The Week Magazine April 22, 2022

You might not have realized it, but our country is getting safer every day. How can that be? you might ask. Didn’t the murder rate soar 30 percent in 2020, and isn’t violent crime up nearly everywhere? Isn’t there, on average, more than one mass shooting of four or more people every day—including a crazed gunman’s barrage of 33 shots in a New York City subway this week? Yes, true enough, but look at the bright side: The sale of deadly weapons has been surging at a record pace for years, with nearly 40 million firearms sold in 2020 and 2021. Better yet, in 25 states, you can now legally buy and carry a firearm without a permit, testing, or training. (See Briefing, p.11.) For decades, the National Rifle Association…

What happened Ukraine braced for a new phase in the seven-week-old war this week, as Russian forces prepared to launch a major assault on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. As Russian units who’d failed to take Kyiv and other northern cities retreated and regrouped, Russia moved an 8-mile column of military vehicles and thousands of troops into position around the Donbas. Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed a shift in strategy, saying that with peace talks at a “dead end,” taking control of the Donbas—where pro-Russia separatists have been fighting with Moscow’s help since 2014—was now the war’s “main goal.” He cast the coming assault as an effort to “help people” in the region “who feel their unbreakable bond with Russia,” and fear Ukrainian oppression. “It is obvious that…

What happened The Covid-19 pandemic entered a new and murky phase this week, as cases of the BA.2 Omicron subvariant began to climb in the Northeast even as hospitalizations remained low. The case rate rose 8 percent over the past two weeks nationwide—and that’s likely an undercount, because most states no longer track daily cases and many people testing at home may not report results. Cases in New York, New Jersey, and neighboring states soared more than 60 percent, and Philadelphia became the first big city to reinstate an indoor mask mandate. Yet while BA.2 now causes nearly 86 percent of U.S. cases, it hasn’t produced a rise in hospitalizations or deaths, both of which continue double-digit declines. In Washington, D.C., where cases have risen by 76 percent, at…

A French retiree is being praised for giving most of his lottery winnings to an endowment he created to protect the environment. The winner, identified only as Guy, won nearly $220 million in December 2020. But he said he never had an interest in acquiring “boats, castles, or sports cars.” The donor was influenced by his experience living in Ivory Coast, where he frequently witnessed a “ballet of trucks” hauling off heaps of lumber from forests. “Giving,” said Guy, “transforms indignation into concrete and useful action.” The latest addition to the staff of an Orlando children’s hospital is an unusually smart Labrador retriever named Parks. The 2-year-old dog, whose training cost about $50,000, performs typical service-animal duties, such as cuddling and kissing chronically ill patients. But he’s also capable of…

“The confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees is broken,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post, “and so, I fear, is the Supreme Court itself.” The Senate voted 53–47 last week to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, with three Republicans joining all 50 Democrats. But to get there, the widely respected Jackson had to withstand a shameful spectacle by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who tried caricaturing her as a radical leftist whose heart, as Sen. Ted Cruz put it, “is with the murderers, the criminals.” Jackson, Republicans insisted, was pro-pedophile because of her (unremarkable) sentences for child porn consumers, and pro-terrorism because as a public defender she represented four detainees at Guantánamo. In the most shameful attack of…

Good week for: Shamelessness, after former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort launched a consulting firm “to help people with strategic advice.” Manafort, 73, was pardoned by Trump after being convicted of bank and tax fraud for millions paid him by oligarchs. Postponing Armageddon, after NASA detected the biggest comet ever recorded—80 miles across and weighing 500 trillion tons—hurtling toward the sun at 22,000 miles per hour. Fortunately, calculations show the massive comet will never get close to Earth. Life imitating art, as romantic suspense writer Nancy Crampton Brophy went on trial in Portland, Ore., for allegedly killing her husband, Daniel, in 2018. The jury will not be told about Brophy’s earlier blog post, titled “How to Murder Your Husband.” Bad week for: Comebacks, after influential Republican pollster Frank Luntz…