Newsweek 06/15/2018

FIVE YEARS AGO, WHEN HASSAN WAS 11, militiamen killed his father not far from his home in Kaga Bandoro, a small, cattle-trading town in the Central African Republic, he says. Full of sadness and anger, the boy, a member of the country’s disenfranchised Muslim minority, didn’t believe the courts would deliver justice. The only thing he trusted, he says, was a Kalashnikov. So, not long after his father’s death, Hassan (identified with a pseudonym for security concerns) joined the Séléka alliance of rebels, a coalition of local and foreign fighters in the civil war, he says. The largely Muslim group seized large swaths of the country in 2013, triggering reprisals from mostly Christian militias called the anti-balaka. His first job: working as a bodyguard for a commander whose armed group was terrorizing…

IT WAS AUGUST 2017, AND WHITE nationalist shock jock Mike Peinovich was firing up his audience on The Daily Shoah, the signature podcast of an “alt-right” network that attracts tens of thousands of listeners a week. Many of them were preparing for the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Counterprotesters, however, were promising to disrupt the event in Emancipation Park, where city officials planned to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Peinovich told his audience to come prepared for a fight. “Bring whatever you need, that you feel you need for your self-defense,” he intoned. “We don’t want them to have the impression that we are going to be showing up there unarmed.… That is not the case.” Some of his listeners apparently got the message. Soon…

ABOUT THREE YEARS AGO, NOT LONG AFTER DONALD Trump announced his improbable bid for the White House, Felix Sater sensed a big opportunity. He and his childhood friend, Michael Cohen—then a lawyer and dealmaker for the Trump Organization—had been working for more than a decade, on and off, to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The New York real estate mogul had long wanted to see his name on a glitzy building in the Russian capital, but the project had never materialized. Now, with Trump running for office, the timing seemed right to Sater, who felt he had the proper connections for the project. A Moscow native whose family had fled to Brooklyn in the 1970s, he had returned to Russia in the 1990s, where he had done business with a…

VLADIMIR PUTIN KEPT A WATCHFUL EYE ON A black-and-white soccer ball as it soared toward him through a spacious Kremlin office, before he deftly bumped it back with his head. On the other side of the room, Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, waited for the return pass. When it came, he flicked the ball up, juggling it from foot to foot before kicking it back to the Russian president. The two men, both dressed in suits and ties, were taking part in a promotional video for this summer’s World Cup, which Russia will host for the first time. In May, just weeks after the filming of the video, Putin and Infantino met again, this time in Sochi, on Russia’s Black Sea coastline, where they inspected the…

Intermittent fasting is something we naturally do already, when we sleep, argues one doctor. “It’s supposed to be part of everyday life.” WEIGHT GAIN MAY BE DRIVEN BY NOT ONLY WHAT WE EAT but also our tendency to eat all day long. That’s the thinking behind the weight-loss trend of intermittent fasting, which has grown in popularity in the past few years. An increasing number of health professionals are also prescribing fasting to people with type 2 diabetes, which currently afflicts more than 29 million people in the United States. Yet a recent study warns that going for long stretches without eating could cause the very damage it’s supposed to prevent. Type 2 diabetes is triggered in part by unhealthy eating, which renders the body resistant to insulin, a hormone produced by…

More than 200 million people are infected with malaria every year, and a new discovery has illuminated the evolution of Plasmodium falciparum—the deadliest of the parasites carrying the disease. Researchers in the U.K., France and Gabon teamed up to create an ancestral tree for the family of malaria parasites that includes P. falciparum, the only member that infects humans. By sequencing and analyzing the genomes of these single-celled organisms, the team pinpointed exactly when P. falciparum jumped beyond chimpanzees and gorillas. Reporting in Nature Microbiology, the researchers believe the parasite emerged 50,000 years ago, developing it’s human-specific form only 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. They also identified the single cluster of genes that enabled P. falciparum to make that leap—a critical discovery that could help end the scourge of malaria.…