Innholdsfortegnelse for April 12, 2021 i Time Magazine International Edition

STRENGTH IN ADVERSITY YOUR COVERAGE ON “Women and the Pandemic” [March 15–22] exemplified the remarkable spirit of women from different strata of society during the worst nightmare we are all facing. It’s their undying resilience that has powered them to navigate this humanitarian crisis and reaffirms how formidable they are in terms of grit and gumption. Pritish De,WAUKESHA, WIS. FESTERING RAGE RE “ON THE HUNT FOR Hate” [March 15–22]: Far-right extremism is not uniquely American, but the U.S. is rapidly becoming its epicenter. As witnessed with the Capitol siege, the movement is characterized only by its hate, mindless violence and nihilistic anarchism. “Fake news,” unhinged conspiracies and government-sponsored disinformation over the past four years have emboldened the far right and make President Biden’s task of controlling this American disease formidable.…

REPRESENTATIVE PRAMILA JAYAPAL LOOKS solemn. She is one of the top leaders of the progressive movement in Congress, and she’s poised to finally effect change in a Democrat-controlled government after a decade of the party’s sharing power with Republicans. But right now, she is in no mood to celebrate. After the passage of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package in mid-March, Jayapal was preparing to reintroduce her Medicare for All Act when, the afternoon before her announcement, a shooter killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, near Atlanta and reignited a national conversation about racism, sexism and violence against Asian Americans. When we spoke by Zoom on March 19, Jayapal had just come from a moment of silence on the House floor for the victims. “It’s been very…

NO OTHER COUNTRY has done a better job of channeling the profit-maximizing drive of private corporations into geopolitical gains in recent years than communist China, the irony of which is lost on precisely no one. The latest drama surrounds Nike, H&M and a slew of other Western clothing brands that voiced concern over reports of widespread human-rights abuses of the Muslim ethnic minority Uighurs by the Chinese government in Xinjiang. Multinationals work hard to avoid getting pulled into geopolitics, but reports of labor camps out of Xinjiang—which produces about 20% of the world’s cotton—made it much harder for them to continue doing so. Add in the increased fervor on social media that demands more corporations take stances on hot-button political issues and suddenly Western companies had a much harder time…

THE HYMNS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAVE BEEN THE SOUNDTRACK to Joe Biden’s life. He attends Mass on Sundays and holy days, and before major events. In Oval Office meetings, Biden sometimes pulls from his pocket a string of rosary beads that belonged to his late son Beau; in quieter moments, Biden will walk his fingers down the beads while saying the holy rosary, a series of meditative prayers. The day the 2020 election was called for Biden, just before he and his family greeted a cheering crowd in Wilmington, Del., a Catholic priest was asked to call in over Zoom to pray with the President-elect and his family. They bowed their heads to the prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is…

ANDY BYFORD WAS FEELING GUILTY. It was March 2020, and he had just left his job as head of the New York City Transit Authority, after Governor Andrew Cuomo moved him off a massive revamp of the ailing subways. Stuck in his English hometown of Plymouth because of pandemic travel restrictions, he sat feeling “frustrated and impotent” as COVID-19 decimated ridership and revenues in public transit in New York and around the world. “Had I known the full horror of what was to emerge,” Byford, 55, says grimly, “I would have put my resignation on hold and stayed to see New York City transit through the crisis.” He even reached out to the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and offered to come back, he says. But Byford, one…

‘If folks don’t want to visit a doughnut shop, they don’t have to.’MIKE TATTERSFIELD, Krispy Kreme CEO, in a March 27 interview responding to criticism of the fast-food chain’s announcement that it would give one free doughnut per day to anyone showing proof of COVID-19 vaccination ‘No one can take a drop from Egypt’s water, and if it happens there will be inconceivable instability in the region.’ABDUL FATTAH AL-SISI, President of Egypt, raising concerns on March 30 that a massive dam being built by Ethiopia on the Blue Nile could impact Egypt’s water supply ‘WE ARE JUST ALMOST THERE, BUT NOT QUITE YET.’ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC director, saying she has a sense of “impending doom” over a possible fourth COVID-19 wave in the U.S. and urging Americans to continue following public-health…

Two 7-year-old migrant children, who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border without their parents, wait at a makeshift processing site in Roma, Texas, on March 27. They are among the thousands of unaccompanied minors who have presented themselves to officials at the border since January in the hope of joining relatives or loved ones in the U.S. While efforts are under way to shelter and unite the children with sponsors as quickly as possible, the rate at which they are arriving has become a logistical, ethical and political challenge for the Biden Administration. For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

As the world watched the large container ship Ever Given block the vital shipping artery of the Suez Canal, I thought back to my own trips through the canal as a U.S. Navy captain and admiral. There is a fundamental lesson to be relearned here about the criticality of a handful of so-called choke points around the world upon which global shipping depends. These are spots where traffic patterns collide and the tens of thousands of ships under way on the world’s oceans at any given moment come together in tightly managed traffic schemes. They represent critical nodes that make navigation faster and easier and allow container and cargo ships to make faster journeys. The key ones are the Strait of Malacca, the Bosporus Strait, the Strait of Bab el…

THE FIRST SIGN THAT TWYLA JOSEPH’S COLLEGE APPLICATION process was not going to go as planned came on March 13, 2020, when, a day before her scheduled SAT, she learned the test had been canceled. The May and June tests were also canceled as coronavirus cases surged. Joseph never got to take the admissions test. She barely knows her high school teachers now that she takes all her classes online at home in Islip Terrace, N.Y. She missed out on seasons of varsity cross-country and track, and lost contact with the coach who “used to give us really good life advice.” During the five months she was furloughed from her job at Panera Bread, she spent the money she’d been saving for college. And while she’s back at work now…

TWO YEARS AGO, WHEN THE college-admissions scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues crashed into headlines, it immediately became a showcase of white privilege. Images of Full House actor Lori Loughlin and Gordon Caplan, the former co-chairman of the white-shoe law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher—making the perp walk to the Boston courthouse where they and nearly 40 other parents were charged with paying an independent counselor named Rick Singer vast sums of money in order to get their children into colleges such as Yale and Georgetown—epitomized the gross inequities of the American class system: rich white people, yet again, were paying to play. It’s a theme that has played out again and again in American culture—and has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. Underlying the parents’ nonchalance, there was something more…

WHEN WEST VIRGINIA DECLARED A state of emergency to arrest the coronavirus, the social network that aids the homeless froze along with everything else. Charities that offered daily meals and warming stations shut down. Volunteers, many elderly, were too afraid to work in the soup kitchens they usually ran. There was suddenly no place to eat or go to the bathroom. “Our homeless community found themselves being told to stay entirely outdoors,” says Kate Marshall, a charity worker in Wheeling, a city in the state’s northern panhandle. “There was not one indoor place to go from March until fall of 2020.” Ordered to shelter in place, people without shelter died at an alarming rate. In a bad year here, according to social workers from three charity organizations, two to four…

PULLING FORD’S NEW ALL-ELECTRIC MUSTANG Mach-E out of a Brooklyn garage late this winter, I felt a little duped. It seemed more like I was driving a giant motorized iPad than the electrified successor to an iconic American muscle car. Just a few weeks earlier, the company’s sound designers told me about the lengths to which they had gone to design and digitally produce the perfect engine noise, experimenting with recordings of electric guitars, Formula E race-car engine sounds and the hum of high-voltage power lines. But inside the loaner car’s cabin, I didn’t hear anything at all. Then, while messing around on the vehicle’s touchscreen, I found—and immediately pressed—an all-too-tempting button to engage “unbridled mode.” Next time I hit the accelerator, the car took off, emitting the throaty, electric…

THIP ATHAKHANH SAYS HER APPROACH to facing racism used to be to “shrug it off, be silent and continue to move forward.” A chef who owns the Lao restaurant Snackboxe Bistro in Doraville, Ga., just outside Atlanta, Athakhanh typically took the name calling and condescension she would occasionally receive in stride, and avoided publicly voicing her opinion on issues related to anti-Asian hate out of fear of retaliation that could harm her business or employees’ livelihoods. But the March 16 spa shootings—in which a gunman attacked three Atlanta-area businesses, killing eight people, six of them Asian women—transformed her perspective. “It was an agonizing feeling,” Athakhanh says. “Those [victims] could have been my mother, my sister, my friend.” Following the shootings, Athakhanh took actions both personal and communal: she brought a…

FOR THE PAST YEAR, AND ESPECIALLY SINCE THE devastating Atlanta-area murders on March 16, many of my Asian American friends have been sharing deeply personal, painful stories of talking with their parents and elders, pleading with them to take care, being exhorted to be careful in turn. As an adoptee, I don’t really have Asian elders in my family—or many elders at all, since the deaths of my father, grandmother and mother. Yet I’ve found myself wondering: If my adoptive parents were alive, witnessing the spike in anti-Asian racism and violence in the U.S. and around the world—with Asian women the most common targets—would they be concerned about me? Would they understand why I cried when I told my own Korean American daughters about the spa shootings? Would I have…

IT WASN’T LONG AFTER HER COMPANY switched to a four-day workweek that Pilar Meseguer began noticing the benefits. Absenteeism fell nearly 30% at Delsol, the software firm in southern Spain where Meseguer is a deputy director, and satisfaction rates among both her co-workers and customers rose. But there were also some smaller, more personal gains. “I could go to the supermarket on Friday instead of Saturday, when it’s packed with people,” Meseguer says. “It’s a simple thing, but it makes a big difference.” She may soon have company, including at the market. Earlier this year, the Spanish government agreed to begin a small nationwide trial of a four-day workweek, promising further details in late March. The concept itself is not new; no less an authority than economist John Maynard Keynes…

BEING A WONDERFUL ACTOR MAY BE MORE OF A BLESSING than being a great actor, and Idris Elba is a wonderful actor. In Concrete Cowboy, Elba plays a resident of North Philadelphia who’s a dedicated horseman, part of a community of riders and horse lovers who have long made use of a stretch of tumbledown stables that, in an increasingly gentrifying world, now lie right in the crosshairs of developers. Elba’s character, a laconic gent named Harp, shares his untidy house with a horse, cordoned off in a makeshift living-room stall. Why is there a horse in Harp’s living space? Who cares? The presence of this horse, a creamy, speckled beast named Chuck, clues us in to certain qualities of Harp’s character that Elba unfurls for us later: this is…