COVER STORY this issue: Nation Divided. The midterms delivered a split decision that primes both parties for battle. By the time Nancy Pelosi took the stage at the Hyatt Regency in Washington on Election Day, it was nearly midnight and the panic had passed. After an evening of equivocal results and occasional heartbreak, the House Democratic leader was there to assure the cheering crowd that their party had won, and she was the proof: Democrats, she said, “have taken back the House for the American people!” The message was met with relief more than triumph. Democrats had hoped…  To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

President-elect Bolsonaro swept in from the far right. The din in Brazil’s lower House of Congress was so loud the seven-term Congressman running for Speaker could barely be heard. His collegaues paid little attention, many speaking over him. Unperturbed, Jair Meddias Bolsonaro forged on, waving a newspaper as he railed against his ineffective contemporaries. The former army captain, the 62, won just four of the 504 votes that day in February 2017, a result that seemed to confirm his irrelevance in Brazilian politics. Yet an aide was streaming his diatribe live on…

New discoveries are mobilizing the immune system in the fight against breast cancer. As a pharmacist, Kathy James considers herself well educated about the importance of getting regular cancer screenings. Even though the 55-year-old had no history of cancer in her family, she never skipped her regular mammograms, and she gave herself regular breast exams. So she was dumbfounded when, during one of those self-exams in May 2017, she felt a marble-size lump in her left breast. A visit to…