Innholdsfortegnelse for 15/04/2016 i Newsweek International

Moscow—President Vladimir Putin, seen before a meeting on March 31, was among the biggest names caught up in a massive leak of documents known as the Panama Papers, which comprise more than 11 million files from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. Although Putin was not mentioned by name, The Guardian reported the files reveal a network of offshore deals and loans worth $2 billion leading to the Russian president via some of his closest friends. More than 100 news outlets collaborated on investigating others caught up in the leak, including Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Sigmundur Davio Gunnlaugsson of Iceland.…

Kolkata, India—A rescue worker photographs a truck crushed beneath an overpass under construction when it collapsed March 31, killing at least 26 and injuring at least 70 others. A 330-foot slab of metal and cement snapped off and came crashing down in a bustling commercial district during midday traffic. The overpass was originally due to be completed within 18 months but is unfinished after seven years. During construction, workers would ramp up efforts before elections, only to stop once polls closed. Authorities arrested four officials from the building contractor on the project amid allegations of possible corruption.…

“THE POINT IS THAT YOU HAVE A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO DIE WITH YOU.” SEIF AL-DIN MUSTAFA’S five-hour takeover of an EgyptAir jet on March 29 could have ended in tragedy. Instead, it ended in farce. The suicide vest with which the 59-year-old Egyptian hijacker had threatened to blow up the plane turned out to be a crude fake. British passenger Ben Innes, a health and safety auditor from Leeds, England, even posed grinning alongside the bomber for the week’s most infamous selfie (although, as the Internet quickly reminded us, the portrait of the two men wasn’t technically a selfie). But for co-pilot Hamad el-Kaddah, the hijacking was no laughing matter. Just minutes after takeoff from Alexandria for a 45-minute flight to Cairo, two members of the…

When a gay professor at one of India’s most prestigious universities was found dead two months after vigilantes barged into his house with a video camera and caught him in a tryst with a bicycle rickshaw driver, police concluded it was suicide. He had been suspended from his teaching duties for “immoral sexual activity” and publicly outed in a society deeply prejudiced against gay people, and there was poison in his blood. But activists and former colleagues of Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras, a professor of Indian literature at Aligarh Muslim University in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, are puzzled by a few odd details of his death—his cellphone was missing, his ATM card was used either just before or just after his death, and while the room where his…

THERE WAS A MOMENT I EXPERIENCED THAT FELT LIKE ART. OCULUS RIFT, the device that kicked off the current rush on virtual reality, was invented in 2011, when 18-year-old Palmer Luckey, working in his parents’ garage, made a prototype. It’s been five years since then, plenty of time to develop consumer-friendly VR software like video games, let competition churn up tweaks and watch the hype build and build. Last summer, Luckey was on the cover of Timemagazine, barefoot and floating, tethered to the earth only by the umbilical cord of his Oculus. It was an evocative image for a technology yet to be birthed. But now it’s here. Oculus came to homes on March 28, chased just days later, on April 5, by the HTC Vive, another consumer VR device.…

Palmyra, Syria—A member of Syrian pro-government forces carries a flag of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) on March 27 after troops recaptured the strategic city. The UNESCO World Heritage site is home to extensive ruins dating from the Roman Empire. Syrian forces found Palmyra largely deserted with neighborhoods badly damaged. Syria’s state news agency SANA said a mass grave was found containing around 40 people, including many women and children. Maamoun Abdulkarim, the government’s antiquities director, said that despite damage to the ruins, “the panoramic view of Palmyra—the colonnades, the baths, the arches and most of the temples—[is] surprisingly still intact.”…

ON A COLD AFTERNOON in February, several former American officials hurried to the Hilton hotel in Berlin, a city long known for its Cold War spies and intrigue. They had traveled there for a private meeting with senior representatives from North Korea, the most reclusive government in the world. Over the next two days, the Americans gathered in one of the hotel’s modern conference rooms and listened to a surprising new proposal. Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans said, wanted to resume negotiations in hopes of ending decades of hostility between the two countries. The timing was significant. A month earlier, the U.S. had agreed to talks to formally end the Korean War, but that effort collapsed when Washington demanded that the North’s nuclear weapons program be part…

“I like my neighbors, but I like my health much more.” Jacqueline Cason didn’t expect to be crawling down the stairs of her own damn house at 38 years old. Back in Mississippi, her asthma was annoying but manageable—a puff from an inhaler now and again. Then, just over a year ago, she moved into a little modular home on a quiet street in River Rouge, Michigan, a tiny city of 7,000 that kisses the southern edge of Detroit. Now she’s awakened in the morning, three days a week, at least, sometimes seven, by an asthma attack. She gasps, desperately sipping the air but inhaling little or none. “It’s like being a fish out of water,” she says. When it hits her, Cason’s lungs fill with mucus while her…

“BEFORE SOMEONE TAKES A DRUG, WE WANT TO SEE: WHAT DOES THEIR BRAIN LOOK LIKE?” EVERY TIME you blink, think or move, your brain generates electricity as individual neurons in the skull transmit information needed to make it happen. If we could detect the electrical signals produced by individual neurons, we could, in theory, read a person’s mind. Amazing. And exceedingly difficult. The amount of electricity generated by an individual neuron transmitting a single piece of information is incredibly tiny. The brain, all 100 billion neurons of it, produces en masse about 20 watts—barely enough to power an incandescent light bulb. For decades, the best neuroscientists could do was use electroencephalography, or EEG, to detect the signals that characterized different stages of sleep, say, or the in-brain power surges brought…

ÖZKAYMAK’S WIFE BOILS UP TO 60 SHEEP’S HEADS IN PEPPER AND LAUREL-LEAF WATER EVERY DAY. DO YOU PREFER your sheep’s head roasted and hot, or boiled and cold? No matter. One street in Beyoglu, Istanbul’s old European district, offers both sorts of sheep’s head (kelle), considered an ancient delicacy across the Middle East. From his cart, Muammer Özkaymak lovingly cuts slivers of cold sheep’s head (kelle sögüs), sprinkles it with thyme and red pepper and serves it with chopped onion on a fresh white roll. Özkaymak took over the family business in 1976 (his cart is decorated with a laminated photograph of himself as a cheerful teenager in flared trousers on the same street corner). But the ancestral tradition goes back to 1890, when his great-grandfather first got into the…

Idomeni, Greece—Stranded refugees at the Greek border with Macedonia gather to listen to Nadia Murad Basee Taha, an Iraqi woman of the Yazidi faith who was abducted and held by ISIS for three months, on April 3. The next day, Greece deported more than 200 refugees to Turkey, the first wave of mass deportations under an agreement between Turkey and the European Union. In return for taking back refugees, Turkey will receive economic aid, and Turkish nationals will have access to the passport-free Schengen zone by June. But human rights groups say the deportations are against international law.…

Number of registered medical studies on ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION Number of registered medical studies on FEMALE SEXUAL INTEREST/ AROUSAL DISORDER Ever since Alfred Kinsey first observed copulating couples in his attic, researchers have been on a quest to understand what makes us tick in the bedroom—and what to do when the ticking stops. However, while the industry continues to aggressively treat male sexual dysfunction, it puts very little thought into what shewants. Women have just one drug for low libido: Addyi (flibanserin), approved in August for hypoactive sexual desire disorder. But the little pink pill is no Viagra; its performance has disappointed clinicians, women and Valeant Pharmaceuticals shareholders. The daily medication is said to have questionable efficacy and potentially dangerous side effects and costs $800 a month. Men, by contrast, have…

PHRA APICHART PUNNAJANTO, the 30-year-old head preacher at Bangkok’s popular Marble Temple, tries to suppress a smile as he explains how very angry he is. The baby-faced monk pulls out documents, one after the other, and spreads them across the table. Next to him, a friend whom he has deputized to memorialize this interview snaps away on an expensive smartphone. This, says Apichart, tapping on the paper, is a list of 20 monks killed and 24 injured since 2007 in Thailand’s deep south. An insurgency in the mainly Malay-Muslim region has been raging since 2004, and more than 6,500 people have been killed. Most of them were Muslim civilians, though the statistical disparity doesn’t bother him. The death of a single monk, says Apichart, is considered a religious attack. “I…

CHILDREN WHO PLAY IN FRONT YARDS FROLIC ON TOP OF WHAT IS ESSENTIALLY A HAZARDOUS WASTE SITE. THERE IS THE LITTLE girl who had a tumor on her kidney and the boy who had cancer of the brain. People get cancer everywhere, but in southeast Los Angeles County, the latest battleground over lead contamination in the United States, people talk about cancer as if it were a tornado: this house, two houses after that, my mother, my husband, my cousin. Sometimes, all of the above. Children here are born early, already ailing. Amelia Vallejo has six, all born premature. All six have breathing troubles, as do many children in her neighborhood, most of them from working-class Latino families. Vallejo’s first five babies got off relatively easy. Her youngest, Michael, was…

THE LUDWIG REITER BRIEFCASE WAS DESIGNED IN THE 1950S FOR USE BY AUSTRIAN OFFICIALS WHO TRAVELED BY BICYCLE. I RARELY WATCH Quentin Tarantino movies, but I am inclined to give Inglourious Basterds a viewing. The film features the work of two talented Austrians: the always excellent actor Christoph Waltz, who plays a cunning and sadistic Nazi officer, and the shoemaker Ludwig Reiter, who supplied the boots worn by Brad Pitt’s character, U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine. The footwear in question is the Husaren, a high-calf boot with laces at the instep and a curious double strap that can be fastened with one hand. It is such a stylized and cinematic piece of kit that I thought it had been made especially for the film. I was delighted to learn otherwise:…