Newsweek 05/25/2018

THREE DECADES AGO, LONG BEFORE PRESIDENT Donald Trump bragged about the size of his inauguration crowd, Oliver North—the new president of the National Rifle Association—held the country in thrall with his own displays of dissembling and dishonesty, turning a fundamental disregard for facts into a political strength. As the Trump-Russia probe continues, North’s rise, fall and return to national prominence offer some clear lessons, both for the president and his detractors. A former Marine who served on the National Security Council (NSC) staff under President Ronald Reagan, North was at the core of the biggest political scandal of that era—the Iran-Contra affair. (He eventually was convicted on three criminal charges, although an appeals panel vacated the convictions on a technicality.) The scandal involved a bumbling series of covert ops in the…

“Our movement is the force of the web combined with the town square. Their symbiosis is the key.” GIUSEPPE “BEPPE” GRILLO, 69, rose to prominence as a comedian, skewering the hypocrisy and venality of Italy’s political class. When he formed the Five Star Movement in 2009, his anti-establishment, euroskeptic stance quickly made the upstart party a player in Italian politics. His supporters: mostly young, working-class Italians who had become disillusioned with the traditional left. After winning 32 percent of the vote in the March election, Five Star became the single biggest group in the country’s Parliament. In the wake of his party’s victory, Grillo refused to take a seat in Parliament or in a possible coalition government, instead preferring to guide the movement from the outside. His colleagues have needed some help.…

In electing Trump, American voters told the world that they didn’t care about abused women. THE HEADLINE SAID IT ALL: “Four Women Accuse New York’s Attorney General of Physical Abuse.” At first, there was denial, talk of “role-playing” and vows of consensual sex. But just three hours later, Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat and prominent women’s advocate, was finished, brought down by The New Yorker in the latest #MeToo scandal. His party had demanded it. “The violent actions described by multiple women in this story are abhorrent,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Describing their relationships with the attorney general, two of the women told the magazine he had slapped and choked them repeatedly. “Given the damning pattern of facts and corroboration laid out in the article, I do not believe…

ON EARLY 2012, A FEW MONTHS AFTER NORTH KOREAN leader Kim Jong Il was buried in an elaborate state funeral, I found myself in the Pyongyang office of a man named James Kim. He’s an evangelical Christian, a veteran of the Korean War and a former political prisoner in North Korea. He is also the founder of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, which is how he met Kim Jong Il. As we spoke, James talked about attending the funeral and how he encountered the Dear Leader’s son, a portly 29-year-old named Kim Jong Un. Back then, the conventional view was that the young Kim was too inexperienced to maintain a tight grip on power like his father and grandfather before him. He’d attended junior high school in Switzerland, loved…

TIM FLACH’S new anthology poignantly captures the similarities between wild animals and the human beings who threaten their e istence IN AUGUST 2016, TIM FLACH SAT for hours in a pit in a remote part of southeast Russia. His goal: to snap a photo of the critically endangered saiga antelope. The heat was intense, and the few images he got were blurred and unusable. By the time he returned some six months later, it was winter and well below freezing, but he got the shot he needed. It took Flach, an award-winning photographer, about two years to put together his new anthology, Endangered, and along the way he had many such adventures. He trekked through Gabon in search of gorillas, photographed polar bears on Arctic ice flow and, in Kenya, looked the…

New research suggests water is equal parts order and chaos—a poetic result for Earth’s most valuable resource. DESPITE OUR UTTER DEPENDENCE ON IT, WATER IS A mystery. Scientists don’t understand why it expands as it cools, why hot water turns to ice faster than cold water or its extraordinary surface tension, which allows it to cling to soil and support insects. “It’s almost like water is trying to hide its secrets,” says John Russo, a mathematician at the University of Bristol in England, who thinks he may have figured one out. Most scientists seeking to parse water’s oddities expose it to extreme conditions, such as very low temperatures. Russo and colleagues at the University of Tokyo took a different approach, creating computer models of “extreme water,” as he describes it. In their…