Newsweek 1/22/2016

Mexico City—Mexican security forces escort Joaquín Guzmán, the world’s most wanted drug trafficker, on January 8. Authorities captured Guzmán, known as El Chapo, six months after he escaped from a maximum-security prison. They zeroed in on his location after learning of actor Sean Penn’s interview with the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. In an article for Rolling Stone, the actor quoted El Chapo as saying: “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats.” The United States has requested Guzmán’s extradition.…

Washington, D.C.— With Vice President Joe Biden looking on, President Barack Obama delivers a tearful statement on January 5 concerning an executive action aimed at reducing gun violence. The order includes mandatory background checks by firearms dealers, stricter enforcement of current gun laws, increased mental health treatment and calls for further research on gun safety technology. Obama is expected to make gun control a key issue during his last year in the White House. Many Republicans immediately deemed the order an overreach, while Democrats hailed it.…

Burns, Oregon—A member of an armed group that has occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge rides his horse on January 7 after a light snowfall. The group took over an empty building on the wildlife refuge on January 2 to protest the prison sentences of Dwight and Steve Hammond for arson after fires they set spread to federal land. Among the protesters was Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, who led a standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in 2014. In a news conference, Ammon Bundy said the broader goal was to “restore and defend the Constitution.” The FBI held off intervening, hoping to avoid the kind of violence seen in Waco, Texas, in 1993.…

London—Mourners and media gather around a mural of David Bowie in London’s Brixton district on January 11 to mourn his death. The legendary British musician had privately battled cancer the past 18 months and had just released Blackstar on January 8, his 69th birthday. The album caps a career that began in 1967 and included over two dozen studio albums. Known for his innovative music, as well as his iconoclastic, androgynous fashion sense and performing style, he was a pioneer of the glam-rock genre, and his penchant for reinvention helped redefine the boundaries of rock music.…

THE RECENT TIT-FOR-TAT clashes across the Middle East have made the first days of 2016 seem a lot like 1979. That was the year Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led Iran’s transformation from an autocratic state ruled by the Shah into the Islamic Republic of Iran. Violence wracked the region in the immediate aftermath of the changeover. Mobs overran embassies, and Sunni Arab governments swore to turn their backs on the new theocratic regime in Tehran. Oil-rich despots throughout the region poured money and weapons into proxy conflicts all over the Middle East, unleashing a wave of destabilizing, sectarian violence that eventually died down but never went away. The event that turned back the clock and made an already roiling situation boil over took place on January 2, when Saudi Arabia killed a…

YOU’VE GOT TO hand it to the North Koreans; they do it all the time. The rest of the world is focused on other dangerous places and issues: an unfolding civil war in the Islamic world; spreading jihadi terrorism; refugees streaming by the millions out of war-torn Syria; China’s stock market crashing; and oil prices plummeting. HAVING NUKES IN HIS POCKET IS KIM JONG UN’S ULTIMATE SECURITY BLANKET. Then, on cue, pudgy little Kim Jong Un does something—just as his father, Kim Jong Il, used to—that reminds us: oh, damn, that place again. North Korea conducted its fourth test of a nuclear weapon on January 6. Pyongyang immediately announced that the bomb it detonated was a two-stage thermonuclear device, otherwise known as a hydrogen bomb. The likelihood that this was not an H-bomb…