Newsweek October 2, 2015

Tom Christopulos steers a black Nissan Armada through the sharply angled streets of Ogden, Utah, a historic metropolis about 35 miles north of Salt Lake City lodged at the base of the towering Wasatch Mountains, dissecting the neighborhoods home by home and crunching the numbers out loud. As part of his drive-by, he canvasses the terrain voraciously, even compulsively, visually cataloguing every detail—a rite he’s performed for nearly a decade. “I know every block in this town, every house,” he says. “See those mansions over there on Jefferson Avenue? They were cut up long ago, turned into rentals—flophouses, really. We bought them up, renovated them and turned them back into single-family homes.” Born and reared in Ogden, Christopulos has labored for the past eight years as the town’s director of community…

One day in January 2015, black crows began to fill the gray sky like wild brushstrokes, so a group of villagers decided to investigate. The birds were circling something, and as the villagers approached they heard the guttural growl of dogs, all teeth and rib cage, scrapping for the last tug of tendon. That’s when they found a floating mass grave of more than 100 corpses washed up in a canal that connects to the Ganges River. The macabre event lent itself well to sensationalization; each headline that came out in the week following ferried me back to June 2013, when Raghvendra “Nandan” Upadhyay, a local journalist and tour guide, greeted me before leading me through his hometown by saying: “Welcome to the city of learning and burning, of light and…

As Bernie Sanders surges in Iowa and New Hampshire polls, many Americans are hearing the presidential candidate rage against “the billionaire class” for the first time. What they don’t know is what his fellow Vermonters know: The 74-year-old socialist seeking the Democratic nomination operates less like a rabble-rouser at home and more like most other U.S. senators: delivering services for veterans, Medicare for the elderly and defense spending for their state. Vermont is tiny (pop. 620,000), overwhelmingly rural and white and heavily populated with migrants—including Sanders—who moved there from New York many years ago. On the back roads of the Northeast Kingdom, the most rural part of the state, aging hippies and their heirs still share tiny towns with fifth-generation loggers and dairy farmers. An unpaved road leads into Stannard (pop.…

Getting old is getting old in Japan. The government has a tradition of presenting Japanese centenarians with the gift of a sakazuki, a silver sake cup, in the year they turn 100, but there are so many people hitting the milestone these days that the state is looking for a cheaper alternative. In 1963, when Japan first recorded the country’s centenarian population, there were just 153 people 100 and over in the country. Five decades later, in 2015, there are 61,568 people that old, according to the Japanese Ministry of Labor, Health and Welfare. That is 0.048 percent of the population, according to the U.N.’s Revision of World Population Prospects 2015 estimates, making Japan the country with the most centenarians per capita in the world. The United States has more centenarians, 71,972,…

Russia’s proxy war in Ukraine has brought President Vladimir Putin a lot of trouble, from economic sanctions that have damaged the Russian economy to awkward questions from the mothers of soldiers killed in a conflict in which they are not officially fighting. But the Kremlin’s latest gambit as it seeks an exit strategy in Ukraine is both bold and baffling. Doubling down on one secret war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has begun a second one—in Syria. Over the past few weeks, U.S. intelligence has picked up ample evidence that Moscow is taking over a Syrian military air base south of the port of Latakia, defending it with Russian navy marines and at least seven T-90 tanks, plus artillery. According to Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis, "We have seen movement of people…

This article contains graphic images. The photograph, even though it was taken in the age of the Reaper drone, Instagram and ubiquitous smartphones that create and disseminate images in nanoseconds, arrived with the primitive force of an arrow to the chest. Turkish photojournalist Nilufer Demir's picture of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi lying facedown in the sand near the Turkish seaside resort of Bodrum, his outfit of red T-shirt, blue shorts and plastic shoes grotesquely well suited to the kind of carefree excursion a young boy might have been enjoying in such surroundings, swiftly became the defining image of Europe's refugee crisis. When she came across Aylan's body around 6 a.m. on September 2, Demir "was petrified," she said in an interview with the Dogan News Agency, the organization she works…