Innholdsfortegnelse for 05/17/2019 i Newsweek International

South Korean children ride a roller coaster at an amusement and animal park south of Seoul on May 2, as part of a temple-stay program that teaches about Buddhism. Each year, Buddhist parents sign up their children to spend three weeks as monks, shaving their heads, wearing robes and taking part in services, leading up to Buddha’s birthday on May 12. Buddhism was brought to Korea from China about 1,700 years ago, and today about a quarter of South Koreans follow the religion.…

CORPORATIONS SOMETIMES DO bad things. Let’s get that out of the way before the calls and tweets start flooding in. Sometimes the acts are intentional, sometimes not, but the damage was done. When Volkswagen created software that enabled its polluting cars to cheat emissions tests, that was bad. Same with Turing Pharmaceuticals, which in 2015 raised the price of a drug used to fight HIV from about $14 a pill to $750. Or when United Airlines had a customer dragged off a plane to give his seat to a crew member needed for another flight. It’s hard not to feel violated when corporations like Facebook peddle private information to marketers and political operatives, or when the former CEO of Sun Microsystems dismisses our concerns by saying, “You have zero privacy…

LOTS OF POPULAR VIDEO GAMES MAKE SWORD FIGHTING LOOK EASY. Players have near-infinite reserves of health, limitless stamina and swords that never break. Raab Rashi, a veteran martial artist and owner of Sword Class NYC, a 10-year-old school where students can learn both Eastern and Western sword styles, says the fights in most games and movies are nothing like the real thing. “They leave out all the screaming and the shitting your pants, all the horrible stuff of real combat,” he says. But one of 2019’s top-selling games is winning over audiences by making swordplay hard. Game director Hidetaka Miyazaki made his reputation on sword fights. His long-running Dark Souls franchise is among the best action and role-playing games. And Miyazaki’s latest, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, released in March, sold…

Anti-government protesters confront security forces around La Carlota military base on May 1, after a day of violent clashes set off by opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s call for a military uprising against President Nicolás Maduro. Guaidó’s plan to force Maduro to resign fizzled when the military did not rally behind the self-declared interim president, who has the support of the United States and dozens of other nations.…

Members of Chapel-en-le-Frith Morris dance on Eccles Pike in the High Peak district before sunrise on May 1, 2018, in honor of the Celtic festival of Beltane. Morris, a traditional English folk dance, is usually performed to music while wearing bell pads on the shins and may involve sticks, swords or handkerchiefs. Chapel-en-le Frith Morris formed in 1975 and now allows women to join. “We dance because we’re happy,” the group’s website says. “We’re happy because we dance.”…

BORN IN 2008 IN RESPONSE TO the global banking and credit crisis, bitcoin has found its “patient zero” a decade later in Venezuela. Faced with hyperinflation, a worthless local currency and a risky black market for dollars, Venezuelans are increasingly turning to bitcoin as a tool for survival in the world’s worst-performing economy. In most countries, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies still struggle for visibility and operate mainly within niche online circles of tech- or finance-savvy speculators and enthusiasts. But in Venezuela, brick-and-mortar retailers, including restaurants and shoe shops, invite customers to spend bit-coin and other cryptocurrencies. As Venezuelans seek to skirt capital controls and a crumbling financial system, it is not difficult to see the appeal of a decentralized digital currency that can function beyond banks and any central authority.…

WRITING MY BOOK, SEE YOU IN THE PIAZZA: NEW PLACES TO DISCOVER IN ITALY, KEPT ME TRAVELING FOR 18 MONTHS. MY HUSBAND and I packed up our white Alfa Romeo and took to the road. How did I decide which places to write about? I chose a base and set out from there—exploring the dirt roads through the olive groves of Puglia, the twisting ones through the mind-bending Dolomite mountains, the stone-walled tracks through vineyards of Sicily and everywhere in between. The places were so exhilarating that I wanted more, then even more, because what I learned over and over is that Italy is endless. You need 10 lifetimes, and even then you can’t say, I know Italy. But my advice is to try. Here are a few favorites, and…

Worshippers carry a statue of Saint Domenico di Sora draped with live snakes on May 1, during an annual procession through the streets of Cocullo, a small village in southern Italy. The festival is said to be one of the oldest (and most unusual) in Europe and based on the belief that the patron saint removed snakes from farmers’ fields around the turn of the 11th century. Snake catchers gather nonvenomous snakes for the faithful to place atop the statue in hopes of gaining protection for field workers against snakebites.…

AS VIRAL IMAGES GO, SCIENTISTS COULDN’T HAVE asked for a better one-two combo. On April 10, the first-ever image of a black hole and its burning ring of gas was seen around the world. Next came a different kind of caught-in-the-moment radiance—the overjoyed reaction of Katherine Bouman, whose algorithm played a role in the black hole’s capture. It was a good day for science, as well as for women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). It was also, unfortunately, a rare day, with the black hole representing a troubling metaphor. That term might describe the experience of many girls who, despite their love of STEM, don’t receive the same encouragement that boys do. Often called the “leaky pipeline,” this problem grows during the high school years, when interest in…

“UP! UP! I BESEECH YOU…. SHUT YOUR GATES,” SAID A prominent New Yorker who would soon launch a political career. A foreign nation, he warned, was sending us “their criminals” because the United States hadn’t erected enough “walls” or “gates.” The heart of the problem: These new immigrants practiced a religion that was so “despotic” and “ignorant” that it would destroy democracy. He also complained that men like him who had the guts to tell the truth about that dangerous religion were unfairly labeled “bigoted” and “intolerant” by a liberal media that was “on the side of your enemies.” The man was Samuel Morse, then a well-known painter who later helped invent the telegraph and the Morse code. The religion he assailed in 1835 was not Islam but Catholicism. The…

01 Rob Banks New York Banks, whose favorite painting is Picasso’s Guernica, describes tattooing as “the most mysterious and powerful art or craft known to man.” 02 Mowgli London Mowgli is a conceptual artist whose work is reminiscent of Salvador Dalí and brings surrealism to life on the skin. 03 Caroline Karenine Paris A mysterious tattooist with a cult following, Karenine draws inspiration from her travels and women around the world to create her complex designs. 04 Julia Rehme Berlin Rehme’s work, described in The Tattoorialist as both “sweet and tortured at the same time,” works out of her own shop, Noïa, by appointment only. 05 Honda Tsuyoshi Itoshima, Japan A master of the Kyushu-style tattooing method—a traditional Japanese technique that uses a stick and…