Newsweek December 16, 2022

1980 “Poland was under the gun,” Newsweek said when the mass labor union movement, Solidarity, challenged the Polish government’s alignment with the Soviet Union. “With that extraordinary cry of alarm, Poland’s Communist rulers begged their own people for cooperation and restraint....” Last month, a Russian-made missile struck Poland, killing two people,the first time in the nine-month-long Russia-Ukraine war that a NATO-country’s territory was hit. Poland and NATO said the rocket could have been a Ukrainian air defense missile and the strike was likely unintentional. 2005 “President Bush has always shown an admirable ability to ignore the Washington pundits and make fun of the chattering classes,” wrote Newsweek of George W. Bush’s indifference to criticisms of the Iraq war. This May, Bush accidentally called the Iraq war “unjustified and brutal” when he meant Ukraine. 2013 “Clearly…

DOHA, QATAR Knock Out Supporters of the U.S. Men’s National Team dejectedly mourn after their players are knocked out of the FIFA World Cup on December 3 by the Netherlands at the Khalifa International Stadium. The round of 16 match ended 3-1, with the U.S. squad’s goal coming in the 76th minute thanks to Haji Wright. A lack of experience and finishing might have been the U.S.’ downfall this year, but with the second-youngest team in the competition, hope abounds for them at the 2026 World Cup in North America. ▸ MOHAMMAD KARAMALI SYDNEY Full Body Check Some 2,500 naked volunteers pose at Bondi Beach at sunrise on November 26. U.S. artist Spencer Tunick created the installation commissioned by the nonprofit Skin Check Champions to raise skin cancer awareness, timing the event with the country’s National…

WHEN A 22-YEAR-OLD MAN OPENED FIRE IN A Colorado Springs nightclub during a drag performance on November 19, leaving five people dead, he put new light on a long-simmering debate within the Mormon Church about its stance on gay, lesbian and transgender people. The alleged shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich was brought up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the days following the shootings, Aldrich’s father, a former adult film star and mixed martial arts fighter with a history of substance abuse, appeared in a television news interview admitting that he condoned his son’s violent behavior as a child while alluding to the values of their Mormon heritage, saying “You know Mormons don’t do gay. We don’t do gay.” “We don’t get to pick and choose,” Rosemary Card, a…

THE LEGALIZATION OF MEDICAL marijuana may reduce opioid use in cancer patients. As of 2022, medical marijuana for pain relief is legal in 37 states and Washington, D.C. Living in these states is associated with a lower rate of opioid dispensing in patients receiving cancer treatments, a paper published on December 1 in the journal JAMA Oncology says. Results of the study show that medical marijuana legalization was associated with a 5.5 percent to 19.2 percent relative reduction in the rate of opioid dispensing (i.e., the rate of receiving at least one opioid prescription) to adult patients aged 18 to 64 who were newly diagnosed with breast, colorectal or lung cancer and receiving cancer treatment. The analysis involved 38,189 patients newly diagnosed with breast cancer, 12,816 with colorectal cancer and 7,190 with lung…

“IT’S MY DUTY.”—A Beijing COVID protester giving the same answer heard at Tiananmen Square in 1989“See you on the other side, My Love”—STEVIE NICKS ON THE DEATH OF CHRISTINE MCVIE“It stays silent and mostly invisible until you poke it with a stick.”—PLAYWRIGHT TOM STOPPARD ON ANTISEMITISM“A good way not to accidentally dine with a vile racist and anti-Semite you don’t know is not to dine with a vile racist and anti-Semite you do know.”—CONSERVATIVE COMMENTATOR BEN SHAPIRO“I FINALLY GOT BACK HOME TO RIGHT THIS WRONG.”—Dwayne Johnson on stealing Snickers bars from a Hawaii 7-Eleven as a kid“They were like the dark matter of biology.”—Nobel Prize-winning chemist Carolyn Bertozzi on her interest in sugars“I CAN’T SLOW DOWN RIGHT NOW. I’LL TAKE A BREAK WHEN I’M DEAD.”—Megan Thee Stallion FROM LEFT: NICHOLAS HUNT/GETTY;…

O STATE IS MORE CAR-CRAZY THAN California—and they’ve paid a big price for it, not just in $6-per-gallon gas. The heat waves, droughts and calamitous wildfires that have ravaged the state in recent years are by-products of climate change, to which greenhouse-gas emissions from California tailpipes (and elsewhere) have contributed. To Governor Gavin Newsom and other state political leaders, the fix is clear: Regulate the tailpipe out of existence. In August, in a continuation of its half-century-plus tradition of setting the nation’s auto emissions standards, California ruled that by 2035 all new cars and trucks sold in the state must be fossil-fuel-free. Instead, electric vehicles, or EVs, will become the law of the land. Shifting the world to zero-emissions all-electric vehicles would in theory eliminate about one-fifth of all carbon-dioxide emissions, the…