Table of contents for August 29, 2025 in Newsweek

Shiite Muslim devotees reach for Imam Hussain’s tomb to receive a blessing on August 14 as they celebrate Arbaeen. The religious festival commemorates the killing of Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. The celebration ends a 40-day mourning period, culminating in a pilgrimage to Iraq’s central city. Considered among the world’s largest annual religious gatherings, over 21 million attended this year.…

CITY LIVING HAS LONG BEEN described as fast-paced. Now, there’s data to prove just how much faster it has become. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reveals that pedestrians in three major northeastern U.S. cities—Boston, New York and Philadelphia—are moving 15 percent faster than they did in 1980. They also found that fewer people are lingering in public spaces, with the number dropping by 14 percent over the past three decades. Co-author Arianna Salazar-Miranda, an assistant professor at Yale, told Newsweek that the findings suggest a shift in how people use public spaces. She said: “One interpretation is that public social life is weakening. The reasons for this shift are likely multifaceted—rising opportunity costs of time and the lure of indoor spaces like cafés—but the result seems to…

Addiction is a serious problem in the United States, with drug use and substance abuse a growing concern in younger populations. Among Americans aged 12 years and older, 47.7 million people were current illegal drug users as of 2023. Even more troubling, those who try drugs before the age of 15 are 6.5 times more likely to develop a substance abuse disorder than those who begin using drugs after age 21. Getting the right help to combat addiction is important, which is why Newsweek is proud to partner with Statista for the sixth year to present America’s Best Addiction Treatment Centers 2025. This year’s ranking awards 420 facilities, an increase over last year’s 400. Our survey evaluated facilities in the 25 states with the highest number of addiction treatment centers,…

With all parking spaces occupied, visitors at the Dolomites’ Sella Pass in northern Italy leave their cars on grass verges on August 11. The scenic area has seen a sharp rise in popularity in recent years, with 8.7 million tourists visiting the region in 2024. While the area relies on tourism, environmentalists have said heavy foot traffic is eroding trails and damaging alpine ecosystems. Landowners nearby recently made headlines after setting up turnstiles and charging visitors to hike the paths.…

HIS PATH TO BECOMING CHAIR OF THE REPUBLIcan National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council started in a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, living room at age 10. The year was 2016 and Brilyn Hollyhand’s parents were watching the presidential debate. “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said. To which Trump responded, “because you’d be in jail.” Hollyhand said his household wasn’t all that political before. Trump’s comment changed everything. “I stood there, and I was like, ‘Wow, where’d this come from?’” he told Newsweek. Trump’s comment drew negative headlines, but Hollyhand found it positively gripping. Not long after that, he created a political newsletter that went to seven family members; he now places its…

DEEP IN THE ARCTIC, ON BOARD NATO’s only research vessel, green bars of data move across screens as computers whir, the noise occasionally rising in pitch. To the untrained eye, it all means little. But to NATO’s lone scientific unit on board the NRV Alliance, it is a glimpse into how the rapidly changing Arctic could force the alliance to switch how it detects objects—and threats—lurking beneath the waves. One of these threats, and one notoriously hard to pick up, is Russian submarines. Climate change is making the task of finding them even more difficult. As the planet heats up, fresh water is seeping into the Arctic Ocean as the sea ice and the permafrost melts, while warmer waters from the Atlantic bleed in from the south. “Whereas in the…

“WE HAD WANTED TO WORK TOGETHER FOR A long time,” Benedict Cumberbatch tells Newsweek, reflecting on the project that finally united him with Olivia Colman. To seal the deal, it took adding powerhouses like writer Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things) and director Jay Roach (Bombshell) to create The Roses (August 29). The new film adaptation of Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses was also made into a hit 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito. “It takes nothing away from the original film,” Colman says. “Ours is with a sort of respectful nod to it and has taken it in a slightly different direction.” The new film follows Ivy (Colman) and Theo (Cumberbatch), a witty British couple whose marriage is so rooted in…

Chinese company Unitree’s humanoid robots train for a kickboxing match on August 13 ahead of the first-ever World Humanoid Robot Games. The contest was held at the National Speed Skating Oval from August 14 to 17, with 280 teams from 16 countries participating. Competitions included soccer, table tennis and track and field. But the machines drew criticism afterward for their clumsy movements and occasional collapses.…

A SEATTLE-BASED STARTUP wants to redefine the concept of a Harvest Moon. Interlune, launched in 2020 by former Blue Origin executives, develops excavation equipment and technology to mine the moon for an extremely valuable and rare helium isotope—and already has customers lined up, including the U.S. government. “At $20 million a kilogram, helium-3 is the only resource in the universe that is priced high enough to warrant going to space and bringing it back to Earth,” Interlune cofounder and CEO Rob Meyerson told Newsweek. “We felt like...we can make the economics work and that’s where we are today.” If successfully extracted from lunar soil, or regolith, where Interlune estimates up to a million metric tons is concentrated, the abundance of helium-3 could revolutionize a number of industries, including quantum computing,…

CANADA IS ACTIVELY MONITORING vessels and has been tracking five Chinese research ships operating around Alaska since early August. The key United States ally in the Arctic and NATO is part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, which provides maritime warnings for North America. The Canadian Joint Operations Command, or CJOC, told Newsweek that it has deployed a CP-140 patrol aircraft around Alaska to monitor vessels and approaches. It was previously tracked flying out of Anchorage as the Xue Long 2, a Chinese icebreaker capable of conducting research, reached the Arctic Ocean. The long-range patrol aircraft—also known as Aurora—is capable of conducting maritime intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare; strike coordination; and search and rescue, according to the Royal Canadian Air Force. Beijing has long…