The Week Magazine August 19, 2022

Vladimir Putin is holding Brittney Griner hostage. The women’s basketball star is a center for the Phoenix Mercury who—because WNBA players are chronically underpaid—plays in the off season for a Russian team in Yekaterinburg. She’s made huge contributions to both U.S. and Russian sports, and has never failed a drug test. But when Moscow authorities caught her at the airport with less than a gram of cannabis oil, a prescribed medication that the 6-foot-9 athlete uses for chronic pain, they saw an opportunity to treat the American like a drug dealer. She was sentenced to nine years (see The World at a Glance, p.9). To free her, U.S. officials have offered to trade Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer now in federal prison for selling weapons to Colombian rebels,…

What happened President Biden and Democrats were on the verge of a major legislative victory this week, as a $430 billion package focused on slowing climate change and lowering health-care costs headed for the House after clearing the Senate on a party-line vote. It marked the culmination of over a year of negotiations between the party’s progressive and centrist factions that whittled down a far more ambitious $3.5 trillion package, and a dramatic turnaround for a bill that seemed dead just weeks ago. Now dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, it was revived by an eleventh-hour deal between Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who balked at the size of previous bills. Fellow centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) signed on after insisting on removing a provision that…

What happened The FBI triggered political shock waves this week when a team of more than 30 agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s private residence and club in Palm Beach, Fla., and reportedly carried off 10 boxes of records. The unannounced search, conducted while the club was closed and Trump was in New York, was prompted by concerns that the former president was withholding classified documents removed from the White House. In January, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents and other items from Mar-a-Lago, which reportedly included correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Two months ago, federal agents, including at least one working in counterintelligence, visited Mar-a-Lago looking for more documents that Trump had not turned over, in apparent violation of several…

What happened China this week continued its largest-ever military exercises around Taiwan, punishing the island for hosting U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Calling Pelosi’s visit last week “malicious and provocative,” Beijing unleashed a barrage of missiles, some flying directly over Taiwan and landing in Taiwanese and Japanese waters. For four days, it conducted a simulated blockade of the island with live-fire drills involving some 200 planes and 40 ships, and then it began a round of anti-submarine and sea-assault exercises. In addition to staging the ongoing military display, China said it would put sanctions on Pelosi and her family. It also suspended talks with the U.S. on climate change, drug trafficking, and other transnational issues, and closed some communications channels between its military and the Pentagon. During her daylong…

The voters of Kansas “just rewrote the script for the midterm elections,” said Daniel Strauss in The New Republic. In a referendum last week, Kansas voters rejected a proposal to strip abortion protections from the state constitution and empower lawmakers to pass a sweeping ban on the practice, as other red states have done since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade. Both sides had predicted the vote would be very close. But the resounding vote margin—59-41 percent in a state that twice voted for Donald Trump—and a massive turnout suggests the existence of a “hidden army of voters who are going to make reproductive rights the issue of these midterms.” The Kansas landslide is the “strongest evidence yet” that overturning Roe may “backfire politically” on Republicans, said Annie…

Good week for: Motorists, after gas prices continued falling for 57 straight days, reaching an average national price of $4.01 per gallon—down a dollar from mid-June. Alarm systems, after Fred Everitt of Mississippi was awakened at 2:30 a.m. by his cat, Bandit, who was frantically scratching his arms to alert him that two burglars had invaded his home. After scaring the intruders off, Everitt called Bandit his “guard cat.” Taste, after Domino’s Pizza closed the last of the 29 pizza restaurants it opened in Italy, ending a seven-year effort to sell its Americanized version to Italians. The chain cited stiff competition from local “‘Mom and Pop’ restaurants.” Bad week for: Cracker Barrel, the iconic Southern restaurant chain, which received furious blowback for adding meatless “sausage” patties to its menu. “You…