Newsweek September 18, 2015

Popes don’t have batting averages, their work resisting easy quantification: Souls Saved Per Mass, Doctrinal Clarifications Per Encyclical, that sort of thing. But one measure does seem especially telling about the tenure of Pope Francis, and it is the frequency with which his face and words appear on T-shirts. You can announce that Francis is your homeboy or ask, What would Francis do (i.e., WWFD)? Francis-themed T-shirts sport his thrilling response to a question about gays: “Who am I to judge?” There’s one depicting Francis in the style of Shepard Fairey’s famous poster for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, with “pope” replacing “hope.” There’s even an “Atheists for Pope Francis” T-shirt. The Beatles may have been bigger than Jesus Christ, but Pope Francis is bigger than the Beatles. The near-universal adulation Francis…

“Do you have any connection to Al-Qaeda?” the man asked. It was the spring of 2002, and Emad Hassan was sitting in a chair in a small tent, hands cuffed behind his back. Standing in front of him were a young American soldier and his Arabic translator. The soldier barked at him in English, a language Hassan barely understood, and the translator repeated his words in broken Arabic. For weeks, Hassan, a small, soft-spoken 22-year-old with dark skin and curly hair, had been held by the Americans in Afghanistan. Born and raised in Yemen, he traveled to Faisalabad, Pakistan, in the summer of 2001 to study the Koran at a small university. But one evening the following spring, Pakistani authorities burst into the house he shared with 14 other foreign students and…

The refugees making life-threatening journeys across the Mediterranean and through Europe have a new hero —German Chancellor Angela Merkel. While Europe has largely flailed in the face of the greatest such crisis since the end of World War II, Merkel has provided rare leadership. The most powerful country in Europe expects to take in 800,000 people this year, four times as many as it did in 2014. Instead of tightening border controls and insisting the country has no room for more refugees, as some governments have done, the German government has made it clear that it will welcome large numbers of the people fleeing the conflict in Syria and other troubled parts of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Asylum seekers have taken to calling the German leader “Mama…

You’d be forgiven for thinking a new cold war is underway in the Arctic. Judging by appearances—from presidential proclamations to front-page screamers—it seems we are deep into an arms race of naval exercises and icebreaker ships, and that any day now the winner will be announced. That country, the popular narrative suggests, will then become the oil-soaked Saudi Arabia of the frozen north, and the losers will hang their heads. The headlines look like that because countries are acting like that: A few years ago, Russia dropped a titanium Russian flag 2.5 miles under water to symbolically stake claim to the disputed North Pole. Nations, meanwhile, are pushing to beef up their presence in the region. When President Barack Obama called for the U.S. to expand its wee fleet of two…

The secret police came for Boris Shternberg on the night of October 17, 1937, at the height of Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin’s purges, arresting him in his central Moscow apartment in front of his terrified wife and teenage daughter. For the next two months, they tortured the 51-year-old civil servant into confessing to a host of false charges, including the poisoning of the city’s water supply. His torment over, Shternberg was then shot dead, most likely with a single bullet to the back of the head, and his body dumped in a mass burial site near Moscow, according to documents later obtained by his family. Under the Soviet system of collective punishment for “enemies of the people,” his family was evicted from their home, and all their possessions were confiscated. His…

Updated | Miriam Szychowska has been hanging decorations on the wall, stocking books to read and preparing songs to sing in readiness for when 10 children stepped into their new preschool classroom on Tuesday. But unlike in other classrooms around Lodz, one of the largest cities in Poland, the colorful drawings that cheer up the space depict boys wearing yarmulkes, and the videos the children will watch once a week feature cartoon versions of figures from the Tanakh, the sacred Jewish text also referred to as the Hebrew Bible. Szychowska’s brainchild, Gan Matanel, became the city’s first full-time Jewish educational institution in nearly half a century when it opened its doors on September 1 to a small group of students ranging in age from 1.5 to 4.5 years, according to the…