TIME Magazine January 31, 2022

LAST OCTOBER, TIME’S SIMON SHUSTER reached out to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with an interview request. It had been 10 months since Navalny’s voluntary return to Russia and imprisonment, and more than a year since he had been nearly killed by a chemical weapon. Simon has interviewed Navalny a half dozen times since he first emerged as a political force a decade ago, and the response suggested Putin’s public enemy No. 1 was happy to hear from him. In the town of Pokrov, where Navalny’s prison is located, “there is probably just one subscriber to TIME magazine,” he wrote back to Simon. “And that’s me.” His lawyers had just brought him a recent issue that morning, which included an article Simon wrote about a Holocaust memorial in Ukraine. “I…

TV’S GREATEST Fans of the showrunner Shonda Rhimes raved about finding her on the cover of the Jan. 17/Jan. 24 issue and the accompanying profile by TIME’s TV critic Judy Berman. “An incredible creative mind, storyteller and leader to look up to,” tweeted Allie O’Connell of Rhimes; Tarika Barrett applauded Rhimes’ “honesty” and wisdom in the piece, also labeling her an “incredible leader and role model.” “How is it possible to have so much brilliance in one person?” wrote Joanna Green on Facebook. Many readers took the opportunity to share what Rhimes and her shows mean to them. “Thank you for the characters we all love, hate, want to love or be like,” Deborah Phillips Carroll wrote on Facebook. “If I need an inspiration or a way to articulate…

‘KEEP YOUR HAMSTERS AT HOME. DO NOT TAKE THEM OUT.’ LEUNG SIU-FAI, director of Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, confirming on Jan. 18 that authorities will kill some 2,000 of the rodents and other small animals after around a dozen hamsters tested positive for the COVID-19 virus in a pet store where an employee was also infected $3.36 MILLION Sale price for a single page of artwork from a 1984 Spider-Man comic at a Jan. 13 auction 60 MILLION Number of icefish discovered in 2021 in a breeding colony—believed to be the world’s largest—in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, per a scientific paper published on Jan. 13 ‘We have all felt the squeeze and changes of these transformational times.’ JASON MOMOA AND LISA BONET, in a joint statement released on…

CAN NATURAL GAS—A FOSSIL FUEL THAT EMITS 50% less carbon dioxide than coal, but still contributes to global warming—help us achieve a transition to green energy? The question has long divided policymakers, but the debate is now coming to a head in Europe. After years of delays, the E.U. wants to finalize its green “taxonomy”—an official list of investments the bloc classifies as sustainable for the planet—by the end of January. The taxonomy aims to help Europe’s private sector, which is trying to overhaul spending to meet recent environmental pledges, move its money to the right places. A draft version, sent to member states on Dec. 31, says natural-gas projects should count as green under certain conditions; natural gas is labeled as a “transitional fuel,” and investments in it will…

A photograph taken by the NOAA GOES-West satellite on Jan. 15 and obtained via NASA shows a huge eruption from the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcano in the South Pacific Ocean, just 40 miles from the island nation of Tonga. In a Jan. 18 statement, Tonga’s government called the eruption, which unleashed clouds of ash and tsunami waves reportedly as high as 15 m, an “unprecedented disaster.” —Madeleine Carlisle…

QUEEN ELIZABETH’S SECOND SON WAS barely mentioned during the December trial of Ghislaine Maxwell on charges of sex trafficking minors, which ended with a guilty verdict Dec. 29. But Prince Andrew, a former friend of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, faces a reckoning of his own in a civil case brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most outspoken accuser. Giuffre alleges Epstein and his then girlfriend Maxwell groomed, abused and forced her to have sex with powerful men. Andrew, she alleges, was one of them. CIVIL CASE Giuffre, 38, is suing Andrew under a New York State law that allows victims of childhood sexual abuse to seek justice outside the standard statute of limitations. Andrew has repeatedly denied Giuffre’s allegations, and claimed in a 2019 interview with the BBC…