Índex per January 27, 2020 a TIME Magazine

ANNOUNCED A royal restructuring The Queen greenlights Megxit IN BRITAIN, THE ROYAL FAMILY IS NICKNAMED “THE FIRM,” AND on Jan. 13 its chief executive announced a “period of transition” ahead of a pending demerger. A week after Prince Harry and his wife Meghan shocked the public and royalty alike by announcing their intent to seek a “progressive new role” largely outside the family business, Queen Elizabeth II acted to stem potential “Megxit” damage: she convened a summit with her eldest son and his offspring to discuss how the Duke and Duchess of Sussex might live independently of the institution she has presided over for more than six decades. Beyond the logistical difficulties, Harry and Meghan’s decision presents an existential problem for the royals. The popular Sussexes invested the crown…

The man’s scraggly hair and white bushy beard hung from a wrinkled face as he stood with a shopping cart filled with clothes, shoes and empty cans. When Americans spot such a homeless person, the impulse is often to hurry past. That’s impossible when you suddenly realize that the homeless person is your old friend and neighbor. “It’s good to see you,” Mike Stepp greeted us warmly. Mike and his brother, Bobby, were Nick’s closest neighbors growing up, and they used to walk together to and from their school bus each day in rural Yamhill, Ore. Their family had purchased a home and seemed to be living the American Dream. That was true across America: until the 1970s, the working class made enormous gains. Yet Mike and Bobby both dropped…

BEYOND ITS EFFECTS ON THE BODY, MEDICAL CARE CAN be a balm for the mind. Extensive treatment can feel like a promise that doctors have done everything possible. But that perceived security can come at a high price. As health costs soar, patients are emptying their pockets for care that may not make them healthier, research suggests. Last year, a 5,000-person trial showed that for patients with chronic but stable heart disease, surgical procedures such as stenting and bypass did not reduce the risk of heart attack or death more than lifestyle interventions and medication. Even patients with extensive damage did not, on average, experience fewer heart problems after surgery than those who simply took meds, ate well, exercised and didn’t smoke. The findings upended assumptions about cardiac care,…

‘It doesn’t really matter.’DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President, in a Jan. 13 tweet on whether Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani was plotting “imminent” attacks, as the Trump Administration claimed after he was killed on Jan. 3 by an American drone strike ‘I hope the Beijing authorities understand that democratic Taiwan, and our democratically elected government, will not concede to threats and intimidation.’TSAI ING-WEN, President of Taiwan, after winning a landslide re-election victory on Jan. 11 ‘I THOUGHT A WOMAN COULD WIN; HE DISAGREED.’ELIZABETH WARREN, Massachusetts Senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, in a statement released on Jan. 13 describing a private December 2018 meeting she had with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders; he denied making the remark ‘This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.’A BOEING COMPANY…

IF HE IS IN BED BY 9 P.M., STEVE INSKEEP CAN GET six hours of sleep before the alarm. He’s due at NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters at 4 a.m. for the live broadcast of Morning Edition that starts an hour later. It means the most intense part of his workday is over when a lot of people are just heading to the office around 7:30, and he passes the rest of the morning preparing for the next day’s broadcast. “But the afternoons are sometimes mine,” Inskeep says, over a clamshell of scrambled eggs and bacon in the NPR cafeteria. “Sometimes they’re not. Someone will say, ‘The Senator will talk to you at 4 p.m.’ And so I’m just going to have a long day, and it’s fine. But other…

2020 WILL PROVE a tipping point for the world. Developed-world countries are toxically polarized. Climate change matters as never before. China and the U.S. are breaking the 21st century economy in two. 1 Rigged!: Who governs the U.S.? November elections will produce a result many will see as illegitimate. If Donald Trump wins amid credible charges of irregularities, the result will be contested. If he loses, particularly if the vote is close, same. The loser is unlikely to accept a court-decided outcome as legitimate. 2 The great decoupling The decoupling of the U.S.-Chinese tech sector is already disrupting bilateral flows of tech, talent and investment. In 2020, it will move beyond strategic tech sectors like semiconductors and 5G into broader economic activity, casting a deep geopolitical chill over global…

THE FIRST TIME I SAW THE STATUE OF LIBERTY WAS 25 years ago, from a noisy ferry that brought me and hundreds of other eager tourists across New York Harbor. Back then I was a foreign student, in Manhattan for three days to attend an academic conference on linguistics. I had only one afternoon to devote to sightseeing, and faced with the choice of which landmark to visit, I settled immediately on Ellis Island. The site loomed large in my imagination, likely because of its romantic portrayal in the American movies I had grown up watching. I ambled through the stately inspection room, where original chandeliers cast their pale light, sat for a few minutes on the wooden benches, then went inside the exhibit rooms, filled with artifacts documenting…

A PECULIAR THEME PARK IN THE HAGUE CELEBRATES THE HISTORY OF the Netherlands through a series of miniature models. The Madurodam features little canals, old-fashioned windmills, tiny tulips and, amid it all, an homage to Royal Dutch Shell, the oil giant that is the biggest company in the country and, by revenue, the second largest publicly traded oil-and-gas company in the world. There’s a Shell drilling platform, a Shell gas station and a Shell natural-gas field, complete with a drilling rig. The display is at once odd—energy infrastructure in a children’s theme park—and entirely fitting: Shell has been, for decades, one of the most powerful players both in Dutch politics and on the global economic stage. But that could soon change. As concerns grow over the existential challenges posed by…

IN THE WEEKS BEFORE THE RELEASE OF GRETA GERWIG’S luminous and superbly crafted Little Women, film pundits on social media wondered aloud about its chances: Did the world need another adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 novel? Would men see the title and think “girl germs”? And when the Golden Globe nominations were announced, in early December, neither Gerwig nor the film, specifically, got one. Good movies are overlooked by awards bodies all the time, but accolades still serve as a kind of advertising to the public. Plenty of people, it seemed, had doubts about Little Women. But when the movie opened on Christmas Day, it made a more-than-respectable $16.8 million its first weekend, holding its own against a new Star Wars picture and a Jumanji sequel. Many of those…

Volcanic ash coats the landscape and livestock near Laurel, Batangas province, Philippines, on Jan. 13, a day after the Taal Volcano, a popular tourist attraction south of Manila, began to spew ash, steam and lava. The eruption forced thousands to evacuate their homes and shut down an international airport, offices and schools as clouds of ash blew into the capital region. The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology set the alert level at 4, warning that a worse eruption might come in “hours to days.” ▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

For 150 years, 98.6°F (37°C) has been considered “normal” human body temperature. But recently, Stanford University researchers analyzed some 677,000 temperature readings collected from nearly 190,000 people, from 1862 to 2017, and found that they fell by 0.054°F and 0.052°F per decade for men and women, respectively, in those years. Changes in average height and weight could explain some of the decline, says Julie Parsonnet, a Stanford professor and lead author of the study. And today, she adds, “we have better nutrition, medical care and public health.” But perhaps most important, antibiotics and vaccines can control many of the inflammatory conditions that can drive up body temperature. Plus, she says, if we do get sick, “we conquered general inflammation with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and statins,” which frees the body…

AUSTRALIA’S FIRES THIS SUMMER—UNPRECEDENTED IN the scale of their destruction—are the ferocious but inevitable reality of global warming. A hotter, drier climate means more and longer droughts and more and fiercer fires. So if Australia is on the front line of the climate crisis, why are we not also a world leader in climate action? In most countries, asking people whether they believe in the science of climate change is like asking them whether they believe in gravity. It is a simple matter of physics. The more greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, the hotter our climate will become. But in Australia, as in the U.S., this issue has been hijacked by a toxic, climate-denying alliance of right-wing politics and media (much of it owned by Rupert Murdoch), as…

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, I WAKE UP FEELING warm. I open the window, pull my hair back into a ponytail and drink some water. Then I glance at my phone, delete a few things and see some spam. I hit unsubscribe and go back to bed. Then I lie there thinking, What if by opening that spam email I got myself hacked? What if I just sent everyone in my contact list a Burger King ad at 2 in the morning? Now wide awake, I move on to other concerns: my parents’ health, my stepson’s college tuition, pending deadlines. Hours roll by. I tackle real-life math problems: how many weeks I have before getting my next freelance check, how many years until my husband and I pay off…

SQUEALS AND LAUGHTER RING OUT ACROSS THE SET OF SEX EDUCATION. It’s Gillian Anderson’s last day of filming for Season 2, and Ncuti Gatwa—who plays the show’s ebullient teen Eric Effiong—has just discovered Anderson has hired an ice cream truck as a parting gift. A blackboard next to the treats, decorated with chalk drawings of genitalia, reads: TO THE CAST + CREW FROM GILLIAN ON HER LAST FILMING DAY. THANK YOU A MILLION ZILLION PENISES AND YONIS!!!! It’s exactly what you might expect on the set of Sex Education, the heartfelt British teen sex comedy that earned acclaim last year for its mix of raunchy humor and vulnerability. In the first month after its debut, Netflix said 40 million accounts were on track to stream the first season, which introduced…