Newsweek 2/12/2016

Damascus, Syria—A rebel fighter reportedly with the Faylaq al-Rahman brigade looks out from his hiding spot in the rebel-controlled area of Arbin on January 29. The violence continued in Syria as U.N.-backed peace talks started in Geneva. The talks, delayed for several days due to disagreements over who would attend, are expected to last for six months. The first goal is a cease-fire and then to increase humanitarian aid. Days after the talks started, the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), which was not invited, killed at least 70 people in a suicide attack in Damascus.…

Port-au-Prince, Haiti—A demonstrator confronts a police line on January 30 during violent protests over alleged fraud that forced the postponement of Haiti’s presidential runoff election. With President Michel Mar-telly due to leave office February 7, supporters of both the government and the opposition have been holding protests almost daily, with no agreement on who will lead if no successor is elected. Representatives from the Organization of American States met with Martelly on January 31 in an effort to resolve the crisis. Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas and has struggled for decades to build a stable democracy.…

Çanakkale, Turkey—Turkish security forces retrieve a child’s body on January 30 after at least 33 asylum seekers drowned when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross to Greece. The boat was carrying refugees from Myanmar, Afghanistan and Syria. The U.K. announced limited plans to help unaccompanied child refugees, in addition to an earlier plan to accept 20,000 refugees from camps near the Syrian border. Other countries in Europe are beginning to place limits on refugees, including Germany, which said those from Syria and Iraq will return to their home countries once the conflicts there end.…

Tokyo—Japan’s economics minister, Akira Amari, bows during a news conference on January 28. Amari said he was resigning to take responsibility for a political funding scandal that has rocked the government. The magazine Shukan Bunshun reported that Amari had accepted a $100,000 gift from a construction company, but he denied taking bribes and said the funds from the company should have been recorded as a political donation. Amari has been a close ally of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a leader in Japan’s negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.…

IT COULD START with a fever, a rash, a headache or all three. More often than not, it spreads through the bloodstream with no symptoms. For most victims with symptoms, it means a week in bed with aching muscles and a high temperature, and then life returns to normal. But when you’re pregnant, Zika is something much worse: It’s the specter of having a baby with a skull like a curled fist, the virus having arrested brain growth sometime between when the mosquito bite infected the mother and the birth. Microcephaly comes in a range—in the mildest cases, children can achieve normal intelligence. But many of the Zika cases emerging in Latin America are truly severe. Where a normal brain has ridges, doctors are seeing scans that show brains as smooth…

CHINA HELPED IRAN KICK-START ITS NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM BACK IN THE 1980S. AS IRAN celebrates the lifting of sanctions and cranks up its oil production, the biggest winner may be China, Iran’s new best friend. Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a visit to Tehran in January, meeting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and signing a 25-year economic, political and military cooperation pact. The two leaders announced the signing of 17 deals—including agreements on oil drilling, nuclear energy and a vast infrastructure project linking China to the Mediterranean, known as One Belt, One Road. Rouhani predicted the deals would boost bilateral trade tenfold to an annual $600 billion in the next decade. “The end of the sanctions will serve first and foremost to help Chinese energy firms—that is why President Xi Jinping is paying…