Newsweek 05/04/2018

WHEN MARTIN SHKRELI, FORMER CEO OF Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of Daraprim, which treats dangerous infections, from $13.50 to $750, the public was appalled. But lost in the outrage over predatory pricing was one crucial fact: What Shkreli did was completely legal—and common. Between 2012 and 2017, for example, the price for Nitrostat, which prevents and treats chest pain, increased by 477 percent, from $15.91 to $91.76. Nothing about the medication changed during those years—not its chemical formula, not its uses and not the manufacturing process. Pfizer, which sells Nitrostat, offered no explanation for the spike. In fact, according to a report published in March by the minority staff of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, prices for the top 20 drugs prescribed to older Americans rose by an average…

ON JANUARY 26, DURING THE World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum tycoon with close links to his country’s government, threw a party at a luxury chalet. The champagne flowed, music pumped from the speakers, and the guests feasted on caviar. The night’s star performer was Enrique Iglesias, the famous pop singer. At some point, according to photos of the event, Deripaska, 50, took to the dance floor in an open-necked shirt. Now, Deripaska probably isn’t dancing. On April 6, the U.S. placed him on a sanctions list that included six other Kremlin-connected oligarchs, as well as numerous Russian officials and companies. The new sanctions prohibit American citizens from doing business with them and freeze any assets they have in the U.S. Citizens of other countries who…

EVER SINCE HE BEGAN BLOGGING during the dying days of the Arab Spring, British citizen journalist Eliot Higgins has made powerful enemies. The reason: Bellingcat, his investigative website, where he’s used satellite images, photographs and social media posts to uncover who’s behind deadly attacks around the world. In 2013, Higgins exposed President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian rebels outside of Damascus. A year later, he implicated Russia in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and revealed inconsistencies in Moscow’s account of the missile attack, which killed nearly 300 people. Most recently, Higgins documented the allegations that the Syrian regime again used chemical weapons, this time on the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma. Working from his home in the English city of Leicester, he used video footage to purportedly…

The multilingual versions of the second volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China were launched in London on April 11, at a ceremony attended by over 300 political and business leaders, academics and representatives of publishing agencies from 14 countries and regions. Chinese wisdom The second volume unveiled during the London Book Fair, contains a collection of 99 articles, including Xi’s speeches, conversations, instructions and congratulatory messages between August 2014 and September 2017. The book was published in Traditional Chinese, English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Arabic and Portuguese, and serves as a supplement to the first volume launched in September 2014 and published by Foreign Languages Press, a publishing house under the China International Publishing Group (CIPG). The first volume contains articles arranged in 18 topics, incorporating 79 speeches, talks, interviews,…

THREE DECADES AGO, KONSTANTY GEBERT BROKE the law. Constantly. He took part in anti-government protests. He wrote for underground newspapers. And he helped organize a secret university that taught subjects forbidden by the state. But since the fall of Poland’s Communist government in 1989, Gebert says, he’s tried to respect the rule of law that Poles fought so hard for. That is, until earlier this year, when Poland’s ruling far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) made it illegal to blame the country for Nazi atrocities during World War II. Gebert felt he had to speak out. So in March, days after the law went into effect, the 64-year-old Jewish journalist made such a claim in an article for his Warsaw-based newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. “Many members of the Polish nation,” he wrote,…

“[GINGRICH] WAS SUCCESSFUL IN USING A VERY SHARP EDGE IN DESCRIBING DEMOCRATS AS not Americans.” FUELED BY THE CONTROVERSIAL PRESIDENCY OF Donald Trump, Democrats are predicting a rout in November’s midterm elections. If they are fortunate, that electoral wave could be as large as the one that swept across the country in the fall of 1974, when Dems took 49 seats in the House and five in the Senate from Republicans. Those Democrats were liberals, and they were young, like many of the candidates hoping to win a congressional seat this fall. “I literally looked up the word Democrat in the phone book to find the local headquarters,” said Bob Edgar, who came to Congress in 1974 from Pennsylvania. Back then, idealism whisked newcomers like Edgar into the Capitol. But once there,…