The Week Magazine December 9, 2022

“Give me liberty or give me death.” Protesters in cities throughout China were actually chanting Patrick Henry’s revolutionary war cry from 1775 this week, as tens of thousands poured into the streets in defiance of the authoritarian regime in Beijing. The demonstrators, mostly young, chanted “We don’t want emperors!” and held up blank pieces of paper to symbolize their inability to speak freely. Thus far, President Xi Jinping has not ordered a violent crackdown, but police cleared streets and photographed protesters’ faces. Those images will be fed into China’s Orwellian face-recognition database, which tracks every citizen’s cellphone and monitors everything from their internet activity to jaywalking. It takes unimaginable bravery—and the pent-up anger created by suffocating repression—for people to defy authority in a society where “bad” citizens can be dragged…

What happened Demonstrators angered to a boiling point by China’s restrictive “zero-Covid” policies took to the streets in cities across China last weekend, in a remarkable uprising that represented the nation’s greatest civil unrest since the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. In Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and at least six other cities, thousands of citizens clashed with police, and called for an end to restrictions that have kept residents confined to their homes for monthslong stretches, sometimes without adequate food and medicine. Many held blank sheets of paper, in silent protest of government censorship laws. Some openly called for an end to President Xi Jinping’s rule and Communist Party repression. “We want freedom!” chanted a crowd in Beijing. “We don’t want emperors!” The spark for the protests was a fire in an…

Joseph Cook was combing a St. Augustine, Fla., beach when he discovered a diamond ring—which a jeweler told him was worth $40,000. Instead of cashing in, Cook put out a call on social media and soon heard back from the ring’s owners—a couple living in Jacksonville. Three weeks later, Cook returned the ring to them in person. “Karma’s always good,” he said. “Every time I return an item, I find something better.” Sure enough, Cook has already unearthed another diamond ring with his metal detector. A Texas family spent five decades searching in vain for their daughter, who was abducted by a babysitter in 1971. Meanwhile, Melissa Highsmith, now 53, had no idea anyone was looking for her. A breakthrough came when the family reviewed DNA evidence on 23andMe with…

What happened With the last undecided seat in the Senate at stake, record numbers of Georgians voted early this week in the tight runoff between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican former NFL star Herschel Walker. Voting began last weekend in some counties and across the state on Monday, and hundreds of thousands of Georgians cast ballots, breaking turnout records on both Monday and Tuesday. The runoff was necessary because no candidate won more than 50 percent in the very close first round, in which Warnock received about 38,000 more votes than Walker out of some 4 million cast. Polls show support for the two men split evenly, and voting will continue through Dec. 6. The campaign turned increasingly bitter toward the end. Walker characterized Warnock as a lackey…

What happened Kari Lake, a 2020 election denier, denied this week that she lost the race to be Arizona’s next governor. The Donald Trump–endorsed Republican is suing Maricopa County, alleging voter fraud after Secretary of State Katie Hobbs beat her by 17,000 votes. In swing states, almost every election denier who lost a prominent midterm race has accepted defeat. Lake, however, maintains that vote tabulation issues disenfranchised her supporters. Maricopa, which includes Phoenix and is the country’s fourth most populous county, experienced some technical problems that caused long lines, but officials said everyone was able to vote. At a contentious public hearing this week, Lake supporters demanded that the county’s Board of Supervisors nullify the election. “This is a war between good and evil, and you all represent evil,”…

To a nation already exhausted by a “historic stretch of gun violence,” the Thanksgiving break was no break at all, said John Woodrow Cox in The Washington Post. In the space of 10 days, we woke on three mornings to “another high-profile shooting and a new death toll.” Three University of Virginia football players were shot and killed by a disgruntled fellow student on a bus. A gunman armed with an AR-15 slaughtered five patrons and wounded 17 during a drag show at a Colorado LGBTQ bar. And back in Virginia, a Walmart supervisor opened fire in a break room and killed six co-workers and injured four others. And those were just the shootings that made the headlines. Already this year we’ve seen 617 mass shootings (those with at…