the times | Tuesday May 17 2022 2GM 31Wonky giraffe needs
a hand to find its feet
Page 32Juan Carlos will
visit King Felipe but
relations are frostydenied palace bed on return from exile
celebrated for his role in restoring
democracy to Spain, he has been lying
low on an island off Abu Dhabi while
King Felipe, his son, attempts to salvage
the monarchy’s reputation.
Juan Carlos was forced into
exile after investigations in
Switzerland and Spain over
alleged tax evasion and sus-
picious payments to his ac-
counts in the tax havens of
Geneva and Jersey.
The dropping of the
Swiss case in De-
cember and
the Spanish
one in
March for
lack ofevidence cleared the way for him to
make trips home, although he plans to
continue to live in the Middle East.
Relations between Juan Carlos and
his son still appear frosty, however.
Felipe did not drop by to see his
father during a brief visit to Abu
Dhabi last weekend after the
death of President Nahyan of the
United Arab Emirates. Instead
they spoke by phone and agreed
to see each other in person in
Madrid, the newspaper El Pais
reported.
Juan Carlos hasbeen told that while he will be able to
visit the Zarzuela Palace outside Ma-
drid, where his wife, Sofía, 83, and child-
ren live, he cannot stay there, since it is
the office of a head of state. Where Juan
Carlos will stay during his visit is un-
clear.
“He will see his family and accept the
conditions,” Ónega said. “But that
doesn’t stop him thinking he’s being
treated unfairly.”
Sanxenxo was always a likely venue
for Juan Carlos’s return, given his pas-
sion for sailing. It was where he spent
his last night in Spain before departing
for the Arabian Gulf in August 2020. He
has been in touch with Pedro Campos,
president of the Sanxenxo Royal Nauti-
cal Club, El Pais reported in March.Shooting suspect
‘attended school
in a hazmat suit’
Police have named all ten victims in the
Buffalo mass shooting, including an
elderly civil rights activist and a church
deacon, as classmates of the shooter
described his erratic behaviour leading
up to the massacre.
All were murdered when the gun-
man walked into a Tops supermarket
with a rifle and assault weapon bought
in another state, and sprayed the
crowds doing their Sunday shopping.
Three people were wounded.
The suspect, Payton Gendron, 18,
was captured alive.
He had been was the subject of police
inquiries for threatening behaviour
nearly a year before the shooting for
making threatening statements.
Former classmates described him as a
quiet, “book smart” pupil who pre-
ferred to continue doing online course-
work than attend class in person.
When in-person teaching resumed,
in 2020, he arrived in a hazmat suit,
Nathan Twitchell, 19, told The New York
Times. “He wore the entire suit, boots,
gloves, everything,” he said. “Everyone
was just staring at him.”
Yesterday details emerged of those
who were killed. Kat Massey, 72, was
remembered as a civil rights activist
who had worked against gun violence
and as a “powerful” and “unapologetic”
voice for her community.
Heyward Patterson, 67, was a church
deacon who gave people lifts to Tops
and helped them with their groceries.
Celestine Chaney, a 65-year-old
grandmother, had been out shopping
with her sister, JoAnn Daniels. When
shots sounded in the store, “she fell and
I thought she had got back up and was
behind me, but she wasn’t behind me,”
Daniels told the Buffalo News. “She was
a breast cancer survivor and she sur-vived aneurysms in her brain, and then
she goes to Tops and gets shot.”
The youngest of the victims was
Roberta Drury, 31, who was said to have
been shot in the head as she walked out
of the supermarket. The oldest was
Ruth Whitfield, 86, who had stopped at
the shop on the way to visit her hus-
band, who is in a nursing home. Her son
Garnell told the New York Post that he
was waiting for his sister to arrive before
telling his father. “We are going to go
there collectively,” he said. Whitfield
“was his caretaker. He’s been in the nur-
sing home for the last eight years.”
Aaron Salter, 55, a retired police offi-cer who worked as a security guard and
who was killed after engaging the gun-
man, was credited with having saved
lives.
In a manifesto posted online, Gen-
dron wrote that he “became racist”
after browsing the internet chatroom
4chan during the pandemic, because of
“extreme boredom”, reading posts that
convinced him that “the white race is
dying out” and that it was being
“replaced” by black people and by
immigrants.
The idea, often bound up with anti-
semitic tropes that a shadowy elite is
seeking to replace white Americans,
has been tied to two previous mass
shootings: in Pittsburgh in 2018 and in
Texas in 2019.United States
Will Pavia New YorkALVARO BARRIENTOS/APDoncellas, or The Maidens, a traditional pilgrimage held to celebrate the arrival of spring in Sorzano, northern SpainMelania warms to idea of
a White House comeback
Melania Trump has hinted at a return
to the White House as first lady as her
husband continues to weigh up another
run for office in 2024.
In her first interview since leaving
last year, she said that she and Donald
Trump had “achieved a lot in four
years”, lamented “biased” treatment
and, when asked if she might return,
added: “Never say never.”
She told Fox News that she never fea-
tured on the cover of Vogue during her
time in the White House, a decades-old
tradition that has since been revived.
Both Jill Biden and the vice-president,
Kamala Harris, appeared last year.
“They’re biased and they have likes
and dislikes,” she said. “I have much
more important things to do.”
She lamented the struggles of ordi-
nary Americans, with the Biden admin-Hugh Tomlinson WashingtonRoberta Drury and Hayward Patterson
were among the ten people shot deadistration struggling to curb inflation
that has rocketed to a 40-year high. She
also noted the nationwide shortage of
baby formula that has become the lat-
est symbol of the cost-of-living crisis.
“It’s heartbreaking to see that [fami-
lies] are struggling, and the food is not
available for children in [the] 21st
century in the United States,” she said
in the interview, broadcast on Sunday.
She blamed the “leadership”, adding:
“I hope it changes fast.”
Trump has yet to confirm whether he
will seek a second term but for months,
at election-style rallies across the coun-
try, he has hinted that he will do so,
while continuing to falsely insist that in
2020 victory was stolen from him.
“We did it twice, and we’ll do it again,”
he told the Conservative Political
Action Conference in Florida. “We’re
going to be doing it again a third time.”
Melania’s back, but for how long? Times2