Innholdsfortegnelse for 18/03/2016 i Newsweek International

London—Cardboard cutouts of Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio invite London pubgoers to “vote” at the urinal of the candidate they dislike the most. Democratic voters in Europe and abroad began voting in a global presidential primary on March 1; by contrast, Republican voters overseas must request an absentee ballot from their home state to vote. The Republican race’s tone hit a new low when Trump responded to Rubio’s insinuation that his small hands indicated something about another body part and Trump assured Americans that all his appendages are up to par.…

Idomeni, Greece—A young girl falls while walking on railway tracks near the northern border between Greece and Macedonia on March 3. Between 12,000 and 15,000 migrants were stranded at the border crossing as Macedonian police fired tear gas and stun grenades to stop them from crossing into the country. On March 7, European leaders held a summit in Brussels on the crisis with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. They are trying to encourage Turkey to take back migrants who do not qualify for asylum and patrol its waters more closely in exchange for 3.3 billion euros in emergency aid.…

“IT’S REALLY A STUPID IDEA. THIS KIND OF THINKING IS COMING FROM THE CONSERVATIVE ELDERLY MEN IN GOVERNMENT.” ON A BRIGHT winter day in the Japanese village of Nagoro, a group of life-size dolls stand silently at a bus stop on a long-canceled route. One, dressed in a suit, furrows his brow with permanent impatience. At 65, the artist who made them, Tsukimi Ayano, is one of the youngest of Nagoro’s 35 remaining villagers. She sewed each doll to look like a former resident who died or moved away. Her dolls now outnumber her neighbors. They are a reminder of a time before the nation’s population began its precipitous slide and the countryside emptied out, leaving an estimated 10,000 “ghost towns” to slowly crumble. Japan has the oldest population in…

SINCE THE 9/11 ATTACKS, the feds have won more than 500 terrorism convictions. In nearly half of those cases, confidential informants played a key role in bringing down the alleged bad guys. Of course, snitches have been around since Judas flipped on Jesus. That they are crucial to making cases is beyond debate. How reliable they are is not. Beyond the scattered community of grieving parents, civil liberties lawyers and a few crusading journalists, however, little attention has been paid to the abuses of the system in which the FBI coached informants to build flimsy cases against defendants. Now comes (T)error–the parenthesis is supposed to emphasize error–an astounding documentary that casts serious doubt on the rectitude of some of the government’s cases. Up to 1 in 10 has been tainted…

RENÉ REDZEPI was not happy. Forty minutes into the first trial run of his restaurant Noma’s Sydney pop-up, the marron was coming out wrong—really wrong. The seventh course in a 12-course tasting menu, the indigenous Australian shellfish—which looks like a crayfish with its claws amputated—was sticking stubbornly to the grill. The ragout of a mango-eating goose on which the crustacean would perch was delicious, but the caramelized milk skin in which the two were wrapped was burning. And the palm frond baskets meant to encase the whole thing looked distressingly as if they had been woven by an errant band of kindergartners. A vein throbbed in Redzepi’s damp forehead. Marching over to the sweating chef working the grill, he said, “What the hell are you doing here?” Redzepi might well…

Istanbul—Women rush to assist a man as Turkish riot police use tear gas to disperse supporters of the country’s largest daily newspaper, Zaman, on March 5. Turkish authorities seized the paper’s offices in a midnight raid that raised new concern about declining media freedoms. A court had ruled on March 4 that the paper, which had been staunchly opposed to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would be taken over by state administrators. On March 6, the newspaper published its first edition under new ownership and featured Erdogan on the cover with a headline about excitement over a new bridge and other pro-government articles.…

WHEN THE political history of the Obama years is written, one important element will be how conservative overreach led to the collapse of the Republican Party. And it all started with a Supreme Court case that proved to be poison Republicans eagerly swallowed, thinking it was cake. That January 2010 ruling was the infamous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which declared that associations of people (read: rich folk and businesses) have free speech rights, and that not-for-profit entities are constitutionally allowed to collect and spend as much money as they want for political purposes, so long as they don’t coordinate those efforts with their candidates. For a bunch of purported constitutional literalists, the decision was nonsense—the conservatives on the court granted First Amendment rights to corporations, a legal construct…

Number of times PRIOR TO 2012 that a player made at least 250 3-pointers in a season Number of times SINCE 2012that Steph Curry has made at least 250 3-pointers in a season Stephen Curry has made more 3-pointers this season than any player has made in any other season in NBA history. He broke the record—his own—during a February 27 game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. His team, the Golden State Warriors, won 121-118 in overtime, bringing their record to 53-5—the best ever through 58 games. Curry scored 46 points, 36 of which came by way of the 3-point shot, tying the single-game record. His final shot, a game-winner that went through the hoop with only 0.6 seconds remaining in overtime, was launched 38 feet away from the basket,…

DEEP IN THE BASEMENT OF THE TEHRAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BEHIND A DOOR THAT OPENS WITH A SPOKED WHEEL LIKE A BANK VAULT, ARE SOME 2,000 PAINTINGS BY ARTISTS SUCH AS FRANCIS BACON, RENÉ MAGRITTE, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. Iranian curators say the collection is estimated to be worth $5 billion, but only a select group of people have seen it since the 1979 revolution. A few days after I arrived in Tehran in February, I was given a rare opportunity: a private underground tour of the former shah’s art collection, one of the largest in the Middle East, housed in a building that the shah’s wife, Farah Pahlavi, erected in the 1970s. There have been occasional limited exhibits, but most of the art has been in storage…

ABE MADE A BOLD PREDICTION: BY 2020, SELF-DRIVING CARS WILL BE CRISSCROSSING THE STREETS OF TOKYO. IF ALL GOES to according to plan, visitors to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games will be awestruck before the sporting contests even begin. Attendees will be shuttled around the city by self-driving taxis. They’ll enter a newly built national stadium with the swipe of a pass, get verified by facial recognition software and be guided to their seats in one of 10 languages on a smartphone app. They may gaze up at the night sky from anywhere in Tokyo to see an artificial meteor shower show unfolding 50 miles above their heads. Concerted efforts are underway to realize these and other innovations and emulate the enviable legacy of technological superiority and reputation rebuilding that…

MONGKOL SMILES MESSIANICALLY AND TELLS ME TO DO 15 MORE PUSHUPS. I AM POURING with sweat. Beside me is a Swedish woman in her late 20s who appears to be perfectly toned and a middle-aged Australian woman who is seemingly in very good shape too. Unlike me. Our personal trainer at this early-morning boot camp in Thailand is a young, lean, fit Thai man named Mongkol. He is merciless, and he has us running, jumping and hopping for almost an hour. It is during this high-energy routine on my first morning at Chiva-Som, a luxury health resort in the seaside village of Hua Hin, that I have a sudden realization: I am a rather overweight, barely fit, middle-aged European male who spends most of his waking hours hunched over a…

Pyongyang, North Korea—Kim Jong Un smiles at the test firing of a new multiple launch rocket system in this undated photo released March 4 by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency. The North Korean leader has ordered the country’s military to prepare its nuclear warheads so they will be “always on standby so as to be fired any moment,” after the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to authorize dramatically strengthened sanctions against the isolated country over its nuclear program.…

“THESE MISSILES ARE VERY PORTABLE AND EASILY SMUGGLED. ALL IT TAKES IS FOR ONE TO GET THROUGH.” DEEP IN Libya’s Sahara Desert, in the sunbaked town of Sabha, a ragtag group of gunmen loyal to one of the country’s two rival militias agreed to show Timothy Michetti their most prized weapons. Michetti, an experienced investigator for a London-based company that tracks the sources of small arms in conflict zones, traveled there on a hunch this past August. Local fighters, he reckoned, might have some of the shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles that disappeared when rebels ousted Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. In the sweltering heat, the gunmen unveiled a small arsenal: four Russian-made SA-7 missiles and two later models of the SA-16 variety. The heat-seeking missiles are capable of shooting down…

“IF A TERRORIST COMES INTO THE KIBBUTZ, IMAGINE WHAT CAN HAPPEN HERE.” OFER LIEBERMAN looks at the patch of earth that, on July 21, 2014, was the gaping mouth of a tunnel. On that day, 10 fighters from the Palestinian militants group Hamas traveled through the tunnel from the nearby Gaza Strip and emerged inside Israel dressed in Israeli army uniforms and equipped with guns and explosive belts. Four Israeli soldiers and all 10 Islamists were killed when the Israeli army confronted the militants. “It was horrible,” says Lieberman, the spokesman for the cooperative village Nir Am, which sits just over a mile from the fence that surrounds Gaza. The attack on Nir Am took place during that summer’s 50-day war between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza. Over the…

“GOD HAS CARED FOR THESE TREES, SAVED THEM FROM DROUGHT, DISEASE, AVALANCHES; BUT HE CANNOT SAVE THEM FROM FOOLS.” JOHN MUIR was a fervent believer. Not just in science or conservation or the National Park Service, which he championed. The founder of the Sierra Club and father of American environmentalism also believed in God. “The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God,” Muir wrote in his 1897 essay “The American Forests.” “[For centuries] God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools.” This sort of religious language was “very much present in early conservation movements,” says Evan Berry, an associate professor at American University…

CLOTHES CAN MAKE US MORE OR LESS CONFIDENT, CARING OR INTELLIGENT. IN 2006, the Utah Department of Corrections (DOC) decided it had to do something about the female inmates in its facilities. The women were unruly and anxious, often refusing to comply with regulations and occasionally acting violently. The guards took a rare step back, thought for a second and came up with a theory. The female inmates might be feeling dehumanized—and acting accordingly—because of their clothes. The guards noted how many of the women’s feet were slipping around in shoes three sizes too large, and how their sanitary pads could be seen through the near-translucent fabric of their uniforms. “A male’s white uniform doesn’t do much for [a woman’s] self-respect,” Jack Ford, a DOC spokesman, told The Salt Lake…

COKE THREW HIS HAT ON THE FLOOR AND JUMPED ON IT—AN EFFECTIVE IF ECCENTRIC FORM OF CRASH TESTING. NOTHING IS MORE iconic of the traditional English gentleman than the bowler hat—otherwise known as the Coke. The first bowler was designed by London’s royal hatmaker, Lock & Co., in the 1840s, and its origins were humble. The hat was commissioned by nobleman Edward Coke, younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Leicester, who wanted a hat that would better protect the gamekeepers who worked on his family estate in Norfolk. (At the time, they wore top hats, which were often knocked off by low-hanging branches or by dead pheasants falling from the skies during shooting sessions.) In August 1849, Coke (pronounced “cook”) took his problem to James Lock of Lock &…