Newsweek 1/1/2016

Damascus, Syria—Medics treat the wounded in a field hospital in this city’s Douma neighborhood on December 13, after unidentified warplanes and surface-to-surface missiles fired by the Syrian army pummeled the neighborhood, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Douma is controlled by rebel groups battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. World leaders recently met in New York to discuss a peace plan that includes a two-year road map for ending the Syrian war, but differences remain, notably over whether Assad should step down.…

ON NOVEMBER 29, over 1 million people in 175 nations took to the streets in the largest protest in history, demanding immediate action on climate change. Among them were 10,000 people in Paris forming a mass human chain, despite a ban on protests enforced by police with batons, tear gas, concussion grenades who would go on to make arrests. The next day, 150 heads of state—the largest such gathering ever—came together in Paris to work on a legally binding global accord on climate change. Thirteen days later, they succeeded. Climate change is a global problem that demands global solutions. Today, in a period of multinational war, terrorism and widespread partisan politics, perhaps the most extraordinary accomplishment of the United Nations’s 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) climate talks that concluded in…

“I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE, AND I’M GOING TO KILL YOU.” “THEY ATTACKED my home but stole nothing,” says Anabel Hernández, describing a break-in at her Mexico City home in November. “There was money lying on the table, but they didn’t take a cent. They were after my files. It was an act of intimidation.” Hernández, author of the best-selling book Narcoland, is one of Mexico’s most prominent investigative journalists. The November intrusion was just the latest in a long line of death threats and assaults she has faced for her work exposing the links between Mexico’s drug cartels and corrupt government officials. Hernández is now pursuing two major investigations: the disappearance in August 2014 of 43 students from Ayotzinapa in the southern state of Guerrero and the escape this past July of…

148 People killed in ISLAMIST MILITANT ATTACKS in France in January, June and November. 61.86° AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE, in Fahrenheit, in July, the hottest month ever on record. t Paris climate conference, the world committed to limiting any additional rise to below 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels. 3,462 Days it took for spacecraft NEW HORIZONS to reach Pluto, from its launch in 2006 to the historic flyby on July 14. 2 Maximum number of CHILDREN A MARRIED COUPLE IN CHINA CAN HAVE after Beijing ended its one-child policy in October. 2,411 People killed in the HAJJ CRUSH in September, according to the Associated Press, more than three times the official Saudi estimate. 954,481 ASYLUM SEEKERS arrived in Europe via the Mediterranean Sea route in 2015 (by December 17), four times more than 2014. t least 3,600 died on…

“WHEN I’D START BACK TO THE HOUSE...I WAS SO AFRAID HE WAS GOING TO KILL HIMSELF.” FOR MONTHS, Jodi Routh would come home from work afraid she’d stumble upon the dead body of her son. A 25-year-old former Marine, Eddie Routh had moved back to her home in Lancaster, Texas, a small, middle-class suburb just south of Dallas. It was early 2013, and he’d recently taken a job at a local cabinet shop but was struggling with what doctors said was post-traumatic stress disorder. His anxiety was so severe he couldn’t drive on his own, and he believed his colleagues were cannibals who planned to eat him. Jodi would drop off her son in the morning on her way to work, and the shop’s owner would bring him home. Because Jodi worked…

“THESE GUYS, AS HORRIBLE AS THEY ARE, ARE ENTITLED TO A ZEALOUS DEFENSE.” ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, shortly after the second hijacked plane hit Manhattan’s World Trade Center, a woman fleeing the building discovered a hastily written note someone had dropped: “84th floor, West Office,” it read; “12 people trapped.” She handed the note to the nearest person in uniform—a security guard at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He hurried to alert first responders, but a few minutes later the building collapsed. Among the nearly 3,000 people who died that day was Randolph Scott, a trader at Euro Brokers Inc. and the author of that note. Fourteen years later, his daughters, Jessica and Rebecca, arrived at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They, along with six other family…