Table of contents for July 2, 2018 in TIME Magazine

JUNE 15 Trump targets China The White House says $50 billion in Chinese goods to be targeted with tariffs JUNE 15 China reacts swiftly Beijing announces tariffs on $50 billion in goods from politically sensitive industries like Florida orange juice JUNE 18 Trump escalates The White House says Trump would be willing to impose tariffs on as much as $450 billion in Chinese imports JUNE 19 White House calls China a security threat The White House releases a report saying China’s trade policies threaten U.S. “economic and national security”…

ON A RECENT SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN Sahabevava village, on the east coast of Madagascar, vanilla farmer Lydia Soa wielded a small wooden stamp studded with steel pins spelling out her producer number: MK021. Soa, 46, had recently branded thousands of green vanilla pods at her small plantation with this unique code. If a thief steals her crop, it can be traced at the local market. “Now I can sleep at night,” she says. These days vanilla theft is a big business. Climate change, crime and speculation have led to skyrocketing prices of the fragrant spice, from $20 per kilo five years ago to $515 in June. A pair of tropical cyclones wiped out a third of 2017’s crop in Madagascar—which supplies 80% of the world’s vanilla—and sent the global…

WITHDREW The U.S., from the U.N. Human Rights Council, on June 19, citing concerns about the body’s criticism of Israel. This is the first time a country has voluntarily left the council, but similar issues also led President George W. Bush to initially refuse to join when it formed in 2006. JAILED Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, by a judge who revoked his bail on June 15. Manafort is set for trial in September on the special counsel’s charges. BANNED Artificial trans fats, from all food in the U.S., effective June 18. The deadline was set by the FDA when it said in 2015 they were unsafe to eat. CLOSED A major alcohol study, by the National Institutes of Health, after an investigation concluded that officials solicited money…

How Trump erodes hope Abdi Nor Iftin, author of the new memoir Call Me American, describes how he once dreamed of leaving his native Somalia—but that now, as a legal resident in the U.S., he has a new fear: “If this country settled by immigrants could close its doors to the most desperate people in the world, who would help?” Why doing nothing is so important “We use our allowance of paid vacation to recharge the batteries … and gear up for a return to work,” writes Brian O’Connor, author of the recent book Idleness: A Philosophical Essay, as he urges us to reconsider our relationship to productivity. “Leisure, in this way, is incorporated into the world of work. It is not a subversion of it.” Autocrats’ favorite scripture…

SMOKING ISN’T AS COOL AS IT USED TO be. The number of adult smokers in the U.S. is at an all-time low, according to new federal data, and a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says almost a million fewer middle and high school students used tobacco products in 2017 than in ’11. But vaping—using a handheld vaporizer that draws on liquid typically packed with nicotine—is up, which raises new issues. At last count, 3.2% of U.S. adults (about 7.5 million) said they used e-cigarettes, and it’s even more common among teens. Nearly 12% of high schoolers vape; they especially favor Juul, the brand that dominates the U.S. market. It’s still unclear whether e-cigs are safe. Their aerosols often contain fewer harmful chemicals than smoke…

IN THE RACE FOR TURKEY’S PRESIDENCY, a candidate is entitled to 20 minutes of television time—even, it turns out, from prison. In what state media are calling a “first in the history of democracy,” Kurdish candidate Selahattin Demirtas, who was arrested during the crackdown that followed a failed military coup in 2016, gave a speech from his cell on June 17. Demirtas has little chance of winning, but his pro-Kurdish party could hold the key to the parliament; he implored voters to use the June 24 elections to keep Turkey from turning into a “one-man regime” under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkish state media called Demirtas’ speech a ‘first in the history of democracy’ AGAINST THE LAW After the attempted coup, Erdogan put into effect a state of emergency,…

REALISTIC FICTION Polish writer Krystian Bala was convicted of murder in 2007, seven years after he killed a man who reportedly slept with his ex-wife. Police charged him after he used the details of his crime to write a best-selling novel. SOCIAL MEDIA In 2012, a Kentucky man siphoned gas from a police car and was so proud of his crime that his girlfriend took a photo. After they posted it on Facebook, police soon found the man and arrested him. DRUNK DRIVING An Australian man with a suspended license allegedly drove drunk to a Sydney police station in April. Police said he told them he had come to check in, per the terms for his bail on earlier drunk-driving charges.…

SALLY HEMINGS, THE enslaved woman who bore Thomas Jefferson’s children, is one of the most famous African-American women in history, but the details of her life have long been a controversial mystery. Now Jefferson’s mountaintop plantation has changed how it tells her story—and, in doing so, affirmed a major shift in the way such institutions talk about the Founding Fathers. The “Life of Sally Hemings” exhibit that opened at Monticello on June 16 is the first time Hemings has had a dedicated space in the visitor experience there. Certain aspects of her life will always be difficult to discuss; for example, she has in the past been called Jefferson’s “mistress,” but under Virginia law she was in fact his property. No firsthand accounts from Hemings exist, so some historians…

A costly distraction By Sarah Saldaña Each year I was the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Congress mandated that we use discretion when deciding how to use our funds wisely. This prosecutorial discretion is a time-honored and rational approach to seeking justice—one that balances the need to ensure public safety with the availability of limited public resources. Every dollar spent by the U.S. government in pursuit of criminal misdemeanor immigration cases is wholly contrary to that mandate. Setting aside concerns of compassion—if that is even possible—the “zero tolerance” policy further burdens our over-burdened justice system when there are drug cartels, international organized criminal enterprises and cyber malefactors to investigate. While Congress has incomprehensibly evaded the responsibility of legislating total immigration reform, there are effective alternatives to…

He divides and unifies, he inspires joy and indifference. But does Elvis Presley still matter? In his stirring documentary The King, Eugene Jarecki takes to the road in Elvis’ own 1963 Rolls-Royce to pose some version of that question to performers like Chuck D and Ethan Hawke, music critics like Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick, and ordinary citizens living in Tupelo, Miss., the town where Elvis was born. The King takes on the seemingly impossible task of parsing what Elvis means in the context of Trump’s America, and just when you think Jarecki hasn’t quite pulled it off, the movie’s final minutes come at you like a lightning bolt. He sets a montage of clips from the mid–20th century and beyond—snapshots from the O.J. trial, from TV shows like…

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S LOOMING TRADE WAR with China ratcheted up so quickly, you might have missed it. On June 15, Trump announced tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports. Within minutes, China responded in kind, targeting a range of goods from soybeans to electric vehicles, prompting Trump three days later to order his trade office to find an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to target. Pre-emptively, Trump said he would be willing to bring the total value of Chinese goods targeted for tariffs to $450 billion. “We have to,” Trump told reporters as he rolled out the initial round. “We’ve been treated very unfairly.” For Trump, who has asserted that trade wars are “easy to win,” the escalating tariffs represent the fulfillment of a campaign promise to…

Displacements hit record high in 2017 More people were displaced last year than in any other year on record, according to a June 19 report by the U.N. Refugee Agency. Approximately 16.2 million people had to flee their homes because of war, violence or persecution, while 5 million returned. The U.N. says 1 in 110 people is now a refugee, an asylum seeker or internally displaced. 22 hurt, 1 killed in N.J. shooting A fight among gang members at an arts festival in Trenton, N.J., escalated into a mass shooting on June 17. Seventeen people were shot, and the rest were hurt by being trampled. One suspect was killed at the scene, and police charged two others with weapons offenses. Right-wing populist to lead Colombia Iván Duque, a conservative…

YOU WOULD NOT HAVE WANTED TO LIVE THE DAY PEGGY Whitson lived on April 19, 2008. During her return from her second stay aboard the International Space Station, the Soyuz spacecraft she was flying aboard failed to separate fully from a propulsion module attached to its aft end. The dead weight hanging from the ship caused it to plunge through the atmosphere at a too-steep angle, subjecting the crew to more than eight times Earth’s gravity and threatening to incinerate them before they reached the ground. Ultimately, a stuck bolt burned through, the module separated, and the crew landed safely. “Gravity is not my friend right now,” Whitson joked after the landing. The next chance she got, she went back to space anyway. Over the course of 15 years,…

PHYLLIS LACETTI FOUND HER OWN BREAST CANCER WHEN she felt an abnormal lump in her right breast in 2007. A nurse at Montefiore Medical Center, she had a lumpectomy to remove it, but an MRI afterward revealed remaining cancer cells, so she opted to get a mastectomy. Her cancer doctor recommended that she get chemotherapy to ensure that her cancer wouldn’t recur, since Lacetti’s family history put her at high risk. Her sister and father had died of leukemia, and her brother passed away from thyroid cancer. Chemotherapy, he said, was her best option for preventing the cancer from coming back. But Lacetti was reluctant to get the toxic therapy. “I saw my sister suffer, I saw my brother suffer, and I didn’t know if that’s what I wanted…

On June 12, the owners of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma were sued by the Massachusetts attorney general, who alleges that the company knowingly misled doctors and consumers about the dangers of its product. (Purdue denied the claim.) This evokes an earlier, separate—and revealing—case against the company. In 2007, Purdue Pharma’s parent company admitted to a felony charge of lying about Oxy-Contin’s potential for abuse and addiction, while marketing the drug. But the Justice Department allowed three Purdue Pharma executives to plead guilty to a misdemeanor “misbranding” charge that held them liable for the company’s actions because of their positions of authority but did not accuse them personally of wrongdoing. All paid large fines. But there was no trial. After the settlement, a U.S. Senator wanted to know: Why was…

Garbage is not an attractive topic, even when it’s in space. So there was little surprise that when President Trump held an event on June 18 to address the problem of orbital debris, he veered off topic to sign an Executive Order concerning something with more appeal: a new branch of the military known as the “space force.” Trump’s space policies have generally been ambitious and well received, but the space force is problematic. A Space Command already exists within the Air Force—managing military satellites, communications, and Earth surveillance. The program could use a funding boost to upgrade satellites and protect them against attack, but it’s operating reasonably well. Still, military technology in space is in its infancy. The Air Force was established in 1947, when the need became…

On April 6, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered the adoption of a “zero tolerance” policy that calls for prosecuting anyone who enters the U.S. Illegally. Because children cannot be jailed alongside adults, families were separated under the policy. Between May 5 and June 19, more than 2,300 children were separated from their parents, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). On June 20, after an outpouring of criticism, President Trump signed an Executive Order to end the separation of families at the border and allow parents and children to be detained together indefinitely. Here’s how the policy began, how it worked and what it means going forward: Whose policy is this? The Trump Administration’s. President Trump blamed the crisis on a Democratic law and said that only Congress…

Costner stars in the new Paramount TV series Yellowstone (June 20) from writer Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water) as John Dutton, the head of a massive ranch in Montana. Things get violent as the Dutton family struggles to protect its land from developers and a Native American reservation. How is Yellowstone different from other westerns you’ve made? It used to be if you were tough enough, mean enough, you created a ranch and nobody said anything about it. Now problems need to be arbitrated with lawyers. The modern-day rancher has to act like a CEO. Is Dutton a moral character? He’s involved in a murder, but he does it to protect his family, his way of life. He has the DNA of his predecessors.…

Sequestered in rural Sweden, Merry and Sam Hurley seem to be intent on carving out an idyllic life for their baby son Conor. At the start of Michelle Sacks’ haunting novel You Were Made for This, the couple has recently left the hustle and bustle of New York City behind. But as they settle into their picture-perfect existence—her baking fresh pies and him pursuing promising new work—the rot beneath the surface of their tidy marriage begins to spread. Merry, silently suffering from postpartum depression, whiles away the hours performing the wifely duties her husband expects her to master. Yet she struggles to curb the resentment she feels toward her child, sometimes crossing into violent territory. Sam, a serial cheater and bitter misogynist, hides the real reason they had to…

‘MAKING YENTL WAS LIKE A PARALLEL STORY; A WOMAN IN A MAN’S WORLD ... DIRECTING WAS A MALE JOB’ Six of your musical specials and a new cut of A Star Is Born just started streaming on Netflix. What does the newest special, Barbra: The Music . . . The Mem’ries . . . The Magic!, say about where you are now? It’s looking back and trying also to do new things. There’s lots of new things in me—specials, new songs I’ve never performed live. I can’t see myself doing any more concerts, but you never know. Why not? Because it’s tough. When you record, you stand in the booth with headphones, and I have never gotten used to the things…