Innholdsfortegnelse for 04/28/2017 i Newsweek International

Pyongyang, North Korea—Men in uniform leave the opening ceremony of a new residential area, on April 13. Tens of thousands of North Koreans gathered to see North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who didn’t speak but clapped intermittently as Premier Pak Pong Ju said the construction was “a very significant, great event, more powerful than the explosion of hundreds of nuclear bombs on the top of the enemies’ heads,” Reuters reported. North Korea continues to test its nuclear weapons and accuses President Donald Trump of “making trouble” with his “aggressive” tweets.…

HIS AGENDA IS TO WHITTLE DOWN THE POWER OF THE CIA. THE WELL-MANICURED Washington, D.C., suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland, is probably what President Donald Trump’s supporters imagine when they whoop about draining the capital’s “swamp.” A high-income enclave of Volvo-driving, wine-sipping, public-radio- listening lawyers, lobbyists, journalists and government bureaucrats, Chevy Chase is such a liberal stronghold that local Republicans said last year they were afraid to plant Trump campaign posters on their lawns. All of which makes the town an unlikely launch pad for Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the suddenly prominent White House National Security Council official at the center of a bizarre backdoor maneuver to provide House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes with top-secret documents on government surveillance. Cohen- Watnick reportedly retrieved the documents from a classified CIA terminal in…

RADIATION. It’s everywhere, from the fallout of nuclear weapons to medical X-rays. It’s a cause of cancer, but it’s also one of the preferred forms of cancer treatment. There’s also a lot of it in space, and if we want to send astronauts to Mars safely, that’s a problem. The charged particles commonly called radiation are a serious threat to anyone traveling in space, whether it’s a stay on the International Space Station or beyond. The Earth’s magnetic field protects people on the planet from radiation by trapping the particles in radiation belts that surround the globe. These doughnut-shaped areas in space, called Van Allen belts, lie up to 36,000 miles from Earth’s surface. Within Earth’s orbit, astronauts are protected, but you can’t get to the moon, Mars or beyond…

THE BRITISH filmmaker Ben Wheatley has made his those-who-can’t views on critics well known in interviews, so far be it from him to openly court us in his work. Yet there are moments when Free Fire, his sixth feature film, feels like it’s been made with certain banally exuberant poster quotes specifically in mind. Wheatley’s banging, clattering heist thriller invites critics to write lines like: “Comes in with all guns blazing!”—and many have duly obliged. Except when it comes to Free Fire, that’s not so much a hackneyed endorsement as a neutral statement of fact: The gunfire begins all but immediately, and on the slimmest of pretexts. Twenty minutes in, when enough bullets had been sprayed and expletives spewed to fill an average Tarantino movie, my date turned to me…

Athée-sur-Cher, France—As the nation prepares for the first round of voting in its presidential election, farmer Jacques Fortin mowed a message in English for the candidates in his wheat field (pictured on April 13). A combination of bad weather, international competition and falling food prices has eroded incomes for French farmers. In 2016, half were earning less than enough to keep them above the poverty line. “Political leaders do not listen to us,” Fortin told Agence France- Presse. “They’re deaf to our anger. I hope they’re not blind and will read this message of despair.”…

PRICES HAVE RISEN SO HIGH THAT SOME PEOPLE NOW FIND THEMSELVES HAVING TO GUARD THEIR GUARD DOGS. IT’S 9 O’CLOCK on a chilly night in January, and the Adhamiyah animal market is teeming with visitors. There are the private zoo owners who’ve dropped by to size up the mangy lions and monkeys, and young couples sneaking furtive kisses in the shadows, ignoring the animals. Yet here in Baghdad’s largest beast bazaar, it’s families and earnest-looking businessmen who outnumber the gawkers and flirts. And they have no interest in exotic flora and fauna. Darting among the cages, they eagerly scan mutt after mutt, dismissing each in turn. “Too small,” Mohammed Salama, a car salesman, says of the Jack Russell terriers. “Useless,” he calls the lone dachshund. It’s only when a dealer…

THROUGH THE CLEAR RUNNING WATER, GOOSE BUMPS ON HER SKIN ARE JUST VISIBLE; HER WHITE DRESS FLOATS ABOVE THE RIVERBED. THE SCENE IS PEACEFUL-BUT HER STORY IS NOT. ONE YEAR BEFORE THIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN, THIS WOMAN WAS RAPED AT GUNPOINT BY A MAN SHE THOUGHT WANTED TO HELP HER. MARIE—not her real name—was a student looking for a job in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. “I met this guy on the street,” Marie says. “We started to chat. He said that one of his friends was looking for someone like me. He said that he needed to go to his place. When we got there, he pulled out his gun. This is when it happened.” Marie’s experience is all too common in Haiti. During the military’s rule from 1991 to 1994,…

“OUR BRAINS CANNOT FUNCTION WITHOUT SOCIAL INTERACTIONS. WE REQUIRE THEM AS MUCH AS AIR AND WATER.” THEY LIVE in tiny, austere cages not much larger than their bodies, isolated from their peers. These pitiful lab rats once served merely as control groups for researchers, compared with rodents in more comfortable abodes. But then scientists realized these unfortunate rats could be the perfect model for a bigger, uglier experiment, since their living conditions mimic those of human prisoners in solitary confinement. Within just a few days, rats isolated in small cages exhibit stress-related symptoms, aggressive behavior and higher incidences of disease, and they begin to lose the ability to recognize other animals. Even their brain cells, synapses, blood flow and nervous systems start to be impaired. Scientists believe this happens to…

IT WAS an overcast afternoon in northern Moscow on April 10, and a crowd was gathering outside the jail where Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, was finishing yet another stint behind bars. The crowd, mostly opposition activists and journalists, was expecting to hear a fiery speech from Navalny, a 40-year-old anti-corruption activist. But there would be no speeches that afternoon. In an apparent attempt to prevent Navalny from addressing the media, Russian authorities had secretly transferred him to a different jail some 10 miles away and released him there. He was forced to make his way home alone on the metro. For Navalny’s supporters, the underhanded move was an indication of his growing nationwide profile, and an indirect admission that Navalny is the only figure with any chance of…

T OKYO IS A CITY to drive a cartographer mad. Each of its 23 wards is a city unto itself, and they all have their own mayors and councils. Only the most major streets actually bear names, and the postal address system is incomprehensible even to many locals. When I lived in Tokyo in 2006 and 2007, I depended on a mental map that bore no relation to the city as it was—only how I lived it. So I recognize Sohei Nishino’s Diorama Map Tokyo, as one might recognize a shared dream. The work is part of Nishino’s “Diorama Map” project, a series of photographic portraits of capital cities that will be shown as part of this year’s Prix Pictet photography-award exhibition, beginning in May. Once at his destination—Amsterdam or…

“YOU NEVER CAN TELL” was Chuck Berry’s masterpiece. It was made in 1964. Most people, however, know it from 1994’s Pulp Fiction , where it accompanied John Travolta and Uma Thurman’s slinky twist. Here was the classic trade-off between old pop music and new movies. The music became edgy by association. The film suddenly had a heart. Since Quentin Tarantino paired a torture scene in Reservoir Dogs with Stealers Wheel’s 1972 hit “Stuck in the Middle With You,” the juxtaposition of pictures that are hard to look at with music that’s all too easy to listen to has become a standard strand of the multiplex experience. We smirk knowingly, tap our feet and feel sophisticated. It’s also been one of the few things…