple” triumph (and that smile) …
Brazil adding Olympic gold to its already crowded soccer trophy case, Team USA’s rock star gymnasts…
And all those marriage proposals…
But there was also the bad — polluted waters, empty seats, green diving pools and (sigh) Lochtegate.
Here’s a look back at the long, strange trip.
AND FINALLY …
Super Mario
The Games may be over, but you can still enjoy the pursuit of athletic excellence. Just watch this hamster plow through a level of Super Mario Bros.
