Newsweek October 23, 2015

Are there any Americans who can’t recite by rote the many allegations leveled by politicians against undocumented immigrants? They are violent, dangerous lawbreakers. They steal jobs from citizens. They cost taxpayers billions for social services. And then there are the proposed solutions: Washington should deport the millions who are in the country illegally and build a wall on the Mexican border to prevent them from returning. Lots of people believe all of this, but how much of it is true? And would the proposed solutions be effective, and at what cost? The answers aren’t what most Americans—conservative or liberal—want to hear. Other than their violation of immigration laws, these “illegals” commit far fewer crimes per capita than lesser educated, native-born Americans. They do take jobs, but they also create more jobs for…

Sixteen-year-old Vedat carries a battle-scarred Kalashnikov that looks much older than he is. This week he would be back at high school studying to become a nurse if a spate of shootings and terrorist bombings hadn't erupted over the summer vacation. As it is, Vedat slouches on a street corner by a makeshift barricade made of ancient paving stones. The alley wall behind his little redoubt is riddled with fresh bullet holes and decorated with spray-painted stenciled images of Kurdish separatist heroes and Soviet-style revolutionary red stars. In the street beyond the barricade, middle-aged shopkeepers sweep up glass and shrapnel from storefronts shattered by police bullets in an attack the day before. “The government does not dare to come anywhere near,” says Vedat, who wears a bright pink scarf around his…

No one has ever mistaken Carly Fiorina for Steve Jobs. But was she really a disastrous CEO at Hewlett-Packard, the Palo Alto, California-based global computing and information technology company she led from 1999 to 2005? As she rises in the polls, Fiorina’s business record is becoming a bigger target. Donald Trump regularly slams her years running a Fortune 20 company. The New York Times trumpets opinion pieces branding her a failure in that job. The headlines suggest the 61-year-old Republican singlehandedly destroyed HP, from which she was fired. The critics cite her spectacular defenestration and point to undeniably ugly metrics, like HP losing more than half its shareholder value under her, as proof that she was a lousy CEO and would be a disaster as president. They note HP failed repeatedly…

Earlier this month, Shell’s tumultuous Arctic drilling campaign came to an abrupt and costly end. In a written statement, the company announced the cessation of its offshore Alaska activities “for the foreseeable future”—at a loss of billions of dollars. This both stunned and thrilled critics, many of whom worried that the seven-year effort to stop Shell was dead in July, when the Obama administration approved the company’s permits to drill. But the truth is, this was a long time coming. Over the past several years, in response to lawsuits by environmental groups and Alaska Natives, public pressure for greater safety following the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and Shell’s series of failures in the Arctic, the federal government placed significant regulatory restrictions on Shell’s permits. These included…

By the end of 2015, less than 10 percent of the world’s population will be living in extreme poverty for the first time, according to new projections from the World Bank. The World Bank adjusted its definition of extreme poverty this year by increasing the benchmark of daily expenditure. In 1990, it set the threshold at $1 a day, and that was raised to $1.08 in 1993 and $1.25 in 2008. Now it has been raised to $1.90. According to the World Bank, “$1.25 no longer buys what it previously did” in terms of food, clothing and basic shelter. The number of people living in extreme poverty is forecast to drop from 902 million, or 12.8 percent of the population, living on $1.90 or less a day in 2012, to 702 million,…

Usumain Baraka was 9 when Arab Janjaweed militants destroyed his village in Darfur in 2004, killing his father and brother. After four years in a Sudanese refugee camp, Baraka says, he wanted a better future. At the time, he says, he thought “Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East…. I really related to the Jewish people because of the Holocaust and thought they would identify with me because of the genocide in Darfur.” At the age of 13, Baraka trekked from Sudan into Egypt, and then over the Egyptian border into Israel. Instead of a safe haven, he found himself in a country that wanted nothing to do with him. “They don’t even check our refugee requests,” says Baraka, who is now 20 and lives and volunteers in a youth…