Welcome back to America This Week, your weekly bias-free news digest, penned from the land of a thousand facelifts! We had another remarkable calendar of events in the past seven days, headlined by an escalating war of words between the Republican and Democratic Parties (tune in to the new “America This Week” podcast with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn for more on that). We also saw worsening economic news at home and abroad, and an energy crisis poised to further destabilize a global order already strained by one war, and threatened now with the possibility of a second.

More on that, plus recaps of other notable/ridiculous/terrifying American headlines, beginning with: