Table of contents for April 26, 2021 in TIME Magazine

“THEY WANT US TO BE AFRAID,” Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, says as his plane starts to descend, bringing him home from a trip to the war zone near his country’s border with Russia. He’s referring to the Russian troops who have massed along that border during the past two weeks, forcing the world to guess at the intentions of President Vladimir Putin. Is it a show of force? A sign of an imminent invasion? Or a test of resolve for Ukraine and its allies? Zelensky has his own read on the Russian message. “They want the West to be frightened of Russia’s strength, of her power,” he tells TIME in an interview on April 9. “There’s no big secret here.” That motive might help explain some of Moscow’s…

On an April day in Manhattan, Erin Fox emerged from the giant glass building where she had gotten her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. The Javits Center, home to comic-book confabs and one highly dramatic presidential nonvictory, had become a key hub of a New York City vaccination effort inoculating close to 100,000 people a day. It was now “operational nirvana,” said Fox, a vice president of operations for Kaplan North America, who was in and out with her shot in under half an hour. Walking into the afternoon sun, Fox felt “surprisingly emotional,” almost like “back-to-school jitters.” It was finally warm enough to loosen her jacket. “It’s like the COVID spring,” she says. “It’s poetic that people are getting vaccinated just as spring is coming, and spring is…

In an earlier era, green referred to grass and trees and jealous eyes. But over the past half-century, green has taken on a life of its own. The Green movement deals with the collisions and contagions of the contemporary world—how to view them, and how to cure them. The book from which this essay is excerpted, The Spirit of Green, examines a wide array of social, economic and political questions from a Green vantage point. These questions include established areas such as pollution control and global warming. But they also involve new frontiers such as Green chemistry, taxes, ethics and finance. The example that follows concerns an approach to large corporations, or what is called social responsibility. One of the major developments in corporate management is corporate social responsibility,…

WE HEARD ABOUT THE STORM A WEEK before the rains. Manny figured they wouldn’t be a problem. Jae disagreed. The news called it a minor inconvenience—a flash flood at most—but we’d learned not to lean too deep into forecasts. In the morning, Houston felt sticky. Our heels slapped across the floorboards. We plodded around the house, yawning and stretching and tugging at our boxers. Manny went straight for the vegetable garden, but Jae took his time with breakfast, stirring a pan of eggs, slipping everything inside pieces of toast. Between mouthfuls of sandwich, he swore we’d end up packing everything growing out back anyway—there wasn’t really a point to tending them now. Our state’s seen 11 straight years of record-breaking hurricanes. Houston’s caught like eight of them. And even…

ON MARCH 22, MIDWAY THROUGH A SERIES OF GUEST-hosted shows, Jeopardy! fans revolted. Their target was Dr. Mehmet Oz, the latest celebrity to fill Alex Trebek’s venerable shoes. As viewers fumed on social media, Variety called his appearance a “black eye” on the show and some 600 former contestants signed a letter protesting that he “stands in opposition to everything that Jeopardy! stands for.” Indeed, Oz had been blasted for pushing weight-loss scams, spreading COVID misinformation, and hosting anti-vaxxers and “ex-gays.” That didn’t necessarily disqualify him from a two-week gig reading trivia questions and making small talk. But at a time when the idea of objective facts has been so catastrophically eroded, if you can’t trust the host of Jeopardy!, whom can you trust? AT A TIME WHEN THE IDEA…

‘Sedition came from within and without our one house.’KING ABDULLAH II OF JORDAN, in an April 7 statement responding to reports of an alleged royal coup attempt ‘Even if I have to lose the crown for the values I stand for, I believe I am serving the purpose Mrs. World stands for.’CAROLINE JURIE, Mrs. World 2020, in an April 10 apology video, following an incident at the Mrs. Sri Lanka pageant, where she snatched the crown from the winner, who she claimed had violated rules mandating that contestants be married ‘WHAT MONSTERS MIGHT BE LURKING THERE?’CHRIS POLLY, Fermilab physicist, speaking at an April 7 news conference on experiments with magnetic fields that suggest the tiny particles known as muons do not always obey known laws of physics, a discovery scientists…

Prince Philip The Queen’s man UNTIL HER FATHER’S HEALTH BEGAN deteriorating, the couple could have been mistaken for any other happy young husband and wife. She had been just 13 when they met. He was the striking, handsome 18-year-old guide who took her and her sister on a tour of his naval college. During the war, when he was on a battleship in the Mediterranean, she kept his photograph on her dressing table, even though her father didn’t quite approve. They had a spectacular wedding, and had had two children by the time they were traveling in Africa and got the news: her father, King George VI, had died. At age 25, she had succeeded to the British throne as Elizabeth II. Everything also changed for her husband. A man…

IN RECENT WEEKS, Molotov cocktails, bricks and bottles have met barricades and water cannons as towns and cities in Northern Ireland faced some of their worst rioting in years. Mobs made up mainly of teenagers from both loyalist and republican neighborhoods have clashed with police, who struggled to keep both sides apart at a “peace line” in Belfast. The anger in Northern Ireland has many sources. Loyalists, who want to remain part of the U.K., want to know why, in a time of COVID restrictions, authorities pursued no prosecutions after crowds defied lockdown rules to gather for the recent funeral of a prominent member of the Irish Republican Army. A police crackdown on criminal gangs in loyalist neighborhoods has also pushed defiant young people into the streets. No border…

When he was a child, James Owuor loved hearing the elders talk about the way life used to be. So it comes as something of a surprise that at 38, he is now the one tasked with the job of describing the Before Times in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Before Lake Baringo started to rise, before it flooded and stole everything he knew. “At the beginning, we just thought it was a bad rainy season, that the water would recede when the dry season came. It didn’t,” he says ruefully, peering over the edge of his motorized canoe at what used to be houses below the milky brown waters. Over the past decade, an unprecedented increase in annual rainfall—widely attributed to climate change—has raised the lake by 40 ft. (12 m),…

1171 SHOREHAM LOOKS much like it did when Anna Zimmerman lived there: modest but presentable. A good starter home for Zimmerman and her husband when they bought it in 2005, for a while it provided an idyllic existence in suburban Charleston, S.C., a community of friendly neighbors for their young child, a quaint backyard and even space for Zimmerman’s mother-in-law. Then, in 2015, the first flood hit, taking most of their property with it after a heavy rain. This came as a shock; no flood risk had been disclosed when Zimmerman bought the house. But, determined to turn lemons into lemonade, she used the insurance money to fix it up just as she liked. “I would have been happy living in this house into retirement,” she says now, looking up…

FOR 365 DAYS AND COUNTING, SOPHIE Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern, better known as the Grammy-nominated electronic act Sofi Tukker, stuck to a routine. At 1 p.m., they suit up—sometimes in sweatpants, sometimes in tropical-print shirts and funky robes—and descend to the living room of their Miami home; flick on the cameras for their livestreams to Instagram, Facebook and Twitch; and begin playing a DJ set. The livestream sessions average thousands of viewers. There’s an always-on Zoom room where their fans, who call themselves the Freak Fam, congregate. Viewers have met up, started dating, worked through health crises together, gotten married. Carly Reeves, a 20-year-old college student in Florida, made new best friends in the Zoom room: in Paris, in Costa Rica, in Italy. She started tuning in to the…

ACTIVIST HONORED Civil rights activist Viola Desmond, arrested for refusing to leave the whites-only section of a Canada theater in 1946, was chosen for the country’s $10 bill in 2018—the first Canadian woman to appear on currency. BILL REVERSED After Saddam Hussein’s ouster in 2003, Iraq’s leaders removed his image from currency and instead issued 25,000-dinar bills picturing a Kurdish farmer to represent the people Hussein had oppressed. NUN CHECKED Since 1978, 17th century nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose feminist views caused controversy in her lifetime, has been featured on several Mexican banknotes. Her poem “Foolish Men” has also appeared on the 200-peso note.…

IT’S BECOME AN AMERICAN routine: a sudden death followed by public displays of grief and protest, and a sorting of two distant camps. Some will call the death an egregious, extrajudicial killing statistically unlikely to be redressed; to others, almost without exception, it is justifiable homicide. The machinery of justice is once again asked how to respond when police officers end civilian lives—a disproportionate share of which are Black. But this week in metro Minneapolis, a rare police trial connected to one Black man’s death could not conclude before another died. In Brooklyn Center, a diverse bedroom community of around 31,000 about 10 miles north of Minneapolis, the April 11 shooting of Daunte Wright, 20, by Kim Potter, a white police officer who has since resigned, has set off…

Amid the worst public-health crisis in our lifetime, President Biden has signed the largest investment in national service in decades. The American Rescue Plan includes $1 billion for national service. That is a significant step, but it isn’t enough to achieve a long-term recovery for our economy or our democracy. Biden has a chance to make national service the cornerstone of his legacy. National service can provide economic opportunity while preserving the planet, creating a more informed public that rejects misinformation and demagoguery, and strengthening the cohesion of the American citizenry. And people who serve advance professionally. As I learned in my 34 years in the U.S. Army, service teaches you to focus more on the things you have in common with others and less on the differences. A…

IF YOU’VE BEEN VACCINATED FOR COVID-19, chances are pretty high that you’re benefiting from a product made by BioNTech. The German biotech company, co-founded by a husband-and-wife team of scientists, developed the vaccine that became not only the first to earn authorization in the U.S. for COVID-19 in December but also the first ever based on a new technology involving the genetic material mRNA. In interviews in December and March, co-founders Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci spoke about their whirlwind year and their partnership with U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer to test and manufacture the vaccine. Over three days in late March, they also opened up their new manufacturing plant to TIME for the first step-by-step look at how their lifesaving, and potentially pandemic-ending, vaccine is made. When Sahin read a…

The climate crisis, like the pandemic, is amplifying existing racial and gender injustices in our society. TIME editors Naina Bajekal and Elijah Wolfson moderated a conversation with two women working to create a more inclusive climate leadership space: U.S. author and strategist Katharine Wilkinson, and Colombian activist Maria Alejandra Escalante. TIME: Women are more likely to work in the industries impacted by the pandemic—70% of the health workforce is female; over 70% of global caregiving hours are given by women and girls. How should we address similar disparities in the climate crisis? ESCALANTE: The climate crisis is already generating disparities. For example, when extended droughts happen, women, especially young women, in rural areas—who are usually the main caretakers of the home—must fetch water from farther away, which affects their overall…

SHARON STONE WANTS YOU TO KNOW THAT she’s a survivor. And it would be easy to assume that her new memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, draws its title from its opening passage—which describes her 2001 hospitalization after suffering a brain hemorrhage and stroke that left her with a 1% chance of survival. But the book contains an entire lifetime marked by beating the odds. Stone details miraculously surviving near-decapitation, being struck by lightning and walking away from her totaled car after skidding on black ice. The most compelling passages, however, are the clear-eyed, and at times brutally honest, recollections of how she’s persevered in the wake of trauma inflicted not by nature or accident but by other people, ranging from the physical and sexual abuse she experienced as…