Innholdsfortegnelse for 09/22/2017 i Newsweek International

Philipsburg, St. Martin—An aerial photograph shows the damage Hurricane Irma inflicted on this tropical island on September 6. The storm slammed parts of the Caribbean, killing dozens, before heading toward Florida. In the hurricane’s aftermath, food and water were scarce in St. Martin and other islands, where there was much chaos. The U.K., France and the Netherlands responded with aid, but all three countries—which oversee territories in the region—faced heavy criticism from those who felt their response was too slow. Jacques Charbonnier, a resident of St. Martin, told The New York Times, “People are fighting in the streets for what is left.”…

HAGAI LEVINE DOESN’T SCARE EASILY. THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY PUBLIC HEALTH researcher is the former chief epidemiologist for the Israel Defense Forces, which means he’s acquainted with danger and risk in a way most of his academic counterparts aren’t. So when he raises doubts about the future of the human race, it’s worth listening. Together with Shanna Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Levine authored a major new analysis that tracked male sperm levels over the past few decades, and what he found frightened him. “Reproduction may be the most important function of any species,” says Levine. “Something is very wrong with men.” That's something you may not be used to hearing. THE MALE PARTNER IS EITHER THE SOLE…

IF X HAD formed in New York City rather than Los Angeles, would it have been as big as the Ramones? The band (co-songwriters Exene Cervenka and John Doe, guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D.J. Bonebrake) was every bit as influential. X’s country-inflected punk was the equivalent of an aural speed-ball—somehow manic and nuanced—with Cervenka and Doe trading hyper-literate lyrics like deranged noir lovers. Yet X still gets marginalized as merely “L.A.’s seminal punk band.” X was, in fact, among the greatest bands anywhere, as evidenced by the group’s first two studio albums, Los Angeles and Wild Gift, and an upcoming exhibition, “X: 40 Years of Punk in Los Angeles,” at L.A.’s Grammy Museum. (The opening, on October 13, will include a performance by the band.) The fiercely gifted Cervenka…

Ukhiya, Bangladesh—This Rohingya refugee is one of hundreds of thousands who since late August have fled the military crackdown in Myanmar and arrived in this country. The operation followed attacks by Rohingya militants in Myanmar near the Bangladesh border. On September 11, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, excoriated Myanmar for what he called a “brutal” campaign against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group. “The situation,” he said in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, “seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”…

 KIDS TODAY will grow up thinking a keyboard is some antediluvian tool like an abacus or butter churn, which they might encounter only because it’s nailed to a wall of a TGI Fridays. EVEN IMPLYING THAT A MACHINE CAN COMPREHEND WHAT BOB DYLAN IS SAYING IS GROUNDBREAKING. Voice is taking over as the way we interact with technology and input words. Actually, it was supposed to have taken over a long time ago. Back in 1998, I wrote a column for USA Today saying that “speech-recognition technology looks ready to change the world,” though I also noted that when I tried to say “two turntables and a microphone” into the latest and greatest speech-recognition software, it thought I said something like “two torn labels and an ice cream cone.” Turns…

ABOVE MY BED IS A SIGN ENCASED in a wooden frame. “In this bedroom,” it says in calligraphic font, “President Donald J. Trump was likely conceived, by his parents, Fred and Mary Trump. The world has never been the same.” The bedroom is on the second floor of a Tudor house on Wareham Place, in a part of Queens called Jamaica Estates, in New York City but closer to Long Island than Manhattan. Far closer. The house is “vaguely faux-Tudorish,” says Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President, and with its cream stucco façade, peaked roof and decorative wooden planks, it looks like the manse of a minor English lord. Every “good” suburb of Connecticut and New Jersey has such houses. This was the…

THE ANIMATED SERIES about a has-been sitcom star who happens to be a horse, has the weirdest shifting tone in TV. One minute, characters—some animal, some human—are debating the nature of the soul in a vapid universe. The next, there are cat puns. Somehow, this adds up to the most powerful evocation of clinical depression in pop culture. I am not a psychiatrist, so by diagnosing BoJack Horseman I will not be breaking the Goldwater Rule. I am, however, clinically depressed, so I recognize the symptoms. BoJack, the inspired creation of writer and comedian Raphael Bob-Waksberg, is a self-sabotaging character desperate for love but unable to accept or give it, and oblivious to the damage he does. He is just the latest in a long line of compulsively watchable, emotionally…

THE DEPLOYMENT OF HEAVY WEAPONRY IS MEANT TO DEMONSTRATE TO NORTH KOREA THAT THE U.S. ISN’T MESSING AROUND. DONALD TRUMP’S North Korea problem just won’t go away. In early September, Pyongyang detonated what it claims was a hydrogen bomb and is reportedly preparing for yet another intercontinental missile test. The good news: There’s a semblance of a savvy strategy emerging from the U.S. and its allies in Asia—one that should be familiar to anyone who lived through the Cold War: containment and deterrence. The question now is whether Trump can make this plan work—without Chinese interference or his usual self-defeating blunders. Consider the most recent developments. After the North’s latest missile tests, both Japan and South Korea said they would deploy their missile defense systems. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador…

A SPECTACULAR SPACE exploration mission will conclude with a dramatic death. The Cassini spacecraft will self-destruct by plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere, ultimately burning up and disintegrating. The planned mid-September dive will be the final farewell for a nearly three-decade-long collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. It’s been good while it lasted, Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft launched aboard a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida on October 15, 1997, and spent seven years en route to its target, Saturn. It entered orbit around the ringed planet in 2004 for what was intended as a four-year mission, but was twice extended for a total run of 13 years, or nearly 20 if you count the journey there. Cassini completed the first in-depth reconnaissance of…

IT’S HARD TO THINK OF ANOTHER PROJECT IN THE WORLD THAT INTENDS TO CREATE SO MUCH OUT OF SO LITTLE. AT FIRST, THERE was nothing but open water. Then silt, dredged from the Sacramento River, was dumped into San Francisco Bay and flattened to create a 400-acre island for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Because the Sacramento River, which flows into the Bay, begins in the heart of gold country, some thought the new island might be made of gold. So they wishfully called it Treasure Island. Traces of harmless radioactive materials remain from a brief chapter in the island’s history—a naval station was erected in 1942 and used, in part, for nuclear decontamination training—but otherwise the island remained woefully underused until 2009, when the federal government sold it…