Innholdsfortegnelse for 02/22/2019 i Newsweek International

It’s looking as if the Los Angeles Laker will come to define basketball’s current decade, much as Michael Jordan did for the ’90s and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar the ’70s. No one has yet beat the latter on overall points, but to see how much a once rough-and-tumble game with an audience in the low thousands has evolved into a high stakes, billion-dollar sport—second only to football—look no further than the salaries and the rise of the three-pointer (made official in 1979; up until then every basket counted for two points): Abdul-Jabbar made one in his entire career; Steph Curry has made 2,344—so far.…

W.K. STRATTON WAS 13 WHEN THE WILD BUNCH was released in 1969. Like a lot of kids living in small towns in that pre-internet time, he found that movie theaters were a prime option for escape. And in director Sam Peckinpah’s radical Western, he was transported to a landscape of “agony and dirt,” says Stratton, author of the new book, The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film (Bloomsbury). “The way the violence was portrayed really got my attention.” Visceral, bone-crunching brutality is so common today that it’s hard to fathom the effect The Wild Bunch had on its first audiences. The film was polarizing—equally reviled (a few early viewers reportedly left the theater to throw up) and celebrated. Many in a…

Congresswomen pose for a photo as they arrive for the State of the Union address at the Capitol on February 5. Voters sent a record number of women to Congress in the November elections, giving them just under a quarter of the seats in the House. Dressed in white in tribute to the women’s suffrage movement, the group later stole the show from Donald Trump when he noted that women had filled 58 percent of newly created jobs in the past year. “You weren’t supposed to do that!” the president joked after they rose to their feet and applauded.…

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was still using his birth name, Lew Alcindor, when Newsweek put him on the cover in early 1967. The UCLA sophomore and soon-to-be USBWA College Player of the Year was 7 feet, 1 inches of “lyrical power and mobility,” sinking a record 67 percent of his shots. He would join the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969 (for a salary of $250,000), move to the Lakers in 1975 and retire from the NBA in 1989. He remains the highest-scoring player of all time. When Alcindor came up, teams were still pretty evenly divided between black and white players, but that was beginning to change; the biggest stars—Boston Celtic Bill Russell, Philadelphia 76er Wilt Chamberlain and Cincinnati Royal Oscar Robertson—were African-American. The Celtics had the first all-black starting five during the…

IN DECEMBER, PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN called for Russia’s economy “to enter another league.” But that priority is far from clear if one looks at where the Kremlin places its foreign policy chips. The latest gamble is Venezuela, where Russia recently flew two nuclear-capable Blackjack bombers. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo dismissed this as “two corrupt governments squandering public funds and squelching liberty…while their people suffer.” Indeed, Venezuela is an economic basket case where, the International Monetary Fund predicts, inflation this year will hit 10 million percent. The U.S., too, has taxed its domestic economy to spend vast sums on foreign wars, from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. During the Cold War, it expended resources to counter Soviet interference in multiple poor countries, such as Nicaragua, Angola and the…

THE PRESIDENT WAS UPSET. WATCHING TV IN HIS WHITE House residence, his usual morning routine, Donald Trump saw his intelligence chiefs kick the legs out from under yet another of his pet campaigns: Iran. Trump and two of his top national security officials had been suggesting for two years that the Islamic republic was still in pursuit of a nuclear weapon and posed a mortal threat to its neighbors and the West. But now, Dan Coats, his national intelligence director, was in a Capitol Hill hearing room saying that wasn’t true: Iran was living up to the letter of the deal the U.S. under President Barack Obama and five other nations had negotiated with the Middle Eastern country to dismantle its nuclear program, Coats said. Not only that, added CIA…