Table of contents for January 29, 2018 in TIME Magazine

THE AVENGERS Each of the women on this week’s cover either ran for office in 2017 or is running in 2018, in races at every level of government from U.S. Congress to local school board. They are: First row (from left): 1. Wendy Gooditis of Virginia; 2. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher of Texas; 3. Dawn Adams of Virginia; 4. Anne Stava-Murray of Illinois; 5. Sarah Coats of Kansas; 6. Noelia Corzo of California; 7. Val Montgomery of Illinois Second row (from left): 8. Theresa Greenfield of Iowa; 9. Kathy Manning of North Carolina; 10. Michele Oberholtzer of Michigan; 11. Kelly Fowler of Virginia; 12. Megan Kilgore of Ohio; 13. Greta Neubauer of Wisconsin; 14. Katrina Callsen of Virginia Third row (from left): 15. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell of Florida; 16. Tanzie Youngblood of…

After three years of unprecedented drought, the South African city of Cape Town has less than 90 days’ worth of water in its reservoirs, putting it on track to be the first major city in the world to run out of water—on April 21, to be exact. DRY SEASON City planners have long pointed out that Cape Town’s water capacity hasn’t kept up with population growth, which has nearly doubled over the past 20 years. But now the record drought has left the city’s reservoirs dangerously short of water. The city is attempting to solve the crisis by calling for households to limit water usage to 23 gallons per person per day, but only 39% of Capetonians are meeting it. DAY ZERO Cape Town says it will be forced to…

Trump gets top marks in health test As part of a medical exam given by White House physician Ronny Jackson, President Trump received a perfect score in a 10-minute cognitive-function test. Jackson said the President’s health was “excellent” overall and that he had no concerns about Trump’s neurological functioning. Weber and Testino accused by models Current and former male models accused famed photographers Bruce Weber and Mario Testino of unwanted advances and coercion, charges both challenged. Condé Nast said it would not commission new work from the pair “for the foreseeable future.” Extra $1.7B payout to be made by BP British oil firm BP announced on Jan. 16 that it expected to make an additional, unexpectedly high payout of $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter for claims related to the…

PHOTOJOURNALISTS BECOME CELEBRITIES BY CREATING images that shape the way we see the world. Photo editors, away from the limelight, shape the way those images are presented—and Barbara Baker Burrows, who died of corticobasal degeneration, a rare brain disease, on Jan. 10 at 73, chose the pictures that told some of the century’s biggest stories. After joining LIFE magazine’s staff in 1966, Bobbi earned a reputation for never closing a story until it had exactly the right image, and for often finding it too. But her half-century at Time Inc. was distinguished by more than her encyclopedic knowledge of photography. She turned colleagues into family, sometimes literally (LIFE photographer Larry Burrows was her father-in-law), and the trust she developed with photographers was a crucial ingredient in her work. She once…

NO ONE IN THE LOOP—INCLUDING, ALMOST surely, the man himself—was sure he would really do it. On March 31, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson was scheduled to address the nation about the Vietnam War at 9 p.m. He had drafted a short section for the end of the speech announcing that he would not seek re-election in November. The President had talked about it with family and a few advisers, but the circle of trust was small after more than four years of tumult and war. As political a man who ever drew breath, Johnson kept his options open through the afternoon hours. At one point, the President stopped in his aide Marvin Watson’s office to talk about the race with Terry Sanford, the former North Carolina governor who had agreed…

How has President Trump done in his first year? Badly, if you would like the country to find common ground and solve problems together. He gave rich business interests a big tax break, and he gave his working-class, populist base NFL players to be mad at. The night Trump was elected, you said you were afraid. Are you still? It’s hard to get past what happened in Charlottesville, where an American citizen was murdered, was assassinated by a white supremacist using ISIS tactics of driving a car through a crowd, and the President didn’t denounce that in a forthright way. Overall Trump’s behavior has been to let hateful, bigoted voices feel emboldened. The President doesn’t seem to be paying a price. Why? Polling numbers are bad. He has paid a…

YEAR ONE As fans of Edel Rodriguez’s TIME covers celebrated his Jan. 22 illustration, marking Donald Trump’s first year in the White House, some of the President’s critics joked that the image “should have shown Trump’s pants on fire and my head on fire,” as Maria Stevens of Hypoluxo, Fla., put it. But others felt it was a misfire. “You beltway pundits have no clue how the rest of America feels” about Trump, tweeted @MadamAsuka, in response to the story. And Gary Wulf of Pointblank, Texas, felt such coverage ought to “put aside all the ‘Trump Noise’” and focus on wins—and that widespread failure to do so weakens what can be expected of a President. “I shudder to think who comes next,” he wrote. ‘Trump likes to brag about…

Chelsea Manning to run for Senate Chelsea Manning, the former soldier who was jailed in 2013 for leaking classified documents, and then released early by President Barack Obama, intends to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland as a Democrat. Manning, 30, will likely challenge two-term Senator Ben Cardin in the primary. Rohingya to be sent back to Myanmar Rohingya Muslims who fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh to escape what the U.N. has described as a program of government “ethnic cleansing” will be returned to Myanmar within two years, per an agreement the two countries reached on Jan. 16. California cops free 13 chained siblings Police in California rescued 13 siblings ranging from 2 to 29 years old from a “horrific” house in Riverside County where they had been starved…

NOTHING ABOUT THE PAST YEAR HAS BEEN EASY FOR HOUSE Speaker Paul Ryan. His Republican conference is fractured. The Democrats are emboldened. And President Trump has regularly scrambled the GOP agenda with offhand comments and surprise tweets. But with the government set to run out of money on Jan. 19, the new year was shaping up to be even more complicated for the Wisconsin native—if not worse. The deadline was the fourth time since September that Republicans had struggled to keep the government open despite controlling Congress and the White House. This time the stumbling block was what to do about the so-called Dreamers, a group of some 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Democrats demanded some form of protection for them in exchange for…

4,000 MILES An Indian restaurant in Birmingham, England, flew $2,757 worth of freeze-dried curries, including 100 popadams, to U.N. troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014. 7,000 MILES Corné Krige, a former captain of the South African rugby team Fedsure Stormers, made headlines in 2001 when he ordered a pizza from Cape Town to be delivered to his hotel room in Sydney. 11,701 MILES An order of vegetable biryani and pilau rice set a world record for long-distance curry delivery in 2008 when it arrived at an office in Manchester, England, having been sent from Christchurch, New Zealand.…

MUSIC, LIKE BOOKS, IMMORtalizes people. Ever since I lost my son Tim in an Irish Republican Army bombing in Warrington, England, I have strived to keep him alive in any way I can. After the death of Dolores O’Riordan at age 46 was announced on Jan. 15, my wife told me that O’Riordan’s band, the Cranberries, had recorded a song, “Zombie,” about the events in Warrington. I’d never heard it—I suppose I am in the wrong generation. So watching a recording of it was a moving experience. O’Riordan sang “Zombie” with intensity, as if she felt the song very deeply. Her voice was alluring, hypnotic. It was a brave song to sing in 1994. That it came from a distinctive Irish voice matters; that O’Riordan wrote this song as an…

HALEY STEVENS U.S. Congress, Michigan-11 The 34-year-old was chief of staff on Obama’s auto task force. She’s running to fill GOP Rep. David Trott’s seat after he retires from this southeastern Michigan district. GINA ORTIZ JONES U.S. Congress, Texas-23 She’s running a tough primary against four other candidates, in a majority-Hispanic border district that voted for both Clinton and GOP Rep. Will Hurd. LINA HIDALGO Judge, Harris County, Texas A Colombian emigré, the 26-year-old Hidalgo is running for the office that handles emergencies for the flood-stricken Houston area. KIM SCHRIER U.S. Congress, Washington-8 Schrier tried to coax GOP Rep. Dave Reichert to vote against the health care repeal. Now he’s retiring and she’s running for his seat in a district that voted for Clinton. TANZIE…

WHEN ROBIN LI LOOKS BACK AT THE QUESTION NOW, HE can laugh. But things were different in 1992, when the Baidu CEO was a tongue-tied Chinese student applying for a computer-graphics graduate program in the U.S. The interviewing professor asked him, “Do you have computers in China?” It left the young man stunned. “I was very embarrassed,” says Li, 49, breaking into a grin from the penthouse office of his Beijing headquarters. “I thought, One day I’ll demonstrate that China has a really powerful computer industry.” Eight years later, he did. In 2000, Li founded Baidu, a search engine that today is second only to Google in popularity, and whose 80% market share in China makes it the world’s fourth most popular website. The company, whose name derives from a…

THE DIRECTOR STEVEN SODERBERGH IS THE most restlessly creative force in Hollywood. But despite the successes of his classically built big-screen entertainments such as Traffic and last year’s Logan Lucky, he keeps chasing difficult work—like the experimental drama Bubble or the black-and-white noir The Good German. His new HBO series, Mosaic, presents the auteur in full, with all that that implies. The show began its life last year as an interactive app, allowing viewers to see the investigation into the disappearance of posh Park City, Utah, children’s-book author Olivia Lake (Sharon Stone) from various perspectives. It’s an attempt to push forward the medium of television, but one that demands more than what most viewers might be willing to give. The HBO series—with one cut-together version of the story—is creepily effective,…

‘I should get in the backseat and close my mouth for a while.’ MATT DAMON, actor, apologizing on NBC’s Today show for his initial reaction to the Harvey Weinstein sexual-harassment scandal, which was perceived as insensitive because he argued there is a “spectrum of behavior” ‘EVEN THOUGH I’M NOW AN INTERNET SENSATION, I SHOULDN’T BE PROUD.’ WANG FUMAN, 8-year-old from China’s Yunnan province who became the face of needy Chinese children when a viral photo showed how his hair froze after he trekked 2.8 miles to school in 16°F weather GOOD WEEK Mars An experiment by Villanova students suggests that hops—a key ingredient in beer—would grow well in Martian soil BAD WEEK Venus Venus Williams was eliminated on the first day of the Australian Open ‘BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO…

THE HARD STUFF Alcohol consumption is a sensitive issue in the Buddhist-majority country, and laws on its sale have long been restrictive; vendors are also forbidden from selling spirits to police and members of the armed forces in uniform. Even so, the Finance Ministry revoked the 1979 ban on female drinkers on Jan. 10, in an effort to strike sexist bills from the books. BITTER TASTE Although the ban had not been strictly enforced, removing it proved controversial. Nationalists and leading monks criticized the decision, arguing that it would destroy Sri Lankan family values. By Jan. 14, President Maithripala Sirisena—a supporter of temperance—bowed to religious conservatives and ordered the ban’s reinstatement. HALF MEASURE The controversy comes as the President attempts to tackle deepening gender inequality. Female labor-force participation in Sri…

AFTER ONE YEAR IN THE WHITE HOUSE, President Trump has insulted a wide variety of countries and their governments. But as a debate rages over which form of profanity he used to describe Haiti and sub-Saharan Africa, let’s return to the President’s very first tweet of 2018. “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit,” he wrote. The U.S. and Pakistan have been through a lot together. In the 1970s, Pakistan’s ability to help drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan brought it closer to the U.S. as Washington distanced itself from socialist-minded India. The Cold War’s end made Pakistan less important for Washington, and the country’s nuclear tests complicated…

DIED Keith Jackson, ABC sportscaster known for his enthusiastic college football play-by-play and signature phrases (“Whoa, Nelly!”), at 89. ATTENDED A public soccer game, by women in Saudi Arabia, for the first time, a reform championed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. ARRESTED Ex-CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee, on suspicion of retaining classified information that led to the deaths of U.S. informants in China. CONFRONTED Longtime U.S. gymnastics-team doctor Larry Nassar, by scores of his accusers, as part of his sentencing. He pleaded guilty to seven counts of criminal sexual conduct last year. ANNOUNCED That the two Koreas will march together in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, in February. BORN A daughter, via a surrogate, to Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West, who…

INDIVISIBLE Borrowing from the tactics of the Tea Party, this organization, founded by two married former Capitol Hill staffers, has a group organizing in every congressional district, and roughly 70% of the members are women. Next up: Indivisible 435, which aims to turn the vast network of activists into canvassers and fundraisers. RUN FOR SOMETHING Founded by former Clinton staffer Amanda Litman and longtime political consultant Ross Morales Rocketto, Run for Something trains progressive millennial candidates to run for state and local offices. Of the 72 candidates it endorsed in 2017, 51% were women. WOMEN’S MARCH After some 4 million people took to the streets in likely the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, the Women’s March kept organizing. A year later, it’s kicking off a national voter-registration drive to…

What made you decide to come onboard this show? When Steven Soderbergh writes something for you, once you get done screaming and get back up off the floor, I think it’s time to say yes! I really got it with him. Did Soderbergh inspire you to work all the harder? I’m really a good soldier. If I have a good general, I’m just great. If I have a really crappy leader, as I think we’ve seen in some of my films, not as great! Because there’s nothing to intuit. When I have a great director and great material, I know what I’m doing. Was the shoot—moving quickly to produce content for the Mosaic app—demanding? Oh, good Lord, yes! When I was first making the deal, they said, You don’t get…

THE OAKLAND, CALIF.– based artist Merrill Garbus has earned acclaim as the frontwoman of the musical project Tune-Yards, developing an eclectic, percussive sound that incorporates everything from Afrobeat to the ukulele. On their fourth album, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, out Jan. 19, Garbus and her longtime collaborator Nate Brenner dig deeper into contradictions: the music is upbeat, with dance-driven rhythms anchoring every song. But the lyrics reflect the turbulent political landscape of the moment, as on the dark, thumping “Colonizer,” where Garbus sings, “I turn on my white woman’s voice to contextualize acts of my white women friends.” On one of the album’s highlights, “ABC123,” she sings, “My country served me horror coke/ My natural freedom up in smoke” before proclaiming, “We’ll unite before the…

THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING UP The first step to a happier, more meaningful existence is organizing your home, one category at a time. THE LITTLE BOOK OF HYGGE: DANISH SECRETS TO HAPPY LIVING Improve each day by injecting coziness with candlelit dinners and snuggly movie nights. THE LITTLE BOOK OF LYKKE: SECRETS OF THE WORLD’S HAPPIEST PEOPLE Test out best practices for fulfillment from around the globe. LAGOM: THE SWEDISH ART OF LIVING A BALANCED, HAPPY LIFE Everything in moderation means less stress and more time for friends and hobbies. THE GENTLE ART OF SWEDISH DEATH CLEANING Before you depart, do yourself (and your family) a favor by passing along your possessions.…