Innholdsfortegnelse for 07/14/2017 i Newsweek International

Raqqa, Syria—A Syrian Democratic Forces soldier weeps as medics treat his comrade, who was injured by sniper fire on June 28. Fighting in the city heated up as the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) fought back against SDF forces, which said they had the insurgent fighters pinned down. “The city center is completely besieged, and our forces are fighting from all sides,” Ali Shervan, a Kurdish SDF fighter, told TV channel Kurdistan24.…

A TALL, husky man with a large machine gun stands next to a missile in a field just south of Damascus, Syria. It’s a warm morning in May, and pale yellow butterflies flutter around him. Rabieh is a Hezbollah fighter stationed in the area, and like other Hezbollah members who spoke to Newsweek, he asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he isn’t authorized to speak to the press. “God willing, we will soon liberate Syria and go back to our country,” Rabieh says. “But until that happens, we will stay here until our last breath.” Since 2012, Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite organization, has been fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against rebel and extremist groups looking to oust him. Though many of its fighters have died in…

FOR PEOPLE wondering where their out-of-pocket medical payments actually go, two new studies have some solid clues. In one paper, Ian Larkin and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared prescriptions written by physicians at 19 U.S. medical centers that limit the interactions with pharmaceutical sales reps with those written by physicians under no such restrictions. The analysis involved more than 25,000 physicians across the country, 262 drugs in eight major pharmaceutical categories and more than $60 billion in total sales. According to the report, published in May in JAMA (formerly The Journal of the American Medical Association), when sales reps did not have unrestricted access to physicians—and could not offer, for example, gifts or free meals and drinks in exchange for some face time—those physicians were more…

IF SOME ambitious women’s studies major decided that her thesis would be a movie in which film noir tropes of the femme fatale are married to a denunciation of the patriarchy, the result might be very close to William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth. Say this for it: As thesis filmmaking goes, it’s nasty enough to keep your interest, but the pleasure is scant—in part because the filmmaking is so calculated. Every shot is meticulously composed to make its point, with nothing left to chance. It is so calculated that you can see every shock from 3 miles out, and if it weren’t for cold cruelty, Lady Macbeth would have no life at all. The setting is some godforsaken part of rural England in the mid-19th century. Katherine (Florence Pugh) is sold…

IT WASN’T supposed to be this way. For seven years, Republicans promised to “repeal and replace” Obamacare once they had one of their own in the White House. “It’s going to be so easy,” Donald Trump often said about it during the campaign. But instead of signing a GOP health care plan “that was so much better” than Barack Obama’s—another favorite Trump phrase—the president and congressional Republicans have struggled to pass their legislation. By the end of June, one version of the GOP health care bill had barely passed the Republican-controlled House, even though the party has its largest majority in the chamber since 1928. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the majority leader from Kentucky known for his legislative wiles, was forced to delay the health care vote because his…

 The blue-eyed boy with the chubby cheeks still talks about the after-school movies he used to love so much. This was three years ago, when he was just 9 and living on the outskirts of Raqqa, in northern Syria. Sometimes, his father would take him and his little brother to an outdoor makeshift theater downtown, or he’d go with his teacher and classmates. “A BRAIN IS NOT LIKE A COMPUTER. ONCE IT DOWNLOADS INFORMATION, IT CANNOT EASILY BE ERASED.” They’d sit on plastic chairs and munch on cookies in front of a big-screen TV shielded from the sun by an umbrella. The films varied, but the plot was always the same: Black-clad members of the Islamic State group (ISIS) “liberated” cities from kuffar, or non-believers, chopping off their heads in…

SILICON VALLEY AND ROTTEN TREATMENT OF WOMEN GO TOGETHER LIKE THE NFL AND BRAIN TRAUMA. THE DOWNFALL of Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick is reverberating through Silicon Valley like a swing of the mallet ending a bad Gong Show act. And now the tech industry seems to be seizing this moment to save itself from its worst excesses. Kalanick is by no means the only problem with Silicon Valley of the 2010s. Plenty of bad players have helped create a tech universe stained by too much misogyny, financial lunacy, social irresponsibility and general asshole behavior. But Kalanick managed to combine all those characteristics into just one person. It is a rare feat usually reserved for the darkest corners of our society, and the White House. So when, in late June, a…

IN CHINESE TRADITION mountains buzz with the energy of qi, draw rain clouds to the rice fields, provide shelter to the immortals and are pierced with caves and grottoes that lead to Taoist paradises of harmony and plenty. All that, at first sight, seems intact in this work by Yang Yongliang. This is a species of digital photograph. But its peak-and-sky-and-water combination reaches back to a brush-and-ink landscape art that first flourished in the fifth century. “My pictures are timeless,” Yang, 37, says. “There is no light, no shadows, and you can’t tell the time of day.” If this image were transported back to the Southern Song Dynasty, it would be read as a “one-corner” picture, which works to draw the gaze away from the center of the frame. To…

 SHOULD I SUE Donald Trump for blocking me on Twitter? TRUMP SEEMS TO HAVE RAMPED UP HIS BLOCKING SPREE—LIKE DIKEMBE MUTOMBO BUT WITH TINY HANDS. I never expected to ask that question. But life is strange. And so is Twitter, especially when the president of the United States is involved. Trump blocked my account on June 15, though I don’t know why. It probably had something to do with my tweet mocking his use of “WITCH HUNT!” (I told the president he should stop using that term because it’s an insult to witches.) Soon I was blocked, and I wrote an article about it. The following day, I heard from a legal intern at the Knight First Amendment Institute. He wanted to know if I was interested in serving as…

SITTING ON HIS BROTHER’S LAP, ADUT DUT WAILS IN PAIN. The child’s skin seems to be clinging to his bones and his eyes sag as he awaits treatment for severe malnutrition at a hospital in Tonj, a small town more than 300 miles from the South Sudanese capital of uba. When his father brought him here in April, Adut was 28 months old and weighed 10 pounds, around a third of the weight of a healthy American male baby. He had come from a nearby village, where food was scarce. But Adut is lucky: Nurses were able to treat his malnutrition with antibiotics and therapeutic formulas. Others won’t be so fortunate. In February, a famine broke out across South Sudan. It was the first time the U.N. had declared a…

“IF WE HAVE A PATHWAY IN THE BRAIN THAT IS ACTUALLY PROTECTING AGAINST AUTISM, WE CAN STIMULATE THAT PATHWAY THROUGH MEDICINE.” JENNIFER AND SARAH ROSS are 6-year-old twins, but they couldn’t be more different. Jennifer is quiet, reserved and calm. She likes to dance, do gymnastics and jump on trampolines. She has plenty of friends. Her sister, on the other hand, is all energy. Sarah has trouble sitting still. She has a gift for math and puzzles, and she likes to play video games. While Sarah has only a few friends and is usually content to be on her own in the playground, she does love a captive audience. “Everyone know I can sing opera?” she asks. “Whaaaa!” Jennifer and her mother, Alycia Halladay Ross, let out a giggle. On…

WHEN LUC BESSON’S now classic The Fifth Element arrived in theaters two decades ago, American viewers were stumped. The campy sci-fi romp, featuring Bruce Willis as a taxi driver reluctantly saving the universe, was called “one of the great goofy movies” by Roger Ebert, but it was also that year’s worst-performing summer film. “We did a screen test in Arizona that was painful,” Besson remembers. “When the opera singer [played by Inva Mula] came out, the guy sitting next to me said to his two kids, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ And they left. It was too weird. It was too European. It was too much.” Besson is telling me this as his latest film, the $180 million sci-fi epic Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,…

AT THE HEART of any book lies a conversation between the author and her work. “Other people can join in,” Nicola Barker says, “but really that conversation has to be the important one.” It is bewildering to imagine the dialogue between Barker and her 12th novel, H(A)PPY, which tells the story of Mira A., who lives in a future after an apocalypse—what Barker describes as a post-truth world, one that is equally perfect (“Nothing can run out—not even life”) and devastating (its inhabitants, The Young, can live only in the moment). Mira A., is one of The Young, a species of perfected human that, while never aging, does occasionally develop technical faults. Each has a computer wired to their brain, a Sensor, and Mira becomes preoccupied with shaping a story…