Newsweek September 11, 2015

A young woman walked into a Family Dollar store in Cleveland, exhausted, sweaty and desperate. Michelle Knight was 21 years old, and she’d spent the past few hours searching for the location of a crucial meeting. The appointment, with social services, was to discuss how she might regain custody of her 2-year-old son, who’d been placed in foster care a few months earlier after her mother’s boyfriend got drunk and, Knight says, became abusive and broke the boy’s leg. It was August 2002—years before smartphones and Google Maps—and after nearly four hours of wrong turns, Knight spotted the Family Dollar store. She bought a soda and started asking people for directions. A woman in the soda aisle couldn’t help. The cashier couldn’t either. Knight was about to walk out when she…

Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine was one of the first U.S. soldiers into Afghanistan. He landed there with an Army Special Forces A-Team in late October 2001, when everyone agreed the war would be brief and the objectives were clear: Avenge the terror of the 9/11 attacks, depose the Taliban and leave. Nearly 14 years later, he went to Capitol Hill to explain why he’s still fighting his way out. Until this past January, Amerine worked at the Pentagon, where he led an Army team ordered to bring home Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, a mission that was expanded to include several civilian hostages held by Taliban-aligned militants in Pakistan. Bergdahl had been captive for nearly four years by the time Amerine got involved, making him the longest-held prisoner of war since Vietnam and a…

The number of so-called experts yammering on television about China who know next to nothing about China has reached an all-time high. And for these pseudo-Sinologists, the verdict is in: China, the world’s great growth story, is imploding. Its stock market plummeted—down five straight trading days between August 19 and 24—and its real economy is slowing. Because China is the second-largest economy and one of the U.S.’s biggest trading partners, some analysts say Beijing is going to drag it down with them. Except it’s not that simple. And for those of us who work in China as correspondents—particularly for those like me, who’ve been here a long time—that reaction has been nothing short of depressing. Apparently, no one reads anything we write. The immediate cause of the market’s volatility was an unexpected…

Updated | Until recently in Washington, the only issue Democrats and Republicans seemed to agree on was Israel. Though lawmakers on opposite sides of the aisle have bickered incessantly over Obamacare and federal spending, they always passed pro-Israel security bills with overwhelming majorities—from slapping new sanctions on Iran to reaffirming the Jewish state’s right to defend itself. But as Congress prepares to challenge President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran this month, the cause that once brought together Israel’s bipartisan supporters has at least momentarily divided them. And that divide has exposed a larger rift between Jewish Democrats and Israel’s main U.S. lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The Iran deal constrains the country’s nuclear program for 15 years in return for ending international sanctions. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,…

Across the galaxy, Star Wars fans are eagerly awaiting the December release of The Force Awakens, the seventh installment in the sci-fi saga. But in Turkey, the force is having a different sort of effect—at least for some conservative Muslims. In August, the official magazine of the Diyanet, Turkey's state-run religious authority, published an article about the power of the silver screen, arguing that the Turkish film industry portrays Islam in a negative light. The article caused a stir in the Turkish media because it focused on the rise of Jediism—a "religion" or way of life based on the mystical space knights depicted in Star Wars. "Cinema can even create a fictional religion," says Bilal Yorulmaz, an assistant professor of theology at Marmara University in Istanbul and the article's author. Since at…

The incidents seem to accumulate at a staggering pace: Mass shootings in schools, movie theaters and other public places have left scores of victims in their wake. And an overwhelming number of them have occurred in the United States. Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama, looks at the “dark side of American exceptionalism” in a new study to be presented Sunday at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Chicago. In “Mass Shooters, Firearms, and Social Strains: A Global Analysis of an Exceptionally American Problem,” Lankford uses a quantitative analysis of mass shootings around the world between 1966 and 2012 to attempt to understand their prevalence in the U.S., and he consults previous research to try to understand the factors behind this unmatched frequency. “It’s…