"If something of such horror is revealed and you're still benefiting from the proceeds, you cannot turn your head and say, 'Well, what has that to do with me?'" says Esther Phillips, Barbados' first poet laureate. In TIME's new cover story, we go inside Barbados' historic push for slavery reparations. This year's demand for reparations—which will call for a Marshall Plan–like public investment, not the individual payments that have dominated the conversation elsewhere—will arrive with force. Letters are expected to say the time has come to negotiate reparations to improve infrastructure and human conditions in the Caribbean. Come to the table, they will say, or prepare to see much of the Caribbean in international court. "I have my doubts, to be honest, that England will ever pay a thing," says Kyle Blackmen, 30, who manages workers near Drax Hall—a Barbados plantation which now belongs to Richard Drax, a Conservative member of the British Parliament. Read the cover story at the link in bio. Photograph by Christopher Gregory-Rivera (@cgregoryphoto) for TIME.

Life in plastic, it's fantastic! All the Barbie girls — Margot Robbie, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, plus director Greta Gerwig — take us inside the most anticipated movie of the summer. Take a trip to Barbie Land at the link in bio. Photograph by Carlota Guerrero (@carlota_guerrero) for TIME

TIME is reporting stories about heat and labor in the U.S., and we want to hear from you. Send us a voice mail, a short note, a picture, or a video clip about what it’s like to work through a heat wave and how you’re staying safe at the link in bio.

The average person in the U.S. spends 90% of their time inside, meaning indoor air quality can have a significant impact on overall health and well-being. But many people overlook one common contributor to indoor air quality: air conditioning, which the vast majority of U.S. homes use in some form. Air conditioners can enhance air quality by regulating temperature, reducing humidity levels, and improving filtration. On the flip side, a dirty system can degrade air quality. At the link in bio, learn how to avoid AC-related health risks and improve the quality of the air you breathe.

Lifeguards are using drones to spot sharks

Hong Kong’s leader said Tuesday that a group of exiled pro-democracy activists will be “pursued for life.” Here, the exiled activists react to their million-dollar bounties.

The last time the Earth was hotter than it is today was at least 125,000 years ago, long before anything that resembled human civilization appeared. Since 1970, the Earth’s temperature has spiked faster than in any comparable forty-year period in recorded history. The eight years between 2015 and 2022 were the hottest on record. In 2022, 850 million people lived in regions that experienced all-time high temperatures. Globally, killer heat waves are becoming longer, hotter, and more frequent. One study found that a heat wave like the one that cooked the Pacific Northwest in 2021 is 150 times more likely today than it was before we began the atmosphere with CO2 at the beginning of the industrial age. At the link in bio, read an excerpt from Jeff Goodell's upcoming book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

Esther Phillips is Barbados' first poet laureate. For years, she dismissed reparations as radical—but now she's an unwavering supporter. When we reach the dirt road leading to Drax Hall plantation, writes Janell Ross in TIME's most recent cover story, Phillips suggests we stop the car. She gets out and draws in a deep breath. Drax Hall, a Barbados sugar plantation, was the site of untold horrors. It now belongs to Richard Drax, a Conservative member of the British Parliament. In July 2021, Phillips published an open letter in Barbados Today under the headline pay up, mr. drax. Phillips had read an article in which Richard Drax said slavery was regrettable but he didn't see himself as culpable. "This man has profited and still profits by the largesse, the wealth, all that was poured out for him through the sacrifice of my ancestors. And the only thing he can find to say is it is 'regrettable'?" Phillips says. "I personally want nothing from Richard Drax. But if I were Richard Drax, I would be so glad to get rid of that [Drax Hall]. I would say let me give it up to show that I have some kind of feeling for the horrors, for the people who were brutalized." Read more on Barbados' fight for reparations at the link in our bio. Photograph by Christopher Gregory-Rivera (@cgregoryphoto) for TIME

These days, UPS driver Barkley Wimpee prepares for his daily route out of Rome, Ga., with the precision of a battlefield commander. He loads up his cooler with ice, and stocks it with sandwiches, a case of water bottles, and a couple of sports drinks. He girds himself with a bandana and some plastic bags: around midday, when the sun is at its height, he will soak the bandana in ice water and wrap it around his head, Rambo style—UPS’s strict appearance rules notwithstanding. Midafternoon, when the day’s accumulated heat blasts out of the back of his non-air conditioned delivery truck like an oven with the door open, he will take off his shoes, slip his feet into the plastic bags and plunge them into the puddling ice of his cooler for a few moments of respite. On really bad days, he will dunk his head in as well. He has surveyed his route’s restaurants, and he already knows which ones will welcome him with a blast of air conditioning and a glass of ice water. Working all day in heat like this, he says from behind the wheel of his truck on a recent 100°F morning, “is physically painful. When your body starts to heat up, you don’t feel right.” As weeks-long, triple-digit heat waves smother the southern U.S. from California to Florida, not feeling right is starting to feel normal for Wimpee, 28. And it’s only going to get worse. “There’s no question that the globe is heating up,” he says. “Summers are getting hotter. Our [work] days are getting longer. I’m thankful that I have a job, but it’s an untenable situation that we’re in right now with the rising heat.” Wimpee is not alone. Across the U.S., UPS drivers are braving one of the most immediate aspects of climate change: longer, more intense heat waves that make working long hours in wheeled ovens not just uncomfortable, but dangerous. What to know about climate change and the looming UPS strike, at the link in bio. Photograph by José Ibarra Rizo (@joseibarrarizo) for TIME

Ukraine is currently in its second month of a long-awaited counteroffensive against Russian forces. But progress, especially in the southern provinces of Zaporizhzia and Donetsk, has been slow. Now, the U.S. is reportedly considering Ukraine’s longstanding appeal for cluster bombs, which could help break Russia’s dug-in positions along the eastern frontline. At the link in bio, what to know about the weapons and the vigorous debate around them. Photograph by Alice Martins (@martinsalicea)—The Washington Post/Getty Images

American beekeepers lost nearly half their managed bee colonies this year, according to an annual bee survey released by the nonprofit research group Bee Informed Partnership on June 22. It’s a staggering blow for an industry that not only provides honey, but vital pollination services for nearly a third of the fruits and vegetables Americans eat, from blueberries to strawberries, peaches, melons and cucumbers. Climate change, pesticide-laden crops, and declining wild plant biodiversity all play a role in honeybee colony death, but the biggest threat is the varroa destructor, an invasive, parasitic mite smaller than a pin head that nonetheless extracts a big toll from the bees it feeds upon. Varroa mites have plagued beekeepers ever since arriving in the U.S. from Asian honeybees in the mid 1980s, but in recent years, commercially available treatments have lost their efficiency, even as the mite’s viral load increases. But a new tool is in the pipeline: Boston-based biotechnology company Greenlight Biosciences has developed an anti-mite RNA treatment for beehives that uses a similar technology to Pfizer’s breakout COVID-19 vaccine. Only in this case the RNA is used to suppress a protein vital to the reproductive system of the varroa mite, instead of creating a dummy protein designed to prime the human immune response. Link in bio for how the tech behind a COVID vaccine is helping save the bees. Photograph by Peter Essick (@peteressick)

King Charles is having a second coronation in Scotland. Find everything you need to know at the link in bio.