Newsweek October 16, 2015

Every police officer knows he might have to save his partner’s life. Few will have to do so in the manner of Nick Belliveau, a 28-year-old cop in the small northern California town of Sebastopol. Belliveau works with a German shepherd named Frank, an energetic 7-year-old who does what Belliveau calls “find-and-bite kind of work.” Nestled in the gentle hills of wine country, Sebastopol is generally a calm place, but it has its cast of small-time crooks. Once, in February 2014, about an hour before midnight, Belliveau encountered one of these when he tried to accost a belligerent drunk in an alley behind a bar. The drunk, swinging a bottle, proved difficult to subdue, so Belliveau pressed a button that released Frank from the squad car. The German shepherd sprinted toward…

When David Martine arrived at the redbrick federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, in the summer of 2011, he was three years past his retirement and had not participated in an interrogation since 2007, when he was one of the CIA’s top inquisitors. On this day, however, he was not going to be asking questions. He was going to be answering them. The Obama administration was investigating the deaths of prisoners in CIA custody. An earlier probe into a CIA official’s order to destroy interrogation videos taped at “black sites” around the globe had failed to result in indictments. But expectations were high among critics of the agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” when John Durham, a celebrated special prosecutor, began issuing subpoenas to CIA officers linked to the deaths. Martine was near the…

The Russians called it Center 2015: a series of military exercises they carried out in mid-September involving some 95,000 troops. In contrast to common practice, Moscow outlined publicly with great specificity what type of exercises its troops conducted. Its Hind attack helicopters, for example, practiced rocket and bombing runs against ground targets and provided air cover at very low altitude to ground forces. They fired unguided rockets against military columns below. They practiced flying with one engine off—simulating engine failure—at just 650 feet above the ground. "These are the kinds of skills,” noted a report from the Institute for the Study of War, "that would be required if the Russians intended to provide close air support to Syrian, Iranian, or Lebanese Hezbollah troops in contact with rebel forces.” [Related: Where the…

China used to disdain the U.N. For the three decades after it joined the Security Council in 1971, it mostly didn't even bother to vote on whether to approve peacekeeping missions, which it viewed as interference in the sovereign affairs of others. So when President Xi Jinping announced at the U.N. General Assembly session on September 28 that China would overhaul global peacekeeping with 8,000 extra troops and hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding, he not only upstaged President Barack Obama, who was holding his own peacekeeping summit across town at the time, but signaled a new Chinese attitude toward international intervention. Rather than just oppose it, China now wants to remake it. Xi announced China would set up a 10-year, $1 billion fund for the U.N.'s work in…

Are we alone in the universe? Slightly more than half of Americans, 54 percent, don't think so. They believe in the existence of intelligent aliens, according to a poll conducted in mid-September by the market research and survey company YouGov. Meanwhile, 22 percent said they don’t know if there are intelligent extraterrestrials, while only 24 percent think that such beings do not exist. On the other hand, many of those who don’t believe in aliens certainly don’t think we are “alone” in the cosmic sense; nearly two-thirds of these people explain their views by responding that “humans were created by a god or another higher being.” (Most of the remaining alien nonbelievers—31 percent—chose the response that “the Earth is unique—it is the only place capable of sustaining intelligent life.”) At the same…

The debate over America’s Iraq War legacy has already cropped up on the 2016 campaign trail, burning candidates like former Governor Jeb Bush. But that’s just a taste of the fight that could flare up if President Barack Obama’s point man on Iraq launches a run for the White House. The president hadn’t even been inaugurated when his vice presidential running mate, Joe Biden, touched down in Baghdad in January 2009. In a meeting with General Ray Odierno, commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Biden made clear what the hierarchy would be in the new Democratic administration. When it comes to Iraq, “I remember [Biden] saying, literally, ‘I will always be the last guy in the room advising the president,’” recalls Ali Khedery, a political…