Newsweek International 2/26-3/5/2021

“We cannot reduce our product prices, but we can reduce your production costs”Shogo Kondo, President and CEO, Yamato Sewing Machine Mfg. Co., Ltd. With garment factories today facing all kinds of severe competition globally, what garment manufacturers really want to know is how they can produce garments both at low cost and high quality. While many people compare sewing machine prices, Yamato focuses on reducing garment production costs to improve overall factory profitability by manufacturing superior-quality sewing machines. In fact, considering their high-quality performance, Yamato’s sewing machines quickly pay for themselves and in effect are cheaper than standard Chinese-made machines. That is because while Yamato’s Japanese-made sewing machines are more expensive than standard ones made in China, they significantly reduce garment production costs compared to Chinese-made machines. Quick return on…

1971 Newsweek reported, “At a moment when they feel more cause for pride than ever before, American Jews find themselves in the midst of a new, troubling search for identity—as Americans and as Jews.” A Newsweek Gallup poll found that nearly half of the Jewish Americans surveyed supported diplomatic and military aid to Israel. Fast forward nearly 50 years: Gallup reported that 95 percent of U.S. Jews were sympathetic to Israel in 2019, but only 29 percent approved of President Donald Trump, despite his pro-Israel policies. 1981 “Before a joint session of Congress, Ronald Reagan laid out his blueprint for a second New Deal potentially as historic as the first,” according to Newsweek—a plan that included major tax cuts for business and individuals. In contrast, President Joe Biden plans to…

IF PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN WANTS TO HEAL THE divisions in U.S. politics, he needs to stop all this talk about “unity” and instead focus the attention of all Americans on a common foe: toxic polarization. That’s the advice the Biden administration has gotten from psychologist Peter Coleman. In a series of memos, Coleman, a mediator with experience in conflicts as far-flung as the Middle East, Haiti and Africa, has advised the new administration that the best way to repair and reverse the extremism in U.S. politics is to focus the attention of Americans on the virulence of their divisions and mobilize them to attack the problem. Coleman has come to this conclusion after traveling the world consulting with peacemakers and policymakers and studying the societal conditions that often precede war,…

“He’s decompressing. He’s enjoying some of the time he hasn’t had in the past. And he’s thinking about impeachment.” SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM ON FORMER PRESIDENT TRUMP “I THINK THAT CANCEL CULTURE, A LOT OF THAT IS JUST A FABRICATION. IT’S NOT REALLY REAL.” —DON CHEADLE “Going through the five phases of grief, we need to come to the acceptance phase that our lives are not going to be the same. I don’t think the world has really absorbed the fact that these are long-term changes.” —THOMAS FRIEDEN, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE U.S. CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION “It troubles and saddens me that in 2021 professionals STILL have to choose between whistleblowing in the workplace and job security.” —actress charisma carpenter alleging mistreatment by director joss whedon “I’M HERE…

IN RESPONSE TO A GASH ON the body, white blood cells rush to the site of the wound. They work vigorously, the body’s immune system alert to threat and activated to protect bodily systems from further harm. So it was that in response to the Trump administration’s authoritarian tendencies, made clear from the earliest days of his presidency, millions of Americans became members of “the resistance.” People who were already involved in politics, as well as many who were not that particularly interested at any time before, became acutely aware that damage that could become irreparable was being done to our democracy. There was a vast realization—on the left and also on the right—that this damage represented something much worse than the routine political corruption we’d all pretty much come…

FOLLOWING THE VIOLENT storming of the U.S. Capitol in January—two weeks before the inauguration of President Joe Biden—misinformation about what happened during the riots found a home overseas. Several European sites that had recently delved into promoting the U.S.-centric QAnon conspiracy theory and falsehoods about the 2020 U.S. election have now turned to the Capitol riots, claiming—as have right-wing commentators, misinformation publishers and some politicians in the U.S—that it was actually the left who caused the violence. Many of those same sites continued to push falsehoods about the U.S. election until right before President Biden was sworn in or even during the inauguration. Claims that antifa, a coalition of left-wing activists, was responsible for the Capitol riots have proven popular on European misinformation sites and social media accounts, despite the…