The Week Magazine December 17, 2021

In the spring of 1940, my grandfather was patching up wounded British troops on the beaches of Dunkirk when a German shell exploded nearby. Shrapnel ripped apart Philip’s left leg below the knee and he was carried, unconscious and bleeding profusely, by his fellow soldiers to an evacuation ship. Philip was placed with the dead and the about-to-die, the hopeless cases that the doctors onboard thought were beyond saving. His young life should have ended then, but a passing medical officer heard Philip moaning and decided that perhaps he wasn’t so hopeless after all. When I was a child, I never once heard my grandfather complain about his war wounds. Yes, his prosthetic limb meant he couldn’t chase after his grandkids quite as fast as he’d like, but he knew…

What happened The Omicron variant was spreading rapidly this week in the U.S. and the world, amid troubling new evidence that it may greatly reduce protection conferred by two-shot vaccinations and prior infection. But Pfizer reported that lab tests showed that people who receive booster shots may be highly protected against serious illness from Omicron, and there were some tentative indications that the variant may cause less severe illness for most people. In South Africa, where the variant was first detected, Omicron sent new daily cases surging from fewer than 300 a month ago to more than 16,000. But doctors noted that the case explosion hasn’t led to an equivalent rise in hospitalizations, suggesting Omicron may cause milder illness. Experts cautioned that South Africa’s population skews young and severe…

Massachusetts native Alexander McLeish was recovering from open-heart surgery on Thanksgiving when he opened a card to find lottery tickets sent by a longtime friend. He began scratching one ticket and revealed the first three letters: AWM, his initials. McLeish kept scratching the crossword-themed ticket until he reached a word in the bottom left corner: “heart.” The ticket won him $1 million. “I was calm and a little bit in disbelief,” McLeish said. He plans to share some prize money with his friend and his two adult sons. Pat Moorehead started his 90th birthday with oatmeal and a cup of coffee. Then, he and his wife drove to Perris, Calif., where he jumped out of an airplane—nine times, solo. Moorehead, a retired firefighter, picked up skydiving at age 37 and…

What happened With Russian troops and artillery massing near the Ukrainian border, President Biden this week warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country will face “severe” sanctions if it invades its Western neighbor. During a two-hour video call with Putin, Biden said the U.S. and its allies could block the Nord Stream II pipeline—which will deliver Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany—from going operational in 2022 and could boost military aid to Kyiv. Speaking after the call, Biden said an invasion would lead to an increased U.S. presence in NATO countries in the Baltic and Black Sea regions, but that putting American troops on the ground in Ukraine was “not on the table.” In an interview with Russian media, Putin said he was simply responding…

What happened Former Republican Sen. David Perdue announced this week that he would run against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in next May’s Republican gubernatorial primary, which could trigger an intraparty civil war and test Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP. Perdue, a one-term U.S. senator whom Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff unseated in a January runoff election, was immediately endorsed by the former president. Trump has blamed Kemp and other Republican state leaders for failing to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory, and had been trying to coax Perdue into the race. Perdue’s announcement echoed Trump’s baseless claims that voter fraud had invalidated the 2020 results, faulting Kemp for not “protecting our elections” and claiming that he “cannot win in November.” Trump is also backing a challenger to Georgia’s Republican Secretary of…

“Oh, how he loved that gun,” said Tony Norman in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. On Black Friday, when his father bought a semiautomatic Sig Sauer SP2022 for him in a sale, Ethan Crumbley, 15, posted a photo of the weapon online, captioned “my new beauty.” The next day his mother took him shooting, proudly posting about her son’s “new Christmas present,” and on Tuesday, Ethan took his new beauty from his parents’ unlocked bedroom drawer and killed four classmates and wounded seven (including a teacher) at Michigan’s Oxford High School. Crumbley is now in jail on murder and terrorism charges. His parents have been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter for their negligence. School officials share in the blame, said Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press. The day…