Newsweek 03/30/2018 - 04/06/2018

IN EARLY MARCH, JÁNOS LÁZÁR, A SENIOR Hungarian minister, posted a video on Face-book complaining about the lack of “white Christians” in Vienna. Muslim migrants, he warned, were destroying the city—and if someone didn’t do something, they would transform Budapest, Hungary’s capital, in a similar way. “If we let them in…our cities,” Lazar told his followers, “the consequences will be crime, impoverishment, dirt, filth and impossible urban conditions.” Lázár is chief of staff to Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, and his post came roughly a month before the country goes to the polls in April. It was a classic move from Orbán, something his Alliance of Young Democrats (known as Fidesz) had done many times before: play to voters’ fears over Islam and immigration. Facebook removed the video, but it…

“HAIL TRUMP!” RICHARD SPENCER bellowed. “Hail our people! Hail victory!” It was November 2016, not long after Donald Trump’s presidential victory, and Spencer, perhaps America’s most well-known figure in the so-called alt-right, was speaking to a packed room of white nationalists in Washington, D.C. A clip of the speech, first published by The Atlantic, went viral and seemed to confirm the worst fears of many Trump critics: that the president-elect had empowered a fringe movement of racist, right-wing radicals—and launched it into the mainstream. But less than 18 months later, on March 5, 2018, Spencer spoke in front of another room of like-minded supporters, this time at Michigan State University. Only now, the audience was smaller than the one in D.C., and Spencer seemed far less triumphant. “We are going to…

On March 4, President Xi Jinping, also General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, attended a joint panel discussion with political advisors from the China Democratic League and the China Zhi Gong Party, those without party affiliation and those from the sector of returned overseas Chinese, who gathered in Beijing to attend the First Session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China’s top political advisory body. During the discussion, Xi stressed that China must consolidate and improve the system of multiparty cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the CPC, and tap the unique potential of multiparty cooperation to provide practical advice and pool wisdom for advancing socialist democracy. Distinctive features After nearly 69 years of progress and reform since its…

RONALD REAGAN CAME TO NORTH CAROLINA on October 8, 1984, a month before American voters would decide whether to give him another four years in the White House. In 1980, running against Jimmy Carter, he’d won the state by only 39,000 votes, but it was now morning in America again, and the president was in a sunny mood as his rally began, shortly after noon, in downtown Charlotte. As is customary in politics, Reagan praised his audience, then himself. Soon, he turned to attacking the Democrats, whom he accused of keeping people “in bondage as wards of the state.” They wanted dependents, not citizens. And instead of listening to Americans, liberals would tell Americans what to do. To illustrate his point, Reagan alluded to a matter of fierce contention across the…

“CLOTHES HAVE A STRONG CONNOTATION HERE, LIKE A JOURNALIST WRITING AN ARTICLE AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT.” “THESE YOUNG CUBANS ARE NOT BURDENED BY THE PAST. THEY ARE REDEFINING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CUBAN. ” KAHN’S SUBJECTS “WORK WITHIN A GRAY AREA, DOING THINGS THAT ARE NOT ILLEGAL, BUT ALSO NOT QUITE LEGAL. ” TOURISTS ARE LURED TO HAVANA by the ruin porn: the capital’s decaying, pastel colonial architecture, its 1950s-era cars and the fading faces of its founding revolutionaries, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. But when photographer Greg Kahn was on assignment in the city in 2012, he stumbled on a scene that gave him a glimpse of a different Cuba: a plaza full of young Cubans partying as a DJ played contemporary electronic dance music. “They told me they hate this attitude…

“My goal is a complete understanding of the universe. Why it is what it is and why it exists at all.” ON MARCH 13, 76-YEAR-OLD STEPHEN HAWKING died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, also called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), with which he had lived since being diagnosed at 21. Doctors predicted he wouldn’t live for more than a few years, but he survived, brilliantly, for nearly six more decades. In 1988, when Newsweek writer Jerry Adler visited Hawking at Cambridge University, where he held Sir Thomas Newton’s chair as the Lucasian professor of mathematics, the physicist had just published his first best-seller, A Brief History of Time, a survey of modern cosmology. In 1974, he had made the discovery of the astronomical phenomenon that bears his name, Hawking radiation (explaining how black holes…