COVER STORY This issue: President Lee Jae-Myung on his plan to kick-start his nation’s economy—and court Donald Trump. It was not how Lee Jae-Myung envisioned his first day on the job. Following his election as South Korea’s President on June 3, Lee’s staff arrived at their new offices in central Seoul the next morning to find rooms strewn with trash and desks equipped with monitors but bereft of computers, which had all been piled in a corner. It was a struggle to get doors unlocked and find even basic stationery…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Once an auto underdog, China’s electric-vehicle boom now powers it tech rise. At Nio’s design workshop in surburban Shanghai, engineers spread billets of clay onto an aluminum frame of a basic car. A robotic arm with a mechanized drill bit then carves a series of grooves into the clay corresponding to a designer’s sketch. The rough surface is then painstakingly smoothed with palette knives before aluminum foil is pasted on top. Finally, the sleek looking metaliic model is rolled into a sunlit courtyard where every curve and camber is scrutinized…

The enhanced games aims to be the alternative Olympics—a multisport competition without the drug testing. When Kristian Gkolomeev woke up one morning in February, the last thing he expected to do was to break a world record in the pool. The Greek swimmer and four-time Olympian, who finished fifth in the 50-m freestyle in Paris and Tokyo, had gone to Greensboro, N.C., to take part in the preview of something called The Enhanced Games, a new start-up that plans to stage an Olympic-style competition…