The Week Magazine April 15, 2022

In Bucha, outside Kyiv, the corpses lay in the street for weeks. Long enough for satellites to pass over them and record their locations from space. Long enough for dogs to gnaw at them. Long enough to rot. We already knew some of the horror of the war in Ukraine—children buried in the ruins of their shelter, a city without water, “green corridors” turned into shooting galleries. But, as almost always seems to be the case, what was hidden is worse than what was known. It is always worse than it looks. But maybe at least things will get better? After all, around Kyiv the Russians seem to be in retreat. At the United Nations, Volodymyr Zelensky captivates the world. Europe is rallying around NATO. Russia faces calamitous economic consequences.…

What happened Gruesome evidence of Russian war crimes, including images of mass graves and Ukrainian civilians shot with their hands tied behind their backs, spurred global outrage this week and new sanctions by Western nations. As battered Russian forces retreated from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, they left behind a trail of atrocities, including dozens of executed civilians lying in the streets and a pair of mass graves that held some 270 residents, according to the town mayor. Survivors reported that Russian soldiers raped, tortured, burned, and indiscriminately shot men, women, and children. “They cut off limbs, cut their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who showed the United Nations Security Council a graphic video of charred bodies and…

What happened A strong jobs report this week showing a March hiring boom brought the U.S. tantalizingly close to regaining pre-pandemic employment levels, but inflation continued to cloud most Americans’ perceptions of the economy. The U.S. added 431,000 jobs last month, Labor Department data showed, with the unemployment rate ticking down to a near-record-low of 3.6 percent. Revisions to January’s and February’s data uncovered 95,000 more jobs than initially reported, and the result is an economy that has regained more than 90 percent of the 22 million jobs shed in early 2020. But wage gains of 5.6 percent over the past year did not keep pace with the 7.9 percent increase in prices—a four-decade inflationary high. Home prices alone jumped a record 18.8 percent last year, putting home ownership…

A Danish company has begun distributing a children’s book to newly arrived Ukrainian refugees. The book includes fun facts about Denmark’s cultural connections to Ukraine, such as the nations’ frequent interaction during the age of the Vikings. Mediabrands, the company that designed the book, has so far distributed 20,000 copies and plans to print at least 75,000 more. Welcome to Denmark also tells kids not to worry too much about pronouncing the Danish language’s three extra letters, which, the book admits, “sound funny.” A British 10-year-old was metal detecting with his father when, after just 10 minutes of searching, he uncovered a rare, 13th-century seal. Priests would have pressed the medieval copper ornament, embellished with an image of the Madonna, into wax to seal official documents and other correspondence. George…

“The right-wing media machine has a new villain”—the Walt Disney Co., said Oliver Darcy in CNN.com. The “family-friendly” entertainment giant is at the center of a major culture-war battle with conservatives, after Disney denounced Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial new Parental Rights in Education law, known by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. With its massive theme park in Orlando, Disney is the state’s largest employer, with about 80,000 workers, and brings billions in revenues to the state. The company has long enjoyed special legal autonomy in Florida and giant tax breaks. Since the 1990s, it also has a history of supporting LGBTQ employees and causes. In response to the new law, which prohibits teachers from including any “instruction” about “sexual orientation or gender identity” that is “not…

Good week for: Songwriters, after a British judge ruled that pop star Ed Sheeran did not plagiarize a one-bar phrase from an earlier song in his hit “Shape of You.” After the ruling, Sheeran noted that “there’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music.” Baseball 2.0, after Major League Baseball approved for this season an electronic device that enables catchers to send signs for fastball, curve, slider, etc. to pitchers. Since catchers will not need to use their fingers to send signs, the device will end sign-stealing. Job openings, with the U.K.’s Antarctic Trust listing three openings for its post office and museum on Goudier Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. The jobs, paying from $1,600 to $2,300 a month, do not include running water or flush…