The Week Magazine April 28, 2023

Even though it’s never had a truly functioning democracy, Russia has produced some extraordinarily brave democrats. Take Alexei Navalny: He almost died in 2020 after Kremlin agents poisoned him with Novichok nerve agent. Yet after he recovered in a German hospital, he didn’t stay in the West but returned to his country to continue his pro-democracy work. He was immediately arrested, of course, and now, after sitting in a maximum-security prison for more than two years, is critically ill and in pain. His spokeswoman says Navalny appears to have been given a slow-acting poison that is rotting his insides. Then there’s Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., who was sentenced this week to 25 years in prison (see The world at a glance, p.9). He comes from a long line of intellectuals and…

What happened Fox News averted weeks of potentially damaging courtroom testimony from its top executives and on-air hosts this week, after it agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. Judge Eric M. Davis announced the settlement—one of the largest ever in a defamation case—as a rapt courtroom in Wilmington, Del., was awaiting opening statements in what would have been the most closely watched media trial in decades. Dominion had sued Fox for $1.6 billion, charging that the right-wing network engaged in “actual malice” by knowingly airing the fiction that Dominion’s machines had been rigged as part of a plot to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. “The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” said Dominion lawyer Justin Nelson after the settlement was…

A missing Texas woman was found miraculously alive inside a nearly submerged Jeep. The vehicle was first spotted by a fisherman at Lake o’ the Pines in Marion County, Texas. When a tow-truck driver was preparing the vehicle for removal, he saw the woman, who’d been reported missing some hours earlier. The woman was rescued and treated at a local hospital for hypothermia. The boat ramp that the Jeep drove down sits at the end of a long curved rural road, and police say the woman apparently made a wrong turn into the lake. Murphy, a 31-year-old childless bald eagle at the World Bird Sanctuary in Valley Park, Mo., was trying to hatch a rock for weeks thinking it was an egg—male bald eagles sometimes incubate their young. So when…

What happened Armed Americans shot innocent people who approached them by mistake in three separate incidents across the country over the past week, raising fears that any random encounter could prove deadly in a nation where guns now outnumber people. In Kansas City, Mo., last week, Ralph Yarl, 16, went to the wrong address to retrieve his younger brothers from a friend’s house. After he rang the doorbell, Andrew Lester, 84, allegedly shot the Black teenager with a pistol through the glass screen door, hitting him in the head and, after Yarl fell to the ground, his arm. Yarl ran to several nearby houses before receiving help from a bystander. Two nights later, in rural Hebron, N.Y., Kevin Monahan, 65, described by neighbors as surly and territorial, allegedly fired…

What happened Senate Democrats and ethics watchdogs this week called on Chief Justice John Roberts and the Department of Justice to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after ProPublica exposed deep financial ties between Thomas and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. In 2014, Crow purchased a home and two vacant lots in Savannah from Thomas and several relatives for $133,363. Crow then spent tens of thousands of dollars fixing up the home, where Thomas’ 94-year-old mother still lives, apparently rent-free. The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 requires justices to disclose property sales of over $1,000, but Thomas never revealed the deal. He claimed he thought he didn’t need to because he’d lost money on the sale; he says he plans to amend the disclosure form. Crow insisted he bought…

Jack Teixeira is “a new kind of leaker,” said Marc Fisher in The Washington Post. His motive for putting top-secret documents online wasn’t to serve as a whistleblower—it was to prove to his buddies that “he had access to cool stuff.” When news broke in early April that hundreds of highly classified documents had been circulating in obscure corners of the internet for months, intelligence analysts were baffled. The leaked information was too wide-ranging—from U.S. doubts that Ukraine can truly defeat Russia to intelligence gleaned from spying on allies like Israel and South Korea—to suggest an ideological motive. The mystery was solved last week when FBI agents charged Teixeira, 21, an IT worker for the Air National Guard, with copying and stealing vital national secrets—evidently to impress the 30…