Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/13/2017 i Newsweek International

A worker cleans a statue of Vladimir Lenin, the Russian Communist leader, on September 28. November marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the Bolshevik Revolution, which dismantled the czarist monarchy and led to the rise of the Soviet Union. Today, Russians often venerate Soviet history, but they remain divided over how to view the revolution. With President Vladimir Putin in power, many of them value stability over liberty.…

A row of dilapidated adobe houses dot the slope of a loess hill in Zhaojiawa, a laidback village in Xinzhou, central Shanxi Province in north China. Many of them have been abandoned as their residents moved out of the village in search of greener pastures. Some of the villagers who have stayed on are grappling with extreme poverty. Wang Sannu is one of them. The 68-year-old lives with her orphaned granddaughter and grandson, who are both mentally challenged. Their bedroom, bereft of any other furniture or ornament except a brick bed with newspapers pasted on the walls and the ceiling, mirrors their stark condition. Xinzhou, due to its inhospitable loess land and steep ravines, is one of China’s poorest places. The mountain-dominated landscape and drought-prone weather make it difficult for…

WE’RE USED TO PROBING QUES- tions from our doctors. “Are you vaccinated? Do you smoke? Are you sexually active? Do you own a gun?” Well, maybe not that last one. We expect doctors to talk about habits that may affect our health, and that’s also true of the pediatricians who take care of our children by educating parents about how to minimize risks. “Pediatricians are comfortable talking about seat belts and poisons and stuff because we all, just through living, have exposure to those things,” says Garen Wintemute, an emergency room doctor and public health researcher at the University of California, Davis. Other risks, like smoking, physicians may not experience firsthand but discuss extensively in medical schools so are comfortable bringing up with patients. Wintemute says that’s often not the…

STEELY DAN WAS BORN AT BARD COLLEGE in 1967, where co-founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker met. The duo’s singular, sophisticated jazz-pop—with obscure, often cryptic lyrics—had fans poring over their albums the way religious scholars study Scripture, and, by the mid-’70s, Fagen and Becker were taking obsessive pains to achieve it. Their approach—odd, neurotic and involving a revolving door of session musicians—turned them into musical auteurs of sorts but made finishing a Steely Dan record challenging and very expensive. “What they might waste on two or three days—most artists like me could make an entire record for that,” says guitarist Steve Khan, who played on numerous Dan tracks. With their sixth album, 1977’s Aja, that attention to detail resulted in a remarkable distillation of their anti-band vision (more than 35…

DAYS AFTER THE ISLAMIC State group fled Mosul, Saeed Quraishi was in a judge’s office in Iraq’s Nineveh province when two women arrived. They were handing over suspects with links to ISIS. But these weren’t hardened fighters. They were their children, all under the age of 3. “We don’t want them,” the women said. “Their fathers are [ISIS], and they raped us.” Quraishi watched as the women walked away, leaving their crying babies behind. He wondered if the women’s families had pressured them to give up the children. “It was a horrible situation,” says Quraishi, an Iraqi human rights worker, who asked to use a pseudonym because he feared for his safety. “Even if it was their decision, that is not easy.” The incident wasn’t isolated. In the months since…

“WHEN HE LIES, HE SPEAKS HIS NATIVE LANGUAGE, FOR HE IS A LIAR AND THE father of lies.”JOHN 8:44 AS HURRICANE HARVEY INUNDATED Houston and tens of thousands fled, good Samaritans emerged on the seething waters. Boat owners from as far away as Louisiana pushed all manner of craft into the deluge, steering down urban streets that had been transformed into rivers, risking their lives to rescue men, women and children. Furniture store owner Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale opened his showrooms to dozens of wet refugees and their pets for several nights. Even workers trapped in a bakery by the rising tide thought first of others—they used the time they were marooned to bake for the hungry and the homeless. Such acts of bravery and charity were as uplifting as…

One downside of sleep research: keeping jellyfish awake also means keeping graduate students awake. WE’RE INTIMATELY FAMILIAR with what a sleeping human looks like, or a sleeping dog or bird. But what does a sleeping ant look like—or a sleeping jellyfish? Despite spending a third of our lives asleep, we still haven’t cracked all its secrets, but becoming more adept at recognizing the state in other species could explain why sleep is so important to us. Sleep—or at least some activity that looks an awful lot like it—is pretty common for all living creatures: among not just humans and our close relatives but also birds, reptiles, fish, insects and even a microscopic worm, called Caenorhabditis elegans, found in many science labs. Still, while scientists haven’t yet confirmed that any animal…

Our national pastime’s long-range capabilities this year would make a Korean dictator blush. THIS PAST SUMMER SAW NO shortfall of long balls: Major league hitters walloped 6,105 round-trippers, eclipsing the single-season record by nearly 10 percent. That barrage of bombastic blasts put Philadelphia Phillies rookie Rhys Hoskins at a disadvantage. Hoskins swatted 18 home runs in his first 34 games, the quickest to that total in major league history. If this were any other year, that would be news, but in 2017 Hoskins’s feat is little more than a Philadelphia story. Records are now a weekly event. On September 22, Cody Bellinger of the Los Angeles Dodgers broke the National League record for home runs by a rookie with his 39th, which is where he finished. (Bellinger’s father, Clay, by…