Table of contents for August 3, 2020 in TIME Magazine

COLOMBIA’S PRESIDENT HAS BEGUN easing a stringent COVID-19 lockdown. But his aren’t the only rules Colombians have been following. A July 15 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) said armed groups in a third of the country’s 32 states have been enforcing their own lockdowns, often using violence. Analysts say guerrillas and gangs across Latin America have used fighting the virus as a way to strengthen their control of territory. That’s making the region’s problem of criminal governance even worse. COVID-19 CONTROL The lack of a strong state presence in remote areas of Colombia allows guerrillas to act as the main authority, while drug gangs control poor regions of Mexico and urban favelas in Brazil. As income-generating activities like trafficking and extortion have become harder during national coronavirus lockdowns,…

TORI GEIB WAS ALREADY ON HIGH ALERT WHEN COVID-19 hit last winter. Diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2016, the Ohio chef went from one chemotherapy regimen to another in an effort to outrun the cancer that had spread from her breast to her bones, lungs and liver. To protect herself from infections, even before the pandemic she often wore masks when she went out in public and carried hand sanitizer at all times. But COVID-19 presented a new and daunting challenge. At some point, Geib knew, she would exhaust all approved treatment options and would need to move to experimental therapies. But when COVID-19 began to burden hospitals, many suspended clinical trials. “It made what limited options I had even more limited,” she says. “When your cancer is…

When it comes to COVID-19, the Internet is equal parts encyclopedia and junkyard. Distinguishing between solid science and utter fabulism is not always easy, and far too often the rubbish is quickly and widely disseminated, creating a ripple effect of falsehoods that can misinform people and endanger lives. It’s impossible to keep the Internet free of such trash, but in theory it ought not be quite as hard to confine it to the fever swamps where it originates. A new paper in Psychological Science explores not only why people believe Internet falsehoods but also how to help them become more discerning about what they share. One of the leading reasons misinformation about COVID-19 gains traction is that it’s a topic that scares the daylights out of us. The more emotional…

OUR ELDERS BECOME OUR ANCESTORS to remind us to be free. When Toni Morrison passed, it was this thought that brought me comfort. When the Rev. C.T. Vivian and Congressman John Lewis passed on the same day, it was this thought that fired me up. I am blessed to be one of the thousands of activists who decide daily to get in Mr. Lewis’ favorite form of trouble: the good kind. We are strong in number. We fight the varied manifestations of oppression every day across the globe. We press for Green New Deals and for America to make good on its original ideals. We radically reimagine public safety and public health to prioritize care over punishment and fund wellness instead of violence. We protect the waters at Standing…

Jack Spielman has been a Republican his whole life. But over the past four years, he has come to two realizations. Increasingly upset by President Donald Trump’s “appalling” behavior, his cozy relationships with dictators and the ballooning national debt, Spielman says his first epiphany was that he couldn’t cast a ballot for Trump again. But for the retired Army cybersecurity engineer, the final straw was the President’s retaliation against impeachment witness Lieut. Colonel Alexander Vindman, who retired in July after Trump fired him from the National Security Council in February. Spielman decided he had to do more than just vote for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden; he had to persuade others to do the same. So Spielman filmed a video for a group called Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT), explaining…

Children tumble off a yellow school bus, where every other seat is marked with caution tape. Wearing whimsical masks—one has whiskers, another rhinestones—they wait to get their temperatures checked before filing into the one-story school building. Inside Wesley Elementary in Middletown, Conn., plastic shields rise from desks, and cartoon posters exhort children to COVER YOUR COUGH. In the middle of a lesson, teacher Susan Velardi picks up her laptop and pans it so her students can see the screen. “Look,” she tells them, “I have a friend that’s joining us at home!” There’s a new set of ground rules in Velardi’s classroom. “Your mask is on, and your mask stays like this. If we go outside if it’s nice, we have to sit apart,” she tells the students, who…

BECAUSE THEY WILL REMAIN RADIOACTIVE FOR centuries, Marie Curie’s notebooks have to be kept in lead-lined boxes in their home, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Similarly, Marjane Satrapi’s inventive and galvanizing sort-of biopic Radioactive takes on a subject that’s almost too hot to handle: we like to think that serious-minded geniuses aren’t so much like you and me, that they’re untroubled by the vagaries of sorrow or anxiety or sexual desire that plague the rest of us. It’s almost taboo to try to imagine the inner life of any rigorous scientific thinker, particularly one who was awarded two Nobel Prizes in a lifetime, in two distinct disciplines. But human lives are made up of poetry as well as science, and Radioactive faces that truth head-on. Though Satrapi stays fairly…

DIED C.T. Vivian Civil rights stalwart CORDY TINDELL “C.T.” VIVIAN WAS STUDYing history at Western Illinois University when he dropped out to make history instead. A minister, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.’s and a key organizer in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Vivian died on July 17 at the age of 95, the same day as longtime Georgia Congressman and fellow activist John Lewis. In a movement in which young people like Lewis played a large role, Vivian represented an older generation that had laid many of its stepping-stones. It was the experience of growing up in Macomb, Ill., during the Great Depression that ignited his passion for economic justice. When he left college and went on to participate in a sit-in that led to…

THIS SUMMER, I TRAVELED. THERE WERE SUN-soaked Italian hill towns; a sleepy Portuguese fishing village; a musty, centuries-old timber church in Romania. I saw it all from my couch, or sometimes the faded hammock on the porch. And I did it under the gentle narration of Rick Steves, the unassuming travel magnate whose childlike wonder and irreverent curiosity, seen in decades of cheap and cheerful guidebooks and travel TV shows, have introduced multiple generations of tourists to the charms of small museums and the pleasures of a walking tour. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic making international travel obsolete, Steves—just like the rest of us—has been staying home. “You can’t go to Europe? Poor boy,” he reminds himself with a burst of laughter. “From my point of view, my life…

FROM HIS PERCH atop the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin has placed himself at the center of Russian politics for the foreseeable future, and anti-Western words and deeds have surely helped him get there. But the story now is anger directed his way from his own country’s East. With support from 78% of voters and 65% turnout, Putin won a referendum earlier in July establishing a new constitution that could extend his reign for decades. Yes, there were millions of contested ballots and “prizes” given to voters who showed up at the polls, but no one really expected a free or fair vote, and credible numbers from the Russian polling firm Levada tell us that even a less popular Putin still has the approval of 60% of Russians. In general, opposition parties…

The 1963 March on Washington is best known for Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, but the address that John Lewis delivered on that day—as well as the one he did not deliver—would also go down in history. It loomed large in the biography of the future Congressman. When Lewis spoke to TIME in 2013 for the 50th anniversary of the March, he said he vividly remembered being introduced to hundreds of thousands of people who had gathered, eager to hear from a 23-year-old who was quickly taking a leadership role in the civil rights movement.—JOSIAH BATES “I STOOD UP AND I SAID TO MYSELF, ‘THIS is it,’” Lewis told TIME. “I looked straight out and I started speaking.” At the time, Lewis was chairman of…

AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE ANALYSTS have been watching a pair of Russian satellites, identified as Cosmos 2542 and 2543, for months. Or rather, they have been watching them since they were one satellite, deployed by a Soyuz rocket that took off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on Nov. 26, 2019. It was 11 days after that launch that the first satellite split in two, the second somehow “birthed” from the other, and no one in the U.S. military was happy about the new arrival. By mid-January, both Russian satellites had floated near a multibillion-dollar spacecraft known as KH-11, one of the U.S. military’s most powerful spy tools, part of a reconnaissance constellation code-named Keyhole/CRYSTAL. It wasn’t clear whether the Cosmos satellites were threatening or surveilling the KH-11, which is said to have…

PART I: PATIENT ZEROIt wasn’t greed, or curiosity, that made Li Rusheng grab his shotgun and enter Shitou Cave. It was about survival. During Mao-era collectivization of the early 1970s, food was so scarce in the emerald valleys of southwestern China’s Yunnan province that farmers like Li could expect to eat meat only once a year—if they were lucky. So, craving protein, Li and his friends would sneak into the cave to hunt the creatures they could hear squeaking and fluttering inside: bats. Li would creep into the gloom and fire blindly at the vaulted ceiling, picking up any quarry that fell to the ground, while his companions held nets over the mouth of the cave to snare fleeing bats. They cooked them in the traditional manner of Yunnan’s ethnic…

THE BLOOP Contrary to popular suggestions, an extremely loud sound heard in the ocean in 1997, known as the Bloop, came not from an unknown animal but from glacial movements, scientists confirmed in 2012. SAND CIRCLES More than a decade after discovering circular patterns on the seabed near Japan in 1995, scientists found that the creators were a new species of puffer fish, which make the ornate circles to attract mates. RED TIDES Scientists can now forecast the emergence of often harmful red tides around the world, after discovering that among the causes are ocean salinity, wind, temperature and explosive growths in algae.…

THANKS TO THE CITY’S INFAMOUS WITCH TRIALS, THE historic homes and gardens on the Salem, Mass., waterfront usually get about a third of their annual visitors in the Halloween season. But the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns have created a scary situation for these places: most of the rest of their visitors arrive in the spring and summer. Thanks to the pandemic, this year’s busy time has been a wash, and it’s not looking like the fall will be much different. At the site of Salem’s The House of the Seven Gables and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthplace, tickets and gift-shop sales made up more than 80% of revenue in 2019. That money doesn’t just keep the home open for visitors; it also keeps an essential organ of the community running.…

WHEN THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND Security (DHS) was formed in the wake of Sept. 11, the agency was given a mandate to protect federal property. That little-known power was put to perhaps surprising use this July as the Trump Administration called out federal forces in the name of protecting facilities in several cities, including Portland, Ore. But scenes of federal agents using tear gas and projectiles on protesters at a federal courthouse—and forcing people into unmarked vehicles—led local officials in Oregon and legal experts across the U.S. to say Trump has gone too far. As protests against racism pass the two-month mark, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said the forces have escalated tensions in his city and called them Trump’s “personal army.” Viral videos of protesters encountering the agents have…

As the pandemic rages on, those of us who are able to work from home will probably still be doing so for the foreseeable future. You know what that means: lots more video meetings. So why not look and sound as good as possible? Here are three tips: PERFECT YOUR LIGHTING Good lighting can make up for even the lowest-quality laptop cameras. Sit with a window to your side, rather than behind you, for a pleasant Rembrandt effect. If you can’t work beside a window, consider an LED “fill light” to make up for harsh indoor lighting. UPGRADE YOUR WEBCAM Even high-end laptops often have low-quality webcams. Adding an external webcam, like the Logitech Brio 4K, will give your video quality a big boost. Alternatively, software like EpocCam can…

It’s not by chance that John Lewis’ name is tied so closely to America’s still visceral memories of the civil rights movement. Lewis undertook a purposeful quest to tell and retell the story of what he had been through so that nobody could forget. He turned his experiences into best-selling books and share-worthy speeches—and he did so with intention. In this previously unpublished excerpt from a conversation Lewis had with TIME in 2017, he explains why he kept telling that story, even though it wasn’t easy.—LILY ROTHMAN Is there a formula that people can follow to know that they’re on the right side of history? Those of us who grew up with a religious background, we just say, Do what is just. Be fair. Be kind. Kindness is something…

DORIE LADNER: My sister and I met John Lewis in Jackson, Miss., when we were students at Tougaloo College. He was one of the Freedom Riders who returned to Mississippi to settle some matters related to Parchman Penitentiary, where they were all jailed in 1961 after being arrested while defying segregation. They came back to pay their bonds and settle their legal issues. At the time, I was learning about nonviolent action and community organizing, and after I started becoming involved with SNCC and the movement, I would often see him in meetings along with the rest of the group’s leaders—Diane Nash, James Bevel and others. JOYCE LADNER: The public is attaching words like saint to John but we certainly didn’t view him that way. He was arrested a lot,…

CHARLES MANSON NEVER RELEASED HIS GRIP ON THE American imagination. Since 1969, when his “Family” committed mass murder in L.A., he’s inspired operas, YA novels, South Park episodes. But the years surrounding his 2017 death and the 50th anniversary of the slayings have seen a surge in Manson mania. Beyond Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Family lore has fueled Emma Cline’s buzzy novel The Girls, Mary Harron’s indie film Charlie Says, and parts of the shows Mindhunter and American Horror Story. Every month seems to bring a new memoir or podcast or TV special. The latest is Helter Skelter: An American Myth, a six-part Epix docuseries from director and producer Lesley Chilcott (An Inconvenient Truth), with executive producers including the ubiquitous television creator Greg Berlanti. While schlocky…