The Week - USA (2021-03-20)

8 NEWS The world at a glance ...

Prague

Worst in Europe: Hospitals in the Czech

Republic are on the brink of collapse as the

country battles a catastrophic Covid-19 outbreak.

The country handled the spring 2020 wave better

than most nations, thanks to an early lockdown

and high adoption of mask wearing. But when

it reopened that summer after suffering few deaths, locals stopped

taking the threat seriously, and the country has since bounced from

surge to lockdown to surge. A recent WHO survey found that

76 percent of Czechs don’t trust the government’s Covid pronounce-

ments, and 46 percent don’t stay home when they have possible

Covid symptoms. Now the Czech Republic has one of the world’s

highest Covid mortality rates and one of the highest infection rates,

registering more than 1,100 daily new cases per 1 million residents.

Rondônia state, Brazil

Selling the Amazon on Facebook:

Illegal land grabbers are burning

down areas of the Amazon rain

forest inhabited by indigenous

peoples and selling the freshly

cleared plots to cattle ranchers

through Facebook Marketplace. In a scheme

exposed by undercover BBC reporters, land

invaders set fire to the forest, then alert the

government that an area with no trees has been improperly desig-

nated as rain forest and should lose its protected status. They then

buy the plot and sell it off on Facebook. The social media giant

told the BBC it would not automatically refuse such listings but

would “work with local authorities” on the matter. “Our com-

merce policies require buyers and sellers to comply with laws and

regulations,” Facebook said. The first fully Brazilian-made satel-

lite, Amazonia-1, blasted into orbit last week; it will peer through

clouds and monitor deforestation in its namesake rain forest.

Paris
Sarkozy sentenced: Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was
sentenced to three years in prison for corruption this week. A Paris
court ruled that Sarkozy, 66, had forged a “corruption pact”
with his lawyer and a judge to try to obtain information
about an investigation into allegations that he accepted
illegal donations to his 2007 presidential campaign.
Sarkozy had offered the judge a cushy job in return
for inside information on the case. Sarkozy plans
to appeal, and even if he loses, he is unlikely to
be locked up, because the court suspended two
years of the sentence, and one-year sentences
can often be served at home. He joins a long list
of French politicians convicted of financial or
legal improprieties, including François Fillon—
Sarkozy’s former prime minister—and Christine
Lagarde, Sarkozy’s former economy minister and
now president of the European Central Bank.

San Salvador, El Salvador
More power for president: El Salvador’s populist President Nayib
Bukele now has the votes to remake the constitution and judiciary
after his newly formed New Ideas party swept this week’s election,
winning 56 of the 84 seats in the Legislative Assembly. That unprec-
edented victory has effectively neutered the two parties that have
dominated El Salvador for three decades, the right-wing ARENA
and left-wing FMLN. Bukele, 39, took office in June 2019 as an
independent and vowed to root out corruption and crack down on
gangs. He is immensely popular, but critics fear his growing authori-
tarianism. He has called critics traitors, denounced the media, and
ignored court rulings. When the legislature last year failed to finance
his security plan, Bukele led uniformed troops onto the assembly
floor, stirring memories of past dictatorships.

Mexico City
Where are the bodies? Of the 80,
Mexicans who have disappeared in
the past 15 years, nearly half are now
thought to have been in govern-
ment graves all along. Mothers of the
disappeared have for years led protests
calling for their children’s bodies to be
found. But a recent news investigation
reported that 39,000 of the missing likely passed through morgues
without being identified. Medical examiners overwhelmed by the
number of bodies from Mexico’s unending drug wars have been skip-
ping the usual process of taking DNA samples and inventorying scars
and other characteristics; many corpses are then buried in common
graves. The government has set up a team to try to identify remains,
but that process is complicated by the fact that the bodies are often
stacked on top of one another, causing genetic materials to mix.

Ottawa
Butter scandal: Canadians are complaining about a mysteri-
ous change to their butter—it’s too hard and won’t soften at
room temperature. Sylvain Charlebois, director of Dalhousie
University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, tweeted about the problem
in late December, and complaints soon spread across social media.
Cookbook author Julie Van Rosendaal tweeted that her butter was
“rubbery,” adding, “Something is up with our butter supply.” The
culprit, it turns out, is palm oil in dairy feed, which farmers use to
boost cows’ milk output. Because of a huge 2020 increase in butter
use, as Canadians baked through the pandemic, farmers turned to
palm fat to meet surging demand. A dairy trade group has asked
milk producers to stop using palm fat while the issue is studied;
Charlebois said he is getting death threats from furious farmers.

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Mothers of the missing

Sickened by Covid

Found guilty

Forest on fire