Innholdsfortegnelse for 11/09/2018 i Newsweek International

“I KNOW WHAT I SAW.” IT WAS LATE JULY, AND Teresa Tindal, a 39-year-old administrator for a consulting firm, was describing the incident that made her a believer: a round, golden object hovering in the evening sky over Tucson, Arizona. Weather balloon? No way. It could only be one thing: a UFO. This kind of certainty had brought her—and 400 other people—to the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Symposium, the “premiere UFO event of the year,” according to its literature. They had gathered to talk about extraterrestrials, UFOs and how to avoid being abducted by an alien mothership (hint: yelling at it doesn’t work). “There are too many people that have seen things,” Christine Thisse, 44, a soft-spoken mother from Michigan,…

IN 2011, A 26-YEAR-OLD HASAN MINHAJ WAS PARKED IN A STRIP MALL, crying on the phone. “Just bawling,” he remembers. “I was in my Camry for hours. People probably thought I was crazy.” The young comedian was driving to an open mic in Los Angeles when his dad called. The two had a deal: Minhaj would take the LSAT after college, and if he hadn’t “made it” in comedy in five years, he would apply to law school. His father’s skepticism was well founded: Mainstream comedy was still a desert for Indian-Americans. Fortunately, Minhaj persevered. In 2014, Jon Stewart, in his last act at The Daily Show, hired him as a correspondent. Three years later, he was the featured comedian at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner (2 million YouTube…

Honduran migrants travel north through Mexico as part of a caravan heading to the U.S. on October 27. While they were still close to 1,000 miles away from the U.S. border, and it was unclear when or whether they would reach it, President Donald Trump deemed the caravan a “national emergency” and called for the military to deploy to the border. Many of the migrants are believed to be women and children seeking refuge from violence, and critics accused Trump of using them to stoke fears ahead of the midterms.…

THE MEDIA HAVE FINALLY discovered that Kanye West struggles with mental health issues. They didn’t figure this out after West went on national television during a fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina and blasted President George W. Bush as a racist who didn’t care about black Americans; they merely chuckled at West’s bizarre hijacking of Taylor Swift’s microphone at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. West hasn’t been stealthy about his struggles with mental health. Earlier this year, he released an album, Ye, on which he celebrated his illness status as a “superpower”; the cover of the album read, “I hate being bipolar it’s awesome.” But that didn’t prompt concern—it prompted respect from members of the media like Jimmy Kimmel, who gushed to him, “I have a theory about you—tell…

THE SAUDI JOURNALIST JAMAL Khashoggi told me he feared for his life. I was reporting Newsweek’s July 9 cover story on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and we were speaking off the record: That’s one reason I haven’t allowed this transcript to be published until now. The other reason is I hoped Khashoggi was still alive. Despite ample signs of the extreme brutality of the crown prince’s regime, I never imagined we would soon be reflecting on the journalist’s horrifying death at the hands of a group of Saudi agents in their country’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2. Khashoggi was calm and deliberate as we spoke about Saudi Arabia’s future and its recent past. “I don’t see myself as an opposition,” he said. He wanted only reform; he wanted…

THE AIR CORRIDOR FROM THE East to West Coast is one of the busiest in the United States. On a typical day, more than 100 flights make the six-hour journey between the Big Apple and Tinseltown. That’s thousands of hours per day that passengers are stuck in airless, soulless tubes with lousy Wi-Fi. And the experience is much worse when you realize the technology currently exists to cut that time in half—but airlines are forbidden to use it. The main reason is noise. As soon a plane exceeds the speed of sound—about 767 miles per hour, depending on temperature and other conditions—it creates a thunderclap heard in all directions. The Federal Aviation Administration banned supersonic planes operating over the continental U.S. in 1973. But NASA thinks it can finally solve…

Supporters of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro celebrate in front of his house on October 28. Following a bitter and polarized campaign—including a near-fatal stabbing of the former army captain—Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, beating leftist opponent Fernando Haddad. Brazil’s new leader, who has been accused by critics of homophobia, misogyny, racism and fascism, channeled the anger and fear of millions of Brazilians fed up with economic woes and deep government corruption.…

“ It WAS A GREAT DAY.” Received like royalty in the spring of 2017, Donald Trump was gushing on the first foreign destination of his presidency: Saudi Arabia. He had pledged new, warmer relations with the kingdom after the relative coolness of the Obama era, and, surrounded by opulence, he heralded a new “strategic vision,” one that would mean “tremendous investments in the United States” and a key partner in Middle East peace. Beaming and giving high fives was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who had spent months cultivating a close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the then-31-year-old who billed himself as a reformer ready to usher in a new era for the conservative kingdom he was entrusted to run. For the U.S., the alliance was…

U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade battle with China has no end in sight and seems to have gone beyond tariffs. After imposing tariffs on $250 billion of imports from China, Trump threatened to “levy even more, with the possibility of substantially more than doubling that number.” Then in a speech on October 4, Vice President Mike Pence launched a broader attack, accusing China of intellectual property (IP) theft, military aggression and attempts to interfere in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections. “The lack of trust in the U.S. about China and the lack of knowledge are so profound that the tension is not only going to stay on trade,” Peter Walker, a former senior partner at McKinsey & Company, told the media on the sidelines of the 2018 U.S.-China Relations Conference…

THREE WUNDERKIND SINGER-songwriters with a shared reverence for Crosby, Stills & Nash walk into a bar—well, a studio. That’s the story behind the year’s most promising rock supergroup—a trio of three rising indie-rock talents: Julien Baker, 23, Phoebe Bridgers, 24, and Lucy Dacus, 23. Each released an acclaimed record in the past 14 months, and all have a knack for thoughtful, melancholy songcraft. Together, they are boygenius, with their debut eponymous EP coming out November 9. “We’re all in very similar places in our career,” says Bridgers. “We’ve done a lot of opening slots. We know what it’s like to be talked down to because you’re young or a woman. And there isn’t a bandleader, which is fucking awesome.” Of her two bandmates, Baker says, “They’re both natural empaths. They…