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Mun Sung and his wife watched helplessly on March 30 as a man wielding a metal pole smashed through glass, ripped down racks and hurled racial slurs at them inside the Charlotte, N.C. convenience store they’ve owned for two decades.
They knew from following the news that Asian Americans were increasingly being targeted and attacked across the nation. But despite facing racism at work on a daily basis since the pandemic began—even growing hardened to the hatred month after month—Sung could not imagine his family would fall victim to violence.
“I didn’t think it would happen to us,” the 65-year-old says, “but it did.”
On Tuesday, less than two months later, it happened again.
After a male customer grew irate that he could not afford a pack of cigarettes, he repeatedly slammed a sheet of plexiglass with his fists until it shattered, shouting racial slurs as he pummeled the protective barrier, according to Mark Sung, who helps his parents run the store and who shared video of the attack with TIME.
“He said, ‘You Chinese motherf-ckers are 100% going to hell, 100% going to hell,’” says the 35-year-old Sung, whose family is Korean.
Sung says his 63-year-old mother, Joyce, was hit by pieces of plexiglass, which sent her stumbling back. She sustained a bruise on her forehead and a cut on her finger. “It hurts every time I blink my eye,” she says. “I was shocked at first, but I’m fine now.”
The second attack on the Sung family is the latest example of the fear Asian Americans live with each day, in a world where they cannot count on bystanders to help. Just like in New York City, where security guards at a nearby building shut the doors on a 65-year-old Asian American woman who was attacked on March 29, nobody came to Joyce Sung’s aid or indicated they were calling for help.
The surveillance video obtained by TIME shows one customer walking away as the man becomes increasingly violent. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department directed comment to G4S, the company that is responsible for daily security operations at the transit hub where the store is located. G4S did not respond to requests for comment.
Mark Sung says he doesn’t blame customers for not intervening, citing the dangers and likelihood that an attacker could have a weapon. Instead, the family has learned to prepare for the possibility of confrontations and has a routine for when things escalate: call the police, assess the damage, file an insurance claim, go back to work.
“Knowing that we’re going to get cursed out every day while we’re getting ready for work is just… we don’t know what words to use,” Joyce Sung says.
The latest confrontation at the Plaza Sundries store erupted at around 11 a.m., when the man first tried paying for cigarettes with 50 cents and then $1. Mark Sung says he turned violent when his mother returned his change.
Surveillance video, which has no audio, shows the man putting down what appears to be a Bible that he entered the store with before whaling on the plexiglass above the cash register with his fists. The man can be seen using both hands to shove the quarter-inch thick protective shield, bending it until it shatters.
Authorities arrested a suspect in the March 30 attack, which was also captured on surveillance video. Mark Sung said someone had also been detained in Tuesday’s attack, but there was no confirmation of that from police or the security company.
There have been more than 6,600 reported hate incidents against Asian Americans from March 2020 to March 2021, according to Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic. Anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities increased 149% in 2020, according to an analysis of official preliminary police data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
Despite the latest attack, Mark Sung says they couldn’t afford to shut down the store for the rest of the day, especially on a popular day for Lottery purchases and after the pandemic drove sales down at the store about 45%.
“Closing would set us back so far,” he says, adding that damages and lost revenue from the March incident cost the family roughly $25,000.
Within two hours, after alerting the authorities, the family erected a new sheet of plexiglass and went back to work.
“We have no choice,” he says.
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When exiled Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya took a Ryanair flight from Athens to Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, she wasn’t overly concerned about her safety. She couldn’t have predicted that just a week later her home country would scramble a fighter jet to force that same passenger flight to land and arrest a dissident journalist.
“We could not imagine that this regime would make such an act, to endanger the lives of hundreds of passengers, just to kidnap one person,” Tikhanovskaya told TIME,speaking from Vilnius on Monday. Of her own recent flight on that route, she said: “we never even thought about security. We were absolutely sure that we were safe.”
For those fighting to end the 27-year rule of President Alexander Lukashenko, who some call “Europe’s last dictator,” any sense of safety within the E.U. has vanished since Sunday’s nightmarish detour of the commercial airliner, which has triggered the bloc to announce stiffer sanctions against Belarus.
Stringer/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockIn March 2017, police officers detain journalist Roman Protasevich while attempting to cover a rally in Minsk.
Ryanair, one of Europe’s most popular budget airlines, had almost reached its destination of Vilnius on Sunday night, when a Belarussian MiG-29 fighter jet sped towards it in mid-air, and ordered its pilots to divert to the country’s capital Minsk. Authorities told the pilots there was a security threat on board. Once the aircraft was on the ground at Minsk Airport, Belarus security agents forcibly dragged journalist Roman Protasevich, 26, and his girlfriend, law student Sofia Sapega, 23, off the plane to be detained in the country’s notorious jails. Three other passengers—believed to be from Belarus’s KGB intelligence service—also disembarked in Minsk.
While the incident was deeply shocking for Tikhanovskaya, she says it is the latest escalation in a pattern of behavior that has become all too familiar. “People are facing kidnapping from the streets every day,” she says. “Thousands of people are in jail. The situation in Belarus is deteriorating.”
She thinks Lukashenko has come to believe that he faces no serious consequences for his actions. “This event showed that the escalation is a result of impunity and the lack of attention,” she says. “Lukashenko thinks nobody can do anything, so he thinks, ‘I’ll do anything I want.’”
ONLINER.BY/AFP/Getty ImagesA Belarusian dog handler checks luggage after the Ryanair flight landed in Minsk on May 23.
‘No one feels safe anymore’
Protasevich’s arrest is part of a sweeping crackdown on whatever non-government media is left in Belarus. Last week the country’s financial policeraided the offices of Tut.BY, the biggest independent news service in Belarus, and opened an investigation into its operations.
As the cofounder of Nexta, a hugely popular news channel on the Telegram platform run by Belarus dissidents, Protasevich was a big target.The channel has posted hundreds of videos and photos detailing the crackdown on protesters and incidents of torture in prisons.
In December, Nexta’s other founder, Stsiapan Putsila, told TIME that hundreds of Belarussians were risking arrest by smuggling images to Nexta. “It is very dangerous for them to send this information,” said Putsila, who now lives in the Polish capital Warsaw. “But their will to share the information is more significant.”
The exiled opposition politicians are deeply on edge after Sunday night’s arrests. Several are now based in Vilnius, just a three-hour drive from Belarus. “I did not sleep last night because I was so nervous,” says Franak Viacorka, Tikhanovskaya’s senior advisor, by phone from Vilnius on Monday. “No one feels safe anymore. They will not stop.”
Mikhail Klimentyev—Russian Presidential Press and Information Office/TASS/Getty ImagesRussia’s President Vladimir Putin, right, and Lukashenko hold a meeting in Moscow in April.
Despite three rounds of E.U. sanctions against Belarus,officials have previously stopped short ofsweeping, tough measures against Lukashenko’s inner circle, in part because of divisions within Europe over how to deal with Belarus’s giant neighbor and ally, Russia. With Belarus on its knees economically, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted Lukashenko a $1.5-billion bailout last September, helping the authoritarian leader to hold on to power.
The crisis erupted last August, when Lukashenko declared himself the overwhelming winner of Belarus’s presidential elections, although many in Belarus believed Tikhanovskaya had easily won. Tikhanovskaya’s campaign had effectively created its own election fraud detection system, by having its voters snap photos of their completed ballots, thus proving her victory.
Tikhanovskaya, 38, a former English teacher, jumped into the race last May, after security police arrested her husband Sergei Tikhanovsky, thwarting his presidential run.
A political neophyte, Tikhanovskaya packed huge rallies, mobilizing thousands to march in protest, before fleeing last August across the border into Vilnius, where she now lives with her two children.
Her husband remains in jail in Minsk, leaving Tikhanovskaya to negotiate with world leaders and diplomats over tough sanctions against Lukashenko.She held talks on Monday with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan andE.U. foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell,urging a strong international response to Sunday’s plane diversion. She told TIME she plans to travel to Washington “as soon as COVID restrictions are lifted,” she says.
Amid global furor over the incident, Ryanair came under pressure to explain why its pilots landed the plane in Minsk. Ina muted initial statementposted on Twitter on Sunday, the company said the pilots “were notified by Belarus ATC [air traffic control] of a potential security threat on board and were instructed to divert to the nearest airport, Minsk.” It made no mention of the fact that Belarus security forces had seized two of its passengers. The companyupdated its statementon Monday, this time condemning Belarus’s action as “an act of aviation piracy,” while its CEO Michael O’Learycalled the incident“state-sponsored hijacking.”
Lithuania’s governmentopened an investigation into Belarus on Mondayand could possibly bring charges of plane hijacking, forced disappearance of a person and violating international aviation treaties.
Belarus became top of E.U. leaders’ agenda as they gathered in Brussels on Monday evening to commence a two-day summit. E.U. leaders demanded the immediate release of Pratasevich and Sapega and agreed to economic sanctions, saying the bloc would expand the list of individuals and entities that would be targeted. They also imposed a ban on Belarusian airlines using E.U. airspace and airports and called on carriers based in the 27-nation bloc to avoid flying over Belarus.
Ramunas Stanionis, advisor to Lithuania’s former Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, who heads the Belarus policy group in the E.U. Parliament, says some E.U. officials had become frustrated by the months of debate over what action to take against Lukashenko. Speaking to TIME by phone from Brussels before the sanctions were announced, he questioned why the E.U. had been slow to act, but speculated that the Ryanair incident could be a catalyst. “It is an act of state terrorism,” he said.
Earlier on Monday AirBaltic—an airline operated by the small E.U. nation of Latvia—said it would no longer fly to Belarus. And in Minsk, Belarus authorities held a Lufthansa plane on the tarmac for 90 minutes, claiming a terrorist threat, before finally releasing the Frankfurt-bound aircraft.
Omar Marques—Getty ImagesPeople hold paper airplanes during a protest in Warsaw on May 24 against the detention of Protasevich.
‘Brazen and shocking act’ raises questions
In the shocked aftermath of theRyanair incident on Monday, one crucial question remained: What might have happened, if the pilots had disobeyed the instructions on Sunday to divert their plane to Minsk?
Belarus experts and opposition figures believe the pilots had been told that if they failed to take the plane to Minsk, the Boeing 737-8AS aircraft would be shot out of the sky by the Russian-built fighter jet that had cornered it in the air.
That would have resulted in major loss of life, with 171 passengers on board. “They were ready to shoot down the Ryanair plane,” says Tikhanovskaya’s senior advisor Viacorka. “The goal was to forcibly land the plane,” he says.
Data from thewebsite FlightRadar24 showshow the plane veered sharply off course just about two minutes—less than 20 miles—from entering the safety of E.U. airspace in Lithuania. The plane was far closer to its destination Vilnius than it was to Minsk, when it made a sudden turn South towards the Belarus capital.
Analyzing the data, Vadim Lukashevich, an aviation expert in Moscow,said in a Facebook posthe was convinced that the Ryanair pilots had been told they would die if they did not divert. “I am absolutely sure that the crew of the passenger airliner turned around only after receiving a notification from the Belarusian fighter that, in case of disobedience, it would open fire before the passenger plane left the airspace of Belarus,” Lukashevich wrote on Facebook on Sunday night.Ryanair has not commented on whether the pilots were threatened with an armed attack in the air.
The FlightRadar24 data also showed that the plane was flying higher and faster than normal for the final minutes of its trip, suggesting that it may have been trying to outfly the fighter jet. That likely madefor a terrifying ordeal for the commercial pilots who had assumed they were on a routine journey between two European cities, both capitals of NATO membercountries—and technically a domestic flight within the borderless, 27-country E.U.
“We don’t know if they really would have been shot down,” said Stanionis, the policy advisor in the E.U. Parliament. “But it is just a matter of pressing a button on a MiG-29.” In addition, the operation appeared to be a complex mission, well-planned likely from the top ranks of Belarus’s military—and perhaps Lukashenko himself. “If the object was to detain Raman [Protasevich] you [would] need to know when he is boarding, have access to registration systems, plan all the possible communication with ground control centers,” Stanionis says. “You need to look at different scenarios, and coordinate with air forces.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinkencalled the incident a“brazen and shocking act,” and demanded an international investigation.
But Tikhanovskaya says action is needed as much as investigations, especially given the dire conditions in Belarus’s prisons.
“There is sexual abuse, women are strip searched, there is stress positions for hours, cells are overcrowded,” she says, listing conditions that have been reported by former and current prisoners. “People from democratic countries cannot even imagine,” she says.
Despite the increased danger—even in the air between E.U. cities—Tikhanovskaya says she intends to continue traveling to meetings to pressure foreign leaders to take action against Belarus. “I have a row of official visits in the near future,” she says, declining to name the countries. “I will not delay any official visits.”
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You don’t have to be a teenager to love Olivia Rodrigo’s music, but it certainly helps. Hitting play on Sour, the 18-year-old Disney star and hit singer-songwriter’s debut album, is a guaranteed one-way ticket to reliving the most potent emotions of adolescence: the all-consuming heartbreak, the envy and insecurity, the sense that everything that’s happening is the biggest thing ever.
Mirroring the album’s intensity, Rodrigo’s rise has been quick and efficient: the January release of chart-topper “Drivers License” propelled her to the top of the pop stratosphere. (Rodrigo is the rare breakout artist to debut at the top of the charts with her very first single.) In just a few months, she has become a household name with an SNL sketch dedicated to her song—and a subsequent SNL performance under her belt.
It’s fitting that everything has happened at lightning speed. Rodrigo is a digitally-native celebrity who lives at the beating heart of youth culture, a pupil of the Taylor Swift school of self-disclosure and the ultimate Gen Z cypher. That Rodrigo rose so far so fast is no mystery: it’s a blend of formula and good fortune, her path paved by the soul-baring vulnerability of her songwriting itself multiplied by the frenetic pace of the TikTok generation. Here’s what to know.
Who is Olivia Rodrigo?
Rodrigo started her career in showbiz young: she was only 12 when she booked her first big commercial for Old Navy, and 13 when she made her Disney debut as the guitar-playing character Paige Olvera on the show Bizaardvark. High School Musical: The Musical: The Series became her biggest role in 2019 when she joined the cast as Nini Salazar-Roberts,, the female lead opposite actor Joshua Bassett, making her a sensation with tweens and teens. In 2020, she signed a record label deal; and just a month shy of her 18th birthday, Rodrigo released the song that would rocket her to new heights.Like Demi Lovato and Miley Cyrus before her, Rodrigo has used her acting background as a springboard, following a well-established Disney funnel to musical success.
How has Olivia Rodrigo become so popular?
Sometimes, a perfect storm brews for stardom. Rodrigo has been at the center of that mostly benevolent storm this year. Despite its tongue-twisting name, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series has been one of Disney Plus’ sleeper hits, thanks in no small part to the affable performances of Rodrigo and Bassett. Add to that a song that dropped right during a pandemic-induced lull in releases from established A-list artists (and a lull in chart competition), a compelling potential romantic backstory that references other Gen Z celebrities and a viral TikTok trend (more on both of these below), and Rodrigo was destined to find herself in the spotlight. That she has maintained momentum through the spring and into the summer comes down to a savvy continuing release schedule, a smart promotional strategy with a teen-friendly aesthetic and music that continues to be witty, catchy and relatable all at once, without pushing the boundaries.
What’s the story behind “Drivers License?”
It starts with the sound of the ringing from an open car door, something so familiar—and, for many, mundane—that it awakens a lifetime of sense memories. And then the song tells the story of a high school love gone awry, of a partner with whom the singer built hopes and dreams only to find herself left behind. The high school nostalgia of it all is cross-generational, timeless and bittersweet. The melody is strong. The bridge would make Taylor Swift, queen of bridges, jealous—or proud.
And the mysterious backstory has brought even greater attention: while never publicly confirmed, many believe Rodrigo was in a relationship with fellow HSMTMTS star Bassett before he allegedly started seeing actor and singer Sabrina Carpenter. Since all three celebrities have passionate fan followings in their own right, the rumor mill went into overdrive upon the song’s release, as listeners searched for clues as to whether or not the lyrics might have a real-life meaning. Rodrigo has stayed professionally aloof about her personal life, letting the music do the talking. Meanwhile, Bassett and Carpenter released their own songs in the wake of “Drivers License.”
But beyond gossip, “Drivers License” hit the jackpot when it found itself the center of a viral TikTok trend. Started by TikTok user Mel Sommers, users re-created a scene from Rodrigo’s music video in which she falls back away from the camera during a dramatic shift between the verse and chorus. Many of the videos have millions of views and likes, a testament to how the trend metastasized across the app and gave extra life to the song’s streams, further boosting its popularity and success on the charts. This is not the first time TikTok has backed a star’s rise; Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” also found its footing there. His career remains on the climb, an indicator that even if the app’s many trends are short-lived, some of its winners can make it big and build careers off the platform.
What does Sour sound like?
Geffen RecordsThe album art for ‘Sour’
Rodrigo’s debut album Sour, released May 21, certainly feels more like an artistic statement than like a newly minted sensation cashing in. Rodrigo has openly gushed about her love for Taylor Swift; one of her new songs, “1 step forward, 3 steps back” even interpolates one of Swift’s melodies (from “New Year’s Day,” off of Swift’s 2017 album Reputation.) But Sour, with its earnest pop-punk anger and hunger to bare insecurities and unpack jealousies, also shares DNA with artists like Fiona Apple, Avril Lavigne and—in its most balladic moments, like on the tender “hope ur ok”—Lorde, all women who turn vulnerabilities into lyrical minefields, putting their deepest wounds on display and using music for cathartic release.
But unlike her predecessors, Rodrigo’s references are distinctly Gen Z: she sings about watching reruns of Glee, a show that debuted in 2009. Aesthetically, everything from her album cover to her Instagram is a nod to her age, a slew of pastel colors and cooler-than-you photo shoots that show off her trendy fashion sense.
But her sound, from the punk angst of album starter “Brutal” to the bedroom-pop minimalism of “enough for you,” is harder to pin down. “I’m so sick of seventeen/ where’s my f-cking teenage dream? If someone tells me one more time, ‘Enjoy your youth,’ I’m gonna cry,” she rants on “Brutal.” Remember being 17? Likely, you felt that way too.
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