Tabla de contenidos para July 19, 2021 en TIME Magazine

Portland, Ore., food-cart co-owners Eric and Nicole Gitenstein didn’t have much choice about whether to open for business during the unprecedented recent heat waves plaguing the Pacific Northwest. Excess heat from their refrigerators and burners often raises temperatures inside their cart 10 to 15 degrees higher than those outside. With area temperatures peaking at 116°F on June 28, working in such conditions could well have put their lives in danger. “It’s better to lose a weekend than to lose your life, or be hospitalized for heat exhaustion,” Eric Gitenstein says. His fears were warranted: the heat wave is believed to have been responsible for more than 100 deaths in Oregon alone as of July 7, officials say, while more than 1,100 people across Oregon and Washington State were hospitalized…

“I’M NOT JUST A FLIP-FLOPPER, I’M A FLIP-flop-flipper on Trump,” J.D. Vance says with a laugh, slicing into a half-stack of breakfast pancakes. The Hillbilly Elegy author and newly minted Republican Senate candidate is sitting at the counter of a Cincinnati diner on July 2, explaining why he thinks he can win. The prior evening, Vance had launched his 2022 bid at a steel-tube factory in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, with paeans to the American Dream and blasts of populist rhetoric. “The elites plunder this country and then blame us for it in the process,” he told a crowd of several hundred. Running for office was a predictable next step for Vance, whose hit 2016 memoir traced his rise from troubled Appalachian roots to the Marines and Yale…

When the British navy was the most powerful military force in the world, towering straight trees suitable for the masts of warships were a prized strategic resource from its colonies, the rare earth resources of their day. Nearly 250 years later, the U.S. is still home to some of the most valuable timber stands in the world, and lumber has been one of the most in-demand commodities this summer, as the strongest housing market in more than a decade has caused its value to soar, peaking in May. Although lumber prices have fallen recently, experts expect prices to remain high relative to historical levels. Housing “demand is just off the charts now,” says Devin Stockfish, CEO of timber company Weyerhaeuser. “We have massively underbuilt housing in the U.S. The whole…

BLACK WIDOW SAUNTERED INTO MAINSTREAM consciousness in 2010’s Iron Man 2. Not walked—sauntered. Natasha Romanoff, the Russian agent turned U.S. spy played by Scarlett Johansson, first meets Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) when he’s working out in a boxing ring with his employee, played by Jon Favreau, the film’s director. Favreau’s Happy Hogan condescendingly offers to teach Natasha how to box, so she slips off her high heels, slinks into the ring and immediately kicks the man’s butt. That’s the joke: Surprise! This unbelievably fit woman can fight. But it’s the moment after Natasha handily beats Happy that truly rankled fans. Stark turns to his assistant turned girlfriend Pepper Potts, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. “Who is she?” Tony asks. To which Pepper replies, “Potentially a very expensive…

‘Don’t judge me, because I am human …I just happen to run a little faster.’SHA’CARRI RICHARDSON, American sprinter, speaking to the Today show on July 2 about her suspension from the U.S. Olympic team after testing positive for THC ‘We will fully support our producers and their excellence. Long live French champagne!’FRANCK RIESTER, French trade minister, in a July 5 tweet addressing a new Russian law banning foreign producers of sparkling wine from using the term champagne, even those in the French region from which the name originates ‘I DO NOT WANT TO WIN SOMEONE ELSE’S GAME.’NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist who created the 1619 Project, announcing on July 6 that she was declining a tenured position at the University of North Carolina, offered after an outcry…

BRONZED MEDALS Viral footage of an October 2020 police academy graduation ceremony in Cairo showed hundreds of buff and shirtless police recruits posing and flexing on a procession of cars, boats and armored trucks. SPLITTING HAIRS The U.S. Army announced on May 6 that female soldiers can now wear ponytails and braids while in uniform. Many soldiers had complained the previously required bun made it difficult to wear helmets. WEDGE ISSUES Photos of a North Korean border-patrol unit received much attention in 2013 for appearing to show female soldiers marching in 4-in. platform heels along the banks of the Yalu River in the town of Sinuiju.…

At the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, unmarked graves were designated with flags and solar lamps ahead of a vigil held by the Cowessess First Nation on June 27. As many as 751 sets of human remains were found on the grounds of the residential school, one of 139 across Canada that for more than a century, Indigenous youth were forced to attend as part of “assimilation” programs. The remains of nearly 400 more children have been found at two other former residential schools in British Columbia in recent months. A 2015 report, funded by the Canadian government as part of a settlement with thousands of former students and their descendants, acknowledged at least 4,000 deaths at the schools, which it termed “cultural genocide.”…

IN ANY COUNTRY, the central political question is, What is the role of the law? Does it exist to protect every individual from abuses of power? Or does it exist mainly to protect the powerful? A landmark court decision gives many South Africans reassurance that their governing institutions work. But it’s not the end of the story. On June 29, South Africa’s Constitutional Court ruled that former President Jacob Zuma must serve 15 months in prison for failing this year to appear before a commission investigating corruption during his presidency (2009–2018). Zuma not only rejected the commission’s authority and refused to answer charges or mount a defense, but he also wrote a 21-page letter to the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court that charged that the corruption commission was…

IT’S NEARLY NOON WHEN PINKY MACWAN WAKES up and rubs her eyes, shifting uncomfortably. She’s in her second trimester of pregnancy with twins and finds herself constantly sluggish. Still in her floral nightgown, she walks down the fluorescent-lit hallway and splashes cold water on her face in the bathroom she shares with 46 other women, all surrogates at various stages of pregnancy. It’s late February, and Macwan has spent the past four months living in the basement of the Akanksha Hospital in bustling Anand, a town in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Home to the headquarters of the major dairy cooperative Amul, Anand has long been known as the milk capital of India. But booming business at Akanksha has also garnered the town another label: India’s baby factory. A…

THE OLYMPICS AND COVID-19 WERE never going to be compatible. The cardinal rule when it comes to controlling an infectious disease is to limit the contact people have with one another. Yet the very essence of the two weeks of competition, which begin on July 23 in Tokyo, is to invite the world to meet, greet and engage in friendly—and often socially not so distant—contests. An estimated 70,000 athletes, coaches, staff, officials and media will be descending on Tokyo from July to August for the Olympic and Paralympic Games—at a time when infections in the city are beginning to creep up again, after spiking in April and May and declining in early June. New cases of COVID-19 emerging from any of the Olympic visitors could not only disrupt the Games…

Yuto Horigome SKATEBOARDING, JAPAN Yuto Horigome wrote in his elementary-school yearbook that his dream was “to become the best skateboarder in the world.” The Tokyo native picked up skateboarding at the age of 6 by accompanying his father to skate parks. Now 22 and ranked second in the world for men’s street skating, he could achieve that goal in spectacular fashion when the sport makes its Olympic debut in his home country. To get to this point, Horigome had to leave home. He began traveling to the U.S., the hub of competitive skating, for competitions as a teenager in 2014. Just four years later, Horigome became the first Japanese skater to claim a world title, at the Street League Skateboarding tour in London. After graduating high school, Horigome moved…

DIED Donald Rumsfeld Led U.S. troops into the (known) unknown HAD HE ONLY A SINGLE STINT AS U.S. Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld would likely be remembered as a wunderkind who, under President Gerald Ford in the 1970s, became the youngest man ever to run the Pentagon. But Rumsfeld, who died on June 30 at 88, is instead best known for his second go-round, as President George W. Bush’s defense chief, and for his role as the architect of the nation’s problem-plagued war on terrorism. Finding someone in Washington who’s indifferent about Rumsfeld’s legacy is a near impossibility. To a few, he’s a crafty bureaucratic knife fighter who spent four decades rising to the highest offices in government. To everyone else, he’s an acerbic, argumentative leader who set the U.S. in…

Burkina Faso is gripped by a war we seldom hear about, even though Western nations had a hand in its creation. Until the NATO bombing campaign in Libya in 2011, the West African nation had enjoyed decades of peace and, though it faced challenges including endemic poverty, was considered a beacon of stability in the Sahel region. After the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s government, militants and weapons flooded southwest across the Sahara and into Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. By 2015, those guns had been turned by extremist groups upon villagers, cattle herders and children in rural Burkina Faso. More than 1.2 million Burkinabe people have fled their homes because of the intensifying violence. Camps for refugees from neighboring Mali have also been brutally attacked. In the days before I…

YOU GET BETTER AT WHATEVER YOU PRACTICE. That’s why I have gotten serious about giving myself the gifts that only I can give. Walking outdoors. Running to clear my head. Maintaining so much clarity about my life’s work that others’ agendas don’t become mine. Being generous with no. Saying yes only when I actually want to do something. The value of these gifts cannot be easily measured. They are priceless. So I usually don’t think of self-care in material terms. Anyone else can give me tea or perfume, a handbag or a piece of jewelry. They can’t take a walk for me. And yet in April, I picked up a custom ring I had purchased for myself. It wasn’t entirely my idea: in January 2020, I had lunch with…

ONE DAY IN SPRING 2019, MORE THAN 2,880 runners competed in a 10-km race in Geneva. It was a regular event on the athletic calendar, but this time with a striking result. The winner was an orphaned refugee from South Sudan, exiled in Kenya, who had laced up his first pair of running shoes only a few years earlier. Atop the podium, clutching a bouquet of flowers and a trophy, Dominic Lokinyomo Lobalu grinned with delight. “I am very happy to have won today,” he said. “I am going back to even more intense training when I return to Kenya.” But Lobalu did not go back. Later that day, he would ask about the prize money he assumed he had won. His questions were directed to the managers who had…

IN AHMIR “QUESTLOVE” THOMPson’s radiant documentary Summer of Soul, an account of a star-studded concert series that took place in a Harlem park during the summer of Woodstock but received far less attention, a 50ish gentleman who attended the shows as a kid, Musa Jackson, describes the experience as if it were a dream. Only when he saw footage of the performances, stored away for some 50 years, did he realize how overwhelming this event—a showcase of great Black performers, staged for a nearly all-Black audience—had been. “You put memories away,” he says, “and sometimes you don’t even know if they’re real.” If part of a musician’s skill is knowing just where to put which notes, the other, more elusive gift is knowing how to spin a dream between performer…