Innholdsfortegnelse for 11/30/2018 i Newsweek International

1963  “In one sudden, awful convulsion of history last week, the majesty and the burdens of the presidency of the United States shifted from one man to another,” Newsweek declared. President John F. Kennedy was dead, shot on November 22 in Dallas, and so was his assassin, identified as a “self-styled Marxist” named Lee Harvey Oswald. As Lyndon Johnson took office as the 36th president, “it was left to a sorrowing nation to answer his call for help—and to pray with him for G d’s.” 1947 An Italian protester resisting arrest for corn hoarding illustrated a wave of violence in Italy and France. The cause, reported Newsweek, was “Communist action in the form of riots and strikes.” A further prediction of civil war didn’t come to pass, but America’s fear…

IN EARLY OCTOBER, VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE gave a speech in Washington, D.C., that, to many foreign policy analysts, signaled nothing less than the formal onset of a 21st-century cold war. This time, China, a single-party dictatorship and the world’s second-largest economy, is cast as the United States’ overarching adversary. Now, President Donald Trump is set to sit down with the man who leads China, Xi Jinping, at the G-20 summit in December, in what may be a last effort to avoid a potentially ruinous trade war. But who is Xi, what does he believe and how does he govern? French journalist François Bougon set out to answer these questions in a new book, Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping. As a former Beijing correspondent for Agence France-Presse, he watched…

ROUTE 9 SKIMS BY BOSTON AND cuts clear across Massachusetts to Pittsfield, a city of roughly 50,000, the largest in Berkshire County. Well east of Pittsfield, Route 9 becomes Worcester Road, named for a city that in earlier times was the nation’s largest manufacturer of wire—barbed wire, electrical wire, telephone wire and the wire used in the making of undergarments by the Royal Worcester Corset Co., once the largest employer of women in the United States. Older Worcester residents can still recall the factory bells pealing to signal the start and end of the workday. Now, the bells are silent, and the wire and corset factories have been replaced with three of the nation’s largest employers: Walmart, Target and Home Depot. If this sounds familiar, it should. It has been…

CAMEROON The U.S. Africa Command has been involved here since October 2015 as part of a broader battle against Boko Haram, which is connected to the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). While the U.S. has also assisted nearby Chad, Niger and Nigeria, the roughly 300 troops in the Cameroon mission have come under new scrutiny as the country becomes increasingly embroiled in an internal conflict with separatist rebels. In addition, the Rapid Intervention Battalion, an elite force trained by the Pentagon, has been accused of human rights abuses. LIBYA Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed in a 2011 Arab Spring rebellion backed by NATO. Competing factions soon launched a civil war, made infamous by the 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi. In a 2016 interview, Barack Obama called U.S. involvement…

STAN LEE, CO-FOUNDER OF Marvel Comics, died at 95 on November 12. Along with artists Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and countless others, he helped create some of modern pop culture’s most enduring icons. Lee leaves behind a daughter and a legacy as complicated as his flawed characters, including Spider-Man and the X-Men. He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on December 28, 1922, and grew up in New York. In 1941, he landed a job at Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics. After filling the inkwells of artists, getting them lunch and proofreading their work, he was quickly promoted to writer. With his first assignment—“Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge” in 1941’s Captain America Comics #3—he adopted the pseudonym Stan Lee. That same year, after the departure of Captain America creators Kirby and…

A.J. JACOBS ISN’T RELIGIOUS, BUT he likes to begin dinner with a prayer of thanks for all the people who contributed to the family meal: the farmer who grew the vegetables, the trucker who brought them to the store, the cashier who rang him up at the supermarket. You can imagine the eye-rolling from his three sons. One night, the youngest said, “You know they can’t hear you, right?” Jacobs pondered this and realized that his premeal thank-you sessions were a little perfunctory. He decided to commit more fully. It occurred to him that every object he encountered in a day required the effort of thousands of people, many of them below the radar. Jacobs decided he would thank everyone involved in something he can’t live without. Thus was born…

AN ESTIMATED 43.5 MILLION Americans are taking care of aging relatives and friends, sacrificing time, money and sometimes their careers and personal health. They are doing the work of professional caregivers, who spend years training for the job. As baby boomers age, the demand for unpaid caregivers is rising. Meanwhile, thanks to smaller family sizes, higher divorce rates and increasingly demanding jobs, the number of people available to help their elderly loved ones is shrinking. A growing number—25 percent—are between ages 18 and 34. If there’s one thing that’s bipartisan, it’s caring for the elderly. In January 2018, President Donald Trump signed the Recognize, Assist, Include, Support and Engage (RAISE) Family Caregivers Act, a law that directs Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar to develop and maintain a…

In late September, the peak harvest time, workers in Youyi Farm, the largest state-owned farm in China located in the vast plains north of Heilongjiang Province, were racing against time. The corn had already been harvested and the soil turned over, waiting for next year’s sowing. As the farmhands worked frantically to gather the rice, there was one noticeable difference. The laborers doing the work were not humans but an army of giant, advanced agricultural machines. “We finished harvesting maize earlier than other places because of the large-scale use of agricultural machinery, which helped us sell our corn earlier and at a better price,” Yang Deqing, in charge of publicity in the farm’s fifth administrative zone, said proudly. As one of the 113 farms under the Heilongjiang Farm and Land…

BY ANNA MENTA @annalikestweets IN 1976, WHEN MOVIE AUDIENCES watched Paddy Chayefsky’s dark comedy Network, they laughed. When playwright Lee Hall rewatched the film in 2008, he cringed. “What Paddy predicted as mad satire in 1976 is documentary realism in our age,” he tells Newsweek. “Week by week it becomes more relevant.” Chayefsky, who won an Oscar for his screenplay and died in 1981, was already noting the diminishing distinctions between TV news and entertainment, and the ominous ability of the medium to harness popular rage. The British Hall, best known for the 2000 screenplay for Billy Elliot as well as its Tony-winning musical adaption, recognized not only Chayefsky’s eerie prescience but also “a very robust piece of dramatic literature—in the same tradition as Arthur Miller. “My job,” Hall adds,…

We thank our parents for raising and supporting their children, sometimes into their 20s, and they jokingly (we think) hold it over us. Less discussed is that, at some point, we will probably be asked to care for them, for a period that can extend into decades—a reality that comeswith emotional and financial challenges. 28 Average hours a week U.S. caregivers spend helping older adults with health care activities. $43,539 Median annual cost of a U.S. assisted-living facility in 2016; for nursing home care, it was $92,378. 69% Percentage of U.S. carers who rearrange their work schedule, decrease hours or take unpaid leave. 44% Percentage of U.S. carers who say their employer is unaware of their caregiving. $324,044 Estimated cost, as of 2011, of lost wages and Social Security benefits…

Young Queen Victoria WAS SHOCKED IN 1842 WHEN SHE belatedly learned the entire British army in Afghanistan, some 16,000 men, had been annihilated by tribal warriors. But not, evidently, for long. Undeterred, the United Kingdom would shrug off the loss, fight two more wars in Afghanistan and never give a thought to relinquishing its self-given role as the world’s civilizing and stabilizing force. A hundred years would pass before it finally exhausted its Treasury and lost its empire in World War II. The United States took over the role as the world’s superpower in 1945. But now it, too, faces exhausting drains on its Treasury, manpower and political will as a result of the original sin of attempting a gunpoint democratization of Afghanistan. Battered further by catastrophic forays into Iraq,…

To put a human on Mars by the 2030s, a stated goal of NASA, the space agency must solve many difficult problems, including protecting the astronauts making the six-month journey (one-way) from exposure to the sun’s deadly radiation (15 times the annual limit for a nuclear plant worker). In the meantime, robot probes will carry the day. NASA’s InSight is about to land on Mars, exploring the planet’s insides with sound and radio waves. 3.7 BILLION Age of riverbeds and ocean beds on Mars. Scientists think water once covered much of the planet’s surface, perhaps supporting life. 205 Number of days it will have taken the InSight probe to reach Mars. It was launched on May 5 at 4:05 a.m. Pacific time and will land on November 26 at noon.…