Newsweek International 04/28/2017

Pyongyang, North Korea—Men in uniform leave the opening ceremony of a new residential area, on April 13. Tens of thousands of North Koreans gathered to see North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who didn’t speak but clapped intermittently as Premier Pak Pong Ju said the construction was “a very significant, great event, more powerful than the explosion of hundreds of nuclear bombs on the top of the enemies’ heads,” Reuters reported. North Korea continues to test its nuclear weapons and accuses President Donald Trump of “making trouble” with his “aggressive” tweets.…

Athée-sur-Cher, France—As the nation prepares for the first round of voting in its presidential election, farmer Jacques Fortin mowed a message in English for the candidates in his wheat field (pictured on April 13). A combination of bad weather, international competition and falling food prices has eroded incomes for French farmers. In 2016, half were earning less than enough to keep them above the poverty line. “Political leaders do not listen to us,” Fortin told Agence France- Presse. “They’re deaf to our anger. I hope they’re not blind and will read this message of despair.”…

IT WAS an overcast afternoon in northern Moscow on April 10, and a crowd was gathering outside the jail where Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, was finishing yet another stint behind bars. The crowd, mostly opposition activists and journalists, was expecting to hear a fiery speech from Navalny, a 40-year-old anti-corruption activist. But there would be no speeches that afternoon. In an apparent attempt to prevent Navalny from addressing the media, Russian authorities had secretly transferred him to a different jail some 10 miles away and released him there. He was forced to make his way home alone on the metro. For Navalny’s supporters, the underhanded move was an indication of his growing nationwide profile, and an indirect admission that Navalny is the only figure with any chance of…

HIS AGENDA IS TO WHITTLE DOWN THE POWER OF THE CIA. THE WELL-MANICURED Washington, D.C., suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland, is probably what President Donald Trump’s supporters imagine when they whoop about draining the capital’s “swamp.” A high-income enclave of Volvo-driving, wine-sipping, public-radio- listening lawyers, lobbyists, journalists and government bureaucrats, Chevy Chase is such a liberal stronghold that local Republicans said last year they were afraid to plant Trump campaign posters on their lawns. All of which makes the town an unlikely launch pad for Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the suddenly prominent White House National Security Council official at the center of a bizarre backdoor maneuver to provide House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes with top-secret documents on government surveillance. Cohen- Watnick reportedly retrieved the documents from a classified CIA terminal in…

PRICES HAVE RISEN SO HIGH THAT SOME PEOPLE NOW FIND THEMSELVES HAVING TO GUARD THEIR GUARD DOGS. IT’S 9 O’CLOCK on a chilly night in January, and the Adhamiyah animal market is teeming with visitors. There are the private zoo owners who’ve dropped by to size up the mangy lions and monkeys, and young couples sneaking furtive kisses in the shadows, ignoring the animals. Yet here in Baghdad’s largest beast bazaar, it’s families and earnest-looking businessmen who outnumber the gawkers and flirts. And they have no interest in exotic flora and fauna. Darting among the cages, they eagerly scan mutt after mutt, dismissing each in turn. “Too small,” Mohammed Salama, a car salesman, says of the Jack Russell terriers. “Useless,” he calls the lone dachshund. It’s only when a dealer…

“YOU infidel, come out! Your days are numbered!” Cradling her baby daughter outside her home in the Minawao refugee camp, Maryam repeats the words Boko Haram fighters shouted at her husband when they arrived in the northeast Nigerian village of Djogode, in 2014. As Christians—her husband is a pastor—Maryam and her family were prime targets for the Islamist militant organization, which has terrorized northeastern Nigeria and neighboring countries since 2009. Her family fled the same day, after fighters set fire to a church and murdered a fellow pastor in Djogode, she says. Maryam is one of 61,000 Nigerian refugees in the Minawao camp outside the city of Mokolo, in Cameroon’s Extreme North region, around 15 miles east of the Nigerian border. Mokolo is only 40 miles from the Nigerian village…