Innholdsfortegnelse for 12/02/2016 i Newsweek International

Damascus, Syria—A rebel fighter reportedly with the Faylaq al-Rahman brigade looks out from his hiding spot in the rebel-controlled area of Arbin on January 29. The violence continued in Syria as U.N.-backed peace talks started in Geneva. The talks, delayed for several days due to disagreements over who would attend, are expected to last for six months. The first goal is a cease-fire and then to increase humanitarian aid. Days after the talks started, the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), which was not invited, killed at least 70 people in a suicide attack in Damascus.…

Tokyo—Japan’s economics minister, Akira Amari, bows during a news conference on January 28. Amari said he was resigning to take responsibility for a political funding scandal that has rocked the government. The magazine Shukan Bunshunreported that Amari had accepted a $100,000 gift from a construction company, but he denied taking bribes and said the funds from the company should have been recorded as a political donation. Amari has been a close ally of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a leader in Japan’s negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.…

The headlines tell us that oil’s fall below $30 a barrel in January and loss of nearly 50 percent of its value in 2015 could spell doom for everything from your individual retirement account to the world’s stock markets. The World Bank has predicted oil could fall another 27 percent in 2016. This has to do with massive oversupply, exacerbated by the return of Iranian crude oil sales and a slowdown in growth among developing economies, such as China. Yet have you also noticed that for every downtick in oil, you have a little more jingle in your pocket, especially if you drive a car? Economists liken falling energy prices to receiving an unexpected tax return in the mail, because it is cash you wouldn’t have otherwise had, and, historically,…

INSIDE A STOREFRONT CHINESE RESTAURANT IN UPSTATE NEW YORK, NEON LIGHT FROM A MULTICOLORED WINDOW SIGN GLOWED ON THE FACE OF AN EXTREMIST PLOTTING MASS MURDER. MISSISSIPPI MILITIA EXTREMISTS DISCUSSED KIDNAPPING AND BEHEADING A MUSLIM, THEN POSTING A VIDEO. He had been seeking backing for his attack and, at this small establishment in Scotia, was meeting with a man who had agreed to take part in his scheme to build a radiation device, a weapon of mass destruction that would slowly and painfully kill anyone who walked near it. “Everything with respiration would be dead by morning,’’ the man who devised the attack told his confederate in tortured English. “How much sweeter could there be than a big stack of smelly bodies?” But there would be no attack. The purported…

ADS HAVE GONE TOO FAR AND BROKEN THE BARGAIN CONSUMERS WERE ONCE WILLING TO MAKE TO GET FREE CONTENT. WILL SOMEONE please save the Internet? How about the guy who invented the thing that is now mucking it up? At the center of the Web’s crisis is ad-blocking software. You might have it on your phone or browser, perhaps stifling the very sources of revenue that allow this publication to fund me to click-clack on my keyboard. Ad blockers are becoming extremely popular very quickly: Global Web Index says 40 percent of the world’s Internet users have installed some sort of ad blocker, up from just 28 percent in mid-2015. Adoption is expected to spike. It’s hard to blame users for climbing aboard this train. Ads have gone too far…

Port-au-Prince, Haiti—A demonstrator confronts a police line on January 30 during violent protests over alleged fraud that forced the postponement of Haiti’s presidential runoff election. With President Michel Mar-telly due to leave office February 7, supporters of both the government and the opposition have been holding protests almost daily, with no agreement on who will lead if no successor is elected. Representatives from the Organization of American States met with Martelly on January 31 in an effort to resolve the crisis. Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas and has struggled for decades to build a stable democracy.…

IT COULD START with a fever, a rash, a headache or all three. More often than not, it spreads through the bloodstream with no symptoms. For most victims with symptoms, it means a week in bed with aching muscles and a high temperature, and then life returns to normal. But when you’re pregnant, Zika is something much worse: It’s the specter of having a baby with a skull like a curled fist, the virus having arrested brain growth sometime between when the mosquito bite infected the mother and the birth. Microcephaly comes in a range—in the mildest cases, children can achieve normal intelligence. But many of the Zika cases emerging in Latin America are truly severe. Where a normal brain has ridges, doctors are seeing scans that show brains as…

SOME EXAMPLES CRITICS HAVE ZEROED IN ON: THE AUTO BAILOUT, THE TROUBLED ASSET RELIEF PROGRAM (TARP) AND CLEAN ENERGY SUBSIDIES. WHEN FLORIDA Senator Marco Rubio voted against a transportation funding bill in December, he said one of his main objections was that it “preserves Washington’s power in picking winners and losers in transportation funding, and even revives the crony capitalist Export-Import Bank,” an agency that provides export financing for American goods. Rubio, however, also likes to pick winners and losers. He supports sugar subsidies, explaining to Chuck Todd on Meet the Press in January, “I believe agriculture, unlike any other industry, should be treated a little differently.... We are competing against other countries that don’t have our regulations, don’t have our labor laws and subsidize their own industries.…I am prepared…

FOR THE PAST CENTURY, THE GREATEST TICKET TO FREEDOM FOR EVERY TEENAGER IN THE SUBURBS WAS A DRIVER’S LICENSE. AFTER A LIFETIME of being chained to your parents—chauffeured around from school to practice to the homes of friends—there is no feeling more adult than the first time you take a car out alone. The next stage of your life has finally arrived, and you are barreling through it at 75 miles per hour. Car culture was pervasive in the United States for years: The annual number of miles traveled by auto rose decade after decade. Until 2004, that is, when it stopped short. And today, younger Americans are changing their minds about the car. The number of high school seniors with driver’s licenses dropped from 85 percent in 1996 to…

“IF I HAVE A SPARE EVENING, I’LL LOOK FOR BUGS. IT’S WHAT I DO TO PROCRASTINATE NOW.” WHEN JACK WHITTON hacked Facebook in 2013, the company thanked him and sent him a check for $20,000. At the time, it was the largest single “bug bounty” payout ever. Facebook had invited the public to break into its website and seek out vulnerabilities that malicious hackers could exploit to attack the company or its users. Whitton got paid for finding a bug that would have let any talented hacker with a phone take over your Facebook account. Bug bounty programs grew out of the idea that well-meaning hackers shouldn’t be punished for finding and reporting security flaws. Netscape started the first program in 1995, but bounties didn’t become a major part of…

Çanakkale, Turkey—Turkish security forces retrieve a child’s body on January 30 after at least 33 asylum seekers drowned when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross to Greece. The boat was carrying refugees from Myanmar, Afghanistan and Syria. The U.K. announced limited plans to help unaccompanied child refugees, in addition to an earlier plan to accept 20,000 refugees from camps near the Syrian border. Other countries in Europe are beginning to place limits on refugees, including Germany, which said those from Syria and Iraq will return to their home countries once the conflicts there end.…

CHINA HELPED IRAN KICK-START ITS NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM BACK IN THE 1980S. ASIRAN celebrates the lifting of sanctions and cranks up its oil production, the biggest winner may be China, Iran’s new best friend. Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a visit to Tehran in January, meeting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and signing a 25-year economic, political and military cooperation pact. The two leaders announced the signing of 17 deals—including agreements on oil drilling, nuclear energy and a vast infrastructure project linking China to the Mediterranean, known as One Belt, One Road. Rouhani predicted the deals would boost bilateral trade tenfold to an annual $600 billion in the next decade. “The end of the sanctions will serve first and foremost to help Chinese energy firms—that is why President Xi Jinping is…

LONDON POLICE REPORTED A 61 PERCENT INCREASE IN ANTI-SEMITIC CRIME IN 2015. SABINE ZEITOUNI remembers when she first realized her family had to leave France. On January 9, 2015, a gunman declaring allegiance to the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) killed four Jewish hostages in a kosher supermarket in Paris. Soon after, the French government deployed armed guards to the entrance of the Jewish school that Zeitouni’s children attended in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. The school advised its students to no longer wear yarmulkes outside the classroom. Zeitouni, 41, told her husband it was time to get out. “We need to go for the future of the children,” she recalls saying. On July 1, they packed their bags and moved to a house in Kensal Rise, a quiet neighborhood…

NO SYMPTOMS TYPICALLY APPEAR UNTIL PATIENTS ARE ON THE EDGE OF LIVER FAILURE, FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIVES. SANDRA C., a special education teacher in New Jersey, didn’t worry too much when her doctor told her to call a liver specialist. Sure, she got fatigued running around with the schoolchildren, and friends sometimes told her she looked green, but in general she felt healthy—she couldn’t be that sick. The phone call she made five years ago shattered her life. “The woman who answered said, ‘Abdominal and Liver Transplant Center,’” recalls Sandra, now 52 and retired. “I hung up thinking I must have the wrong number.” But Sandra’s doctor assured her that she had called the right place—they wanted the specialists there to perform a liver biopsy to investigate why certain enzymes…

PATRIOTIC DINING HAS SPREAD FROM THE HIPSTER FRINGE TO MOSCOW’S SUIT-WEARING PLUTOCRATS. BEETROOT.You love it, right? And cabbage, obviously. Buckwheat? Turnips? Pork fat with pickled garlic? OK, the basic elements of Russian cuisine might not seem the most promising start to a world-beating culinary culture. But thanks to Kremlin-imposed bans on the import of foodstuffs from Europe, the United States and Turkey, millions of Russians now have little choice. Italian Parmesan, Spanish ham and Greek olives have disappeared from the shelves of Moscow supermarkets. In their place is produce from the farms, fields and woods of Mother Russia. One consequence of Russia’s self-imposed food sanctions has been a strange and wonderful renaissance in its cuisine—a hipster-driven, artisanal revolution that has transformed Moscow into one of the most interesting culinary capitals…