Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/27/2017 - 11/03/2017 i Newsweek International

So who penned the “intercourse with Harvey Weinstein” joke for 30 Rock? IT WAS AN AUDACIOUS MOVE, ONE OF THE riskiest in the history of modern diplomacy. In 1972, when China was desperately poor and largely insular, President Richard Nixon, a staunch Cold Warrior, traveled to Beijing for historic meetings with Mao Zedong, the father of the Communist revolution there. At the time, the U.S. recognized neighboring Taiwan and its leaders, whom Mao had vanquished, as the true rulers of China. But the goal of Nixon’s visit was to change course. As Henry Kissinger, the architect of the president’s strategy later put it, “We wanted to see whether the beginning of reconciliation was possible.” So it was telling that Kissinger, now old and frail, was in the White House in…

A giant tree rules the large fields dotted with wildflowers in the Saihanba Jixie Forest Farm. Planted in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) period, the nearly 20-meter larch is said to have survived 200 years of vicissitudes. Belying its age, it still looks vigorous and indefatigable with branches stretching out and its strong trunk wrapped with red ribbons. The locals in Weichang Manchu and Mongolian Autonomous County in north China’s Hebei Province, where the farm is located, have tied these ribbons. The act is to express their gratitude. The immense tree has been the savior of the area, rekindling hope of transforming a once barren land into lush green forest. “We call it the blessing tree. Without it, today’s Saihanba would not have been possible,” Zhao Yunguo, an administrator of the…

The incredible depth and smoothness of Kavalan Whisky takes many people by surprise. Especially when they find out how long it’s been matured. Mr TT Lee is a man who has defied his critics countless times. He started manufacturing insecticides and then took on bottled drinks. He saw the Japanese succeed with canned coffee and then created the greatest Taiwanese coffee brand. But perhaps the most remarkable instance of his hardheadedness is using Taiwan’s subtropical climate to make some of the world’s smoothest whisky. Before Kavalan came into being, Mr Lee was handing over the executive reins of his massive conglomerate to his son. Father and son knew their whisky could depend on Taiwan’s purest water source from Snow Mountain, close to their bottled water factory in Yilan County. The…

“The emperor of China built the biggest, longest Great Wall. It’s now tourist ruins.” “GOOD ART ALWAYS HAS A SENSE OF ACTIVISM,” SAYS CHINESE DISSIDENT Ai Weiwei. After being confined for 81 days in 2011 for protesting his country’s human rights abuses, his passport was seized for four years. When he got it back, he left China. Ai may be the world’s best-known contemporary artist, but he has been “homeless” since then, and that helped spark his latest activist works: the documentary Human Flow, on the global refugee crisis, and a group of monumental public structures called Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, in New York City. Fences addresses the rise of nationalism and the closing of borders—and hearts—to refugees and immigrants; Human Flow illustrates Ai’s fundamental belief that humans need…

ONCE MEXICO’S MOST POWERful drug lord, El Chapo now spends his days alone, in a wing of the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center. The lights are on at least 23 hours a day, and 60-year-old Joaquin Archivaldo Guzmán Loera is allowed out of his cell for just one hour of every 24. Plexiglass separates him from his lawyers every time they meet. And the authorities permitted just one visit—from his wife and their 5-year-old twins (his sister was barred from attending on that occasion because of fears she might pass on information to his cartel). In his court appearances, Guzmán has said little more than “Yes, sir,” in response to the judge’s questions. If he takes the stand at his trial next April and decides to say anything more than that,…

Exercise stemming from daily life had the most dramatic risk-reducing effects. EXERCISE AND ITS BENEFITS are not just for the wealthy anymore. In the U.S. and other Westernized nations, exercise is often seen as a luxury that requires the time and money that only the rich can afford. New research demonstrates that you don’t need to enjoy a life of leisure to squeeze in enough exercise. You also don’t need to go to the gym to “feel the burn.” Exercise and its benefits are for everyone. An international team of researchers designed the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study to find out whether staying active for at least 30 minutes a day—the amount recommended by leading health authorities—significantly reduced cardiovascular disease. The study enrolled nearly 170,000 people from 17 middle-…

THE BLACK MERCEDES WEAVES THROUGH THE SWARMS OF MOTORBIKES IN DANANG, Vietnam. At the wheel is a former Viet Cong guerrilla fighter with a combat ribbon on the lapel of his suit jacket. He takes me along the harbor, once a major port for U.S. Navy ships, then past the site of the former U.S. military command, now occupied by the towering regional headquarters of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Beside him is my minder from the Foreign Ministry in Hanoi, a worldly young man named Duc. I’m in the back seat, next to another former VC fighter, who is regaling me with a tale of ambushing U.S. Marines just north of the city in 1969. Smiling, he raises a trouser leg to show me a bullet wound. I ask him…

Radio advertisements featured fans bitching about how deeply they hated Dylan’s new guise. HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A fan scorned. In 1979, when Bob Dylan issued Slow Train Coming, an album that made plain his born-again conversion as an evangelical Christian, devotees felt disillusioned, if not duped. How could such a committed skeptic, a man possessed of endless probing and independent thought, buy into this or any orthodoxy? What place did the nuanced observation of Dylan have in the rigid script of the believer? Slow Train found him paraphrasing Scripture in ways that struck the agnostic as condescending, condemning and small. Of course, Dylan had pulled stark switcheroos before. In 1965, he stunned many by going electric, but the boos soon disappeared. Five years later, this avatar of originality…