Table of contents for February 26, 2018 in TIME Magazine

USING THE HASHTAG #MOSQUEMETOO, Muslim women have begun to speak up online about sexual abuse experienced while on the hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, and in other religious spaces like mosques. Here’s more. THE SPARK An unidentified Pakistani woman took to Facebook in February to write about the repeated sexual harassment she encountered while on the hajj in Mecca. A mandatory religious obligation for Muslims, the hajj is a five-day pilgrimage undertaken by about 2 million Muslims each year. The woman subsequently deleted her post, but it encouraged women across the world to share their own stories on social-media platforms. THE HASHTAG As women’s accounts of being poked, pinched, groped and in other ways sexually violated on the hajj began to snowball, social-media users converged with the…

IT’S THE BEGINNING OF THE END IN SOUTH Africa. Or the end of the beginning. Either way, scandal-plagued President Jacob Zuma is on his way out after eight years in power. After he resigned on Feb. 14 amid attempts by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party to dislodge him, one thing is clear: South Africa is ready to turn the page. And given how abysmally run the country has been over much of the past decade, that’s unqualified good news. Compared with other countries whose economies are fueled by entrenched patronage networks, South Africa is much more pluralistic. Information about corruption at the top political levels is readily available, so few South Africans will be unaware that Zuma still faces 783 corruption, fraud, racketeering and money-laundering charges relating…

‘If someone finds the strength and courage to come forward, he or she is to be believed.’ RECENTLY, A FRIEND AND I WATCHED AS THE PRESIDENT OF the United States sat in the Oval Office and praised the work of my ex-husband, Rob Porter, and wished him future success. I can’t say I was surprised. But when Donald Trump repeated twice that Rob had declared his innocence, I was floored. What was his intent in emphasizing that point? My friend turned to me and said, “The President of the United States just called you a liar.” Yes. And so he did. The next morning, following the overnight resignation of another White House staffer who claimed he was innocent after his ex-wife came forward with her story of abuse, the…

Our average lifespan of three score and 11 years finds humanity somewhere in the middle of animal-kingdom longevity. From an insect that lives for minutes to a jellyfish that ages in reverse, here are lifespan outliers from the land and sea. OLD AND WISE QUAHOG CLAM While these plankton eating mollusks, which are found in the Atlantic off North America and Europe, often live for about two centuries; one, named Ming, lasted a mind-bending 500 years (an eternity if you’re buried under sand at the bottom of the sea). Like a tree, growth rings provide scientists with clues about the creature’s age—and the ocean conditions and climate in which it lived. RED SEA URCHIN These spindly sea creatures, which can live to be at least 200 years old, are…

AT 28, ADAM RIPPON IS RELAtively mature for a first-time Olympian. But perhaps the world stage wasn’t quite ready for him until now. Rippon tried and failed to get there in 2014. But the first openly gay U.S. Olympic figure skater seized the moment during his long-awaited debut under the rings. As part of the Feb. 11 team event, in which the U.S. took bronze, Rippon executed his jumps with willowy delicateness rather than brusque showmanship. In interviews and on social media, he was irrepressible, calling himself “a glamazon bitch ready for the runway” as he prepared for his solo routine. It all added up to a new kind of Olympic hero: softer, quirkier and, yes, gayer. Along with freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy, the first two openly gay Winter…

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THERE MAY BE NO GREATER ACT OF obsessive movie love than making a stop motion animated film, and Nick Park, director of the marvelous Wallace and Gromit films and a co-director of the flying-the-coop coup Chicken Run, has given us some of the best. The expressiveness of his characters—poultry suffering from existential anxiety, cranky dogs passing silent judgment on the idiocy of humankind— speaks volumes about the human condition, though always with a wink. Park’s latest, Early Man, isn’t always as mischievously delightful as those earlier films, but its breezy, generous spirit counts for plenty. Eddie Redmayne is the voice of Dug, a goofy kid from Stone Age England who helps his small, bumbling tribe fend off the nakedly colonialist Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston), a snooty French Bronze Age…

ON NBC’S GOOD GIRLS, THREE suburban moms (played by Christina Hendricks, Retta and Mae Whitman) charge into a grocery store, toy guns blazing, faces covered in ski masks that resemble the iconic Pussy Riot headwear. They’re broke, dismissed by the men in their lives, and want to seize back their power. Chaos ensues. For years, shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos featured male antiheroes who found strength in criminality. But these women are exposed to different kinds of risk. After all, Walter White never had to worry that an enemy might rape him. As Margaret Atwood once said, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Good Girls, a drama with plenty of laughs, is unflinching in how it…

TIME FIRST WROTE ABOUT LORENA HICKOK (“Hick” to her friends) in 1934: “She is a rotund lady with a husky voice, a peremptory manner, baggy clothes. In her day one of the country’s best female newshawks, she was assigned to Albany to cover the New York Executive Mansion where she became fast friends with Mrs. Roosevelt.” Imagine reading that description of yourself—and imagine seeing your lover described as your “fast friend.” Hard knocks for Hick. Amy Bloom has done just that kind of imagining in White Houses, creating a novel out of the longstanding affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and Hickok, which was an open secret inside the White House (as was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s affair with his secretary Missy LeHand). Historians have debated the nature of their relationship, but…

BLACK PANTHER Jamil Smith’s Feb. 19 cover story on the movie Black Panther as an exploration of black identity won cheers from celebrities such as filmmaker Ava DuVernay and This Is Us actor Susan Kelechi Watson, who tweeted that it was “Black History in the making.” Facebook user Phillip Schulz expressed appreciation for the chance to discuss representation in a “more positive” way. “Some of what this article says is hard for me to swallow,” wrote @ClairePiquette on Twitter, “but that’s okay.” However, Karen Raskin-Young of Flagstaff, Ariz., took issue with Smith’s idea that white Americans “again have a President” in Donald Trump. “I AM white,” she wrote, “and MY President was Barack Obama.” ‘I’m going to need this TIME cover in my classroom.’BERNADETTE BACERO, teacher, Dearborn, Mich.…

Russian plane crashes A Russian airliner carrying 71 people crashed 25 miles from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, killing all on board. Snow had been falling at the time of the crash, and questions have been raised over whether the plane had been thoroughly de-iced. Yosemite’s famous ‘firefall’ runs dry The “firefall” that appears when a waterfall at El Capitan in Yosemite National Park glows orange at sunset each February typically attracts thousands of spectators, but it likely won’t occur this year. Park officials said the waterfall had run dry following California’s drought. Oxfam deputy chief resigns Oxfam’s deputy chief, Penny Lawrence, has resigned as the British charity faces a scandal over its response to sexual-misconduct allegations involving workers who were stationed in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. Peter Rabbit film…

EVERY FEBRUARY, THE NATION’S TOP INTELLIGENCE officials appear in public on Capitol Hill to brief Americans on the biggest global threats facing the country. This year their testimony hit closer to home: two miles down Pennsylvania Avenue in the West Wing of the White House. Nearly 13 months into Donald Trump’s presidency, dozens of his advisers reportedly still hold only temporary security clearances. At least two of the most senior aides have had access to the nation’s highest secrets, including Rob Porter, who resigned on Feb. 7 amid allegations of domestic abuse, which he denies. That, says Trump’s own intelligence chief, is a problem. “The system is broken,” declared Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, during congressional testimony on Feb. 13. For people working in the government on interim…

A member of the Russian parliament has proposed that the street on which the U.S. embassy in Moscow sits be renamed “North American Dead End.” It’s not the only example of “street-name diplomacy” rankling governments around the world. U.S. The Russian proposal was a direct response to Washington authorities, who last year voted to rename a strip of Wisconsin Avenue so that the Russian embassy is now at 1 Boris Nemtsov Plaza—a tribute to a fervent critic of President Vladimir Putin’s who was shot dead in Moscow in 2015. TURKEY City authorities in Ankara have proposed changing the name of the street where the U.S. embassy sits to “Olive Branch.” Although it sounds like a peaceful gesture, that’s the name of a military operation against Kurdish militia in Syria…

THE “LIKE” BUTTON has been a Facebook mainstay for as long as many of the network’s 2.13 billion monthly users can remember. Now the social-media giant has started testing, on select public pages for a small set of U.S. Android users, a “downvote” feature. This is not the fabled “dislike” button the company was once rumored to have been developing, though Facebook has recently taken other steps—like the introduction of a range of reactions, from “angry” to “love”— to acknowledge the complexity of social-media interactions. Rather, it’s a new way to provide Facebook with feedback about comments that are inappropriate, misleading or uncivil. The downvoting system being tested could make it easier to report spam and cyberbullying, potentially marking an important step for Facebook as it continues to crack…

MAYFLY Across the board, insects tend to live far shorter lives than other members of the animal kingdom. But female Dolania americana mayflies take the cake: they typically go through their entire life cycle in less than five minutes—and somehow manage to find a mate, consummate the relationship and lay eggs during that time. Talk about moving fast. GALL MIDGE Every day is judgment day for this family of flies. The Rhopalomyia gall midge emerges fully grown in the morning and perishes by that afternoon. So short is their adult lifespan, in fact, that the bugs don’t even eat a first—let alone a last—supper. LABORD’S CHAMELEON This type of chameleon is the living embodiment of arrested development. The reptiles spend eight to nine months incubating in eggs, then live…

Maybe it’s the sizzling chemistry or the cozy choreography, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that more than a few of the figure-skating and ice-dancing pairs in PyeongChang are couples who share a connection both on and off the ice. Some are current partners, others have broken it off, and one pair is together off the ice—but not on it. Alexa Scimeca Knierim (26) and Chris Knierim (30), USA The Knierims are the first married couple to compete as a pairs team for the U.S. in 20 years, following Jenni Meno and Todd Sand in 1998. The couple have skated together since 2012; they made the ultimate commitment off the ice when they tied the knot in 2016 in a ceremony officiated by their coach Dalilah Sappenfield. Madison…

NATALIE PORTMAN’S NEW MOVIE WAS SHOT NEARLY two years ago, but it couldn’t be coming out at a better time. “It’s this very simple but radical thing: five female central roles,” she says. “It should be totally normal. But it’s actually completely remarkable.” The film is Annihilation, an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 sci-fi novel by the same name, the first in his best-selling Southern Reach trilogy. In the film, biologist Lena (Portman) is troubled when her husband (Oscar Isaac) returns from a top secret mission not quite himself. Lena travels into the same territory her husband somehow survived—a contaminated zone known as Area X that’s surrounded by a mysterious haze—with a group of fellow female scientists, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez and Tuva Novotny.…

ANIMATION FOR ADULTS Founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who began working in animation as teens, started their careers with children’s TV programs in the 1970s. But it was Creature Comforts (1989), a short film for adults, that won them an Oscar by putting real, human conversations into the mouths of Plasticine animals. AN OSCAR-WINNING DUO Animator Nick Park joined in 1985, bringing his graduate film project featuring Wallace and Gromit, the now iconic clay duo of an eccentric inventor and his canine pal. Gromit began as a cat, until Park realized that dogs were simpler to animate. The pair starred in four shorts and a 2005 Oscar-winning feature. BOX OFFICE BONANZA Aardman’s first full-length feature, the comedy Chicken Run, was released in 2000 in partnership with DreamWorks. A…

THE FIRST TIME I LEFT BERLIN I WAS A VERY SMALL GERman person with an American mother, a German father and a very odd accent in English. I sounded like I’d been raised by 19th century nuns, or Jackie Kennedy. (This is what happens when you learn a language in a vacuum.) After a year of American kindergarten, I didn’t remember much about Germany except for the pink marzipan piglets they sold in pastry shops and my babysitter Gerde. She was a capacious woman whom you could hide behind or burrow into. Gerde spoiled me, and I adored her. She spoke in Berliner slang, and her cheek was pitted with bits of glass from the war. Some of her family ended up on the east side of the Wall.…

‘HE WANTS JUSTICE ONLY WHEN IT’S IN HIS FAVOR.’ EMMA ARBUTHNOT, judge, upholding the U.K. arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012 to avoid prosecution for publishing classified U.S. documents $5 million Amount that a Maine dairy company will pay its drivers after a judge ruled that the lack of one Oxford comma in a list of tasks legally exempt from overtime pay meant their work wasn’t covered by the law 8 hr. 7 min. Length of the address with which U.S. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi set a new record for longest continuous speech in the chamber, per the Office of the Historian ‘They should get back to baby pictures.’ SUSAN WOJCICKI, YouTube CEO, reacting to…

The European Parliament called for an investigation into daylight saving time on health grounds on Feb. 8, following other legislatures scrutinizing the practice of changing clocks every year. Here’s more. THE EUROPEAN CASE Critics of moving clocks an hour forward every summer say it disrupts human biorhythms. Supporters say the practice has benefits, like preventing traffic accidents, and a 2014 study found that the overwhelming majority of E.U. member states were happy with it. THE AMERICAN CASE In the U.S., states that wish to end daylight saving time must petition Congress, as Arizona did in 1968. But some states want DST to last all year; California and Florida are either considering or pushing bills that would move the clocks an hour forward permanently. THE RUSSIAN CASE Russia switched to…

Charges suggested for Netanyahu Israeli police have recommended that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be charged with “bribery, fraud and breach of trust” in two cases, one involving the receipt of gifts and the other an alleged mutual agreement with the publisher of Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot. School shooting in Florida A gunman opened fire on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., causing multiple fatalities, according to local officials. By late in the day, a suspect was in custody. Already in 2018, there have been more than a dozen school shootings in the U.S. Vanessa Trump taken to hospital Vanessa Trump was brought to a New York City hospital as a precaution after she opened an envelope addressed to her husband Donald Trump Jr. that…

DIED Leading Pakistani human-rights activist and lawyer Asma Jahangir, who chaired her country’s Human Rights Commission, at 66. > Baseball player Wally Moon, the outfielder whose “moon shot” home runs helped the Dodgers win the 1959 World Series, at 87. > Postwar American crooner Vic Damone, who sang the title track for An Affair to Remember (1957) starring Cary Grant, at 89. SUED Harvey Weinstein and his company, by the state of New York, over allegations of not protecting workers from “pervasive sexual harassment, intimidation and discrimination.” ANNOUNCED The introduction of long-awaited redhead emoji, by the Unicode Consortium. Its new batch of 157 images, which also includes curly-haired characters, will be released in June. AWARDED $6.7 million, by a federal judge, to 21 graffiti artists whose works at the…

CARTER G. WOODSON, THE black historian and creator of Negro History Week in 1926, wrote: “If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world.” That is, no amount of legislation can grant you equality if a nation doesn’t value you. It’s not that policy doesn’t matter. But lost amid today’s facile depictions of Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad or George Washington Carver’s peanuts is black America’s claim as co-authors of the United States, a version of history the nation has never accepted. Indeed, policy is needed, but the politics of black history tells us that ain’t enough. Nearly five times as many white Americans as black ones say the U.S. has made the changes necessary to…

Old age demands to be taken very seriously—and it usually gets its way. It’s hard to be cavalier about a time of life defined by loss of vigor, increasing frailty, rising disease risk and falling cognitive faculties. Then there’s the unavoidable matter of the end of consciousness and the self—death, in other words—that’s drawing closer and closer. It’s the rare person who can confront the final decline with flippancy or ease. That, as it turns out, might be our first mistake. Humans are not alone in facing the ultimate reckoning, but we’re the only species—as far as we know—who spends its whole life knowing death is coming. A clam dredged from the ocean off Iceland in 2006—and inadvertently killed by the scientists who discovered it—carried growth lines on its…

Getting four Oscar nominations is a big deal. You’re only the fifth black director to be nominated in 90 years of academy history, and for a social thriller about race. How have you processed all of this? I’m trying. The only thing that makes it make sense is the realization that it’s bigger than me. I’m inspired by the wonderful black directors that have come before me and realize that I can pay it forward. I am also proud to be a part of this renaissance happening in Hollywood. There used to be the view that black films couldn’t sell overseas. Straight Outta Compton proved them wrong. It just feels great to be part of this moment in which directors who come from groups that have been marginalized by…

MARVEL SUPERHERO MOVIES ARE NO LONGER just a single entertainment option among many; they’re a man-made force of nature. The only thing wrong with Ryan Coogler’s stirring, imaginative Black Panther is that it’s required to fit into the superhero-movie mold at all. The whole thing moves a little too fast. There are so many gorgeous details—from Ruth E. Carter’s Afro-futuristic costumes to Hannah Beachler’s Emerald City-ago- go production design—that you might wish you could linger on certain images a bit longer. But Black Panther, smart, lavish and fun without being assaultive, is still a cut above—no, make that several cuts above—any other recent superhero movie. The picture has a social conscience, speaking out plainly about the moral obligations of powerful countries, including sheltering refugees, sharing technology and science, and…

‘The culture was very much about authenticity. Today [Facebook is] a very different network. They’ve got all kinds of problems with bots and impersonation.’ In Fair Shot, you propose that we give every working adult whose family makes less than $50,000 an extra $500 a month, paid for by taxing the richest 1%. Will other rich people get on board? Over the long term, the most powerful thing to spur economic growth is to increase consumer spending. If you give $100 to somebody struggling to make ends meet, they’ll spend it on housing, health care, education, whatever they need. If you give $100 to a wealthy person—and I am part of that 1%—the vast majority of it is going to the bank and not the productive economy. If working…