The Week Magazine June 16, 2023

How should the news media cover Donald Trump’s pursuit of another term in the White House? “You cover him like any other candidate,” proclaimed CNN’s CEO, Chris Licht, shortly before his hubris got him fired this week. CNN’s new owners had installed Licht to rebrand the network as a nonpartisan alternative to MSNBC and Fox News where “both sides” would get equal treatment. (See Briefing, p.11.) To prove CNN’s neutrality, Licht recently featured Trump on a prime-time town hall. Moderator Kaitlan Collins valiantly challenged Trump’s torrent of lies, but proved no match for Trump’s superpower: utter shamelessness. When confronted with evidence that contradicts his ravings, the Mad King bellows, attacks his questioner, and portrays himself and his fanatical followers as victims of bias and persecution. The dilemma another Trump run…

What happened Ukraine began exploratory attacks on Russian lines this week in the first phase of its long-awaited counter-offensive, even as the collapse of a hydroelectric dam in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine inflicted a fresh humanitarian crisis. Ukrainian forces staged a series of artillery strikes and ground attacks along the eastern front in the southeastern Donetsk region, which U.S. and NATO officials cast as an effort to probe for Russian weaknesses in advance of a larger assault. It is widely expected that the counteroffensive will aim to break through Russian lines, drive to the Sea of Azov coast, and sever the “land bridge” connecting Russian-occupied Crimea with the Russian mainland. That would cut Russia’s occupying forces in two. Russia said the counter-offensive was underway, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told…

What happened President Biden took a victory lap this weekend after signing the bipartisan bill to raise the debt ceiling, even as his negotiating partner, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, faced a revolt from the far-right House Freedom Caucus. The final vote on the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which passed the House 314-117 and gained the support of nearly two-thirds of the Senate, “was far more bipartisan than anyone thought was possible,” Biden said in his first televised address from the Oval Office. “No one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed.” The deal to suspend the $31.4 trillion borrowing limit until January 2025 included only a few of the spending cuts Republicans had asked for but did keep discretionary spending flat. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen,…

Gelje, a 30-year-old Nepali sherpa, saved a Malaysian climber from dying on Mount Everest last month. Gelje was nearing the summit with a Chinese client when he saw a man clinging to a rope and trembling in minus-22 Fahrenheit temperature. The two stopped their own ascent, wrapped the man in a sleep mat, and carried him 1,900 feet down, where Nima Tahi, another sherpa, joined the effort. When the team reached a camp at 23,500 feet, a helicopter completed the rescue. “Saving one life is more important than praying at the monastery,” said Gelje. For Dev Shah, a 14-year-old from Largo, Fla., four years of study culminated in one word last week: psammophile. If you’re wondering, it means an organism that thrives in sandy areas. And for Dev it meant…

“If they’re worried, we should be worried,” said Greg Moore in The Arizona Republic. Hundreds of artificial intelligence researchers and tech leaders, including Bill Gates and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, recently signed a one-sentence declaration with a dramatic warning: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI,” they said, “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” A more urgent version of March’s open letter calling for a six-month “pause” in AI research, the statement shows the tech world’s mounting anxiety that AI will not only replace millions of human workers and serve as a tool for bad actors to create and flood us with disinformation—it might just “kill us all.” This could happen either by accident, as artificial intelligence blindly pursues some…

Good week for: Potty mouths, with the announcement from Apple that an update to the iPhone operating system will no longer auto-correct a common swear word to “ducking.” Believers, with reports that David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former U.S. intelligence officer, has filed a whistleblower complaint claiming that federal authorities have recovered numerous “intact and partially intact vehicles” of “non-human origin” that have crashed on Earth, including dead aliens. Consistency, after a Utah school district banned the Bible in response to a parent’s complaint that it discusses fornication and other “sensitive material.” State Sen. Todd Weiler called the ban “a fair trade” so schools could censor “X-rated content” in other books. Bad week for: Kim Jong Un, after South Korean intelligence reported that the 5-foot-7 North Korean dictator…