Newsweek October 09, 2015

“You are at ground zero of an unbridled fascist contagion of fundamentalist Christianity, supremacy, exceptionalism, triumphalism and extremism.” Former Reagan White House lawyer Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein is holding forth at a table in the Broadmoor, the renowned Colorado Springs resort where George W. Bush famously vowed to stop drinking the morning after his 40th birthday. In the porte cochère, taxidermied elk have stared with glassy eyes at countless military contractors and Pentagon brass arriving to meet commanders at Cheyenne Mountain, the piney bunker for America’s nuclear weapons command looming above the hotel. Weinstein, a pugnacious Air Force Academy graduate, third-generation military, with a fire-engine-red polo shirt and a beacon of a bald head, prefers to meet at this five-star nuclear Xanadu not because he likes sitting at the bar by…

In the thousands of hours Boye Brogeland has spent playing bridge, he had never before proffered such a bold declaration—not even an artificial two clubs bid. Seated at home in the picturesque harbor village of Flekkefjord, Norway, in late August, he gazed at his computer screen, at the words he had written and was about to post online: “If you have a cheating pair on your team.…” But before doing so, Brogeland alerted the authorities. His accusation, he knew, would reverberate north and south, east and west across the global coordinates of high-stakes contract bridge. It could end the careers of the reigning European champions, Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz, the former known as “the wonder boy of Israeli bridge”; it would also likely mean a terminus to their six-figure income,…

The newest crisis in the Balkans began with a fence rather than a bout of ethnic or nationalist bloodletting. In July, Hungary began building a barrier along its 110-mile border with Serbia, and it plans similar fences on its borders with Croatia and Romania to prevent an influx of refugees. “We are practiced at this now, and we are very good at it,” Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, told a group of foreign journalists in September. The regional reaction to the fence-building was immediate: Governments in the region sealed more borders, introduced trade bans and began a tit-for-tat torrent of insults. And as the war of words intensified, columns of weary refugees continued trudging northward through these troubled lands. Once again, Europe’s poorest and most volatile region was turning into a…

It’s easy to think of Japan as the country that has fallen and can’t get up. The country that’s in a perpetual economic funk—more than two decades and counting; a country that can’t escape deflation no matter how hard it tries. In an era when Western business executives and traders obsess over China, and governments focus on ISIS, Syria, Iran and Vladimir Putin, Japan has receded into international obscurity. But while much of the world was looking away, Shinzo Abe, the country’s prime minister since 2012, has become one of the most consequential Japanese politicians of the postwar era. That became undeniable in the wee hours of September 19, a Saturday morning, when the Japanese parliament (the Diet) passed a series of historic—indeed, once unthinkable—bills, despite massive protests on the streets…

There’s no denying that football is a dangerous sport. Regardless of whether the game is played on a professional or amateur level, it is high risk, particularly for traumatic head injury and concussions. In many circumstances—if not most—frequent blows to the head have effects that may last a lifetime, a condition now known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The degenerative brain disease causes a spectrum of neurological and psychiatric symptoms, including memory loss, depression, anxiety, aggression and dementia. Recently, a group of researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University, collaborating with the Concussion Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit organization, examined the brains of deceased football players and found that 87 of 91 former NFL players had CTE. The scientists conducted a total of 165 postmortem exams of men who…

Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ encyclical, released last June, took humanity to task for its “cheerful recklessness” in pursuit of profits and its exploitation of the Earth. We’re bludgeoning the most vulnerable parts of society and destroying our only home while we do it, it said, calling for no less than a social and economic paradigm shift. Behind this sweeping environment encyclical was Cardinal Peter Turkson, once thought to be a contender for the papacy. Turkson, from Ghana, is now a key adviser to the pope, and he led the creation of the encyclical’s first draft and coordinated the team that helped the pope craft the final draft. Newsweek spoke to Turkson just as Francis landed in New York City on September 24. Some members of Congress have used the Bible to say…