Innholdsfortegnelse for 19/02/2016 i Newsweek International

Bab al-Salam, Syria—Syrians wait for permission to cross a closed Turkish border on February 6. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, about 40,000 Syrians have fled a Russian-backed offensive on Aleppo that threatens to create a new humanitarian disaster. The combined forces of Russia, Iran and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime appear to have shifted the balance on the battlefield, with government forces and allies closing in on the city’s rebel-held eastern half. Peace talks in Geneva were put on hold February 3 as the assault escalated. Whether they will restart February 25, as announced, is unclear.…

Tainan, Taiwan—Rescue workers search a collapsed building on February 7, a day after a magnitude-6.4 earthquake killed at least 38 people and left nearly 500 injured. Many of those killed were in a 17-story apartment building in the Weiguan Jinlong residential complex, sparking questions about whether faulty construction was to blame. Tainan Mayor William Lai said the government had launched an investigation, adding, “We will hold the builder responsible if they have broken the law.” The quake’s force was felt as far away as Taipei, which is nearly 200 miles from Tainan.…

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” supermodel Kate Moss once told a reporter when asked if she had any mottoes she lived by. Her waifish figure marked the start of “heroin chic,” fronted by runway models so impossibly thin you wanted to check them into rehab with a couple of sandwiches. This beauty ideal became de rigueur in the industry; the average runway model has a body mass index (BMI) of 16, which the World Health Organization classifies as severely thin. And for the average young woman, living up to that sort of expectation is enough to send her into an emotional tailspin and a lifetime battle against her bulge. “We do know from years of psychology and public health research that shame and body dissatisfaction lead to weight…

 THE STANDARD American critique of French capitalism goes something like this: “The French need to embrace failure and celebrate success”— which is why it’s surprising that these words come from Emmanuel Macron, the French minister of economy, industry and digital affairs under a socialist president. “FRANCE PRODUCES 17,000 PH.D.S EVERY YEAR, AND 1 IN 3 NOW WANTS TO CREATE A BUSINESS.” It’s also a bit of a surprise to see a government minister get mobbed like a member of Daft Punk. When Macron, 38, leaves the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on La French Tech night in January, a string of TV crews and fans leaning in for selfies hold him up. “It’s like this everywhere, even in France,” an aide tells me. Macron’s trip…

VERY EARLY ONE MORNING, six days before Christmas, 19-year-old Siobhan walked through her college campus in the dark on the way to a nearby bus stop. She saw no one until she got to the stop and met an international student she knew. Both young women were waiting for a bus to take them to Dublin Airport. The student told Siobhan she was going home to Germany. In response, Siobhan lied. “I’m going to Liverpool for shopping,” she said. When she landed in Liverpool, Siobhan switched on her phone. She hoped that her parents, who thought she was still at college, wouldn’t try to contact her for the rest of the day. Then she sent a text to her friend, the only person who knew why she was in Liverpool.…

“I’VE NEVER had so many students want to take part in a project,” says Jane Langdale. “They want to save the world.” Langdale, a professor of plant development at the University of Oxford, is part of a team of scientists from 12 universities in eight countries working to develop a new strain of hyper-efficient, drought-resistant rice known as C4. And in a world with a rapidly changing climate where nearly a billion people live in hunger, it could have a huge impact. Over 3 billion people across the globe depend on rice for survival—it’s one of the most widely consumed food crops, providing over one-fifth of the calories consumed by humans worldwide. As populations grow, this demand will increase. According to the International Rice Research Institute, each hectare of land…

MANY HONG KONG RESTAURANT WALLS ARE DECORATED WITH TROPHIES THAT COMMEMORATE EVENINGS MARKED BY THE DRINKING OF BIG-NAME WINES. A QUESTION for wine lovers: Where would you expect to see the greatest consumption of the world’s priciest bottles of wine? A fusty gentleman’s club in London? The private room of a culinary temple in Paris? A high rollers’ table in Las Vegas? Well, those are all good places to observe oenophilic excess, but they hardly compare to what you can find in Hong Kong. Amuse Bouche, for instance, a modest French restaurant in Hong Kong’s former red-light district, has an impressive wine list and might see more fancy bottles opened and drunk than any other dining location in the world. But that wine the customers are drinking? It’s rarely purchased…

Athens, Greece—Prosthetic legs lean against a wall on February 4, beneath a banner reading “Movement for emancipation of people with special needs,” during a 24-hour general strike in Greece against planned pension reforms. Isolated clashes between police and protesters erupted as about 50,000 people marched on the parliament to demand an end to austerity measures. The demonstrators insisted that the government reject plans to cut costs in order to repay debt owed to international creditors. The backlash is putting pressure on Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whose left-wing Syriza party has only a three-seat parliamentary majority.…

BERLIN’S LEGACY of division is clear to anyone visiting the German capital. Sections of the wall that once separated the democratic West from the Communist East have been left standing as reminders of the costs of partition. When the wall fell in 1989, Berliners hoped they would never again see their capital divided. But a new divisive issue threatens the unity of Berlin—and of the country at large. Last year, the city of 3.5 million people took in 80,000 refugees. During an interview in November, Berlin’s mayor, Michael Müller, said the city, like the rest of Germany, was “overrun by the big number of refugees,” adding that in one month the capital took in more people than in the past three years. A backlog formed, and in the struggle to…

“I HAVE NO IDEA WHO BERNIE IS LISTENING TO ON SECURITY AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS.” THE ANNOUNCEMENT should have given Bernie Sanders a thrill. Only hours before the candidate’s February 4 debate with Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, Saudi Arabia said it was ready to send ground troops into Syria as part of a U.S.-led coalition. He might even have claimed some vindication, since he’s said for months, as he would that night, that “the key doctrine of the Sanders administration would be...we can’t continue to do it alone. We need to work in coalition.” But no. The debate came and went without Sanders (or Clinton) making note of the development. Perhaps the Vermont senator chose not to say anything about the Saudi announcement. Perhaps he didn’t know about it. His…

“NUSRA DO KIDNAP PEOPLE, OR ARREST THEM. BUT THAT IS IF THEY ENTER THEIR AREA WITHOUT PERMISSION.” ON MAY 20, Norwegian filmmaker Paul Refsdal was in a village in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo when he heard an explosion. Camera in hand, he jumped into a white minibus driven by a fighter from the Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. The bus drove three miles to the nearby town of Tawama, where Refsdal—and the fighters he was with—inspected the damage. A U.S.-led coalition airstrike had hit a base in the town, leaving at least 10 people dead. Refsdal’s footage shows Nusra Front fighters struggling to lift the rubble from their “brothers.” A clean-shaven civilian speaks angrily into the camera, saying the airstrike has targeted civilian homes and killed innocent…

“THEY HAVE a look in their eyes—they look like they are possessed,” says Amira, a Nigerian woman held captive by Boko Haram fighters for several years. “They would even drink the blood of the people they killed,” she adds, using her hands to tip an imaginary bowl of blood to her mouth. Amira is in her mid-50s, and the signs of a life of hard agricultural labor show across her face and hands. (She asked Newsweekto identify her only by the pseudonym Amira because she fears reprisals.) She is dressed in clean but worn clothes, a long skirt and a head wrap. Leaning forward in her plastic lawn chair in the modest administrative office of a camp for internally displaced people, she describes how the young fighters of Boko Haram,…

SUPERBUGS ARE KILLING AN ESTIMATED 700,000 WORLDWIDE EACH YEAR. LAST NOVEMBER, researchers in China announced they’d made an alarming discovery: a new bacterial superbug lurking in the food chain. Through routine animal testing, they found a high number of E. colisamples that were resistant to Colistin, an antibiotic used as a last line of defense against the deadliest infections. The samples, which had come from a commercial pig farm near Shanghai, confirmed that after years when tons of the drug were dumped into animal feed, a strain of the bacteria had developed that could no longer be killed by one of the most effective and toxic antibiotics in existence. That Colistin was no longer effective against this strain of E. coli wasn’t even the worst—or most surprising—part of the news.…

Seoul, South Korea—A couple pose in front of a display of model missiles, including a North Korean Scud-B, at the War Memorial of Korea on February 7, the same day North Korea launched a long-range rocket carrying a satellite. Pyongyang said the launch was for scientific and “peaceful purposes,” but other nations saw it as part of a program to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are banned by multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. South Korea, the United States and Japan called for an emergency meeting of the council in response to the launch.…

THE SHOCKING truth about the last two Republican secretaries of state has finally come out: Colin Powell and aides to Condoleezza Rice trafficked in classified information on their personal email accounts. This is an enormous scandal! Oh, wait. No, it’s not. This news involving Powell and Rice is meaningless except that it sets up a rational conversation (finally) about the Hillary Clinton bogus “email-gate” imbroglio. Perhaps the partisans on each side will now be more willing to listen to the facts. From the beginning, the “scandal” about Clinton using a personal email account when she was secretary of state—including the finding that a few documents on it were retroactively deemed classified—has been a big nothing-burger perpetuated for partisan purposes, with reports spooned out by Republicans attempting to deceive or acting…

ONLY 14 PERCENT OF EGYPTIANS BELIEVE WOMEN SHOULD BE ABLE TO WEAR WHATEVER THEY WANT. GABER NASSAR sits in his ornate office, behind a huge oak desk covered with piles of papers, as he explains why his university recently banned women from teaching while wearing the niqab, a veil that covers the face but reveals the eyes. “Everyone has the right to dress how they want, but on one condition: Don’t break the rules,” says Nassar, the president of Cairo University, one of Egypt’s oldest academic institutions. Some members of Nassar’s staff disagree and filed suit to overturn the ban. He jabs his finger at a binder filled with details of all 77 female university employees who wear the niqab. Nassar says the ban was informed by research showing a…

THE HISTORY OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN THE UNITED STATES IS INTERTWINED WITH RELIGION. CLARENCE DARROW was right: Religion guides how harshly people view criminal defendants and felons. “If a Presbyterian enters the jury box and carefully rolls up his umbrella, and calmly and critically sits down, let him go,” the famed defense attorney wrote in a 1936 essay for Esquire, “How to Pick a Jury.” “He is cold as the grave; he knows right from wrong, although he seldom finds anything right. He believes in John Calvin and eternal punishment.” A new study backs up Darrow’s advice, finding that belief in a vengeful God will lead a person to oppose programs that help prisoners re-enter society, while a person who believes in a loving and forgiving God is more likely…

LAST WEEK, at the bottom of a New York Times story about the Zika virus outbreak, an old and controversial insecticide made a brief appearance. DDT, made famous for its environmental consequences by Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, was being “mentioned a bit” as a possible means to eradicate Aedes aegypti, the Zika-carrying mosquito, the Times wrote. DDT works as a neurotoxin, killing mosquitoes and other pests brain-first. Scientists determined decades ago that DDT also causes serious environmental damage, leading the U.S. to ban the chemical in 1972; the 150 parties to the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants also agreed to put an end to its use. Recent studies have drawn connections between DDT and neurotoxic health effects in humans, like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, breast cancer, diabetes…

STEFÁN THORODDSEN still has a few bugs to work out with his latest culinary endeavor. “My grandma thinks I’m crazy. She literally does not believe we are making an actual product,” says the 28-year-old Reykjavik, Iceland–based entrepreneur. “She says to me, ‘Sure—you’re making food out of insects. Sure.’” Thoroddsen has faced similar discussions many times since the summer of 2014, when he and his longtime friend Búi Aðalsteinsson founded the Crowbar protein company. Its flagship product is the Jungle Bar, a protein bar with a savory, cranberry-heavy flavor, slightly tangy aftertaste and pleasingly chewy texture of brown rice and quinoa. However, one main ingredient is more exotic than quinoa, especially in Iceland: crickets. And quite a bushel of them at that: Seventy-five of the insects, milled into powder, are in…