Newsweek 10/26/2018 - 11/02/2018

1975 With the release of his career-making album Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen became the first rocker on the covers of Newsweek and Time simultaneously. “The first day I can remember lookin’ in the mirror and standin’ what I was seein’ was the day I had a guitar in my hand,” the 26-year-old told reporter Maureen Orth, who described his two-hour-plus concerts ending with “four foot-stomping encores” and a fan base possessing “a kind of cult hysteria.” Forty-three years later, that stamina and popularity remain. 1936 In March, Adolf Hitler sent German troops to reoccupy the Rhineland, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. By October, his jingoistic rhetoric and threats to Moscow (“a national hymn of hate”) had Newsweek wondering if Europe was “building up mighty war machines.” Indeed: World War II…

Members of the Colla Joves Xiquets de Valls team dazzle a massive crowd at the 27th Concurs de Castells, or Human Towers, competition on October 7. Starting some two centuries ago near this port town, castells have drawn a huge following across Catalonia. At local festivals, teams construct the highest, most complex displays possible, usually with the stoutest participants at the base and a small boy at the top. In 2010, UNESCO anointed the castells as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.…

IT’S NOT EASY TO GET IN TO SEE DIANE Ellis-Marseglia, one of three commissioners who run Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Security is tight at the Government Administration Building on 55 East Court Street in Doylestown, a three-story brick structure with no windows, where she has an office. It also happens to be where officials retreat on election night to tally the votes recorded on the county’s 900 or so voting machines. Guards at the door X-ray bags and scan each visitor with a wand. Unfortunately, Russian hackers won’t need to come calling on Election Day. Cyberexperts warn that they could use more sophisticated means of changing the outcomes of close races or sowing confusion in an effort to throw the U.S. elections into disrepute. The 2018 midterms offer a compelling target: a…

The Huangpu River, winding through Shanghai, separates the city into an east and west section called Pudong and Puxi, respectively. Although both are part of the same city, they grew at totally different speeds in the past. Looking across from the Bund in Puxi, Pudong was a vast land with low-rise houses and tracts of farmland. The only transportation linking the two sides was a ferry system. This all began to change on April 18, 1990, when, as part of the continued reform and opening-up process, China decided to develop the Pudong area and named it Pudong New Area. By then, China’s reform and opening up had been carried out for more than 10 years. Pudong was somewhat of a late passenger boarding the reform and opening-up express train. But its…

Young Queen Victoria WAS SHOCKED IN 1842 WHEN SHE belatedly learned the entire British army in Afghanistan, some 16,000 men, had been annihilated by tribal warriors. But not, evidently, for long. Undeterred, the United Kingdom would shrug off the loss—fight two more wars in Afghanistan—and never gave a thought to relinquishing its self-given role as the world’s civilizing and stabilizing force. A hundred years would pass before it finally exhausted its Treasury and lost its empire in the Second World War. The United States assumed Britain’s role as the world’s superpower in 1945. But now it, too, faces exhausting drains on its Treasury, manpower and political will as a result of the original sin of attempting a gunpoint democratization of Afghanistan. Battered further by catastrophic forays into Iraq, Libya and Syria,…

CAMEROON The U.S. Africa Command has been involved here since October 2015 as part of a broader battle against Boko Haram, which is connected to the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). While the U.S. has also assisted nearby Chad, Niger and Nigeria, the roughly 300 troops in the Cameroon mission have come under new scrutiny as the country becomes increasingly embroiled in an internal conflict with separatist rebels. In addition, the Rapid Intervention Battalion, an elite force trained by the Pentagon, has been accused of human rights abuses. LIBYA Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed in a 2011 Arab Spring rebellion backed by NATO. Competing factions soon launched a civil war, made infamous by the 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi. In a 2016 interview, Barack Obama called U.S. involvement in Libya the…