Innholdsfortegnelse for 06/15/2018 i Newsweek International

LADIMIR PUTIN EPT A WATCHFUL EYE ON A black-and-white soccer ball as it soared toward him through a spacious Kremlin office, before he deftly bumped it back with his head. On the other side of the room, Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, waited for the return pass. When it came, he flicked the ball up, juggling it from foot to foot before kicking it back to the Russian president. The two men, both dressed in suits and ties, were taking part in a promotional video for this summer’s World Cup, which Russia will host for the first time. In May, just weeks after the filming of the video, Putin and Infantino met again, this time in Sochi, on Russia’s Black Sea coastline, where they inspected…

How much exercise will keep hearts young? That was the question posed by researchers at the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine in Texas for a newly published study in The Journal of Physiology. The subjects—102 people over 60—were asked to be accurate and honest about their exercise history; their arteries, which move blood out of the heart, were also examined for stiffness. By matching up the amount of exercise with the flexibility of these life-sustaining vessels, the researchers found that exercising two or three times a week could preserve the midsize arteries, which bring blood to the head and neck. But the larger vessels, which go to the chest and abdomen, require four or five sessions. The researchers hope the findings will lead to programs specifically designed for heart…

IN 1970, ROBERT LONGO WAS A SENIOR AT Plainview High School on New York’s Long Island—a football star with long hair who smoked pot. “I wasn’t good in school, and I was worried about getting drafted and going to Vietnam,” he says. “I’d seen guys older than me come back totally scrambled.” On May 4 of that year, the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students during an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University. One of them, Jeffrey Miller, had graduated from Plainview a few years earlier. In John Filo’s now iconic Pulitzer Prize–winning photo, Miller is the 20-year-old man lying face down on the pavement as a young woman crouches over him—the two forever a symbol of the country’s social unrest. Longo would go on to become one…

IT WAS AUGUST 2017, AND WHITE nationalist shock jock Mike Peinovich was firing up his audience on The Daily Shoah, the signature podcast of an “alt-right” network that attracts tens of thousands of listeners a week. Many of them were preparing for the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Counterprotesters, however, were promising to disrupt the event in Emancipation Park, where city officials planned to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Peinovich told his audience to come prepared for a fight. “Bring whatever you need, that you feel you need for your self-defense,” he intoned. “We don’t want them to have the impression that we are going to be showing up there unarmed.… That is not the case.” Some of his listeners apparently got the message.…

WEIGHT GAIN MAY BE DRIVEN BY NOT ONLY WHAT WE EAT but also our tendency to eat all day long. That’s the thinking behind the weight-loss trend of intermittent fasting, which has grown in popularity in the past few years. An increasing number of health professionals are also prescribing fasting to people with type 2 diabetes, which currently afflicts more than 29 million people in the United States. Yet a recent study warns that going for long stretches without eating could cause the very damage it’s supposed to prevent. Type 2 diabetes is triggered in part by unhealthy eating, which renders the body resistant to insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas. Without insulin, sugar from food can’t enter our cells, leaving the blood with an excess amount of sugar.…

Evidence is mounting that the world’s food supply is at risk. The latest research concerns rice, a food providing at least half of the dietary energy and protein consumed by 600 million people worldwide. At sites in China and Japan, researchers grew 18 genetically distinct types of rice, each selected for its richness in protein, iron, zinc and several vitamins. Contained in a plot elevated 1 foot above the surrounding rice fields, the plants grew in their own mini ecosystem with escalated carbon dioxide levels, mimicking the environment that scientists predict we’ll be living in later this century. According to the study, published in Science Advances on May 23, the futuristic ecosystem depleted the levels of vitamins and minerals in the plants. This change in the nutritional quality of rice…

PETER WEIR EEPS HIS WEBCAM covered with tape. He doesn’t want anybody watching him. Can you blame him? Weir, after all, directed The Truman Show, an incisive satire-drama from 1998 that seems startlingly prescient today. Back then, the movie drew acclaim for its imaginative storyline and barbed commentary. Two decades later, it resembles a veiled warning, both as an astute predictor of reality television’s enormous rise and as a cultural forerunner to the age of digital surveillance. The film stars Jim Carrey as the happy-go-lucky insurance salesman Truman Burbank, a man whose every moment, unbeknownst to him, has been broadcast on TV, turning his life into a 24-hour reality show. Millions have watched him grow up, go to school, fall in love, get married, eat, sleep, brush his teeth. Things…

More than 200 million people are infected with malaria every year, and a new discovery has illuminated the evolution of Plasmodium falciparum—the deadliest of the parasites carrying the disease. Researchers in the U.K., France and Gabon teamed up to create an ancestral tree for the family of malaria parasites that includes P. falciparum, the only member that infects humans. By sequencing and analyzing the genomes of these single-celled organisms, the team pinpointed exactly when P. falciparum jumped beyond chimpanzees and gorillas. Reporting in Nature Microbiology, the researchers believe the parasite emerged 50,000 years ago, developing it’s human-specific form only 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. They also identified the single cluster of genes that enabled P. falciparum to make that leap—a critical discovery that could help end the scourge of malaria.…

Ebola On May 8, the Democratic Republic of Congo declared a new outbreak of the Ebola virus, the country’s ninth in the past 42 years. As health agencies mobilize to contain the spread, the devastation from prior outbreaks serves as a haunting reminder of what is at stake. 11 Number of people treated for Ebola in the U.S. between 2014 and 2016. Estimated number of deaths from the 2014–2016 epidemic: 11,325 1976 The year Ebola was discovered. Health workers believe the virus likely passed to humans from a bat or nonhuman primate. The disease spread simultaneously in SOUTH SUDAN and the DRC. Named after the Ebola River, near the village where the DRC outbreak occurred that year, the virus infected about 600 people, 430 of whom died from it. Number…