Newsweek August 26, 2022

1975 “The Bronfman case was a summer media thriller,” Newsweek said of the kidnapping of 21-year-old Samuel Bronfman II, heir to the Seagram fortune. In 2020, decades after the trial of the two kidnappers during which the jury ruled that Bronfman played a part in his own kidnapping, a revelation came out. One of the kidnapper’s defense attorneys, Peter DeBlasio, wrote in his memoir that he knew the conviction was false and that Bronfman had no part in engineering his kidnapping. According to DeBlasio’s daughter: “He knew all along from Day 1 that his guy had done it.” 1986 “The bill will make taxation more efficient and sharply lower rates,” Newsweek said of what eventually became the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which lowered the top tax rate on ordinary income from 50…

LASSIE COME HOME ▸ Imagine finding a dog who’s been missing for over 2 months, safe and sound… deep inside a 22-mile long cave system. How do you get him home? What does the Red Lobster restaurant chain do with a rare orange lobster? And how worried should we be about the new Henipavirus, spread by shrews? Host Tallman shares the trending stories of the day—from the serious to the surreal, in under 10 minutes. HOST ▸ Andrew Tallman, co-host of The Debate IN THEIR WORDS ▸ “They actually put the dog in a duffle bag and then sort of carried, dragged it out, up a 500-foot awkward vertical climb....” THE ROYAL REPORT Palace news—Meghan Markle to the Queen Courtside Seats ▸ What did Prince Harry say that “wounded” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito?…

Children react in the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on August 6. As Israel hit Gaza with air strikes, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group launched nearly a thousand rockets into Israel over three days, in the area’s worst escalation of violence since last May. Israel says it was forced to launch a “pre-emptive” operation against Islamic Jihad, saying the group was planning an imminent attack. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: GIORGIO VIERA/AFP/GETTY; MARIO TAMA/GETTY; MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/GETTY…

“Is it possible there could be something in that stack that is very damning to the President?”▸ P.15 SCIENTISTS BELIEVE THAT DATA FROM THE JAMES Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will enable them to figure out whether a group of nearby exoplanets are habitable or not, a NASA expert says. JWST should be able to determine whether any of the planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 have atmospheres, according to NASA astrobiologist Shawn Domagal-Goldman. And If the exoplanets have the right kind of atmospheres, they may also have life. Despite decades of scanning the skies for radio signals and an ever-growing list of exoplanets—the name given to planets orbiting other stars—scientists have never found evidence that life exists anywhere but Earth. The TRAPPIST-1 System The TRAPPIST-1 star system is a collection of at least seven exoplanets orbiting…

“IT WAS 55 YEARS AGO, BABE.” —Pete Rose dismissing allegations he had sex with an underage girl in the ’70s “I wouldn’t be friends with her.”—SARAH SNOOK ON HER SUCCESSION CHARACTER“What a horrible place this would have been.”—ARCHAEOLOGIST WADE CATTS ON A MASS GRAVE AT A NEW JERSEY REVOLUTIONARY WAR BATTLEFIELD“This war is basically about the action and reaction of NATO pushing right up to the Russian border which they promised they wouldn’t do.”—ROGER WATERS ON UKRAINE“I’M RICH, I’M FINE.”—Doja Cat, on shaving her head and eyebrows “The war on drugs has failed.” —Colombian president Gustavo Petro “IS IT POSSIBLE THERE’S SOMETHING IN THAT STACK THAT IS VERY DAMNING TO THE PRESIDENT? YES, THERE IS.”—Mick Mulvaney, ex Trump chief of staff, on papers seized at Mar-a-Lago FROM LEFT: MATT WINKELMEYER/GETTY; VICTORIA…

In the 2020 U.S. election, six women ran for president. The winner was a white man. In all the years of presidential elections, only one woman has made it onto the ticket for a major party presidential nominee—Hillary Clinton in 2016. But why? What are the invisible—and very present—barriers preventing the election of the first female president of the United States? In her new book, ELECTABLE: WHY AMERICA HASN’T PUT A WOMAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE…YET (Dey Street Books, August), NBC News Congressional Correspondent Ali Vitali investigates the double standards and limitations that keep women politicians from being judged purely on merit. She asks what will make a candidate electable. In this excerpt from her book, Vitali discusses Kamala Harris’ attack on Joe Biden at the June 2019 Democratic presidential…