Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2, 2020 i Time Magazine International Edition

IN A PROMOTIONAL VIDEO FEATURING Japanese tennis superstar Naomi Osaka, as well as fans of different nationalities, the organizing committee for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games revealed on Feb. 17 the event’s official motto: “United by emotion.” Yet if there’s one emotion linking the world today, it might be fear. The COVID-19 outbreak shows little sign of weakening. As of Feb. 19, the disease has infected more than 75,000, killed 2,014 and prompted more than 50 nations and territories to close their borders to arrivals from China. The “devil” virus, as Chinese President Xi Jinping has called it, is on the cusp of becoming a pandemic. The coming weeks will determine whether containment efforts can prevent COVID-19 from morphing into the “black-swan event” that Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang…

FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, U.S. ENVOY ZALMAY Khalilzad has been trying to negotiate an end to the 18-year war in Afghanistan. Now Khalilzad, or Zal, as he’s widely known, is confident he’s on the brink of inking an elusive peace deal between Washington and the militant group that sheltered al-Qaeda terrorists while they plotted the attacks of 9/11. If he succeeds, Zal will deliver a pivotal election-year victory for his boss, President Donald Trump, who has long pledged to end America’s involvement in “endless wars.” If he fails, the U.S. will remain mired in the longest war in American history, a conflict that has killed more than 3,500 U.S. and NATO troops, cost the U.S. government nearly $900 billion, and left more than 100,000 Afghan casualties and millions more…

THOMAS JEFFERSON BEGAN LIFE IN A MONARCHY, UNDER THE reign of George II, in one of Britain’s North American colonies—Virginia. In this monarchical system everyone knew his or her place, with little expectation of being able to move very far outside of it. Though the American provincials were not on a par with the aristocrats in the mother country, they had developed their own version of hierarchy. Jefferson, by dint of his family ties, was born at the top, and there would have been no reason to suspect that he would ever come to be associated with the idea of equality. This is especially so given that he was born into a slave society, and his family fully participated in the institution of slavery. From an early age, he would…

THERE’S AN OLD-SCHOOL MENTALITY FOR PARENTS, ESPEcially if you play basketball, that when your son is born, he’s going to follow in your footsteps. Zaire, who’s now 18 and a key player for one of the best high school teams in the country, quickly met that expectation. When Zaya was born, we thought the same thing: let’s give her a ball and see if she’s into it. But ever since she was about 3, we realized she wasn’t. This summer, she told us she wanted to use she/her pronouns and that she wanted to go by Zaya. Zion was now her “dead name” and should no longer be used. We projected our fears onto her. As black people, we know what we’re facing. When you’ve seen the devil up close…

TV IS A CONSTANT PRESENCE IN MY HOME, AS IS THE CASE with most Americans. According to Nielsen research, U.S. adults now spend almost six hours per day watching TV. Honestly, I spend more time with my television than I do with friends and family. Sitting on my couch with popcorn and gummy bears observing the lives of others unfolding in front of me is one of my most intimate interactions. We welcome people like us, and unlike us, into our homes. They show us what it means to be human, to love, to struggle and to dream. Television commands our attention. Sure, it’s entertainment, fun and flashy, fast-moving—but it’s also a highly effective communication tool. TV shows us who we are, where we stand as a society and how…

You introduced intersectionality more than 30 years ago. How do you explain what it means today? These days, I start with what it’s not, because there has been distortion. It’s not identity politics on steroids. It is not a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs. It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts. How do women experience inequality differently than men? Where do we see that in our daily…

How do you see the state of equality today fitting into the history of equality? One of the most dramatic shifts to the structure of the African-American community has been the doubling of the black middle class and the quadrupling of the black upper middle class since 1970. When we look at the child-poverty rate, we would have expected that would go down dramatically too. But it didn’t. Usually when we’re talking about equality, we’re talking about the black community vs. the white community. But I’m very concerned about the inequality within the African-American community. How did this situation come about? People like me who entered Yale around 1969 are solid members of the American upper middle class, and it’s because of affirmative action. My colleague Lani Guinier once said…

SINCE A 2006 RULING BY ITS CONSTITUtional Court, majority-Catholic Colombia has allowed abortion in three cases: rape or incest, fatal fetal abnormality, and danger to the physical or mental health of the mother. Antiabortion campaigner Natalia Bernal Cano may be about to change that—but perhaps not in the way she hoped. Last year, she filed two legal actions demanding an end to the three exceptions. But on Feb. 19 a judge examining the case proposed that the court instead use its ruling to legalize all abortions in the first 16 weeks of pregnancy. A decision is expected by early March. CONTROVERSIAL CASE Opponents of abortion say Colombian authorities have become too permissive since 2006. Many point to the case of a woman in the city of Popayán, who had a…

HANGING AROUND In 2011, a burglar in China’s Liaoning province tried to climb through a fifth-floor window into an apartment, but got stuck dangling above the street. Firefighters rescued him before handing him over to police. CAR CALAMITY A suspected car thief in Pretoria, South Africa, was caught when an auto-lock system trapped him inside the car he was trying to rob in 2014, reportedly imprisoning him for over an hour and a half before the owner returned. IDENTITY ISSUE In March 2019, police accused a Montana man of breaking into a bike shop and stealing some sunglasses and a bicycle. He left his wallet and state-issued ID behind, making it easy to track him down.…

HISTORY CAME FAST AT JACINDA ARdern. Just a few years ago, in 2017, having been a local Member of Parliament for a matter of months, she became a Hail Mary candidate for Prime Minister, a millennial woman thrown into an election at the last minute to resurrect the fortunes of her slumping party in a Pacific Island nation of 4.8 million people. With a mere seven weeks left in the campaign, she put together enough votes and allies to form a government. She officially became her country’s leader around the same time she learned she was pregnant with her first child. In the past year, she has been confronted with a mass shooting committed by a far-right extremist, a suddenly active and deadly volcano and, most recently, a global virus…

Reforming criminal justice has growing bipartisan support. President Trump signed a law in 2018 that, among other things, offers exceptions to mandatory minimums and reduces crack sentences. What do you make of it? I don’t think most people understand the nature of this problem. First of all, the First Step Act impacts less than 1% of the people who are incarcerated in this country. It applies only to federal prisons. It’s not even a scratch. So what do people need to understand? Since President Richard Nixon, with his “tough on crime” rhetoric and “war on drugs,” we have used a criminal-justice approach when we should have used a public-health approach. We’ve created a whole matrix for imprisoning, arresting, condemning and marginalizing millions of people in this country. We are the…

WHEN MEMPHIS SANITATION WORKERS WENT ON STRIKE IN 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. knew they had a lesson to teach America. “You are reminding the nation,” he told attendees at a March 1968 rally there, “that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages … working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.” Economic justice was not new to his agenda. Today, many people identify King with his soaring “I Have a Dream” rhetoric at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. But what was his dream? The March on Washington sought equality before the law, but also an economic bill of rights for poor white, black and brown workers. He had constantly linked civil rights and labor and poor…

THOSE FIVE FAMOUS WORDS FROM THE DECLARATION OF Independence sound simple enough: all men are created equal. For nearly 250 years, the U.S. has leaned on that founding proposition. In theory, its meaning is clear. In practice, battles have raged—sometimes literally—over what it means, not just for American government but for American life in general. The false simplicity of the “self-evident” truth has led to divergent attitudes toward that fundamental proposition. Today, equality has become a cliché, drained of fire and revolutionary fervor. Any sort of perceived inequality—income, racial and ethnic differences, gender distinctions—will raise an accusation of injustice from some. But another view has it that the equality of the declaration is best expressed as equality of opportunity, a gradually expanding ideal that has come to erase distinctions that…

ECONOMIC DISPARITIES BETWEEN RACIAL GROUPS HAVE persisted for centuries in America. To understand the drivers of these disparities, we analyzed new data on 20 million children to examine how economic outcomes change across generations: not just where people are today, but where their children will likely end up. We find that race matters—even among families in the same socioeconomic class. For example, black children born to low-income parents have just a 2.5% chance of rising to the top fifth of the household-income distribution as adults. White children born into families with the same income are four times more likely to reach that threshold. Perhaps most surprising, the data reveal that growing up in a high-income family provides no insulation from these disparities. Black children have very high rates of downward…

“NO UNION IS MORE PROFOUND THAN MARRIAGE, FOR IT embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family,” the pastor said at our wedding ceremony, borrowing from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that made same-sex marriage equality the law of the land. I realize now that I didn’t understand the gravity of those words. Everything I did that day was a leap of faith, but when you’re in a church, all you need is faith, isn’t it? I’d left the ceremony up to David, my now husband, and busied myself with the reception, asking one of the singers to perform a medley of three Whitney Houston songs. Originally, I’d suggested that she perform the Bodyguard soundtrack followed by The Preacher’s Wife…

JACKSON POLLOCK’S BEST-KNOWN influences are greats of European modernism like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. But often overlooked is the artist’s time at New York City’s Experimental Workshop, founded in 1936 by David Alfaro Siqueiros, who along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco led the postrevolution Mexican muralism movement. As an impressionable young painter there, Pollock was exposed to the techniques that would shape his signature “drip paintings” more than a decade later. A new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Vida Americana,” aims to rectify such oversights. The show shines a light on the Mexican artists whose politically charged, populist work shaped some of the most significant American artists of the 20th century, from Pollock to Philip Guston. The exhibit places Mexican works next to those…

Virginia’s ban on assault weapons fails Governor Ralph Northam’s push for a bill that would ban the sale or transfer of assault weapons was blocked after four Democratic lawmakers sided with Republicans to reject the proposal on Feb. 17. They voted to delay the bill for a year and ask the state crime commission to study the issue. Attorney General Barr under fire More than 2,000 ex–Justice Department officials signed a Feb. 16 open letter calling on Attorney General William Barr to resign after he moved to reduce the sentence recommended for President Trump’s confidant Roger Stone. Trump had attacked prosecutors’ initial recommendation of up to nine years in prison. Leak exposes China’s Uighur camps A 137-page document was leaked detailing the Communist Party’s crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslim…

The Rev. William J. Barber II SPEAKING UP FOR THE POOR FOR 27 YEARS, THE REV. WILLIAM J. BARBER II HAS been the pastor at a church in the small city of Goldsboro, N.C. But on a recent afternoon, he could be found at a hotel in Raleigh, about an hour away from home. His work as an activist takes him to the state capital often enough that he’s well known there. Not long after, he’d move on to an event in Charleston, S.C., and then to Iowa, where he’d lead a march demanding a presidential debate on poverty. Barber is ever in motion, and he’s still picking up momentum. He’s hardly stopped since he attracted national attention as the leader of the Moral Mondays protests held at the North…

THE STAY LODGE HOTEL ROOM IN CHARLOTTE, N.C., where Shanna Lee lives with her 3-year-old daughter, Lavi, isn’t much to look at. There’s a queen-size bed pushed up against the wall, a mini-fridge in the corner and a toddler’s pink kitchen play set purchased for $5. The most valuable item in the room sits atop a counter in a plastic sleeve: an unused federal Housing Choice Voucher. In theory, that little piece of paper would contribute around $512 for a $1,012 two-bedroom for Lee and her daughter, covering the difference between 30% of her income and a unit’s market rate. But Lee, 34, can’t find a new landlord willing to accept it. The last two places that took her voucher failed routine inspections, which meant the local housing agency could…