Innholdsfortegnelse for 09/15/2017 i Newsweek International

Bangkok—The star of an August 31 press conference in Thailand was one of the 136 pangolins recently seized by customs officials there. The massive haul came after officials received a tipoff about an upcoming attempt to smuggle the highly endangered species from Malaysia. Pangolins, the only mammals with scales, are the world’s most traficked wild mammal, and poachers have ravaged populations in Asia. Their meat is considered a delicacy in Vietnam and parts of China, and traditional Chinese medicine uses the animal’s keratin scales, which are dried and roasted and consumed for everything from treating palsy to stimulating lactation.…

A DECADE AGO, when Elmehdi Boudra began attending college in his native Morocco, he didn’t expect to see swastikas scrawled on his door. Like almost every other student at his school, Boudra is Muslim. But growing up, his grandmother cooked him Jewish food and told him stories about Jewish friends—including the woman who nursed her. “We didn’t care who was Jewish and who was Muslim,” Boudra recalls his grandmother saying. “We were Moroccans—and human.” Yet Boudra’s peers didn’t like his fondness for Jewish culture, and they let him know it, both with the swastikas on his door and with the names they called him: rabbi, Zionist, a traitor to the Palestinian cause. “They never met Jews before,” says Boudra. “To them, Judaism is Israel. It’s the Palestinian conflict.” For the…

“THERE IS SOMETHING RIVETING ABOUT WATCHING BATTLES; IT’S THE CAR WRECK YOU SLOW DOWN FOR.” DOCUMENTARY filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are essentially detectives, exposing new layers of entrenched facts about facets of American history, whether it’s the Civil War, World War II, jazz, Prohibition or baseball. Their latest film—a typically exhaustive 10-part, 18-hour inquiry into the Vietnam War, written by Geoffrey Ward—turned out to be the most challenging project of their careers, involving 100 interviews over a period of 10 years. The duo had no way of knowing when they began the project that their documentary would be released during the presidency of Donald Trump, whose short, controversial tenure has been compared to that of Richard Nixon, accused of escalating the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to…

PRESIDENT DONALD Trump’s $1 trillion plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure may be unprecedented in size and ambition, but it mimics a controversial scheme championed by Vice President Mike Pence when he was Indiana’s governor. That’s why he is the public face of the Trump initiative, and executives from financial companies that helped privatize Indiana’s toll road are in the White House, sculpting Trump’s national plan. Pence and his allies like to boast about how Indiana sold control of major roads to private companies, claiming the move prompted corporations to invest money in infrastructure that would otherwise have been funded by taxpayers. But opponents say Indiana made some bad deals that offer a cautionary tale of get-rich-quick scheming, secrecy and cronyism that led the state to sell off valuable assets that…

WO DECADES AGO, ON A FRIGID night just before the New Hampshire primary, America first met Bill and Hillary Clinton as a couple. It was January 26, 1992, a drowsier time when daily papers controlled the narrative of presidential campaigns; when CNN was the only cable news network on the air, and blogs didn’t exist. Bill Clinton was the favorite to win the Democratic nomination and face President George H.W. Bush in November. And then he had what a chief adviser of his would call a catastrophic “bimbo eruption.” Her name was Gennifer Flowers, and the Star, the supermarket tabloid, was about to publish a story saying she and Clinton had had a 12-year affair. In response, Arkansas’s first couple had agreed to a do an emergency interview with Steve…

THE OMINOUS changes at Ryan Sequeira’s workplace began in early 2015. First came the biometric machines, two on every floor of the New Delhi office where he worked as an architect for a government think tank. Then, about a month later, they did away with sign-in sheets—instead, employees had to clock in and out on the new machines by scanning their fingerprints and keying in their Aadhaar numbers. This was all part of a radically ambitious plan set in motion in 2010, when the Indian government decided to enroll its 1.3 billion residents into a central database and issue unique identification numbers. Aadhaar, which means “foundation” in Hindi, was to form the backbone of social welfare programs by ensuring that beneficiaries could be properly identified, which in turn would help…

THE SECOND SEASON of the art-house TV detective series Top of the Lake begins at the watery bottom. Through a crack in a suitcase pushed into the ocean, long black strands of human hair swirl in a delicate dance of horror. The image is eerie, beautiful, feminine and chilling—a hallmark of New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion, who, with series co-creator Gerard Lee, introduced viewers four years ago to an incandescent Elisabeth Moss as the damaged, undaunted woman-of-feminist-sorrow Detective Robin Griffin. We quickly learn that the hair is attached to the body of a young Asian woman, a prostitute who worked in a brothel in Sydney, where sex work is legal. We learn, too, that she was being used as a pregnancy surrogate, managed by a singularly creepy man who goes…

“THE ENTIRE [CUBA] STORY IS BIZARRE.IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE.” IT SOUNDED like something out of Spy vs. Spy, the satirical Cold War comic strip featuring two black- and white-clad slapstick characters trying to destroy each other with bombs and booby traps. Last year, secret agents in Havana began bombarding American diplomats with a mysterious weapon that used sound waves to damage their hearing, among “other symptoms.” Or so the Trump administration indicated in August, months after it announced the expulsion of two low-ranking Cuban officials in retaliation for the alleged attack. As critics began to ask why U.S. officials have yet to identify the victims or a motive, the State Department backed away from blaming Cuba for the assault. Meanwhile, scientists and intelligence analysts continue to question whether undetected…

COMING to a theater near you: the films American Made, American Assassin and Steve McQueen: American Icon. On TV, you can look forward to the shows American Horror Story: Cult, American Housewife and American Vandal. And that’s just September. In 2016, we got, among others, American Gods, American Playboy, American Crime (not to be confused with The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story), American Anarchist, American Honey, American Grit, American Epic and American Satan. “There do seem to be a lot of these things,” says actor Michael Keaton, the co-star of American Assassin (opening on September 15). “You think, Hey, maybe we should be careful with how we throw that word around. Come to think of it,” he adds, “I was just sent another script that I’m not going…

STEVE MARTIN has been a sadistic dentist, an out-of-towner, a frustrated traveler, a father of 12 and a jerk. Now he’s just happy to be a banjo player—in real life, not on screen. In recent years, the comedy legend has stepped away from Hollywood and shifted his focus to theater (his comedy Meteor Shower—starring Amy Schumer—is set to open on Broadway in November) and a longtime passion: bluegrass music. On September 22, the skilled banjo player will release a new album, The Long-Awaited Album (yes, that’s the title), with his band, the Steep Canyon Rangers. The songs are up-tempo, goofy stories of love (“Caroline”) and family awkwardness (“Strangest Christmas Yet”). Martin, who famously incorporated the banjo into his ’70s standup act, is pretty sure the bluegrass community doesn’t see him…