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NEWSWEEK: Media Lead Sheet/July 21, 2008 Issue (on newsstands Monday, July 14).

COVER: "What He Believes" (p. 26). Senior Editor Lisa Miller and Senior White House Correspondent Richard Wolffe report that although Barack Obama has spoken often about the importance of religion, questions about what he believes in and how he arrived at those beliefs persist. In the new Newsweek Poll, 12 percent of voters incorrectly believe he's Muslim; more than a quarter believe he was raised in a Muslim home. Obama's reticence in revealing much about what he believes is understandable considering that his religious biography is unconventional. Born to a Christian-turned-secular mother and a Muslim-turned-atheist African father, Obama grew up with plenty of spiritual influences, but without any particular religion. Having been baptized in the early 1990s at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Obama is a Christian. Although he severed ties with Trinity, his spiritual life survives through prayer and the bible. In an interview with Newsweek, Obama says he prays daily for the protection of his family and that he is carrying out God's will, "not in a grandiose way, buy simply that there is an alignment between my actions and what he [God] would want."

Cover: http://www.newsweek.com/id/145971 Interview: http://www.newsweek.com/id/145967 Poll: http://www.newsweek.com/id/145737

POLITICS: "At Arm's Length" (p. 34). National Correspondent Allison Samuels reports on the complicated relationship between Barack Obama and the Rev. Jesse Jackson as well as the misgivings of one generation of black leaders about the next. The men have different approaches to politics: Jackson is old school, an unyielding civil-rights-era fighter ever on the lookout for injustice. Obama-like other younger black politicians who came up after Jim Crow-is less heated, a results-oriented pragmatist who is willing to compromise and who sees the old guard's combative style as obsolete.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145844

JONATHAN ALTER: "Obama's No-Brainer on Education" (p. 35). Senior Editor and Columnist Jonathan Alter writes that with the general election underway, Barack Obama has a chance to show that he can move at least as far toward real change in education as John McCain. "Obama needs to embrace a Grand Education Bargain-much higher pay for teachers in exchange for much more accountability for performance in the classroom." Good teachers need more resources. But, Alter adds, "they also need to be removed from the classroom when they fail to improve. Obama occasionally says as much, but goes fuzzy when it comes to how."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145843

MILITARY: "A Smarter Way to Fight" (p. 40). Senior Editor Michael Hirsh reports that American-style counterinsurgency is going global. After years of fighting a fierce, conventional war against the leftist guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's military used a complex, unconventional ruse to free 15 hostages earlier this month without firing a shot. While the government of President Alvaro Uribe deserves a lot of credit for its recent successes, the dramatic shift in strategy over the last two years also has much to do with a quiet U.S. effort to school allies in counterinsurgency and Special-Operations tactics.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145874

INTERNATIONAL: "Why Vietnam Loves McCain" (p. 42). South Asia Bureau Chief Ron Moreau reports that just about everyone in Vietnam knows who McCain is, and many of them want him in the White House. That goes for ordinary Vietnamese, senior bureaucrats and people who met him during his captivity for more than five years at the Plantation and the notorious Hanoi Hilton. They like the way McCain pushed Washington to normalize relations in the 1990s and the way trade has mushroomed from $1.5 billion in 2001 to $12 billion last year, and they believe he'll help them even more if he wins.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145875

PROJECT GREEN: "Beyond Backpacking" (p. 44). General Editor Anna Kuchment reports that as more people become environmentally conscious, green travel has shifted from being a trend to becoming part of mainstream culture. Today a hotel in Times Square is just as likely to call itself green as a lodge in the Costa Rican rain forest.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145868

MEDICINE: "The Woman Who Died in the Waiting Room" (p. 48). Reporter Jeneen Interlandi reports that Esmin Elizabeth Green's death in the waiting room of the G Building at Brooklyn's Kings County Hospital Center, after waiting almost 24 hours for a bed, should not have come as a surprise. Public hospitals across the country have struggled to provide acute psychiatric care to the poor and uninsured since the early 1960s, when large mental hospitals began closing their doors en masse. But with insufficient outpatient services and a dearth of community-based support, many have ended up in overtaxed emergency rooms. And with just 50,000 inpatient psychiatric beds for tens of millions of people across the country, the mentally ill typically wait twice as long for treatment as other patients.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145870

SHARON BEGLEY: "Lies, Damned Lies and ... " (p. 51). Senior Editor and Science Columnist Sharon Begley writes about how new statistical tools will help ferret out mistakes in traditional statistical analysis methods. "Traditional tools of statistics work fine when analyzing mere thousands of data points," Begley writes. But "in the new century, we've had a whole new class of problems, with 100,000 times more data than we used to see," says Bradley Efron of Stanford University. "That is especially true in genomics, which spews out data like there's no tomorrow," Begley writes. "In the Wild West that is genome research, statisticians are the new sheriffs in town."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145865

SCIENCE: "Common Scents" (p. 52). Correspondent Anne Underwood reports on a new book on the science of smell, "What the Nose Knows." Author and self- described "smell chauvinist" Avery Gilbert believes few people adequately appreciate their sniffers. Most of what we perceive as flavor in food does not come from the tongue, which picks up only the basic five tastes. Instead, it comes from aromas of food being drawn up into the nose from the back of the throat, then exhaled through the nostrils.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145867

MOVIES: "Bat Trick" (p. 54). Senior Editor Devin Gordon interviews "The Dark Knight" director Christopher Nolan who talks about the making of the latest Batman installment and why he chose the late Heath Ledger to play The Joker. "I'd met Heath a couple times over the years ... One time he gave me a speech that a lot of young actors have given me, where they basically say that they haven't achieved, as serious actors, what they want to before they're pushed into being movie stars. And of all the actors who've given me that speech, he's the only one that I would actually want to pay $10 to see give that kind of performance," Nolan says. "People were a little baffled by the choice, it's true, but I've never had such a simple decision as a director."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145508

TIP SHEET: "How to Grow It Alone" (p. 61). Associate Editor Christina Gillham reports that vegetable gardening is gaining popularity with a younger set of green thumbs looking to reduce their carbon footprint and ensure that their food supply is healthy and safe. For those who are interested in starting gardens but find it somewhat daunting, the National Gardening Association (garden.org) suggests starting small, with some raised beds in an area that gets at least six hours of sunlight a day, as well as using organic seeds from seedsofchange.com or johnnysseeds.com.

http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/tipsheet/default.aspx

SOURCE Newsweek

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