Table of contents for January 15, 2018 in TIME Magazine

ITALY’S PRESIDENT SERGIO Mattarella dissolved the Parliament on Dec. 28 ahead of a March 4 general election. No party is projected to win a majority, leaving the key players in search of a coalition to run the euro zone’s third largest economy. Here are the front runners: FIVE STAR MOVEMENT The Euroskeptic, antiestablishment party, led by Luigi DiMaio, tops the polls with close to 30% of the vote. Founded in 2009 by comedian Beppe Grillo, the party promises to clean up corruption in Italian politics. Until now, it has refused to form alliances with the mainstream parties. DEMOCRATIC PARTY The ruling Democratic Party, of which current Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni is a member, is second in the polls, with about 23% of the vote. Internal splits and a banking scandal…

THE LAW The new rules stipulate that all companies and government agencies employing at least 25 people will have to obtain government certification of their equalpay policies. Employers will face fines if they are found to be in violation. The current gender pay gap in Iceland is about 14% to 18%; the government reportedly plans to eradicate it by 2022. THE CULTURE The small island nation has been ranked as the globe’s most gender-equal country by the World Economic Forum for nine years in a row. Nearly half of Iceland’s parliamentarians are women, and the country has had a female President for 20 of the last 50 years. As of 2015, 44% of boardroom executives in Iceland were female, compared with an OECD average of 20%. THE REST OF THE…

DIED Thomas Monson, the 16th leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at 90. Monson, who assumed the role in 2008, was credited with a surge in Mormon missionaries after lowering the age limits for service. > U.S. crime writer Sue Grafton, the author behind the alphabetically titled murdermystery series about private investigator Kinsey Millhone, at 77. APPOINTED Tina Smith as Minnesota Senator, replacing Al Franken, who resigned over sexualharassment claims. She is the 22nd woman to serve in the current U.S. Senate, a record. OPENED California’s first retail cannabis stores, on Jan. 1, two decades after the state became the first to allow medicinal marijuana. SUED Music-streaming service Spotify for $1.6 billion, by Wixen Music Publishing on behalf of artists including the Beach Boys and Neil…

ACCORDING TO BOTH THE AVIATION SAFETY NETWORK (ASN) AND Dutch aviation consulting firm To70, 2017 was the safest year ever in commercial airline travel. There were zero commercial passengerjet deaths last year worldwide; 79 people died in airliner accidents (combining fatalities onboard and on the ground, of both cargo planes as well as scheduled and non-scheduled passenger planes). Twelve of the 44 onboard fatalities were from a Dec. 31 crash in Costa Rica; 10 of the deceased were Americans. In a Jan. 2 tweet, President Trump claimed credit for the superlative year, citing his “strict” policies on commercial aviation. While the last person to die in a commercial jet accident was in 2016 in Colombia, there have been no such deaths in the U.S. since 2013, and airliner accidents have…

THIRTY YEARS AGO, 1 IN 5 CHILDREN IN Ethiopia didn’t live to their fifth birthdays. The government, struck by those dire prospects, made a long-term commitment to improve health care and increase the number of providers throughout the country. Ethiopia wrestled down its mortality rates for children under five by two-thirds from 1990 to 2012—an impressive feat for a low-income nation. That’s the year our cover subject, Mohamad, was born. Toiba, Samredin, Munira, Toiba and Hanan—pictured at right—were born in 2012 too. And Faruk was born at the end of 2011. Their faces are a reminder of how their fates, and the world’s, have changed. And Ethiopia is not the only country where such progress is quantifiable. Around the globe, child mortality rates are falling, and millions of children have…

ST. STEPHEN’S HOSPITAL IN NEW DELHI Decades ago, Dr. Mathew Varghese went from house to house in northern India to study victims of polio. He saw people who could only crawl. He learned to ask questions they didn’t teach in medical school: What is your social class? Are you able to attend school? His findings came with a lesson: “What you see in the hospital is only part of the story.” Today Varghese, an orthopedic surgeon, runs India’s last polio ward, at St. Stephen’s Hospital in New Delhi. In 1990, the city saw 3,000 new paralytic cases of polio; since January 2011, India has seen zero new cases, but for the victims, polio is forever. Doctors like Varghese are assisting with therapy, surgery and more. That work, he says, “is…

WASHINGTON STATE 2017 TEACHER OF THE YEAR At Pioneer Elementary, a K-3 school in Quincy, Wash., a rural district 150 miles from Seattle, all 450 students visit Jones every other week for classes in what she calls STEAM. It’s a play on STEM—which stands for science, technology, engineering and math—but with an A thrown in, for the arts. “The process that an engineer goes through is the exact same process that a writer uses,” she says. “You start with an idea and you develop a plan, and then you go back and revise it. They have the same core goal, which is preparing kids to be successful in the world.” Jones, 31, says she and her colleagues are attuned to the idea of being inclusive. Her students are mostly poor…

ICIPE IN NAIROBI Segenet Kelemu has always been a discoverer. As a scientist, she would achieve breakthroughs— “Crack the constraints,” as she puts it—and feel euphoric. But she came to a realization: “So you do research, you publish the paper—and then what?” Having constructed an international network of biotechnology laboratories in Africa and now serving as director general of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology—a research facility in Nairobi that solves problems posed by insects to public health— Kelemu ensures that research reaches people. Thanks to improved seed and farming technology, the ICIPE has been able to control grain pests and improve soil, now reaching at least 20,000 Ethiopian farmers. Kelemu, 60, grew up in a small Ethiopian village with only one dress and no shoes to wear.…

EBOLA SURVIVOR/DISEASE FIGHTER In 2014, Dr. Adaora Okoli contracted Ebola while treating the first person with the disease in Nigeria. It wasn’t long after that Okoli began to come down with symptoms, including vomiting and diarrhea. Okoli was quickly moved into a special treatment ward, along with several medical colleagues, some of whom succumbed. “We couldn’t get the experimental therapy, and there was no survivor’s plasma,” she says. “The only thing I knew to do was to talk to God and say, ‘I need you to heal me.’” Okoli also knew she had to stay hydrated and check her pulse. Six days after she entered the ward, she started to improve. One morning, a doctor confirmed she no longer tested positive for Ebola. She cut a red ribbon on her…

TOM HANKS AS BEN BRADLEE The famously charismatic editor, who became a legend for his leadership during Watergate, swaggers again; he was previously portrayed by Jason Robards in All the President’s Men. CARRIE COON AS MEG GREENFIELD Greenfield, who won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1978, was a Graham confidante at a time when women were less common in newsrooms. In The Post, she’s at the center of the action. MERYL STREEP AS KAY GRAHAM Streep is uncommonly shy onscreen as Graham, who is still a fierce advocate for the newspaper. Graham, who took over after her husband’s suicide, had a personal stake in its success.…

The Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad alum, 29, has two big roles this winter: he stars in an episode of the latest season of Black Mirror as a space captain whose sexism makes victims of his whole team and appears opposite Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in Steven Spielberg’s The Post. In Black Mirror, you play a Captain Kirk–like character, except evil. Were you already a sci-fi fan? Not really— my sci-fi was westerns growing up. The most important thing at the core of the scenes in space was tapping back into playing make-believe and using your imagination, like when you were a child. That’s what he was doing, although there’s nothing too childlike about it. The episode has some sharp commentary on toxic masculinity in culture. Did that…

THIS TIME LAST YEAR, MILO YIANNOPOULOS HAD a reported six-figure book deal to air out his controversial far-right views. And then, very publicly, he didn’t. In February, Simon & Schuster canceled Dangerous after Yiannopoulos’ more inflammatory comments—including one in which he appeared to defend pedophilia—pushed over the edge a public that had already been agitating. Ten months later, he has sued his publisher—and found himself surrounded by new pariahs. Yiannopoulos is part of a trend of writers being scrapped by their publishers over matters of personal accountability. In October, Hachette announced that it would discontinue its Weinstein Books imprint, absorbing the titles published by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein into another imprint. The same month, Penguin Random House canceled Mark Halperin’s book about the 2016 election after allegations of sexual harassment…

A FEW WEEKS AGO, MY ELDEST SON, WHO IS IN HIS FIRST year teaching fourth grade in a public elementary school, decided to put a suggestion box in his classroom, though he wasn’t quite sure what the box would yield. The result was not so much suggestions as appeals for kindness. From “Lots of people don’t mind their own business” to “I am stressed out because everybody keeps arguing about little things,” there was a classwide desire for compassion, if no clear sense of how to get it. As a new teacher, my son is routinely surprised by things his 9-year-old students do, but more than anything he is surprised by how badly they treat one another. The children want to be on the receiving end of kindness but have…

‘I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his.’ DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President, responding to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s claim that he has a nuclear button on his office desk 1,950 Number of false or misleading claims that President Trump has made in 347 days in office $19.6 million Amount of money, in lottery winnings, that could be doled out to South Carolinians after a computer glitch caused store computers to accidentally print too many winning tickets ‘What is Gangster’s Paradise Lost?’ NICK SPICHER, Jeopardy! contestant, mispronouncing rapper Coolio’s similarsounding song “Gangsta’s Paradise,” an error that cost him $3,200 after responding to the clue “A song by Coolio from Dangerous Minds goes back in time to become a 1667…

YouTuber: Sorry for suicide video YouTube star Logan Paul apologized after sparking outrage for posting a video that showed the body of an apparent suicide victim in a Japanese forest at the base of Mount Fuji. Paul told his millions of followers that he had “intended to raise awareness for suicide and suicide prevention.” U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch to retire Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, the longestserving member of the Republican Party in the upper chamber, announced his plan to retire at the end of 2018, paving the way for former presidential contender Mitt Romney to run for the seat. U.S. missile would break Russia treaty The $700 billion defense bill signed by President Trump in December included a $25 million fund to develop a new road-mobile, groundlaunched cruise missile prohibited…

MARKETS ARE SOARING, BUT THERE ARE DEEP DIVISIONS among citizens of both developed and developing countries as we enter 2018. Liberal democracy is leaking legitimacy, and the global order is unraveling. Consequently, this year looks especially ripe for an unexpected crisis: the geopolitical equivalent of the 2008 financial meltdown. The risk of a geopolitical depression—as the U.S.-led order erodes and no other country or set of countries stands ready or interested to rebuild it—forms the backdrop for Eurasia Group’s top 10 risks this year: 1. CHINA RISING At a moment of policy incoherence in Washington, Beijing has redefined China’s external environment, developed the world’s most effective global trade and investment strategy, and used tech companies to advance state interests. The global business environment must adapt to China’s new sets of…

North, South Korea resume contact North Korea’s Kim Jong Un re-established contact with South Korea on a crossborder hotline for the first time in nearly two years. The two nations connected twice on Jan. 3, hinting at a thaw in relations. The reopening of the communication channel, one day after U.S. President Donald Trump challenged Kim over who had the bigger “nuclear button,” raised questions of whether Seoul might part ways with Washington on addressing the North’s nuclear arsenal. Ethiopia to release political prisoners Ethiopian leader Hailemariam Desalegn announced plans to release all political prisoners and close a notorious detention center in what he said was an effort to “widen the democratic space.” The move follows antigovernment protests and criticism by humanrights groups over the stifling of opposition. Trump threatens…

I GREW UP IN SOUTH AFRICA DURING apartheid. Black people lived in separate areas from white people. They had different rules. They were segregated. This was particularly tough for me, because I grew up in a mixed family, with me being the mixed one. My mother is a black woman, Xhosa woman, from South Africa. My father is Swiss from Switzerland and a white man. They got together during apartheid, which was against the law, and they had me. That’s really where our journey began, because we were a family that couldn’t be together. We were a family that was, for all intents and purposes, a crime. Me being born from my mother was me being born a crime. Despite that—or maybe because of that—I grew up surrounded by optimism:…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS ONE OF the hottest, least understood and most debated technological breakthroughs in modern times. In many ways, the magic of AI is that it’s not something you can see or touch. You may not even realize you are using it today. When your Nest thermostat knows how to set the right temperature at home or when your phone automatically corrects your grammar or when a Tesla car navigates a road autonomously— that’s AI at work. For most of our lives, people have had to adapt to technology. To find a file on a computer, we input a command on a keyboard attached to one particular machine. To make a phone call, we tap an assortment of numbers on a keypad. To get a piece of information, we…

PANZI HOSPITAL As founder and lead doctor of the Panzi Foundation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Denis Mukwege treats some of the most vulnerable victims of rampant sexual violence: women who have been raped in front of their husbands, girls who have been assaulted by multiple soldiers, babies as young as 4 months old who have been raped. It’s not a job brimming with optimism. “When I have women coming to my hospital, they are completely destroyed,” he says. “Physically, mentally and economically.” But at Panzi Hospital, one can take heart. The center in Bukavu has treated more than 50,000 survivors of sexual violence and over 37,000 patients with gynecological injuries since 1999. At least 120 sexual-violence survivors seek help there every month. Mukwege, 62, specializes in fistula-repair surgery…

I AM NOT A MASOCHIST, AND CLEARLY as a singer in a rock ’n’ roll band I prefer the roar of the stadium’s affection to the whistles and boos of town-hall politics. But I must say I quite enjoyed the trouble I got into about a year ago when I was the lone man honored as part of Glamour’s Women of the Year awards. My favorite trash-talking tweet came from a woman who said that in my defense, my glasses did make me look like a 75-year-old granny from Miami. Or another who said it was inspiring how I’d overcome “the adversity of being a millionaire white dude.” I was aware and I was glad that I was being offered up as a firestarter for a debate the magazine rightly…

I’VE SEEN UNBELIEVABLE CHANGES during the past 50 or 60 years. When people say, “Nothing has changed,” I feel like saying, “Come and walk in my shoes.” I truly believe that if there is faith and hope and determination, we can continue to lay progress and create an American community at peace with ourselves. The next generation will help us get there. When I was growing up as a child in Alabama, I saw signs all around me—I saw crosses that the Klan had put up, an announcement about a Klan meeting. I saw signs that said WHITE, COLORED, WHITE MEN, COLORED MEN, WHITE WOMEN, COLORED WOMEN. There were places where we couldn’t go. But we brought those signs down. The only place you will see those signs today will…

TIME WAS, DINNER AND A MOVIE WAS A TWO-PART AFFAIR. BUT increasingly, the two have merged into a single experience, allowing moviegoers to save on the babysitting tab and get fries and a beer while they watch the latest superhero blockbuster. Full-service theaters have broken free of hipster meccas like Brooklyn and San Francisco to become a Friday-night pastime as American as, well, going to the movies—before truffled Parmesan flatbread was on the menu. Dine-in cinemas are not altogether new. In the late 1980s, brothers Mike and Brian McMenamin opened one in Portland, Ore. A decade later, inspired by the McMenamins, Tim and Karrie League began pairing trendy beer with cult hits like The Craft at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. But in recent years, the trend has expanded from…

LOVE IT A woman in India practiced yoga for over 103 hours straight to break a Guinness World Record. Music producer DJ Khaled announced that he has signed up for Weight Watchers and was named a social media ambassador for the weight-loss service’s new Freestyle program. The Buffalo Bills qualified for the NFL playoffs for the first time since 1999, ending a 17-year drought. ‘Mama is back in the office.’ ALEXIS OHANIAN, Reddit co-founder and husband to Serena Williams, who shared a photo of the tennis superstar signing autographs at her first match since giving birth to their daughter Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. in September. Jay-Z released a star-studded music video for his song “Family Feud,” directed by Ava DuVernay; the short film featured appearances from wife Beyoncé, Mindy…

An electronic billboard in New York City’s Times Square displays a photograph of women who spoke out against sexual assault and harassment, and were named TIME’s 2017 Person of the Year as the Silence Breakers, on Dec. 31. The image, by photographers Billy & Hells, appeared on the cover of the magazine and was included in the New Year’s Eve festivities as part of a campaign…

Since 1970, the Red Cross and other groups have marked January as National Blood Donor Month in the U.S. to inspire contributions. But the first fix to the dearth of donors looked to a more morbid crowd. During World War I, doctors experimented with connecting a volunteer’s artery to a recipient’s vein, but the Soviet Union was too sprawling to get matches into a room. So it found a different solution. “The first blood bank actually consisted of cadaver blood in Moscow,” says Douglas Starr, author of Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce. In one 1930 case, a surgeon gave blood from a man fatally hit by a bus to a young engineer who had attempted suicide. After reading about such controversial efforts, Chicago doctor Bernard Fantus had…

ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE IS A MOST tragic disease. It robs people of their memories and identities; it steals one’s sense of self. People affected by Alzheimer’s are growing in numbers. Currently, there are more than 5 million people in the U.S. diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. By 2050, that number could nearly triple, to 14 million people. The economic case is equally staggering. The Alzheimer’s Association reports that in 2017 Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias cost the U.S. more than $250 billion in health care and long-term care. The need for a treatment is dire, and in the search for new medicines the rates of success are not high—only about 1% of early scientific discoveries will make it to become a medicine that reaches patients. It is a story that, on its…

ACCORDING TO THE LATEST DATA, people are living longer and becoming healthier, better fed, richer, smarter, safer, more connected—and, at the same time, ever gloomier about the state of the world. As the political scientist John Mueller once summed up the history of the West, “People seem simply to have taken the remarkable economic improvement in stride and have deftly found new concerns to get upset about.” How can we explain pessimism in a world of progress? It’s not that people are naturally glum. On the contrary, they tend to see their lives through rosetinted glasses: they say they are happy, their schools are good, their neighborhoods are safe and that they are less likely than the average person to become the victim of an accident, a disease, a layoff…

GAPMINDER FOUNDATION/DOLLAR STREET As a co-founder and product manager of the Stockholm-based fact tank Gapminder, Anna Rosling Rönnlund’s mission is to show how economics, not geography, dictates lifestyle—and how the world is less divided than we think. Using images of quotidian items like toilets and door locks, Gapminder’s “Dollar Street” interactive shows how most people have similar daily existences, whether they live in China or Chattanooga, Tenn. Take toothbrushes. The poorest people in the world use a twig—or even just a finger and mud—to clean their teeth. But with a small rise in income, a family can afford a shared plastic toothbrush. Another rise, and each family member gets a toothbrush and toothpaste. In the top bracket, electric toothbrushes. Rönnlund, 42, who has a background in photography, says Dollar Street…

IT’S EASY TO SPIN YARNS ABOUT THE NEAR future—until it catches up with you. That’s the problem that Black Mirror, now in its fourth season, faces. The twisty sci-fi anthology series, which first aired in 2011, still tells stories about technology and how it affects relationships. But imaginative, prescient stories are harder to gin up these days. Reality in the late 2010s has been more creative than fiction in devising narrative turns. As for prescience, if many are convinced there’s no future, who cares what that future’s tech looks like? But one episode this season has the imaginative power of Black Mirror at its best. “USS Callister” begins as a 1960s space serial before revealing the captain as an avatar of contemporary male rage, a gamer who uses digital warfare…