Newsweek 5/27/2016

Maaret al-Numan, Syria—Children duck under desks during a war safety awareness class conducted by civil defense members in a rebel-held area on May 14. In addition to attacks by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and air bombings by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Russia, Syrians may soon have to contend with Al-Qaeda, according to U.S. and European intelligence and counterterrorism officials quoted by The New York Times. It reported that a dozen of Al-Qaeda’s most seasoned fighters have been dispatched to Syria in an effort to challenge ISIS for dominance in the region.…

Tokyo—Mitsubishi Motors Chairman and CEO Osamu Masuko, center, and company President Tetsuro Aikawa, left, bow during a press conference on May 11 while apologizing for falsifying emissions data and announcing that the problem involved more cars than previously announced. Mitsubishi’s stock price has plunged and its reputation has taken a hit since it confessed in April to altering the fuel efficiency data of over 600,000 of its Japanese vehicles. In a potential lifeline to Mitsubishi, Nissan agreed to buy a 34 percent stake in its rival for $2.2 billion.…

Baghdad—People gather at the scene of a car bomb attack in Sadr City, a mainly Shiite district, on May 11. Three car bombings claimed by the Islamic State group (ISIS) killed at least 93 people in the deadliest single day of attacks on Iraq’s capital this year. There is a security vacuum in Iraq as the government appears to be unraveling—the country’s parliament has been unable to hold meetings, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is struggling to uproot extremists as well as to address economic and political problems left over from years of war.…

Fort McMurray, Alberta—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks into a burned car while visiting neighborhoods devastated by more than a week of wildfires, on May 13. The visit was Trudeau’s first to Fort McMurray since 88,000 people were forced to evacuate on May 4, when the blaze swept into the city, the hub of Canada’s oil sands industry. Low humidity, unseasonably warm weather and high winds caused by El Niño put the region at a high fire risk and raised concerns about climate change. The blaze destroyed 2,400 buildings, but officials said nearly 90 percent of the city is intact.…

MIKE TELLS DON his house is on fire. He adds that he will extinguish the blaze if Don pays him. Don forks over the money, but Mike does nothing. There are two possible explanations for this shocking betrayal: Mike was lying about the fire or he never planned to help Don. In that story, Mike is the Republican Party, and Don represents all the members of the Tea Party and their conservative think-alikes. And in this analogy lies the explanation for both the rise of Donald Trump and why the GOP elite is condemning him viciously. For years, Republican leaders have engaged in what might be called boogeyman politics. No claim was too crazy to justify their storyline that the Constitution had been set ablaze by Democrats: Barack Obama isn’t a real…

“I’M NOT AFRAID OF THIS INVESTIGATION. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME!” BACK IN MARCH 2014, when the scandal over Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras that would eventually topple the government was just getting started, some of President Dilma Rousseff ’s top aides saw a golden opportunity to kill the investigation—or at least badly wound it. Márcio Anselmo, the Federal Police deputy in charge of the probe, had given an interview to Jornal Nacional, Brazil’s most-watched news program. On-camera, Anselmo and others laid out the main points of the case, which would soon become notorious: a former Petrobras board member who had accepted a Land Rover as a bribe, the money launderer whose plea-bargain testimony would prove key and the bribes paid by some of the country’s biggest construction companies for…