Table of contents for July 20, 2020 in TIME Magazine

THE JUNE 29 MURDER of activist, singer and political icon Hachalu Hundessa has ignited violence across Addis Ababa and other Ethiopian cities. This is the latest chapter in this country’s tumultuous journey from authoritarian rule toward genuine democracy. Reports of vandalism, arson, robbery and murder have made national headlines. Some 1,200 people have been arrested. In the city of Ambo, police have shot and killed at least nine people, some of them mourners at Hundessa’s funeral. Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation, is no stranger to unrest. The country’s constitution divides Ethiopia into ethnically based territories, but many disputes over boundaries have never been resolved. Oromo, the largest of Ethiopia’s many ethnic groups, make up about one-third of the country’s 112 million people, but they say they’ve been excluded…

A FEW YEARS AGO, I BEGAN TAKING VOCAL LESSONS. LIKE many people, I was an enthusiastic, lifelong singer, at least in the privacy of my shower. But I wondered if I could actually acquire any skill in the discipline, enough that my family would stop flinching as I belted out the occasional tune around the house. As with any motor skill—what singing primarily is—it took a lot of work. But, gradually, I began staying more on pitch, expanding my range, improving my breath control. I soon felt the need to do something with this singing. As I was hardly ready for a solo recital at Carnegie Hall, I decided to join a choir. I signed up with a group called the New York Choir Project, largely on the strength of…

DONALD TRUMP HAS smashed a lot of environmental china in four years. To name a few instances: he pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement (a move that becomes official on July 6, 2021); loosened automotive-mileage and power-plant-emission standards; and sought to eliminate the protected status of the sage grouse, opening up 9 million acres to oil and gas extraction. Reasonable minds may differ on the wisdom of any one of those moves, but no one can deny the unprecedented sweep of Trump’s policies. Data from Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program and Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law show that the President has signed more than 100 administrative rules, Executive Orders and acts of deregulation, 66 of which have gone into effect. If presumptive…

CONCERNED ABOUT HER COUNTRY’S rising temperatures, Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, 23, spent months protesting alone outside the gates of Parliament in Kampala. Her Rise Up Movement seeks to amplify voices from Africa. The work you’re doing is really teaching all of us because, as you know more than anyone, the conversation about the climate crisis has been very limited to a few voices. How did you get involved? Before my graduation, I started carrying out research to understand the challenges that people [in my community] were facing, and I was really surprised to find that climate change was actually the biggest threat facing humanity right now. I realized every part of my country, Uganda, is affected by the climate crisis: when you go to the north, the people…

ON APRIL 12, A MEAT-PROCESSING plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., owned by Smithfield Foods shut down after hundreds of employees contracted coronavirus. The closure was hardly unique. Food-processing plants are tinderboxes for infection because employees work in close proximity and often need to shout, spraying droplets that can be laced with the virus. Cargill, Tyson and other major industry players closed about two dozen poultry-, pork- and beef-processing centers over the following weeks as workers fell ill. In April and May, more than 17,000 industry workers tested positive for COVID-19 and 91 died, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The impact rippled to grocers, who struggled to stock certain items, and to restaurants like Wendy’s, which temporarily changed its menu at some locations to compensate…

ON THE CUSP OF DONALD TRUMP’S SENATE IMPEACHMENT trial in January, Val Demings went to dinner at a Washington seafood joint, the Salt Line, with her colleague Hakeem Jeffries. The two Representatives had recently been chosen, with five other House Democrats, to present the case to remove the President from office—the first two Black presidential impeachment managers in American history. As they discussed the weight of the role, Jeffries, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, made a prediction. “When this is all said and done,” he told Demings, “you’re going to be on the short list for Vice President.” “Get out of here,” Demings said. “I just have that feeling, Val,” Jeffries insisted. “The world is getting ready to see what we here in Congress already know about who…

CONSCIOUSNESS DEFINES HUMANITY. IT GIVES US EMOTIONS and choices, allows us to form societies, create art, understand the world around us. But it also opens the door to inequality, war, genocide, environmental destruction. It’s what makes us dream of utopia and—because any perfect society would still require drudge work no self-actualized individual would be happy doing—what keeps that idyll out of reach. The futuristic World State of Aldous Huxley’s classic 1932 novel Brave New World, which comes to TV in a pulpy adaptation for NBCUniversal’s new streaming service Peacock, believes it has solved that paradox. Each person is genetically engineered to be an ideal member of their caste: Alphas are the brilliant ruling class. Epsilons are the simple manual laborers. The rest fall in between. Each rank performs a crucial…

ONE: GET POLICE DEPARTMENTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY TO report when their officers use lethal force or seriously injure someone. Two: Collect that information in a national database. Three: Release those statistics to the public. That simple formula has been at the heart of nearly every comprehensive police-reform proposal in modern U.S. history. And for good reason: police chiefs and community organizers, Republicans and Democrats, federal lawmakers and local leaders all agree that a comprehensive database of use-of-force incidents is key to fighting racial injustice in law enforcement. But that bipartisan agreement, as well as a 26-year-old federal law mandating the creation of a database and a five-year effort by the FBI to build one, have all failed to produce reliable data on how and when America’s police officers use force…

A Breonna Taylor mural at Chambers Park in Annapolis, Md., is captured by drone on July 5. Future History Now, an art nonprofit, partnered with the Banneker-Douglass Museum and the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture to create the work. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was shot and killed in her Louisville, Ky., home in March by police executing a “no knock” warrant as part of a narcotics investigation. No drugs were found. In June, one officer was fired, and the Louisville Metro Council unanimously voted to ban such warrants in the city, naming the policy Breonna’s Law. For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

How did the term social distancing evolve? It’s used as a euphemism for class and race in the 19th century. In the 1920s, the Social Distance Scale [describing comfort levels between people of different races] becomes a social-science tool. During the AIDS crisis, it’s used to describe misguided fears of contagion. It’s not until 2004 that the CDC picks it up to talk about airborne illness. How did the idea become part of the study of race? The Social Distance Scale turns up in the wake of the summer of 1919, especially the Chicago race riots, in order to try to make sense of race. It makes it seem like people fit very neatly into these groups. It’s just this huge reduction. What do you hope people take away from…

FOR MICK BARON, THE GIANT KELP forests of Tasmania were a playground, a school and a church. The former marine biologist runs a scuba-diving center on the Australian island’s east coast, and rhapsodizes about the wonders of the seaweed’s dense habitats. “Diving in kelp is one of the most amazing underwater experiences you can have,” the 65-year-old says, likening it to flying through the canopy of a terrestrial rain forest. “You won’t find a single empty patch in a kelp forest … From the sponge gardens on the seafloor all the way up to the leaves on the surface, it’s packed with life.” Or rather, it was. In late 2015, a marine heat wave hit eastern Australia, wiping out a third of the Great Barrier Reef, and the kelp forests…

THE 2019 FIRE AT THE PHILADELPHIA Energy Solutions refinery started with a simple failure: one leaky elbow pipe in a 1,400-acre facility covered with pipes, tanks and industrial towers. Within a few hours last June, enough gaseous propane had seeped into the air to ignite the facility into a fiery hellscape with an explosion hurling human-size pieces of industrial equipment into the air and shaking the ground miles away. Workers rapidly shut down the facility, which had for decades converted crude oil into usable products. The workers escaped with only a few minor injuries, but the facility had already spent decades killing its neighbors in South Philadelphia. The refinery—the largest on the East Coast, dating back to the early days of the oil industry in the 19th century—was single-handedly responsible…

THE CYCLISTS PEDALING UP TO A COBBLED square on Paris’ Left Bank looked like any group of friends enjoying a Sunday afternoon ride in late June. But this was no casual outing. To them, it was a revolution in the making. From one bike hopped a slight dark-haired woman in a Chicago Cubs windbreaker: Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. Unclipping her bike helmet, she told journalists gathered there that the French capital needed to drastically cut car use—the key message on the campaign trail for her re-election on June 28. “We are getting there,” she said, “but we have long way to go.” Hidalgo is hardly alone among city leaders in trying to transform urban life. Across the U.S. and Europe and even in the megalopolis of Istanbul, mayors…

74% of MLM sellers are women, and 20% are HispanicDirect Selling Association When Christine Baker, a financially strapped stay-at-home mom to two little girls, made up her mind to lose 30 lb., she took a cue from a friend who’d gotten fit with Beachbody. The company’s online workouts and diet products cost Baker about $160, but they worked. “Literally within 30 days, I looked and felt like a different person,” says Baker, of Roseville, Calif., who was so impressed with her 2015 transformation that she decided to become a Beachbody fitness coach herself. She started paying around $135 per month to set up her own online portal and to purchase Beachbody products, and she got to work looking for customers. Yet as she spent more hours trying to sell people…

IT HAD BEEN BARELY SIX WEEKS SINCE MICHAEL Beltran and his staff reopened his Miami restaurants when he had to sit them down again and tell them the bad news. Despite all their efforts, working feverish, 20-hour days to reconfigure the spaces for new guidelines amid the rush to reopen, Beltran was now being forced to close again. “I had to look them in the eye and say, ‘You did everything right, but you’re not going to have a job on Wednesday,’” says the chef and restaurant owner. “It’s soul-crushing.” Florida, which now has one of the fastest-growing COVID-19 caseloads in the nation, is struggling to balance its fresh spike with the cost of reclosing. In the early months of the crisis, things had looked good. Despite predictions that spring-break…

THE PRESIDENT PRACTICALLY SNARLED AS HE made the accusation. “They think it’s going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed,” Donald Trump said in the East Room of the White House on July 7, referring to Democratic governors. “We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools.” With that, Trump waded into a debate that’s come to the fore of America’s pandemic response. Mere weeks before schools start, a brutal reality has descended on parents: after months of hunkering down with their kids, there may be no end in sight. The coronavirus is still raging, which means the school closures imposed as temporary measures in March will be difficult to reverse. Schools at every level are struggling to…

At long last, we have made a truly game-changing scientific breakthrough in preventing the spread of COVID-19. We have found a disease-control tool that, when used properly, can reduce transmission by somewhere between 50% and 85%. The tool is cheap and remarkably low-tech. You can even make one at home. If this tool were a vaccine or a medicine, we’d be high-fiving one another and popping the champagne, knowing we’d discovered a crucial means to help prevent the spread of the pandemic. I’m talking, of course, about face masks. Face masks block the spread of respiratory droplets that can carry the novel coronavirus. But just as with so many other aspects of the response to COVID-19—including mass testing, contact tracing and the early use of stay-at-home orders—the U.S. is once…

A FEW DAYS BEFORE OUR LONGTIME NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR moved out of his New York City loft in late March, he texted us and asked if we would look after his fish and some plants, since he could not move into his new place for a while. “Sure,” we texted back. “It’s not like we’re going anywhere.” Our history of looking after things is spotty, but he needed a hand, and I thought it might be time to skill up. His home and ours have only ever been separated by a semipermeable membrane anyway. We share a common outdoor space. We have each other’s spare keys, use each other’s appliances, have permission to just go in and borrow anything when the other is away. When we had young kids in…

As the COVID-19 pandemic and police-brutality protests heat up metaphorically, we can’t forget that the earth is still heating up literally. Because of systemic racism, these crises are hitting communities of color especially hard. At the same time, these very communities are developing concrete, homegrown solutions. Too often, the money and decisionmaking power needed to address a crisis rest in faraway offices that deploy far-flung consultants and contractors to affected areas. It’s no surprise that these responses without community leadership tend to make matters worse. When communities have resources to build on local strengths and buy-in, they come up with effective, durable and creative solutions to address short-term crises and long-term inequities. For example: in 2018, when developers wanted to turn abandoned School 77 in Buffalo, N.Y., into luxury…

THE HONEYMOON FOR EXTINCTION Rebellion, the hugely influential climate activist group, ended on Oct. 17, 2019. From its launch, a year earlier, until that day, it seemed like the group might have cracked the formula for saving the planet: its strategy of shutting down city centers with disruptive, nonviolent civil disobedience had drawn ordinary people onto the streets to demand action on the climate crisis. It had also made the group, now present in 75 countries, the most radical of a wave of climate activist groups sweeping the world in recent years, including the youth-focused Sunrise Movement in the U.S. and the school strikers led by Greta Thunberg. In the U.K., Extinction Rebellion (or XR) is a household name, able to generate enough pressure to reach milestones that traditional environmental…

This planet is our only home. Environmental experts say that over the next few decades, global warming will reach such a level that many water resources will go dry. So ecology and combatting global warming are very important. For example, my country, Tibet, is the ultimate source of water in Asia. Rivers including Pakistan’s Indus, India’s Ganges and Brahmaputra, China’s Yellow River, as well as the Mekong, flow from Tibet’s plateau. So we should pay more attention to the preservation of Tibetan ecology. This is not only for the interest of 6 million Tibetans but all people in this region. In the past, when I was flying over Afghanistan, there were clear signs that what used to be lakes and streams were already dry. I feel that Tibet also may…