Innholdsfortegnelse for 08/11/2017 i Newsweek International

Saguiaran, Philippines—Displaced children stand next to police gear on July 24. Fierce fighting between government forces and militants inspired by the Islamic State group (ISIS) has prompted hundreds of thousands to flee Marawi, the only predominantly Muslim city in the country. The authorities set up evacuation centers, but many are overcrowded and unsanitary, according to Reuters. The Philippine Congress voted to extend martial law in the country’s south in hopes of crushing the militants, leading some to fear that President Rodrigo Duterte is trying to impose permanent authoritarian rule.…

“YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE STARTED TO MOVE AWAY. THEY DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE DIFFERENT HERBS, WHERE TO PUT YOUR CAMEL…ABOUT HOW TO BE IN THE DESERT.” HOSNI MUBARAK has been walking the Egyptian desert for most of his life. He knows where to find shelter in a flood, what plants are medicinal and when a storm is coming. As a Bedouin from the Jabaliya tribe, his territory lies in the hills surrounding Mount Sinai, where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments from God. Last year, he was selected for a program training young Bedouin to become guides to the south Sinai, and he has mastered skills like first aid and GPS navigation. He wants to be part of a grassroots tourist industry that will revitalize a community battered…

PORT-A-POTTY shortages. Cellular blackout zones. Ambulances stuck in gridlock. These are the conditions emergency managers across the nation are expecting the week of August 21. No, a major hurricane isn’t forecast. This isn’t preparation for a cyberattack after someone tipped the FBI. Beyoncé isn’t doing a national tour—but the cause is a star of another kind. The upcoming solar eclipse—the first in 99 years to sweep across the continental United States—has so many fans that disaster-level preparations are being put in place because of the large number of travelers predicted to jockey for prime viewing spots. As many as 7.4 million people are expected to pack into a 70-mile-wide band across the U.S.to watch the moon’s umbra block out the sun for a two-minute window on August 21, according to…

La Croix-Valmer, France—Beachgoers have too good a view of a forest fire in La Croix-Valmer, near St.-Tropez, on July 25. France’s Mediterranean coast is experiencing a particularly dry, hot summer, making it more susceptible to fire, according to The Guardian, and wildfires have forced thousands of people to evacuate the area. Thousands of firefighters have been battling the flames, which have consumed large swaths of southeastern France and spread to Italy, Corsica and Portugal.…

 LAURENT BINET describes the 10 years he spent researching and writing his first novel, HHhH, about the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, as “a neurotic search for the truth.” The 45-year-old French author’s second novel, The Seventh Function of Language, completed in half the time, has a more slippery grasp of reality. “ARE YOU HAPPY WITH MY EMASCULATION? EVERYBODY LIKED IT.” Binet developed a passion for the French literary theorist Roland Barthes when he was a high school literature teacher. (Barthes’s wide-ranging and influential criticism contributed to, among other fields, semiotics and structuralism.) In March 1980, Barthes was hit by a laundry van as he was walking home in Paris; he died a month later due to his injuries. It was an accident, but Binet began to spin a…

IT WAS CHAOS—even by the standards of Donald Trump. In one 24-hour period in late July, the president announced—on Twitter—that the U.S. would ban transgender people from serving in the military. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, the move stunned the military brass, who said the president’s tweet was not the law of the land. If that wasn’t bizarre enough, hours later, the new (and already departed) White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, accused Reince Priebus, then White House chief of staff, of leaking information to the press. “If Reince wants to explain that he’s not a leaker, let him do that,” Scaramucci fumed on CNN. On top of that, he told The New Yorker that Priebus is a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic.” (Trump later replaced his chief of staff with…

The week that began on August 8, 2011, found President Barack Obama in the midst of what The New York Times would call “the most dismal stretch of his presidency.” Days before, Congress had finally managed to strike a deal on raising the debt ceiling, thus averting a disastrous default on the national debt. But the process had been long and hideous, like an ugly domestic argument waged in front of the neighbors. On the 5th, a Friday, Standard & Poor’s had handed the United States its first ever credit-rating downgrade, citing a lack of “predictability of American policymaking and political nstitutions.” Obama tried to calm Americans with a speech that Monday, in which he declared the nation’s economic woes were “eminently solvable.” The financial markets disagreed, with the Dow…

EMOJI MIGHT BE ANOTHER SIGN OF THE GROWING ANTI-INTELLECTUAL, ANTI-SCIENCE MOVEMENT IN AMERICA. FORGET DONALD TRUMP. Let’s talk about something truly dim and oafish: emoji. The world is in the middle of a disturbing emoji-gasm. You can go see The Emoji Movie and sit through a plot as nuanced and complex as an old episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. (Don’t miss esteemed Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart getting to be the voice of Poop.) July also brought us World Emoji Day. To mark the occasion, Apple trumpeted its upcoming release of new emoji, a milestone for society that might only be topped by a new shape of marshmallow in Lucky Charms. Microsoft, always an innovator in artificial intelligence, announced a version of its SwiftKey phone keyboard that will predict which emoji…

IN AL GORE’S An Inconvenient Sequel, there’s an enjoyable episode involving Dale Ross, the mayor of Georgetown, Texas. An affable booster built like a fireplug, Ross tells Gore he’s spearheading the plan to get his town to switch to sustainable energy. His reason is that it’s cheaper, and he has a responsibility to his ratepayers. The kicker is that Ross is a conservative Republican. It’s a heartening moment at a time of horrendous political division, but it’s also central to the movie’s approach, which is to insist on facts over ideology and show why it’s a good idea to present the practical as well as the moral argument. The documentary, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, doesn’t have to do much to make its case. This sequel to…

HBO’S WESTWORLD has great moments, but too often it is more puzzling than pleasing. The Blinds, the third novel from Adam Sternbergh, is, like Westworld, a sci-fi Western thriller, equally wily in its vision, but it crackles with noir-ish delights, thanks to the author’s flinty wit and a cast of indelible miscreants and psychopaths. The book’s inhabitants live in Caesura (rhymes with tempura), a fenced-in cluster of cement cottages in Texas, cut off from society. The name sounds like a brand of antidepressant, and that’s essentially what the town is: Each Caesuran is either a former violent criminal who ratted or a witness to a crime, but they don’t know which. Their worst deeds, impulses and memories have been wiped from their minds, an experiment in second chances—at least, that’s…