Newsweek 3/18/2016

London—Cardboard cutouts of Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio invite London pubgoers to “vote” at the urinal of the candidate they dislike the most. Democratic voters in Europe and abroad began voting in a global presidential primary on March 1; by contrast, Republican voters overseas must request an absentee ballot from their home state to vote. The Republican race’s tone hit a new low when Trump responded to Rubio’s insinuation that his small hands indicated something about another body part and Trump assured Americans that all his appendages are up to par.…

Istanbul—Women rush to assist a man as Turkish riot police use tear gas to disperse supporters of the country’s largest daily newspaper, Zaman, on March 5. Turkish authorities seized the paper’s offices in a midnight raid that raised new concern about declining media freedoms. A court had ruled on March 4 that the paper, which had been staunchly opposed to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would be taken over by state administrators. On March 6, the newspaper published its first edition under new ownership and featured Erdogan on the cover with a headline about excitement over a new bridge and other pro-government articles.…

Idomeni, Greece—A young girl falls while walking on railway tracks near the northern border between Greece and Macedonia on March 3. Between 12,000 and 15,000 migrants were stranded at the border crossing as Macedonian police fired tear gas and stun grenades to stop them from crossing into the country. On March 7, European leaders held a summit in Brussels on the crisis with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. They are trying to encourage Turkey to take back migrants who do not qualify for asylum and patrol its waters more closely in exchange for 3.3 billion euros in emergency aid.…

WHEN THE political history of the Obama years is written, one important element will be how conservative overreach led to the collapse of the Republican Party. And it all started with a Supreme Court case that proved to be poison Republicans eagerly swallowed, thinking it was cake. That January 2010 ruling was the infamous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which declared that associations of people (read: rich folk and businesses) have free speech rights, and that not-for-profit entities are constitutionally allowed to collect and spend as much money as they want for political purposes, so long as they don’t coordinate those efforts with their candidates. For a bunch of purported constitutional literalists, the decision was nonsense—the conservatives on the court granted First Amendment rights to corporations, a legal construct never…

“THESE MISSILES ARE VERY PORTABLE AND EASILY SMUGGLED. ALL IT TAKES IS FOR ONE TO GET THROUGH.” DEEP IN Libya’s Sahara Desert, in the sunbaked town of Sabha, a ragtag group of gunmen loyal to one of the country’s two rival militias agreed to show Timothy Michetti their most prized weapons. Michetti, an experienced investigator for a London-based company that tracks the sources of small arms in conflict zones, traveled there on a hunch this past August. Local fighters, he reckoned, might have some of the shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles that disappeared when rebels ousted Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. In the sweltering heat, the gunmen unveiled a small arsenal: four Russian-made SA-7 missiles and two later models of the SA-16 variety. The heat-seeking missiles are capable of shooting down civilian airplanes. The…

“IT’S REALLY A STUPID IDEA. THIS KIND OF THINKING IS COMING FROM THE CONSERVATIVE ELDERLY MEN IN GOVERNMENT.” ON A BRIGHT winter day in the Japanese village of Nagoro, a group of life-size dolls stand silently at a bus stop on a long-canceled route. One, dressed in a suit, furrows his brow with permanent impatience. At 65, the artist who made them, Tsukimi Ayano, is one of the youngest of Nagoro’s 35 remaining villagers. She sewed each doll to look like a former resident who died or moved away. Her dolls now outnumber her neighbors. They are a reminder of a time before the nation’s population began its precipitous slide and the countryside emptied out, leaving an estimated 10,000 “ghost towns” to slowly crumble. Japan has the oldest population in the world…