8 NEWS The world at a glance
THE WEEK 28 May 2022
Indianapolis
Formula milk shortage: In an attempt
to ease a nationwide short age of
formula milk for babies that has left
millions of parents struggling to feed
their infants, President Joe Biden has
invoked the Defence Production Act
to enable him to deploy the US
military to fly in supplies. The first
plane, carrying 35 tons of formula
from Switzer land via Germany,
arrived in Indianapolis on Sunday.
Formula – the production of which is dominated by a hand ful of
big players – was already in short supply owing to pandemic-
related supply chain problems. But the shortage has dramatically
worsened following concerns over insanitary conditions at the
nation’s biggest formula manufacturing plant. The plant’s owner,
Abbott, recalled vast quantities in February and had to
temporarily cease production. The shortage has led to a
rise in the sharing of potentially unsafe “homebrew”
recipes for making formula on social media.
Ottawa
Killer storm: At least ten people were killed, and 900,
householders left without power, after vast swathes of eastern
Canada were ravaged by a short but devastating tornado-style
storm last weekend. Most of those who died were hit by falling
trees. The rare phenomenon, known as a derecho storm, struck
a large area of southern Ontario and Quebec – including a
direct hit on the national capital, Ottawa – for around two
hours on Saturday afternoon, and has caused widespread
damage to electricity poles and pylons and other infrastructure.
“This storm was almost 1,000km long,” said David Phillips, a
climatologist at Environment Canada. “That’s what a derecho
is, it’s a long line of very active thunderstorms. Nothing can deter
it. It just marches along.” Hundreds of thousands of people were
still without power in the region early this week.
Atlanta, Georgia
Trump’s man defeated: Donald Trump suffered a major blow to
his standing in the Republican party, when the can didate he had
backed for governor of Georgia was soundly defeated in a bitterly
fought Republican primary this week. Trump had campaigned
hard to oust the “turncoat” Republican governor Brian Kemp –
who had refused to back Trump’s claim that the 2020 election had
been “stolen” – and to have him replaced by right-wing former
senator David Perdue. Kemp, for his part, had the backing of Mike
Pence, who had been Trump’s vice-president but who has since
had a dramatic falling out with his ex-boss. Pence had travelled to
Georgia to campaign for Kemp, saying that a Kemp victory would
“send a deafening message all across America that the Republican
Party is the party of the future”. Trump in turn had accused Pence
of being “desperate to chase his lost relevance... hoping someone is
paying attention”. But it was Kemp who triumphed.
Uvalde, Texas
School massacre: Scarcely a week
after a gunman shot dead ten people
in a supermarket in Buffalo, New
York (see page 15), America has
been traumatised by another mass
shooting, this one at a school in the
city of Uvalde, Texas. The 18-year-
old killer, Salvador Ramos, is thought
to have shot his grandmother before
going on the rampage at Robb
Elementary School with a handgun
and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Nineteen children and two
adults were killed in the shooting, the fourth-deadliest school
massacre in US history. Ramos himself was then killed in a
firefight with Texas border patrol officers. “When in God’s name
are we going to stand up to the gun lobby,” asked President Joe
Biden in an emotional address to the country. In a tribute to the
dead, he ordered all flags at federal buildings to fly at half mast.
Buenos Aires
Fined for lockdown party:
Argentina’s president, Alberto
Fernández, has been fined 3m pesos
(about £20,000) for breaking Covid lockdown rules in July 2020
by throwing a party for his wife’s 40th birthday. At the time, all
gatherings, even for funerals, were banned. Fernández at first
denied being at the celebratory dinner for about a dozen guests,
but when leaked photographs of the event emerged, he pleaded
that the dinner had been an “error, a slippage” during a pandemic
“management maelstrom”. Under a legal settlement approved by
a federal judge, Fernández’s wife, Fabiola Yáñez, was fined 1.4m
pesos. Prosecutors symbolically fixed the couple’s penalties at the
cost of a hospital respiratory machine and a stay in intensive care.
Resistencia, Argentina
Historic injustice: In the first trial of its kind in Latin America,
the Argentinian state has been found guilty of “crimes against
human ity” over a massacre of indigenous people working in
conditions of semi -slavery that took place almost a century ago.
Police and Euro pean settlers had killed between 400 and 500
people from the Qom and Moqoit communities, who’d been
protesting against the inhumane working conditions at the cotton
plantation. Many children and elderly people were among the
dead; the wounded who couldn’t escape were murdered “in the
cruellest form possible with mutilations and burials in common
graves”, according to the ruling by Judge Zunilda Niremperger.
The court has ordered “historic reparations” – most notably the
obligatory inclusion of the massacre in Argentina’s school syllabus.
