Innholdsfortegnelse for 05/19/2017 i Newsweek International

Caracas, Venezuela— A demonstrator was engulfed in flames during clashes with police during a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on May 3. Protesters in huge demonstrations accused Maduro of becoming a dictator, saying he is avoiding elections so he can cling to power. Violence has swept the country along with the anti-government unrest, with at least 37 killed and over 700 injured, Reuters reported. Anger against Maduro and his United Socialist Party has also been stoked by a dismal economy, food and medicine shortages and skyrocketing inflation.…

IT WAS THE day the world didn’t end, the day that the tide of populism that gave the world Brexit and Donald Trump turned, the moment when French voters chose pragmatism over protest. That, at least, was the judgment of Europe’s establishment at the victory of centrist Emmanuel Macron in the May 7 French presidential election. It’s not hard to see why the defeat of the Euro-skeptic, anti-immigration Marine Le Pen was so vital to the West’s future. A victory for Le Pen’s far-right National Front party would likely have heralded the disintegration of the European Union and the end of the continent’s grand experiment with open borders. And it would have caused a deep crisis in a world order based on free trade, mass migration and globalization—precisely the forces…

On a winter afternoon that threatened tornadoes, retired federal judge U.W. Clemon stood at a window 31 floors above Birmingham, looking south. In the foreground was the University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose medical center powers the city’s economy. To the west, railroad tracks snaked between warehouses, vestiges of boom times, when Birmingham was known as “the Pittsburgh of the South.” On the horizon rose Red Mountain, a slight green ridge. Clustered on the other side of its hump, outside the city limits, are some of the wealthiest suburbs in Alabama: Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Hoover and Home-wood. They have the best schools in the state, and although Alabama has some of the worst schools in the nation, those suburbs frequently make it onto national best-schools lists. Many…

AIRLINES DON’T HAVE TO COMPETE AT BEING GOOD—THEY HAVE TO COMPETE ONLY AT BEING CHEAP. NEXT TIME YOU get dragged off an airliner or punched by a pilot or are just overwhelmed by the feeling that air travel is more soul-sucking than sitting alone at a Barry Manilow concert, blame the internet.... and then pray for new technology like artificial intelligence that might help fix what the internet broke. And no, we’re not talking about robot flight attendants that can dispense wine out of their wrists like Spider-Man shooting a web, though that would be awesome. The trouble began around 20 years ago, when many of us started jumping on Expedia or Travelocity to book travel. Before that, most people called a travel agent, who looked at a computer screen…

O LIVER COATES is probably a little weary of being described as Radiohead’s “secret weapon,” though the British cellist and composer’s work with the London Contemporary Orchestra added much of what charged the band’s 2016 album, A Moon Shaped Pool. He might be equally tired of being known for his work with Massive Attack or, indeed, his reputation as a Hollywood musician; he played Mica Levi’s compositions for the film Under the Skin in 2013, and, yes, those are his strings on the scores for There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012). Coates is an interesting enough proposition in himself. He graduated with the highest grades ever awarded by the Royal Academy of Music, served as artist in residence at the Southbank Centre in London, and has released…

THE AUSTRIAN SCULPTOR Erwin Wurm, 62, conceived his “One Minute Sculptures” in 1988. They’re participatory artworks designed for gallery visitors to perform, using simple props like buckets and chairs. The absurd resulting poses—and the photos of them—appear at the Venice Biennale in the Austrian pavilion from this month to late November. Hatje Cantz’s new book, released to coincide, includes several essays explaining the work’s art-historical roots, from the Duchampian readymade to the “Living Sculptures” of British-based artists Gilbert and George. Thankfully, most of its pages hold something more entertaining: gloriously deadpan shots of all the “One Minute Sculptures” he’s made since 1997. They reveal such sights as a woman lying prone, balanced on a series of tennis balls, and two people squeezed into a single cardigan. One, The…

“ABANDONED BUILDINGS HAVE A SPECIAL SMELL.” TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, when the world was upside down, Romantic poets strapped on knapsacks and went to dream amid ruins: the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Tintern Abbey. Places of melancholy pleasure. Places that exposed the mutability of powers, empires, ideas. Photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre grew up in the concrete southern suburbs of Paris. They met in 2002, when Marchand was 21 and Meffre 15. Good Romantic ages. Instead of Greece and Rome, they flew to Detroit and photographed the carcasses of its public buildings. They explored the unpeopled corridors of Gunkanjima—a derelict mining colony in the South China Sea, built at such density that it reshaped its host island into a brutalist battleship. They also developed an eye for the deconsecrated cathedrals…

Vandenberg Air Force Base, California—An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile was launched during an operational test just after midnight on May 3. The U.S. has about 450 of the missiles and routinely tests them, but the latest tests came amid rising tensions with North Korea, which has tested its own missiles—including some designed to reach the United States. The missile flew 4,200 miles to a test range near the Marshall Islands, CNN reported.…

DURING HIS successful quest to win Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, Donald Trump told the state’s voters that colleges are fleecing taxpayers and enriching Wall Street. “What a lot of people don’t know is that universities get massive tax breaks for their massive endowments,” he told a crowd in suburban Philadelphia. “These huge multibillion-dollar endowments are tax-free, but too many of these universities don’t use the money to help with tuition and student debt. Instead, these universities use the money to pay their administrators, or put donors’ names on buildings, or just store the money away. In fact, many universities spend more on private equity fund managers than tuition programs.” Trump promised to make universities’ tax breaks contingent on schools’ willingness to reduce tuition prices—and lawmakers are now considering bills to…

THE SAINT LUKAS TRAIN DOESN’T ACCEPT PASSENGERS—IT ACCEPTS ONLY THE SICK. The Saint Lukas is one of five government-funded medical trains that travel to remote towns in central and eastern Russia. Each stop lasts an average of two days, and during that time the doctors and nurses on board provide rural populations with basic medical care, X-ray scans, prescriptions and referrals to seek specialist help. “People started queuing to make an appointment early in the morning, around 6:30 a.m.,” says Emile Ducke, a German photographer who traveled with the staff of the Saint Lukas for a two-week trip in November through the vast regions of Krasnoyarsk and Khakassia. Russian local government and state rail services have operated the five trains since 2010, although the Saint Lukas started running three years…

CERTAIN GENETIC VARIANTS PUT SKINNY PEOPLE AT HIGHER RISK FOR DEVELOPING OBESITY-RELATED DISEASES. AT 73, Kanta Patel is contending with a host of chronic health conditions. In 2004, she went for a physical and learned she had elevated cholesterol. Then, two years later, Patel’s doctor diagnosed her with hypertension. She’s also a borderline Type 2 diabetic. One would never think Patel, who emigrated from India 50 years ago, had such serious illnesses. She appears fit: 5 feet tall, 102 pounds, with a body mass index of only 19. She has always been physically active, and she eats a vegetarian diet. But looks (and a great BMI number) can be deceiving. An increasing amount of research shows that BMI and weight are not necessarily the main indicators of a person’s health.…

STIFF-BACKED, starched-linen dinners with people you know formally but don’t like, grazing on microscopic courses of what tastes like lawn clippings while discussing an upcoming election in politely guarded tones—could anything be more tedious and anxiety-provoking? Actually, yes; The Dinner, the ambitiously sculpted but ultimately exasperating new film from Oren Moverman, rather too vividly recreates all the aforementioned discomfort for viewers—minus the extensive wine list to make it go by less painfully. Dutch author Herman Koch’s 2009 international best-seller, which has already twice been filmed in Europe, follows well-to-do parents gathering to discuss a crime committed by their children—only for the meeting to reveal their least civil instincts. Moverman’s fussily Americanized adaptation retains the angular moral conflicts of its source material but largely sheds Koch’s curt, sour-pickled irony. In its…

Abuja, Nigeria— A group of girls from Chibok wait to meet Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on May 7 after being released by Boko Haram, the militant group that kidnapped them in 2014. Eighty-two of the girls were freed under a prisoner swap with the government, but more than 100 remain in captivity. While the president pledged to support the girls, they face a difficult future reintegrating into a society where former captives of Boko Haram are often shunned, especially if they have given birth to children after being raped by militants.…

“THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA OIL RESERVES ARE WORTH A MINIMUM OF $750 BILLION. PROBABLY A LOT MORE.” SANTA BARBARA is dripping with oil. Walk along the beaches of this Southern California city and chances are, tar will stick to your feet from the natural seeps. In 1896, due west of the waterfront, the world’s first experiment in offshore drilling unfolded in the Summerland oil field. A half-century later, Congress passed the Submerged Land Act, which established that states regulate everything within 3 nautical miles of the shoreline. Beyond that, it’s federal territory. The first federal lease, about 8 miles off the city of Carpinteria, was sold to Phillips Petroleum, Continental and Cities Service Oil Co. in 1966; two years later, 2,000 gallons of crude leaked from the platform that Phillips Oil…

FEDERICA BERTOCCHINI, a researcher who studies chick embryos, is a beekeeper in her spare time. She was cleaning some hives recently and found they were infested with waxworms, annoying pests for people who keep bees because their larvae chew through hives. “I put the worms in a plastic bag, and after a short while they were all around, and the plastic bag was full of holes,” says Bertocchini, who works at Spain’s Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria. Very few organisms are known to break down plastic, so she contacted collaborators Paolo Bombelli and Christopher Howe at the University of Cambridge, who study plastic biodegradation. To their surprise, the team found that the waxworms are capable of breaking down polyethylene, one of the most prevalent plastics in the world.…

FEMALE GENITALIA are something of a mystery to scientists, male and female. “It’s much easier to study something external than internal to the body,” says Dara Orbach, who researches anatomy at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. For this reason, male reproductive organs have long been the low-hanging fruits of sexual reproduction research, while knowledge about the role of vaginas in successful mating is murky at best. That imbalance has thwarted our understanding of many aspects of copulation. Until now—at least when it comes to dolphins. Orbach studies reproduction among cetaceans, the group of water-dwelling mammals that comprises dolphins, porpoises and whales. Several years ago, she learned that female dolphins have unusual folds in their vaginas, and she suspected this feature could be a way for females to make fertilization…

In London’s retail scene, independent businesses increasingly struggle to cope with inflated rents and fierce competition. But Aria, a stalwart selling quality furniture and homeware, has endured in the north of the capital for more than two decades. It recently opened Aria One.Six.Eight, an extension to its Islington showroom that offers fashion accessories and the kind of London-flavored gifts that make great alternatives to standard touristy souvenirs. The store has always embraced whimsical, colorful and affordable contemporary design, and its current buyer, Carl Blücher, has stayed true to this ethos while combining it with a more pared-back aesthetic. Here, he picks three of his favorites. MUG By David Shrigley “The humorous and often provocative British artist David Shrigley has created a collection of textiles and mugs,” Blücher says, “which include…

ONCE, THE MENTION of Cuba brought to mind cigars and communism. Today, the country is just as widely known for dance—for its salsa, its rumba and, increasingly, its national hero Carlos Acosta. Acosta is the ballet star whose unlikely rise from a boyhood of petty crime on the backstreets of Havana spawned a book, a stage show and numerous TV documentaries. In his 17 years at the U.K.’s Royal Ballet, Acosta never stopped pining for his native island. So it comes as no surprise to find him back there. Having hung up his ballet pumps in London, he says he’s “giving something back” to Cuba with the founding of a Havana-based dance company. Acosta Danza, which launches its first European tour in Lodz, Poland, this month, is not a classical…