Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Can a Wartime Election Be Successful?
This weekend, Ukraine will hold a parliamentary election, but only part of the nation will participate. Crimea has fallen to Russia and eastern Ukraine is still widely dominated by pro-Russian separatists, who consider the territory they control a sovereign nation. As a result, 30 out of 450 parliamentary seats will remain vacant. Born in Kiev...
The Psych Ward for People Who Broke Into the White House
Last month, Omar Gonzalez, an Iraq War veteran from Texas, hopped the White House fence, overpowered a guard, and made it all the way into the East Room before he was apprehended by a Secret Service agent. Gonzalez had a knife on his person, and it soon emerged that he had previously been arrested in July, when state troopers in Virginia found...
What it Took for SpaceX to Become a Serious Space Company
The Space Exploration Technology rocket factory is a large, white hangar-like building near Los Angeles international airport, with a parking lot filled with late-model motorcycles and Tesla electric cars. The vast metal structure once churned out 737 fuselages for Boeing. When you get through the front doors, past security and a cubicle farm...
The Russian Crusade Against the Golden Arches
Following the Russian annexation of Crimea earlier this year, the three McDonald’s outlets in the erstwhile Ukrainian peninsula were shuttered. At least one of the stores was taken over by RusBurger, the nationalist Russian hamburger chain, which boasts Czar cheeseburgers instead of Big Macs and pear lemonade instead of Coca-Cola. In the...
The World’s Greatest Fears, Mapped by Country
The biggest fear among the Japanese is, unsurprisingly, nuclear weapons. People in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda are most worried about AIDS and other diseases. And inequality is the deepest concern for much of Europe and the U.S. These are among the findings of Pew Research Center’s survey of more than 48,000 people in 44 countries this...
Rick Perry’s Biggest Advantage in 2016
Texas Governor Rick Perry quietly traveled to Europe last week to assert his foreign-policy credentials. He got what he was looking for—but in an unexpected way. Perry planned to visit the United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, and Ukraine. He was to meet business and energy groups, confer with Ukrainian political leaders, pay his respects to the...
Germany Says Pro-Russian Separatists Stole Missile Launcher that Took Down MH17
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has determined that pro-Russian separatists brought down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 this summer. The agency investigated the incident through a series of satellite images and photographs coupled with intelligence from within the pro-Russian groups and the Ukrainian...
Australia Challenges Putin Over MH17
Under pressure from world leaders, Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised international investigation teams access to the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash site. Earlier this week, an international team attempted to visit the site and were unable to due to gunfire, due to the continuing separatist fighting in the area. However, Dutch...
What Revolution Looks Like On Instagram
As anti-government protests escalated in Ukraine in February, activists took to Facebook and Twitter to popularize a name for the revolutionary movement. They called it “Euromaidan,” after the pro-European bent of the demonstrators and the central square in the capital where they were massing. On both social networks, the watchword...
Sloviansk: A City With PTSD
SLOVIANSK, Ukraine—Psychologist Tatyana Aslanyan is on a mission to treat a city that seems to be suffering from a collective form of post-traumatic stress disorder. “Everyone, in some way or another, shows the symptoms,” she told me at the Donbass State Pedagogical University in Sloviansk, the eastern Ukrainian city where she is an associate...
