Table of contents for October 17, 2016 in TIME Magazine

"Whoever saves one life, saves all of humanity," reads the verse from the Quran that serves as the fuel for an impossible mission. The White Helmets of Syria--teachers, tailors, builders, doctors--didn't flee the country, didn't take up arms; instead they return day after day to the scene of some of the worst carnage anywhere on the planet, where civilians are not collateral damage: they are prime targets. With the collapse of a fragile cease-fire, the violence is now as bad as at any time during the civil war that has killed at least 400,000 people and driven 11 million more from their homes. But that number would be even higher were it not for the work of the volunteer White Helmets. A war defined by impossible choices and implacable hatreds…

MOUNTING ANGER Oromia has been racked by protests since 2014, when the government announced plans to expand the capital, Addis Ababa, into the region. Demonstrations have continued, despite the shelving of the plans in January, over issues such as human rights and local governance. REFORMS DENIED Oromos say the TPLF party, which runs the government and whose Tigrayan elites are seen to have unduly benefited from Ethiopia's economic boom, is standing in the way of vital reforms. Although the government says it did not open fire on protesters in Oromia, its frequently violent treatment of dissenters is likely to inspire more unrest. AROUND THE HORN The protests threaten not just Ethiopia's burgeoning economy but also regional stability. The country is considered a bulwark against terrorist groups active in the Horn…

VENEZUELA ODALISQUE IN RED TROUSERS, MATISSE The Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art realized in 2002 that the Matisse original had been switched with a copy. The FBI caught a couple in 2012 attempting to sell the canvas in Miami Beach. NORWAY THE SCREAM, MUNCH It took only 50 seconds for a thief to steal the most important of four versions of this iconic painting from a Norwegian museum in February 1994. It took police two months to recover it. U.K. FRUITS ON A TABLE, GAUGUIN Stolen from a London flat in 1970, this still life was found some 40 years later in the home of an Italian pensioner. He had bought it at a lost-property auction and eventually got to keep the $44 million piece.…

At first glance, London's Oxford Street looks like any other pristine urban corridor. Trees bloom. Taxis honk. Shoppers flock to stores like Starbucks, Uniqlo and the Gap. Of all the words you could use to describe this destination, dangerous would be low on the list. But the air that flows through Oxford Street is far from benign. Over time, it has become saturated with nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that is invisible to the naked eye and contributes to a number of health issues--asthma, lung disease, even death--if inhaled on a regular basis. In August, London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, dubbed Oxford "the most polluted street in the world" in terms of nitrogen dioxide (though that distinction is always in flux). This is not the narrative we're used to hearing about air…

If you put people in brain scanners and give them something delicious--say, wine or chocolate--the reward centers of their brains light up. In other words, it's making them feel good. But if you promise them a delicious item in the future, there's no reward-center activity. If it's not in our hands (or mouths), we don't care. Money is the rare exception to this rule, and studies show it has a unique ability to affect the way we think, feel and behave--even if we don't have much or are unaware of its influence. Just as most people think they're better than average at driving, they also think they're better than average at negotiating a deal, which primes them to get ripped off. Moreover, if patients believe pain relief to be pricey,…

The most interesting thing about Tim Kaine and Mike Pence is that they represent parties that no longer exist. Kaine is a moderate Democrat in a party hijacked by the Bernie Sanders left. Pence is an old-fashioned conservative in a party hijacked by Donald Trump populism. Left to their own devices, they might have engaged in the civilized, well-informed, stultifying arguments that we've been seeing for years. But both were forced to focus most of their attention on the two heavyweight contenders, Hillary Clinton and Trump, and neither did a particularly good job of it--though Pence got the better of Kaine by being calmer, less intrusive, the exact opposite of his obnoxious ticket partner. Whoever told Kaine that he had to be aggressive, interrupt constantly and focus on Trump's insanities…

Terrifying as the C word can be, breast cancer today means something very different than it did a decade ago. Doctors know more than ever about what causes cancer in the first place and when it's best to screen for the disease as well as which cancers are more likely to spread aggressively and which may be able to be monitored and left alone. This knowledge will only grow more refined in the years to come, thanks in part to a handful of landmark studies launched this year. Mounting evidence shows that the tendency to respond to every breast cancer with every treatment option available--surgery, chemotherapy, radiation--isn't always necessary, takes a toll in serious side effects and rarely adds years to women's lives. This is especially critical as doctors learn…

There are some things no parent should ever have to say. In Kim A. Snyder's modest but devastating documentary Newtown, the father of Daniel Barden, one of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, says that memories of his 7-year-old son's funeral are hazy. He adds, "We did manage to attend quite a few of the other children's funerals." Newtown is an intimate snapshot of what it means for a small community to face the funerals of 20 children and six adults--deaths that, the film posits, probably wouldn't have happened if not for the easy availability of assault weapons. The picture is quietly yet intrepidly political: it includes footage from a 2013 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which emergency-room doctor William Begg explains bluntly, but with…

This is your fourth album with OneRepublic. What's different about putting this one out? For the first time ever, I've taken the initiative in regards to promotion. We've quietly done a lot while making very little noise. I don't have 40 million Instagram followers and I'm not doing TV, but I'd like to be less of the guy who's intentionally behind the curtain all the time. What's the most critical thing you think about as a songwriter? There are songs that fly up the charts because of the zeitgeist, but if you're too attached to the current sound, that song will be time-stamped. We just handed in an album with six or seven singles, but by the time we get to single six or seven, production will have changed. So…

One of the best things about living in Los Angeles was that it had no NFL team. So for the past 10 years, I got away with pretending to watch football by spouting analysis about my hometown New York Giants such as, "Eli Manning throws the football with his arm." So I was upset when, after 21 blissful NFL-free years, L.A. got a team, the Rams. Then I realized that this was an amazing opportunity. The new fans would be as ignorant as I am about the team. So I could experience whatever it is that America loves about the NFL and not be mocked while I did it. I could go back in time and fix the mistake I made when I was 5 and assumed people would continue…

Chorizo Chipotle started offering the sausage at all U.S. locations GOOD WEEK BAD WEEK Pastrami New York City's famed Carnegie Deli will close after nearly 80 years 'I have said enough for a lifetime.' Vin Scully, announcer for the L.A. Dodgers, broadcasting his final game after 67 years; he started when the baseball team was still in Brooklyn 'He's asking everybody to vote for somebody that he cannot defend.' Tim Kaine, Democratic vice-presidential nominee, on his opponent, Republican Mike Pence, during the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 4 'The winds are making so many bad noises. We're just doing our best to stay calm.' Jenniflore Desrosiers, resident of Port Salut, Haiti, describing Hurricane Matthew on Oct. 4 as the storm hit the nation, which is still recovering from a 2010 earthquake;…

"Too big to fail" is back. A series of penalties for past misconduct at Deutsche Bank, one of the linchpins of the global financial system, is threatening to ravage shareholders, raising fears about what happens to trillions of dollars in complex financial products known as derivatives on its balance sheet. How it came to this: TROUBLE MONEY Germany's biggest lender has been paying out large amounts to traders to settle claims that it rigged interest and exchange rates, and it faces more from financial watchdogs for allegedly helping clients (notably in Russia) avoid money-laundering regulations. Negative interest rates, overcapacity in Europe's banking sector and structural changes to financial markets are making it hard for Deutsche to generate profits to pay these penalties, with an even bigger fine on the horizon.…

SELECTED Former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres, as Secretary General of the United Nations, by the body's Security Council. The onetime U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is set to succeed Ban Ki-moon in 2017. WON Nobel Prize in Physics, by David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, for work in the field of topology revealing "secrets of exotic matter." Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, by Yoshinori Ohsumi, for research into autophagy, the process by which cells essentially eat themselves. Nobel Prize in Chemistry, by Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart and Bernard "Ben" Feringa, for developing "molecular machines." The tiny structures could radically change health care, computing and more. PERFORMED Four womb transplants from living donors in the U.S. for the first time. The surgeries could allow thousands of women without…

Dogs may be man's best friend, but in her new book, The Lion in the Living Room, Abigail Tucker argues that cats deserve more credit for their domestic dominance. House cats outnumber dogs by as much as 3 to 1 worldwide, she writes, which is especially impressive given their defining traits: unlike dogs, which were originally domesticated for their ability to hunt, shepherd and protect, cats were never utilitarian (aside from their ability to deter mice). Humans could have embraced another small species, like badgers or foxes. But cats primed us to love them, partly because of their humanoid faces--those big eyes remind us of our own babies--and partly because they didn't fear us as much as other animals do. Now felines are a global obsession, especially online, where figures…

A roundup of new and noteworthy insights from the week's most talked-about studies: 1 THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU AFFECT YOUR ATTRACTIVENESS A study in the journal Psychological Science found that people's rankings on an attractiveness scale increased as they were viewed alongside an increasingly unattractive face. 2 DOGS MAY LEARN MORE EFFICIENTLY THAN CHILDREN Yale researchers who taught dogs how to open a box containing food found that a significant number of dogs learned to skip the unnecessary lever step in four trials, suggesting they're more likely than children to disregard instructions that aren't needed to solve a task at hand. 3 CAFFEINE MIGHT PREVENT DEMENTIA A 10-year study in Journals of Gerontology, Series A, found that for women 65 and older, caffeine consumption above 261 mg--at least two to…

Apichet "Madaew" Atilattana, Olivier Nsengimana, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Héloïse Letissier, Rubén "El Rubius" Doblas Gundersen, Lotfullah Najafizada, Molly Crabapple, Feng Zhang, Joey Alexander and Janne Saario FASHION DESIGNER / THAILAND Madaew THAI À LA MODE If great art can come from the most unlikely places, then so too can great fashion--as the rise of Apichet Atilattana proves. The 17-year-old, who goes by the pseudonym Madaew, grew up in Thailand's impoverished northeastern region of Isaan, the country's rice-growing heartland. He knew as a young child that he identified as a kathoey, a transgender female sometimes referred to as a "third sex" in Thailand (he prefers to use a male pronoun). His parents never tried to change who he was, he says, letting him dress up Barbie dolls without feeling ashamed. Soon he…

Daveed Diggs became accustomed to rapping rapidly in front of hundreds of people in the Broadway smash Hamilton. But at 7:30 a.m. on a Tuesday in September, he's performing for an audience of one. Sitting in a coffee shop in the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights, just north of Harlem, he warns that it's "too early to do anything," including rap. He has to catch a flight to Los Angeles soon--a trip he makes with increasing frequency now that he's an in-demand actor, including a six-episode arc on black-ish that began on Sept. 28. Still, Diggs eventually begins singing at his signature clip: "Feeling the weight of a city growing fat off hipster chic/Fusion food, organic beets./ It's a wonder that we still tongue-in-cheek/ When it's so much…

Some books ought to come with a warning--not for the reader but for those nearby, who are bound to be interrupted with passages read aloud. Mind-blowing ideas demand to be shared. Such a warning ought to come with both James Gleick's Time Travel: A History and Richard A. Muller's Now: The Physics of Time. The central question of Muller's book is how to define "now," and crucial to the answer is figuring out why (or whether) time moves in only one direction. Muller, an acclaimed physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, posits a theory that seems at once plausible and--surprisingly, for a book with equations--one worth not spoiling. His style is friendly to those without a science background, though the feeling of understanding quantum physics may be fleeting. Gleick,…

Your new book with photographer Stephen Shames, Power to the People, is full of pictures from the early days of the Black Panther Party. How does it feel to look back at that time? It feels like yesterday. Because I never stopped being active in one way, shape, fashion or form. The introduction notes that you want to help people make sense of the present by understanding the past. Where do you see that connection? Let's take the Republican efforts, in many states, of voter suppression. When I started the Black Panther Party I was working for the city government of Oakland, Calif. In that framework, young folks were saying, "We're going to have black power." I said, "You ain't getting no power until you get some political power seats."…

Colombian voters shocked outsiders on Oct. 2 by voting down a measure, backed by their President, that would have formally ended the government's half-century war with FARC rebels. Given similarly surprising referendum results elsewhere, it's natural to wonder why voters are increasingly choosing no when political leaders are asking for yes. Case in point: Former Prime Minister David Cameron asked Britons to vote yes to continue membership in the E.U. Instead, a majority voted no. The clearest lesson from that experience for leaders hoping to win a referendum is to avoid personalizing the vote. By putting so much of his personal credibility on the line, Cameron gave political opportunists, like fellow Conservative Boris Johnson, a chance to use the vote to push him aside and provided former U.K. Independence Party…

Allan Thiel likes to stay informed. That's how he knows that President Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim who cheated his way into the presidency in order to promote a globalist "utopia." A retired factory worker and born-again Christian, he waits on the floor of the Greenville, N.C., convention center for Donald Trump to take the stage, holding up his phone so others can see the latest headline he had just read: "Obama Announces Plans for a Third Term Presidential Run." The story is not true. But right now, in this moment, Thiel believes it, just as he believes that climate change is a hoax, that Islam is being promoted in American schools and that the government has been bought out by drug cartels. He says that "people aren't being…

LOVE IT Rihanna described her latest Fenty × Puma collection--which includes sweatpants, hoodies, pearl chokers and fans--as 'if Marie Antoinette was going to the gym and needed something to wear.' HBO programming president Casey Bloys said he's open to the possibility of a Game of Thrones spin-off series: "For us, it's about finding the right take with the right writer." One-year-old Princess Charlotte--daughter of Prince William--took her first public steps while attending a party in British Columbia. Tom Hanks crashed a wedding photo shoot in New York City's Central Park, then offered to preside over the couple's ceremony (he's also an ordained minister). One Direction's Niall Horan surprise-released his first solo single, a ballad called "This Town." Time's weekly take on what popped in culture LEAVE IT A tech vlogger…