Newsweek 01/18/2019

1997 On Christmas Day 1996, child beauty pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey disappeared from her Boulder, Colorado, home. A lengthy ransom note was left in her bedroom, but eight hours later her father found her body in the basement; she had been strangled and bludgeoned. Her death transfixed millions of Americans, wrote Jerry Adler, with both “the grisly nature of the murder and the novelty of putting mascara on the lashes of a 6-year-old.” Her parents—briefly suspected—were exonerated by DNA evidence. Decades later, Ramsey’s murder remains unsolved. 1982 Newsweek declared the breakup of Ma Bell’s monopoly “the most memorable in antitrust enforcement” history. Thirty-six years later and AT&T is still generating historic lawsuits: In December, the Justice Department challenged the mega-merger of AT&T and Time Warner—a deal that a federal judge in…

Members of the 116th Congress welcome a triumphant Nancy Pelosi back to the speakership on January 3. After a blue wave in the midterm elections, Democrats returned to power in the House of Representatives. “Our nation is at a historic moment,” declared Pelosi, who became the first female speaker when she previously held the post from 2007 to 2011. “I pledge that this Congress will be transparent, bipartisan and unifying, that we will seek to reach across the aisle in this country and across divisions across our nation.” President Donald Trump kept the partisan flag flying, however, threatening that a partial shutdown of the federal government could last “years” if he did not get money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall.…

IT’S BARELY 2019, BUT THE 2020 DEMOCRATIC presidential primary is already so packed with possible candidates that debate planners must be plotting how to expand their stages. One of the not-so-subtle questions dogging the scrum is whether a white male can or should headline a Democratic ticket. Amid Trumpian despair, in the post-Obama, #MeToo universe, a significant wing of the party has gravitated toward the idea that none but star-quality female candidates of color (Michelle! Oprah!) can hope to resurrect the rainbow coalition that elected President Barack Obama. In a recent analysis, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie suggested that it will be easier for a black candidate—male or female—to get the Democratic nomination because of the growing diversity of the party’s base. But Steve Bullock is hoping to meet, if not transcend, the political…

ON A RAINY DAY IN THE SPRING OF 1976, FBI Special Agent Myron Fuller took the New York subway to Brooklyn to interview Donald Trump. The future tycoon, about 30, was just getting his real estate career off the ground, aided by secret payments from his father. Fuller found Trump working out of a temporary office in a double-wide trailer on a muddy construction site. “There were boards covering wet dirt, in lieu of cement walkways,” Fuller recalls to Newsweek. He knocked on the door and went in. “His secretary sat there by the entrance, and Trump was a door away from there.” Ushered in, he found Trump sitting behind his desk. The businessman did not get up to welcome the agent. “He never came around, and I do not…

LAST MONTH, AMERICA LEARNED about something the millennials like to call “adulting.” The term started as a sort of quasi-joke—whenever a millennial would do something age-appropriate rather than radically immature, this was an act of “adulting.” Now, though, millennials apparently require training in being an adult. According to CBS News, Rachel Flehinger has co-founded an Adulting School, which includes online courses on simple sewing, conflict resolution and cooking. CBS suggests the cause for such classes: Many millennials “haven’t left childhood homes”—in America, 34 percent of adults aged 18 to 34 still lived with their parents as of 2015, up from 26 percent a decade before. There’s a good deal of truth to this. If you’re living at home, with Mom and Dad doing their best to spoil you, you’re less likely to…

RESIDENT DONALD TRUMP WANTS TO bring Americans home again. Seventeen years after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. troops are currently engaged in seven countries under outdated legislation, and the commander in chief has suggested that two of those open-ended wars may be closing. Ignoring officials’ advice, he declared victory over the undefeated Islamic State group (ISIS) last month and ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria. He also significantly cut American forces in Afghanistan by instructing the Pentagon to rotate home 7,000 service members in early 2019. Like George W. Bush declaring “Mission Accomplished,” Trump has asserted that American forces will come home under a banner of victory. He argued on Twitter that if his predecessors brought troops home and crippled militant extremists, they would have been hailed as national heroes. Growing…