Índex per January 18, 2021 a TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … TIME’S PERSON OF THE YEAR IS ALWAYS THE SOURCE OF IMPASSIONED DEBATE, and the 2020 selection of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris was no exception. Tim Ackert of Orlando applauded the “thought-provoking issue” that “covered the highs and lows of a very rough year,” and Paul Bacon of Hallandale Beach, Fla., called Biden and Harris a “great choice.” Many readers argued, however, that frontline health workers—who, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci and racial-justice organizers, were recognized as TIME’s Guardians of the Year—should have been Person of the Year. “We’re in the middle of a pandemic and you pick politicians?” wrote Michael Dendis, of Memphis, N.Y. Doctors, nurses and first responders, argued Jerry Lynn Tuders of South Pittsburg, Tenn., are “the true…

AUSTRIA In 2012, Austria’s national anthem, “Land der Berge, Land am Strome,” was made more gender-inclusive, with lyrical changes including “great sons” to “great daughters and sons,” and “brotherly choirs” to “jolly choirs.” SOUTH AFRICA Postapartheid South Africa in 1997 blended a previous national anthem and a popular hymn into a single song, which features verses in the country’s five most spoken languages: Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and English. CANADA After 18 months of debate, Canada made its English-language national anthem, “O Canada,” gender-neutral in 2018, changing the words after “true patriot love” from “in all thy sons command” to “in all of us command.”…

The health care response to the pandemic defined 2020; the economic response to its lasting damage will define 2021. A world in crisis will miss the leadership and cooperation of a well-functioning superpower. With the most powerful country as divided as the U.S. is now, the geopolitical recession is sure to deepen. America’s growing divisions are why we must start with the problem of political legitimacy there. Here are the top risks of the year ahead: 46* Joe Biden’s term opens the era of the asterisk presidency in the U.S., a time when the Oval Office occupant is seen as illegitimate by roughly one-third of the country—and by the lawmakers that election skeptics sent to Congress. Most of the risk here is domestic, with President-elect Biden the weakest executive to…

IN THE DARK DAYS AFTER 9/11, dire pronouncements about our nation’s new cultural identity rained down like the acrid particles floating over lower Manhattan. It would be the end of irony. The end of comedy. Our sense of innocence, particularly for Gen X and millennials, who largely had known lives of peace and security, was gone. Hello fear. RIP fun. Yet six months later, The Bachelor debuted on ABC. Shortly after came American Idol. Then Joe Millionaire, a preposterous real-life acid test to shame gold-digging women. (The show garnered 35 million viewers for its finale.) Cynicism didn’t end; it took steroids. Nowhere was that more manifest than in an obsession with celebrity that would come to define the decade. I was the young editor in chief of Us Weekly from…

WHETHER PERFORMING IN ROCK CONCERTS OR STARRING IN A KUNG FU MOVIE, JACK MA HAS ALWAYS RELISHED THE LIMELIGHT. But as of Jan. 6, the founder of China’s e-commerce behemoth Alibaba—and, until recently, the country’s richest man—has not been seen in public for over two months. An Alibaba spokeswoman declined to comment on his whereabouts after it was revealed that Ma, 56, had been replaced by another Alibaba executive for the finale of a TV talent contest he’d helmed, with his picture scrubbed from the gallery of judges. RAGS TO RICHES Ma is beloved by millions as a self-made tech mogul who never learned how to code and suffered repeated rejection on his way to a personal fortune worth $50 billion. As a party member who rubbed shoulders with China’s…

2020 WAS A YEAR OF EXTREME WEATHER. Hot and dry conditions drove wildfires across vast areas of Australia, California, Brazil and Siberia. A record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season landed a double blow of hugely damaging storms on Central America. Droughts pushed millions of people into hunger in Zimbabwe and Madagascar. A supercyclone unleashed grave floods on India. And 2020 may end being up the hottest year on record—despite the impact of La Niña, an ocean-atmospheric phenomenon that tends to have a cooling effect on global temperatures. While in the past it’s been difficult to say if single weather events were directly caused by climate change, scientists have proved that much of 2020’s weather would have been far less likely, or even impossible, without the warming of the earth. As we…

THE ARAB SPRING BEGAN IN TUNISIA, where 28 days of protests ended 24 years of a dictator’s rule. The next day, Jan. 15, 2011, students in Yemen called for demonstrations against the strongman there. A dictator fell in Egypt, then in Libya. A change of season appeared to be bringing democracy to an arid stretch of the planet where it had never quite blossomed. It proved a false spring. Today Egypt has a different dictator, and Yemen, Libya and Syria have wars. But read on. The passion for change—for dignity—lives on in the generation that led the way into the streets a decade ago. LARA SABRA, 22, LEBANON Even before the votes had been counted, the makeshift campaign headquarters of the Secular Club near the American University of Beirut (AUB) rang…

BEFORE THEY ENTERED THE EMERGENCY ROOM IN SAN ANTONIO IN SEPTEMBER, Randy Hinojosa turned to his wife of 26 years and assured her that they’d both get better and see each other again. “I said, ‘We came together. We leave together,’” he recalls. Five weeks later, Hinojosa had recovered from his bout of COVID-19, but Elisa Hinojosa had not. On Oct. 25, she died of the disease. Faced with a $15,000 bill for funeral expenses, Hinojosa, 52, paid it without hesitating, even though his own four-day hospital stay had set him back $5,000 and the pandemic had hurt his business as a self-employed contractor. “I knew what I had to do as her husband and as her best friend,” he says. “I said I don’t care if I have a…

What are your top priorities for the Biden Administration? On day one, an Executive Order that will demonstrate the Administration’s commitment to sexual- and reproductive-health care. That order to eliminate the global gag rule, keep medication abortion easier to access during the pandemic and begin the process of rolling back harmful policies, like the Trump birth control rules that allow employers to essentially force their personal beliefs on employees. We’re also working [toward] a budget that will eliminate the Hyde Amendment [which prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for most abortions]. Democrats did not do as well as expected in the House. How do you interpret the 2020 results? Over 7 million more Americans voted for Biden-Harris, and [their victory] was delivered by a coalition of young people,…

"WE WILL NEVER GIVE UP, WE WILL NEVER CONCEDE!” President Donald Trump told the crowd of supporters he had summoned to Washington on Jan. 6. They heard him and obeyed. Within hours, a mob of self-styled revolutionaries waving Trump flags had stormed the Capitol. Scaling scaffolding and breaking windows, they filled the marble halls. Shots were fired inside the building as lawmakers and their staffs scrambled for cover and tear gas filled the Rotunda. For the first time since the Civil War, America would not have a peaceful transfer of power. Before the riot interrupted it, Trump’s last-ditch attempt to steal the presidential election that he unambiguously lost was not going well. Vice President Mike Pence announced he would fulfill his ceremonial role of counting the states’ electoral votes, rejecting…

Argentina legalizes abortion Argentina’s Senate in Buenos Aires on Dec. 30 approved elective abortions up to the 14th week of pregnancy—a landmark move for a continent home to some of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws. The vote came after years of grassroots organizing by abortion-rights and feminist activists and was decried by anti-abortion groups. Vietnamese journalists jailed over ‘propaganda’ A court in Vietnam on Jan. 5 found three journalists guilty of spreading “anti-state propaganda,” charges Human Rights Watch describes as “bogus.” Pham Chi Dung, Nguyen Tuong Thuy and Le Huu Minh Tuan, known for work critical of the government, face jail sentences of 11 to 15 years. Russian hack in U.S. much broader than once thought Now believed to be the work of the Russian intelligence service, the…

DIED Pierre Cardin Avant-garde trendsetter FOR PIERRE CARDIN, WHO DIED IN FRANCE ON DEC. 29 AT 98, FASHION WAS A MEDIUM FOR ENVISIONING THE FUTURE. Perhaps best known for the sculptural mod clothing that helped define 1960s and ’70s style, the designer leaves a rich legacy of innovative, daring work. Cardin founded his own fashion house in Paris in 1950 after working under Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli. In the decades that followed, he established himself as a fearless trailblazer. His designs—including futuristic space-age bubble dresses, the wildly popular Nehru suit jacket and even a NASA space suit—embodied the cultural zeitgeist, and often pre-empted it. Even more revolutionary was his vision for a diversified namesake brand; Cardin licensed his name on everything from fragrances and furniture to pickle jars…

“NO!” THE DOCTOR SNAPPED. “LOOK AT ME!” I had been staring her in the eyes, as she had ordered, but when a doctor on my other side began jabbing me with a needle, I started to turn my head. “Don’t look at it,” the first doctor said. I obeyed. This was in early August in New Orleans, where I had signed up to be a participant in the clinical trial for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. It was a blind study, which meant I was not supposed to know whether I had gotten the placebo or the real vaccine. I asked the doctor if I would really been able to tell by looking at the syringe. “Probably not,” she answered, “but we want to be careful. This is very important to…