Índex per July 5, 2021 a TIME Magazine

ALL FOR LOVE In 2017, Japan’s Princess Mako announced her engagement to her college boyfriend Kei Komuro, a commoner. While the couple has not yet wed, Japanese law dictates that Mako must leave the imperial family once she is married. LOST TITLE Norway’s Princess Martha Louise gave up her Royal Highness status in 2002 to work on her career—but continued using her princess title in commercial contexts. After backlash in 2019, she said she would stop. MEGXIT Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle gave up their royal patronages when fully stepping back from official royal duties in 2021, citing racism and hostility Markle experienced from the press and the palace itself.…

For years, critics of the college-sports business model—which tends to enrich schools and administrators but not the actual players—have relished the potential of a Supreme Court ruling against the NCAA. The June 21 unanimous court opinion, which allows schools to provide uncapped education benefits to college athletes, offers real change in college sports. But for the good stuff, go to Kavanaugh. As in, the concurring opinion of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh took a sharp turn from the measured approach in criticizing NCAA arguments offered by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who authored the principal opinion of the case (National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston). It shouldn’t be entirely surprising. During oral arguments in NCAA v. Alston, which questioned whether the NCAA was permitted to cap education-related benefits to college athletes—a…

I’M AT THE STAGE OF PANDEMIC LIFE WHEN I AM STILL counting the hugs. The first time I invited a good friend not just over to but into my house, postvaccination, sans masks, I couldn’t even wait until she walked up to my door—I ran outside to greet her, and we tackle-hugged each other in the driveway. We both held on tight, the otherworldly buzz of a thousand cicadas in our ears, as we took turns exclaiming how good it was to see each other. We hadn’t hung out in person since January 2020, and of course I was looking forward to talking, sharing a meal, catching up on all her news—but somehow I’d forgotten that before any of that happened, I would also get to hug her. It…

‘THE ONLY OPERATORS ARE THE ONES IN THE CEILING,’ SAYS CHRIS BELFI, wrapped up in a Tyvek bunny suit, tinted yellow under the photo-safe lights. The robots rush by on overhead tracks, blinking and whirring. Every few seconds, one pauses above a giant machine. Out of its laundry-basket-size belly, a plastic box drops on thin wires, like Tom Cruise in a catsuit. It holds precious cargo: up to 25 shiny silicon wafers, each the size of a 12-in. pizza. The process of transforming them into tiny computer brains—call them microchips, semiconductors or just chips—takes nearly three months. “I use an analogy like baking a cake,” says Belfi, an automation engineer at chipmaker GlobalFoundries. “The only difference is our cake is about 66 layers.” This $15 billion complex tucked away behind trees…

CODY HOWARD IS STANDING at a makeshift pulpit under an overpass preaching about the COVID-19 vaccine. The pastor of a congregation he calls Church Under the Bridge, which serves the homeless of Texarkana, Texas, Howard delivers a crucial message: he got the shot. He admits that science and the authorities aren’t yet 100% sure about “the long-term effects of this thing,” and emphasizes that every person can make up their own mind. But he says his own decision to get vaccinated was a response to a question posed by a core tenet of Christianity: “Will it help my neighbor?” Plenty of the three dozen or so attendees on this rainy June morning are skeptical. “When [COVID-19] first started spreading, they said it’s like a high-powered flu or pneumonia,” says Tony…

DIED Milkha Singh India’s “Flying Sikh” I PLAYED MILKHA SINGH—THE INDIAN SPORTING LEGEND WHO died on June 18 of COVID-19 complications at age 91—in the 2013 biopic Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. The first time we met was at a running track in Mumbai where I was training for the film. He arrived dressed in a tracksuit and told me, “Let’s not stand here and talk. Let’s jog.” There was an electric energy; once young athletes on the field realized he was in their presence, they all rushed to touch his feet as a sign of respect. Singh—or the “Flying Sikh,” as he was widely known and beloved—became the first Indian athlete to win a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 1958. He represented India in track and field in…

With Celebrity Cruises preparing for its first departure from a U.S. port in 15 months, on June 26 from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., CEO Lisa Lutoff-Perlo acknowledges that cruising is not first on everybody’s list of reopening activities. She tells TIME, “I’ve been in this business for 36 years, and long before COVID, people said, ‘Oh, I don’t think cruising is for me,’ so I’m not surprised when people say that cruising might not be at the top of their list of vacation choices.” Still, she claims her company’s ships are “probably the safest place you can be on the planet right now. If I’m traveling, or if I’m going out to dinner and I’m sitting in a crowded restaurant with no social distancing and no requirements for vaccinations and I…

WHEN TERRANCE FRANKLIN WAS SHOT TO death in a Minneapolis basement eight years ago, the only witnesses were the five police officers assembled to capture him. Two of them were bleeding—wounded by rounds from a police submachine gun the department declared the young Black man had managed to get control of in a brief struggle, a contest it said ended with Franklin’s death in a fusillade of immediate return fire. The officer who gave the most detailed account said the fatal encounter lasted “seconds.” Franklin’s death was briefly a major story in the Twin Cities but nowhere else, not least because it was a story told by the police alone. On May 10, 2013, there was no body-camera footage that his skeptical family could demand be released, and no demands…

“Hi, sweetie,” Dr. Sherri Young says to the 13-year-old rolling up her sleeve and giggling nervously, who also happens to be her daughter. “Are you ready?” Young uncaps a syringe and pokes it into her daughter’s waiting arm. It’s May 14, only a few days after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration greenlighted the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for 12-to-15-year-olds, and Young is trying to set an example. As health officer and executive director of West Virginia’s Kanawha-Charleston Health Department (KCHD), she wants other families to bring their children to community vaccine clinics like this one, a drive-through set up in a church parking lot a few miles outside downtown Charleston. Throughout the day, dozens of cars—ranging from a battle-tested garbage truck to a brand-new Mercedes sedan—roll in to the drive-through…

WHEN YOU’VE WON SEVEN NATIONAL championships, 19 world titles, five Olympic medals (four of them gold), and your leotards are already decorated with a rhinestone goat (a nod to Greatest of All Time status), is there anything left to prove? For most people, the answer is no. But Simone Biles is not like most people, or even most Olympians. The 4 ft. 8 in. 24-year-old from Spring, Texas, is not only the most dominant gymnast of her time—she is likely the greatest in history. With an unmatched blend of skill, power and daring—and more than a splash of charisma—Biles has won every all-around national, world and Olympic competition she has entered since 2013. Her record haul of 25 World Championship medals is five more than that of her closest rival—who…

BECAUSE HUMANKIND WILL NEVER STOP INVENTING NEW forms for old stories, it was only a matter of time before we got a movie adapted from a Twitter thread. In Zola, directed and co-written by Janicza Bravo, a young waitstaffer at a Hooters-style restaurant makes a new friend who cajoles her into taking a weekend road trip to Florida. The goal is to make some quick money dancing at strip clubs, which seems forthright enough. But the ensuing adventure involves guns, sex work, a menacing pimp and a lovelorn boyfriend’s suicide attempt. And all of it really happened—or sort of happened—as recorded by a young woman named A’Ziah “Zola” King in a series of 148 tweets posted in October 2015. Each installment was a nail-biter rendered in 140 characters or less.…

IT WAS A PICTURE NOBODY IN ISRAEL COULD have imagined: the Arab leader of the political party of the Islamic Movement, Mansour Abbas, sitting alongside Naftali Bennett, the envoy of Jewish ultranationalism. But there they were with the secular centrist Yair Lapid on June 2, pens in hand, ready to sign documents bringing a devout Muslim into coalition with two Jewish Zionist leaders. “It was a historic moment,” Abbas tells TIME on June 9 from his party office in Kafr Qana. “Some people in the room teared up.” Over the past two years, Israelis had gone to the polls four times to elect a government to run the country, and each time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had failed to muster support to form a stable coalition. The people on…

FOLLOWING A THREE-month pandemic delay, French voters went to the polls on June 20 for the first round of local elections, which will fill the seats of assemblies in France’s 13 regions and 96 departments. There will be a second round of voting on June 27, but the electorate has already sent some clear messages. President Emmanuel Macron’s party, La République en Marche (LREM), has little local support. Main opposition leader Marine Le Pen and her right-wing National Rally party are not expanding their base. And a record number of eligible French voters can’t be bothered to vote. Four years ago, the French electorate cast a ballot for change. In presidential voting, the traditional center-right finished in third place behind Le Pen and her far-right party. The traditional center-left…

FOR MANY AMERICANS, IT’S ALL TOO EASY TO ASSUME THAT the fight for LGBTQ rights has been won. After all, same-sex couples have enjoyed the same right to marriage as their straight neighbors since 2015; the Supreme Court ruled last year that a person’s sexuality alone is not a justifiable reason for them to lose their job. Support for same-sex relationships is at a record high, while major corporations for the past month have been bathing consumers in rainbow-hued marketing and affirmations amid Pride celebrations. In Washington, D.C., more LGBTQ lawmakers than ever before are in power at the Capitol—and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is the first openly gay member of a presidential Cabinet. But Americans would be better served by benching gestures of performative allyship and recognizing just…

For Itzel Schnaas, a 31-year-old professional ballet dancer in Mexico City, going public was her insurance policy. If the plan worked, she believed a world-famous public intellectual, with ties to Mexico’s government and major media conglomerates, would be exposed as a sex offender, and she could be protected from him and his powerful friends. They couldn’t go after her if the world was watching, especially if other women came forward too. On Feb. 15, she posted a nearly seven-minute YouTube video excoriating the man: “It turns out that I had barely been born when you started violating women and sowing fear to obtain their silence, you miserable a--hole,” she says in Spanish. “You ought to be scared of us. Because I am certain that many other women are going to…

MOON JAE-IN CAN STILL HEAR THE roar today. South Korea’s President had been seated next to Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium on Sept. 19, 2018, for the close of the Mass Games when North Korea’s leader beckoned him up to the dais. Beneath a vast collage calling for Korea to “unite the strength of the entire people,” Moon urged the 150,000-strong crowd to “hasten a future of common prosperity and reunification,” while revelers brandished white flags with powder blue outlines of a unified Korean Peninsula. For Moon, it was a transformative experience. The North Koreans’ “eyes and attitudes” showed that they “strongly aspire for peace,” he tells TIME. “I could see for myself that North Korea has completely changed … and is doing everything possible to develop.”…