Newsweek November 13, 2015

“Now it’s not my intention to offend anyone,” renowned neurosurgeon Ben Carson told a crowd of dignitaries assembled at the Washington Hilton Hotel in 2013. A devout Christian, Carson is surely aware of the proverb about good intentions and the road to hell. He was speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual affair that’s usually the opposite of edgy—a brief bit of bonhomie (contrived at times) when D.C. puts aside the feuding, at least until the orange juice and coffee have been cleared. With that opener, it’s not surprising Carson’s 27-minute speech prompted hosannas as well as head scratching. Most of his remarks focused on his remarkable life story, rising from a Detroit ghetto to become one of the world’s most celebrated surgeons. But conservative commentators glommed on to his…

On the morning of February 27, a 28-year-old Spaniard named Sergio Becerra Vasquez was just starting to get dressed when he heard a loud banging on the front door of his house in the Vallecas neighborhood of Madrid. Almost in the same moment, he heard male voices on the street: “Police! Open up! Open up!” Vasquez was terrified and did nothing, but the men would not go away. He put the safety chain on his door, opened it slightly and peered through. Seven men in civilian clothes stood outside. One asked if they could enter. “I want to see some ID,” Vasquez said. The men obliged. The badges showed them to be Spanish counterterrorism police. Vasquez unhooked the chain. The officers came in and told Vasquez he was under arrest. He…

Omid Fatehi Karajo, his wife, Nadereh, and their 10-year-old daughter, Wanya, have made a bold decision. In a few days, they will pile into an inflatable raft and cast off from the Turkish coast in the hope of landing on one of the Greek islands. Sitting together on a sofa in front of their webcam, the adults don’t smile much. Omid is busy explaining his story through a translator, his wife occasionally intervening, while their daughter alternates between sitting on them and sliding in next to them, grinning shyly through her mass of black curls at the webcam. “I am worried [about the journey],” Wanya says. “Especially from Turkey to Greece, because the sea is dangerous.” She can swim, but her parents cannot. Omid says he will buy life jackets…

Lebanon has long been a playground for wealthy citizens of austere Arab countries, but even the worldly Lebanese were taken aback on October 26 when security officials arrested a 29-year-old Saudi prince, Abdel Mohsen bin Walid bin Abdel Aziz al-Saud, on suspicion of trying to take 2 tons of amphetamines with him on a private jet bound for the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Lebanese police also arrested four other Saudi men at Beirut International Airport in what the state news agency described as the biggest bust in the airport’s history. The prince’s arrest has focused attention on Lebanon's notorious drug-trafficking networks and their ability to cross the Middle East's political and sectarian divides. Combatants in Syria’s civil war, civilians in the battle-weary region and the wealthy citizens of the Gulf countries all…

When the World Health Organization officially designated processed meats like bacon and sausage a definite (Group 1) carcinogen in October, the meat lobby hit back immediately. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the WHO, has evaluated many hundreds of agents for cancer risk, yet found “only one substance, a chemical in yoga pants,” to probably not cause cancer, Betsy Booren, of the North American Meat Institute, said in a statement, implying that the agency was a bit trigger-happy with their cancer designations. This premise fits nicely with what was said over and over in living rooms and online comment sections after the bacon news broke: “Everything gives you cancer.” Ironically, that’s a welcome palliative; inevitability is liberating. Keep eating your bacon, drinking your wine, smoking your…

When Yekaterina Vologzheninova, a shop assistant from central Russia, shared around half a dozen links about the war in eastern Ukraine with her online friends, she was expecting nothing more than a few heated arguments, at the most. But her 52 virtual friends on VKontakte, the Facebook of the Russian-speaking world, weren’t the only ones following her posts, which included links to Ukrainian-produced documentaries and TV shows sharply critical of the Kremlin. Officers from the Investigative Committee, an FBI-style law enforcement agency answerable only to President Vladimir Putin, were also tracking her online. In December 2014, Investigative Committee officers, accompanied by agents from the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, raided Vologzheninova’s modest apartment in Yekaterinburg, some 900 miles east of Moscow. They seized her computer and digital…