Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/20/2017 i Newsweek International

The Puerto Rican National Guard delivers food and water on October 7. Weeks after Hurricane Maria hit, life has not returned to normal. In the countryside, food and water are scarce, and even in cities, the storm destroyed the power grid, forcing most to rely on generators. Those who can leave are moving to the United States. As Jorge Duany, a professor at Florida International University, told The New York Times: “It’s going to be a stampede.”…

IN A BARN IN HARYANA, A STATE in northwest India, more than a dozen men are preparing for a night they might not survive. Around them stand injured heifers, many with broken limbs. The air reeks of urine and feces, and in a bowl on the ground, maggots writhe in rotting flesh a vet has cut from one of the cow’s wounds. The men, however, are unfazed. They call themselves the Gau Putra Sena, or the Son of Cow army, and their life’s mission is to protect cows. In front of them stands their leader, a Hindu militant named Sampat Singh. Tonight, he’s dressed in white and showing me two snub-nosed pistols under the dim lights. Soon he and his group will cluster along the nearby highways, stopping and inspecting…

There is an epidemic of SUDDEN DEATHS occurring throughout the U.S. military.” THE LAST TIME JANETTE LAYNE saw her husband alive, Sergeant Eric Layne was dozing on their couch with the TV on. That was in January 2008. Because of his mounting outbursts of rage and paranoia since returning from Iraq, psychiatrists at two Veterans Affairs hospitals had been prescribing him increasing doses of a drug cocktail for post-traumatic stress disorder that included the powerful antipsychotic Seroquel. Although not approved by the FDA for such “off-label” uses, Seroquel is among the most prescribed drugs in its class and at its peak brought in more than $5 billion a year for its manufacturer, AstraZeneca, despite side effects ranging from diabetes to sudden cardiac arrest. Eric kept complaining of headaches and tremors—concerns…

THE ABNORMALLY SMALL HEADS seen among children infected with the Zika virus have haunted many of the people who live in regions where mosquitoes carry the pathogen, including the U.S., South America, Africa and Southeast Asia. It turns out that a single genetic change in the virus may be responsible. The defect, known as microcephaly, wreaks all kinds of physical and developmental havoc. Children with microcephaly may have seizures, hearing loss, difficulty seeing or moving, and may not learn to sit, stand or walk at the same rate as other children. They may also have intellectual disabilities. At least 3,000 children around the world have been born with microcephaly or another Zika-related brain birth defect. Microcephaly was not always a common birth defect in children affected by Zika, and the…

Shiite militias run for cover during an attack by the Islamic State group near Hawija, Iraq, on September 30. The militants have earned a reputation for fierce fighting—and refusing to surrender. But that reputation is crumbling, much like the cities ISIS once held. As coalition troops continue to defeat the militants across Iraq and Syria, more and more of them are putting their weapons down. The war, it seems, is almost over.…

IT BEGAN AS A PLAYGROUND ARGUMENT FOR REED TUCKER, WHO CAN remember schoolyard battles over which was better, Marvel or DC comics, or whether Hulk could whup Superman. But the idea for a book about the creators of his childhood heroes didn’t come until 2016, when Time Warner–owned DC Entertainment threatened to release its long-awaited superhero movie Batman v. Superman on the same day as the Disney-owned Marvel Studios blockbuster Captain America: Civil War. The internet exploded. Tucker’s resulting Slugfest digs into decades of rivalry between these comic-book behemoths, beginning with DC inventing the superhero in 1938, with Superman, followed quickly by Marvel’s debut of the Human Torch in 1939. Competition deepened in the ’60s, when Marvel’s Stan Lee introduced the superhero to the sort of real-world anxieties college students…

LATE ONE SUMMER NIGHT IN 2014, KEVIN KELLER BROKE INTO HIS BEST FRIEND’S HOME. Keller was a U.S. Navy vet wracked with constant pain, and because his right arm had been crippled by a stroke, he had to use his left hand to scrawl a note of apology to his buddy: “Marty, Sorry I broke into your house and took your gun to end the pain! FU VA!!! Can’t take it anymore.” He then drove to his nearby Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic in Wytheville, Virginia, and pounded on the locked doors of the medical office, probably out of frustration or as a final protest, since the facility had been closed for hours. Keller then put the barrel of his friend’s 9 mm pistol to his head and shot himself. Grieving…

This approach not only fosters faster drug development but is more cost-effective research too. FOUR OUT OF 10—THAT’S HOW many Americans the National Cancer Institute estimates will be diagnosed with cancer at some point. While 33 percent of those patients won’t live longer than five years, giving them precious little time to find effective treatments, it takes over a decade to bring new cancer drugs to market. The process involves animal testing, human trials and regulatory review—a gantlet through which less than 7 percent of experimental medicines successfully pass. Is it any wonder, then, that there are less than 2,000 Food and Drug Administration-approved pharmaceuticals on the market? Not 2,000 cancer treatments—2,000 drugs for all diseases. Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based biotech research company, hopes to revolutionize drug development by slashing…

CHRISTIAN SCOTT ATUNDE ADJUAH ALWAYS hated the trumpet. Really hated it. But growing up in 1980s New Orleans, where music was one of the few ways a kid could get out of his neighborhood, the instrument he preferred was already taken. Adjuah is the nephew of renowned saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., and “I knew that if I played the saxophone, I probably wasn’t going on the road,” he says. “My uncle still would have trained me at home. But if I played the trumpet, I was going to be onstage getting the actual lessons.” By 16, he was a bona fide prodigy, and in the more than two decades since, the 34-year-old has won awards, toured the world and released close to a dozen acclaimed albums, beginning with his self-titled…

Looking for a sadistic ruler with a thirst for pain? Negan, meet Cersei (one man’s Lucille is another woman’s Mountain). WALKERS, WALLS AND CROSSBOW crusaders. All of humanity bifurcated into a good-vs.-evil, winner-take-all main event while a greater existential threat—the zombie apocalypse—looms. Add to that a callous indifference on the part of showrunners to killing off (and then occasionally resurrecting) a beloved main character. As the October 22 Season 8 premiere of The Walking Dead approaches, we wonder if AMC’s mega-hit is not Game of Thrones with a more penurious per-episode budget. The Walking Dead premiered on Halloween night, 2010, and has since become the most-watched series in cable television history. Five months later, Game of Thrones made its debut on HBO and has since whacked The Sopranos as the…