Innholdsfortegnelse for 27/05/2016 i Newsweek International

Maaret al-Numan, Syria—Children duck under desks during a war safety awareness class conducted by civil defense members in a rebel-held area on May 14. In addition to attacks by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and air bombings by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Russia, Syrians may soon have to contend with Al-Qaeda, according to U.S. and European intelligence and counterterrorism officials quoted by The New York Times. It reported that a dozen of Al-Qaeda’s most seasoned fighters have been dispatched to Syria in an effort to challenge ISIS for dominance in the region.…

Fort McMurray, Alberta—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks into a burned car while visiting neighborhoods devastated by more than a week of wildfires, on May 13. The visit was Trudeau’s first to Fort McMurray since 88,000 people were forced to evacuate on May 4, when the blaze swept into the city, the hub of Canada’s oil sands industry. Low humidity, unseasonably warm weather and high winds caused by El Niño put the region at a high fire risk and raised concerns about climate change. The blaze destroyed 2,400 buildings, but officials said nearly 90 percent of the city is intact.…

In the 20th century, chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease decimated billions of U.S. trees. The tree diseases, caused by invasive pests—a fungus spore from Japan and a beetle from the Netherlands—changed the face of one U.S. city landscape after another and cost local governments and homeowners a fortune. Today, 63 percent of U.S. forestland is at risk of increased damage from established pests like the emerald ash borer, hemlock wooly adelgid and others, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Urban and suburban trees are the costliest casualties. Removal and replanting are expensive, and loss of trees from streets, yards and parks hurts property values and robs communities of the benefits, such as improved air quality. Those costs are not evenly distributed: Homeowners who have to remove dead trees from…

IN 1966, Newsweek published a landmark cover story, “The Teen-Agers: A Newsweek Survey of What They’re Really Like.” The 18-page article examined the teen world in fine detail: their heroes, politics, sexual proclivities and shopping habits, as well as what they thought about education, the world and their future. The article was based on an extensive survey of nearly 800 girls and boys across the country, conducted by famous pollster Louis Harris and Associates, and it also profiled six teens in depth, including a black teen growing up in Chicago, a California girl and an Iowa farm boy. Fifty years later, Newsweek set out to discover what’s changed for American teenagers and what’s stayed the same. For a generation that’s growing up online, coming of age with the first black…

“TODAY, I MADE a self-driving car,” NyEla, 10, says to a room of parents and girls ranging from elementary to high school. “It was pretty easy.” Just hours ago, NyEla had never programmed, and now she is showing off her creation, a game she created where a car, of its own accord, navigates a roughly rendered track. NyEla dove into computer programming with the help of an organization called Black Girls Code (BGC). When Amber Morse, BGC’s events coordinator, shouts to the crowd, “What do we do?” the girls shout back, “We change the face of technology!” Black Americans make up just 7 percent of the country’s technology engineers. Just 3 percent are black women. These race and gender gaps can’t be explained by lack of access; the days when…

Tokyo—Mitsubishi Motors Chairman and CEO Osamu Masuko, center, and company President Tetsuro Aikawa, left, bow during a press conference on May 11 while apologizing for falsifying emissions data and announcing that the problem involved more cars than previously announced. Mitsubishi’s stock price has plunged and its reputation has taken a hit since it confessed in April to altering the fuel efficiency data of over 600,000 of its Japanese vehicles. In a potential lifeline to Mitsubishi, Nissan agreed to buy a 34 percent stake in its rival for $2.2 billion.…

MIKE TELLS DON his house is on fire. He adds that he will extinguish the blaze if Don pays him. Don forks over the money, but Mike does nothing. There are two possible explanations for this shocking betrayal: Mike was lying about the fire or he never planned to help Don. In that story, Mike is the Republican Party, and Don represents all the members of the Tea Party and their conservative think-alikes. And in this analogy lies the explanation for both the rise of Donald Trump and why the GOP elite is condemning him viciously. For years, Republican leaders have engaged in what might be called boogeyman politics. No claim was too crazy to justify their storyline that the Constitution had been set ablaze by Democrats: Barack Obama isn’t…

“AS SOON AS WE SUSPEND OUR MAJOR SANCTIONS, THE WORLD WILL FLOOD INTO IRAN.” USED CLOTHING, toiletries and gifts worth no more than $100—for a decade, these were among the few Iranian products allowed into the U.S., thanks to international sanctions. But when the Iran nuclear deal went into effect in January, Iran was suddenly allowed to resume exports of its famous Persian carpets and pistachios. Iranians also looked forward to reviving their oil industry and gaining access to tens of billions of dollars in previously frozen petroleum revenues. Perhaps most important, U.S. officials assured Tehran that foreign investment would return, finally ending Iran’s pariah status. ”As soon as we suspend our major sanctions,” Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator, had said in 2014, “the world will flood into Iran.”…

GROWING UP IN THE PROJECTS OF CHICAGO’S SOUTH SIDE IN THE 1960S, TOMMY BREWER USED TO WATCH ABC’S THE FBI ON SUNDAY NIGHTS WITH HIS FATHER. “I said one day, out of excitement, ‘I wanna be an FBI agent!’” recalls Brewer. “And my father said, ‘You’re not allowed in the FBI. They don’t allow blacks to be FBI agents.’” Brewer’s father was a steelworker with a sixth-grade education, and his mother didn’t make it past the fifth grade. But Brewer, surrounded by gang violence, was convinced an education would get him wherever he wanted to go. So each morning, he took two buses and an L train to Lindblom Technical High School, where he got A’s (and one B) and took honors courses. He dreamed of…

THE LIST OF THE MANY CHALLENGES TEENS TAKE ON FOR SOCIAL MEDIA READS LIKE A DISTURBING REPORT FROM A TORTURE CHAMBER. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if you took a can of aerosol hairspray or air freshener and sprayed it directly at a cigarette lighter’s flame? Any rational adult is likely to say, Nothing good. But if you’re a teen, you might think, Great snap! Since mid-March, social media outlets have been flooded with videos of young people creating blowtorch-size dragon-breath puffs of fire by putting flame into contact with flammable liquid (usually while indoors). It began when one teen Instagram user gave the stunt a try and tagged the video post #FireSprayChallenge. The online dare spread rapidly, and now there are over 4,000 posts on Instagram with the #FireSprayChallenge hashtag. The…

Baghdad—People gather at the scene of a car bomb attack in Sadr City, a mainly Shiite district, on May 11. Three car bombings claimed by the Islamic State group (ISIS) killed at least 93 people in the deadliest single day of attacks on Iraq’s capital this year. There is a security vacuum in Iraq as the government appears to be unraveling—the country’s parliament has been unable to hold meetings, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is struggling to uproot extremists as well as to address economic and political problems left over from years of war.…

“I’M NOT AFRAID OF THIS INVESTIGATION. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME!” BACK IN MARCH 2014, when the scandal over Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras that would eventually topple the government was just getting started, some of President Dilma Rousseff ’s top aides saw a golden opportunity to kill the investigation—or at least badly wound it. Márcio Anselmo, the Federal Police deputy in charge of the probe, had given an interview to Jornal Nacional, Brazil’s most-watched news program. On-camera, Anselmo and others laid out the main points of the case, which would soon become notorious: a former Petrobras board member who had accepted a Land Rover as a bribe, the money launderer whose plea-bargain testimony would prove key and the bribes paid by some of the country’s biggest construction…

A million young men and women turn 18 every month in India. IN HER NEW BOOK, The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young , Somini Sengupta, a former New Delhi bureau chief for The New York Times , explores today’s India through portraits of seven young people who, despite many obstacles, aspire to mobility and opportunity. Here, Newsweek excerpts the story of Varsha, a high school student and daughter of a laundryman. THE LAND OF AND YET SATURDAY NIGHT, suburban Gurgaon, 20 miles southwest of New Delhi. The sky turns from blue to black, the burnt-toast smell of fireworks blows across the ravine, and tall, broad-shouldered Varsha hauls a hot-coal iron over the shimmering finery of others.…

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE OFTEN TALENTED IN MANY WAYS “BUT DON’T HAVE SOME BASIC SOFT SKILLS.” THERE WAS A surge of energy at the annual Gap Year Conference in Boston in May. Attendees, eager to hear the latest from the world of gap years—the time some young people take off between high school and college in order to travel or work—had learned that the movement would be getting a famous new participant: Malia Obama, the president’s eldest daughter. Malia will attend Harvard University, the White House recently announced—but she won’t be starting this fall as originally expected. Instead, the older first daughter will take a gap year, a practice that has been gaining momentum in the United States over the past decade. Gap year programs (though not always lasting a year…

“PORN-PLUS-IPHONES IS CHANGING CHILDHOOD AND TEENAGE LIFE.” NANCY JO SALES has a special gift: the ability to talk—really talk—to teenagers. From New York City rap hipsters to the notorious, fame-obsessed teen burglars that Sales dubbed “the Bling Ring,” the author and veteran journalist can get teenagers to open up about almost anything. For her new book, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, Sales spent two years on the road listening to over 200 teenage girls talk about what plagues them today. Sales, the mother of a high school freshman, has delivered a harrowing compendium of anecdotes about coming of age in an era of mainstream sexualization, slut shaming, online porn and cyberbullying. She spoke to Newsweek about why she wrote the book and what she learned…