Innholdsfortegnelse for 01/01/2016 - 08/01/2016 (Double issue) i Newsweek International

“By 2025, Ethiopia will be a middle-income economy with zero net growth in carbon emissions.” Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn Regional security Ethiopia is one of the best performing economies in Africa, growing at an average of 10% for the past 11 years. In the last six years, our economy has doubled in size, thanks to the success of our state-led development model and our Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP). My Government is now implementing the second phase of the GTP. Over the next 5 years we are targeting average annual growth of 11%, supported by the expansion of our manufacturing sector and by exports. We are also looking to accelerate our agenda of structural reforms. While the private sector will play an increased role in the economy, public investment will…

ON NOVEMBER 29, over 1 million people in 175 nations took to the streets in the largest protest in history, demanding immediate action on climate change. Among them were 10,000 people in Paris forming a mass human chain, despite a ban on protests enforced by police with batons, tear gas, concussion grenades who would go on to make arrests. The next day, 150 heads of state—the largest such gathering ever—came together in Paris to work on a legally binding global accord on climate change. Thirteen days later, they succeeded. Climate change is a global problem that demands global solutions. Today, in a period of multinational war, terrorism and widespread partisan politics, perhaps the most extraordinary accomplishment of the United Nations’s 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) climate talks that concluded…

“THESE GUYS, AS HORRIBLE AS THEY ARE, ARE ENTITLED TO A ZEALOUS DEFENSE.” ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, shortly after the second hijacked plane hit Manhattan’s World Trade Center, a woman fleeing the building discovered a hastily written note someone had dropped: “84th floor, West Office,” it read; “12 people trapped.” She handed the note to the nearest person in uniform—a security guard at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He hurried to alert first responders, but a few minutes later the building collapsed. Among the nearly 3,000 people who died that day was Randolph Scott, a trader at Euro Brokers Inc. and the author of that note. Fourteen years later, his daughters, Jessica and Rebecca, arrived at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They, along with six…

IT’S AN OLD LAW THAT HAS FAILED TO KEEP UP WITH THE CHANGING TIMES.... LIKE MOST TEENS, LABRIE USED HIS COMPUTER AND SMARTPHONE TO LOOK FOR LOVE AND SEX. THIS PROBABLY ISN’T THE VERMONT YOU KNOW, the quaint or hip parts with artisanal maple candies and transplanted New Yorkers in barns converted into luxury homes. Here the houses (many modest, some ramshackle) and the roads (largely rutted) seem more like hardscrabble West Virginia than picturesque New England. I’m at the home of Owen Labrie’s father, a spry landscaper, musician and copy editor who makes us a killer beef stew for lunch on a cool November afternoon. The house is overstuffed with books and has a single broken, bulky television that looks as if it hasn’t seen any action in years.…

A NEW TOP predator roams the northeastern United States. The creature, which is equally at home in city parks, in graveyards and on the exurban fringes of civilization, has the lithe body and rust-tinged gray coat of a coyote. But it’s bigger, with a robust, wolfish skull and steel-trap jaws. Peer into the animal’s DNA, as scientists have begun to do over the past decade, and in addition to wolf and coyote you’ll find a dose of domestic dog. Some call this in-between animal a “coywolf,” a mashup of the two largest contributors to its genome. Others prefer the more sober “eastern coyote”—the animal is mostly coyote, but is very much distinct from the form native to the Southwest and Great Plains. Whatever you call it, this coyote-wolf hybrid is…

Damascus, Syria—Medics treat the wounded in a field hospital in this city’s Douma neighborhood on December 13, after unidentified warplanes and surface-to-surface missiles fired by the Syrian army pummeled the neighborhood, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Douma is controlled by rebel groups battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. World leaders recently met in New York to discuss a peace plan that includes a two-year road map for ending the Syrian war, but differences remain, notably over whether Assad should step down.…

INABEZE MEDIKINTOS felt sure she was about to die. A mob had seized her, and she was separated from her colleagues in the Burundian police force. “Leave her for us!” an angry civilian shouted at the backs of Medikintos’s retreating colleagues. Medikintos screamed as her attackers hurled rocks and blunt objects at her head and jostled to stab her with a kitchen knife. Police had just opened fire on protesters in the capital, Bujumbura, killing one in the mid-May scuffle. But the protesters, who were angry at the government, had picked up sticks and stones and were using them in pitched battles. The police had turned and fled. The group surrounding Medikintos accused her of shooting a female protester. “They could have killed me,” recalls Medikintos, a former fighter in…

LEGEND HAS IT that in 1920, the first adhesive bandage, the Band-Aid, was invented by a young Johnson & Johnson employee newly wed to a woman who had a knack for cutting her fingers while preparing dinner. And for nearly 100 years since, we’ve been using the same basic design—cotton gauze, crinoline and an adhesive strip—to cover our nicks and burns. But in recent years, science has begun to give us all types of bandages that go way beyond just covering scrapes and cuts. Some can stop bacterial infections or put an end to bleeding in as little as 15 seconds. Now researchers from MIT have created one out of a malleable polymer with sensors that is capable of stretching over your skin and healing wounds faster. A team led…

ON A TUESDAY evening in July 2013, a woman in her 50s was found bound, gagged, stabbed to death and wrapped in a carpet in the driveway of her Honolulu home. The woman’s ex-husband hadn’t heard from her since the two had dinner the Saturday before, and he grew worried, so he went over to her house. No one answered the door, and her car was missing, so he flagged down a security guard from a building next door. They investigated and quickly noticed a foul odor emanating from around the back of the house. The police were called in and they soon discovered the decaying body, rolled up in a moldy rug tucked away out of view in the driveway. Then they started piecing together evidence about her murder.…

VISITING New York in December can feel like taking a trip to the winter holiday capital of the world—the elaborate window displays at Saks Fifth Avenue, the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza across the street, the aroma-filled aisles at Zabar’s food emporium on the Upper West Side. There’s one problem: You are not the only person who thinks it’s enchanting. The place is packed. The pavements are overcrowded, the subway cars are jammed, and if you’re hoping to do any Christmas shopping, you’ll probably want to run back to your hotel room and log on to Amazon. Sound less than fun? If so, try visiting in January. You’ll be able to enjoy all that New York has to offer at much greater leisure, and it is sales time in one…

Los Angeles—BB-8, the newest robot star in the Star Wars series, arrives at the world premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens on December 14. The seventh installment has excited fans around the world and introduced a new generation to George Lucas’s fictional universe. The premiere, one of the biggest events Hollywood has seen in years, took place at three theaters and required a veritable empire of security guards, off-duty cops and at least one bomb-sniffing dog.…

“HALF A MILLION PEOPLE ARE DEAD WHO SHOULD NOT BE DEAD.” NOT TOO long after the Soviet flag was hauled down from the Kremlin, a startling number of Russian men started dying. Young and middle-age men began to drown, get run over and suffer asphyxiation and heart attacks in shocking numbers. There were all manner of suspicious, gruesome deaths, the details of which suggested alcohol abuse and suicide. The life expectancy for Russian men was plummeting; between 1986 and 1996, it dropped from 65 to 57. For years it was a source of great perplexity and despair, and when journalists and academics finally began to make sense of what was happening, the answers were knotty. The fall of the Soviet Union had created what the United Nations Development Programme called…

BUYING A GUN as a response to terrorist attacks is prepping for last century’s war. If you want to be a modern anti-terrorist vigilante, get a laptop and help Anonymous. Seriously, we ought to pass a new constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to bear technology. You know all these programs like Code.org meant to get people to learn code and retrain themselves for the future? It’s time to glamour them up with a patriotic call to arms. Hacking is the best way to protect America. When thousands of beefy guys in crew cuts and fatigues start huddling over keyboards in dive bars and working to gum up ISIS with denial of service attacks, the world will be a safer place. Sound counterintuitive? Wimpy? Geekier than an episode of The Big…

AFRICA HAS long been irresistible to art photographers. The diversity of its 54 nations, its natural beauty—even, say some photographers, the difference in light compared with Europe and the U.S.—have spawned vast bodies of work and helped inform the way many in the international community regard the continent. The problem is that these photographs have, until recently, been taken by non-African photographers. Through their lenses, we have seen the continent’s beauty and its rawness, the savannahs and the cities—but rarely have we seen this through the eyes of those who actually call Africa home. The problem comes from a mix of access and interest. African photographers have been showcasing their work within the continent for years. One of the best-known photography festivals in Africa, the Bamako Encounters biennale in Mali,…