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The goal of the military-run shop seemed to be to discourage people from buying weapons, and even gun lovers like Mr. García, 45, a regular at a local shooting club, said that was how it should be. “If you want to stop someone who gets mad at their wife or the world from running out and buying a gun and killing everyone, you have to make it hard,” said Mr. García, who waited two months for the approval to buy a .38-caliber pistol. “It’s the only way to make people think.”

The 1917 Constitution written after Mexico’s bloody revolution, for example, says that the right to carry arms excludes those weapons forbidden by law or reserved for use by the military, and it also states that “they may not carry arms within inhabited places without complying with police regulations.”

the largest weapons in Mexico’s single gun store — including semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the Aurora attack — can be bought only by members of the police or the military. Handgun permits for home protection allow only for the purchase of calibers no greater than .38, so the most exotic option in the pistol case here consisted of a Smith & Wesson revolver selling for $803.05.

Meantime, are people following Tina Turner’s lead? No, and not Eduardo Saverin’s either. Most expatriations are probably motivated primarily by factors such as family and convenience. Many people like Ms. Turner have built a life somewhere else and may not plan to need a U.S. passport.

Although statistics are not available for why people say a final good-bye, many now find America’s global income tax compliance and disclosure laws inconvenient and nettlesome.

What’s more, U.S. reporting is based on their worldwide income, even though they are paying taxes in the country where they live.

. It requires an annual Form 8938 to be filed with income tax returns for foreign assets meeting a threshold. And foreign banks are sufficiently worried about keeping the IRS happy that many simply do not want American account holders. Americans abroad can be pariahs shunned by banks for daily banking activities.

To exit, you generally must prove 5 years of tax compliance in the U.S. Plus, if you have a net worth greater than $2 million or have average annual net income tax for the 5 previous years of $155,000 or more (that’s tax, not income), you pay an exit tax.

the market for these Versailles knockoffs is “flight capital.” “It’s oligarchs, oilgarchs, people from Asia, people who came up with the next app for the iPhone,” he said. While global wealth is pouring into other American cities as well, Los Angeles is still a relative bargain, Mr. Hyland said, adding: “Here you can buy the best house for $3,000 a square foot. In Manhattan, you’re looking at $11,000 a square foot and you get a skybox.”

In a city traditionally as hostile to architectural preservation as it is hospitable to architectural innovation, the gigamansion trend is accelerating the decimation of residential gems. A midcentury modern home in Bel Air designed by Burton Schutt (best known as the architect of the Hotel Bel-Air) and furnished by the decorator Billy Haines for Earle Jorgensen, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” and his wife, Marion, was recently razed

In the Sunset Strip area, a geometric hacienda built by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta for the actor Ricardo Montalbán was “remodeled” into a hulking glass spec house.

As the number of Los Angeles’s buildable lots dwindles and land values soar, houses that are out of scale with their surroundings are popping up everywhere. (

Newspaper accounts pointed out that in Denmark, the flag—affectionately called the Dannebrog or “Danish cloth” in ancient Danish—is everywhere. It flies on public buildings and churches to celebrate local and national holidays, including Denmark’s Flag Day—on June 15. It is hoisted over private homes to mark occasions like weddings and funerals, anniversaries and graduations, or just plain fine weather. It is printed on gift-wrapping paper. It decorates birthday cakes and Christmas trees.

Throughout Scandinavia, the flags of Norway, Sweden, and Finland are revered and domesticated broadly; they are considered people's flags, not state's flags.

Describing what it looks like, she went on: “It seems to be from WWI. It’s not rare - it’s more of a common medal for anybody that served. The sentimental value is more important than anything.

“It says SMN, which means Seaman and RNR for Royal Naval Reserves, so it’s obviously somebody who was in the Navy. It could have been a case that somebody that was a collector had one and dropped it or it could be that there is family around this area.”

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the battalion formed part of the 109 Brigade of the 36th Ulster Division and assembled at the edge of Thiepval Wood. Blakey was among scores who died that day. And in subsequent letters to his wife, it emerged he had last been seen seriously wounded in No Man’s Land

Although the poppy is most commonly worn today in Britain and Commonwealth countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it was a woman from the U.S. state of Georgia who was responsible for turning it into a symbol of the Great War. Moina Michael, a teacher, was so moved by McCrae’s poem that she vowed always to wear a poppy as a way to “keep the faith with all who died.”

To this day, the factory in west London’s Richmond makes the bulk of the 45 million poppies, wreaths and crosses sold across Britain

There are also those in Britain who avoid the tradition, saying the poppy has become too politicized and nationalistic, or even a symbol that glorifies war. Margaret MacMillan, a historian at Oxford University, said she once reluctantly pinned a poppy when appearing on television because producers insisted she do so.

Webb's campaign never really got off the ground and was seen by even some close Webb aides as more of a vanity play than an actual presidential bid. In total, Webb spent four days campaigning in New Hampshire and 20 days in Iowa, far fewer than the senator's challengers.

Webb has long expressed outright frustration with the Democratic Party -- and did so again in announcing the end of his bid -- questioning its strategy and the support they were providing him. During the first Democratic debate earlier this month, Webb spent considerable time complaining about the amount of time he was given to speak.

"Some people say I am a Republican who became a Democrat, but that I often sound like a Republican in a room full of Democrats or a Democrat in a room full of Republicans," Webb said. "Actually, I take that as a compliment."

Webb, then a Republican, notably served as secretary of the Navy under then-President Ronald Reagan after a decorated military career.

a celebration of aggressive masculinity,

the best people of the world.”

Wallace was a noxious segregationist, but his racism was bound up in a local and regional chauvinism, a skepticism of centralized power and far-off Washington elites. Not so Trump:

One could even go a little further. A great deal has been written on the question of why America didn’t produce an enduring socialist or Communist mass movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

as opposed to the “fascism” that liberals see lurking in every Republican president) is equally striking.

that inoculated our politics against fascism’s appeal.

nd while he has a number of obvious similarities to past right-populist candidates, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the Alabama governor George Wallace,

e fascist temptations can creep in.

He plainly regards his semi-professed Christianity purely instrumentally and has little time for the religious right’s causes.

Not so Trump: He clearly doesn’t care a whit for limited government or libertarianism, and he’s delighted

“beat” by other nations and need to start beating them instead, his surprisingly deft exploitation of blue-collar economic anxieties, his dark references to Mexican “rapists”

he can do things better, that centralization is fine and dandy so long as you have the right Duce

“proto-fascist” zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative

Should Trump’s rivals imitate the “fascism” whisperers in their party and start attacking Trump as a

Trump may indeed be a little fascistic, but that sinister resemblance is just one part of his reality-

He isn’t actually building a fascist mass movement (he hasn’t won a primary yet!)

still several degrees of ugly away from the actual fascist move,

precisely because Trump doesn’t have many of the core commitments that have tended to inoculate conservatives against fascism, it’s still quite likely that the Republican Party is inoculated against him

but they should make it awfully difficult for him to get to 40 or 50 percent. And a somewhat fascist-looking candidate who

Finally, freaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far —

the reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration

then tarring his supporters with the brush of Mussolini and Der Führer right now seems like a shortsighted step

The best way to stop a proto-fascist, in the long run, is not to scream “Hitler!” on a crowded debate stage. It’s to make sure that he never has a point.

“Look at these things. Crazy,” Obama said to the infant. He then dispensed a bit of advice:

he venue — which opened in October, and was festooned with LED banner lights saying “Welcome to Obama”

”It’s still got that new arena smell,” the president joked, prompting applause from the enthusiastic crowd when he recalled that he won one electoral vote in Nebraska during his first White House bid.

it was not pretty. It was not pretty. But I love Nebraska anyway.”

Nebraska boasts a political culture of “civility,” Obama said, “and people treating each other with respect.”

Not Democrat first, not Republicans first, but Americans first. That’s our priority. And, and that’s harder to do during political season. I understand that.”

Alluding to the coming presidential primary contest “across the river” in Iowa, Obama said the ads were filled with “some doom and some gloom.”

That’s not what I see in communities and neighborhoods all across this country.”

where he will hold a town hall Thursday to highlight the newly elected Democratic governor’s plan to expand Medicaid coverage there under the Affordable Care Act.

Just after arriving at Joint Base Andrews, the president went into the lounge for a five-minute meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah, who has been visiting Washington this week.

During his speech, Kerry said the debate over refugees on the campaign trail was “pretty nasty politics,” adding: “People make statements designed to scare people with no basis in the facts.”

On Wednesday, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch planned to meet in Boston with current and former inmates to discuss

“That is who we are. That is what we do. That is how we wrote our history.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Wednesday that the Senate would take up legislation next week to suspend the federal resettlement program for Syrians and Iraqis seeking asylum.

along with any asylum seeker who has visited either Syria or Iraq in the past five years

which has already passed the House. But the fact that the Senate will vote on the proposal

The main thrust of Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night focused on fixing the nation’s broken politics.

institutions of this government and democracy” are functioning, something that has not happened amid all the partisan rancor of the last few years.

e also said that Obama will turn to more intimate settings such as the one scheduled in Omaha on Wednesday.

Pete Ricketts, to accept an invitation to be part of the welcoming party for Obama at the airport, saying he did not have time. After a public flap, Ricketts said he had found time to meet Obama at the airport.

“This democracy is hard work, and we want to make sure it is the American people who were driving that change,

The president believed that it was important that there be an alternative argumentation to rebut the prevailing wisdom in some of the public debate right now,”

Penny Pritzker will head to Denver on Friday to discuss the effect of climate change on the nation’s economic growth.

pisode of the television series “The West Wing” that celebrated the long-forgotten event. Roughly 50 administration officials

“He had an unshakable faith in the idea that what was best for the world would be best for the United States,” as Patricia O’Toole wrote in “The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made,” her biography published this year. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has made clear that he believes if something is good for the rest of the world, it must be bad for the United States.

His “America First” approach has rewritten the compact between the United States and the countries it allied with in World War I and thereafter, leaving them to find their own way in this new era

Just last week, Mr. Macron called for the creation of a “true European army” because the continent can no longer depend on the United States. “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” he said. “When I see President Trump announcing that he’s quitting a major disarmament treaty, which was formed after the 1980s Euro-missile crisis that hit Europe, who is the main victim? Europe and its security.”

“You can make the argument that the classical liberal world order has perhaps outlived its normal life span,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale historian. “Obviously, Trump is doing that kind of thinking — not in a manner that is very polite or very decorous for sure, but in a sense responding to the inner strains that have been building for a long time.”

Unlike Wilson, Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular in Europe. Only 27 percent of people in a 25-nation survey by the Pew Research Center had confidence in the American president to do the right thing in world affairs — and only 9 percent have such confidence in France. Mr. Trump cited the survey on the campaign trail this fall to prove that he has the United States’ interests at heart.

In effect, Mr. Trump’s every-country-for-itself philosophy is a return to 19th-century great power politics, one that its advocates call more realistic than Wilson’s naïve romanticism.

Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College, has argued that Mr. Trump is not an isolationist, as some see him, but is reinventing internationalism to take on American enemies like China, Iran and Russia in a more cleareyed way. “He appears determined to upend the international system as thoroughly and disruptively as he has upended American politics,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gaddis said internationalism remained the dominant force in the United States when there was still a Cold War and what is remarkable is that it lasted so long once that existential threat evaporated.

“I’m not surprised that some of these foundations have been shaken at this point,” he said. “I have no idea what is going to replace them. I’m not sure I like how it’s shaking. It’s a little too shaky, it seems to me.”

There is no longer any room for teachers, medical technicians, firefighters or construction workers, who may drive two or more hours and sleep in their cars for an hour before work to avoid longer commutes.

Gardeners, cleaning people, babysitters and dog walkers cram into small apartments, sometimes 12 in two bedrooms, according to Marroquin.

In East Palo Alto, once a low-income community where many people of color lived, the median price of homes is $953,000. The school district has reported that more than half of its students are homeless, and some teachers commute more than two hours each way because they cannot find affordable local housing.

illionaires of Silicon Valley play real-life monopoly, buying up houses on their blocks and down the street for family, staff, art collections, or to hold political and philanthropic events.

Zuckerberg’s people, for instance, knocked on doors in his neighborhood and offered “well over the fair market value of the house, some would argue at double the value”, said Repka of DeLeon Reality, which did over $800m in sales last year. “He did it as a privacy buffer around his house.”

When the former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer throws a party at her Palo Alto house for hundreds of guests, residents brace for the delivery trucks, caterers, decorators, electricians, and valets. At Mayer’s annual Christmas party, a generator the size of a shipping container buzzes for days to maintain her ice skating rink.

For the vast majority of the workforce, “single-family homes have become untouchable”, said the prominent urban planner Peter Calthorpe, who grew up in Palo Alto.

“What’s this going to mean for future communities, if only totally affluent, young people can afford to move in?”

Three years later, after ratification of the 19th Amendment, universal suffrage was a reality.

The first traces of the Nubian kingdom called Kush date to roughly 2,000 B.C. Egyptians conquered parts of the Kushite Kingdom for a few hundred years, and around 1,000 B.C., the Egyptians appear to have died, left, or mixed thoroughly with the local population. At 800 B.C., Kushite kings, also known as the black pharaohs, took over Egypt for a century—two cobras decorating the pharaohs’ crowns signified the unification of kingdoms. And somewhere around 300 A.D., the Kushite empire began to fade away.

A woman’s skull half coated with termite-riddled dirt rests on a wooden table. Smith beams and locates an amulet the size of his fist that he found beside this skeleton. The amulet is shaped like a scarab beetle, a common symbol of rebirth in Egypt, but the insect bears a man’s head. “This is very unusual,” Smith says. He laughs as he paraphrases hieroglyphics etched into the scarab’s underside: “On the day of judgment, let my heart not testify against me.”

“This period has been burdened by racist colonial interpretations assuming that Nubians were backwater and inferior and now we can tell the story of this remarkable civilization,” he adds

When ancient Egyptians conquered the region, they identified Jebel Barkal as the residence of the god Amun, who was believed to help renew life each year when the Nile flooded. They carved a temple into its base, and illustrated the walls with gods and goddesses. And when ancient Nubians regained control, they converted the holy mountain into a place for royal coronations, and constructed pyramids for royalty beside it.

Perhaps the most tragic manifestation of racist sentiment in Mississippi is silent.

Material poverty is persistent, both for my family and for all black Mississippians: It cleaves to generations, passes from grandmother to mother to child like a genetic trait—like a crooked nose, or detached ears, or freckles.

We are at the southernmost tip of Mississippi, but even so, we saw some of what Dr. King and other civil-rights activists accomplished. Some aspects of our lives have changed: We can access the same public beaches as everyone else, on the Gulf of Mexico and on Lake Pontchartrain. We attend desegregated public schools; we can attend any college or state university we desire. We can walk into any public restaurant on the coast and ask to be seated and served, and, often without incident, we are. This was not the case for my parents and grandparents. I grew up to be a writer, an artist, but I came to this in spite of my poverty, which insisted that my desire to create was frivolous. Which claimed that it was the natural state of my life, that I and those like me should always want, should always be empty.

It makes itself known in all these very vocal, confrontational ways. But perhaps the most tragic manifestation of racist sentiment in Mississippi is silent. Built into the very bones of this place. My state starves its people and, in doing so, actively resists King’s legacy. Our Republican lawmakers have made an effort to undercut programs that serve the poor, maybe because so many people of color in Mississippi live in poverty and depend on social programs for help.

Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not at the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline.

He argued that such a system of wealth distribution would not only “diminish … the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars” but would also free men and women to pursue work that would increase knowledge, encourage literary pursuits, and elevate thought.

Yet every day I wonder at living in the kind of place that would have my children understand that they are perpetually less. That would starve them not only of food but also of a sense of what is possible in their lives. I wonder at raising them in a place that has been telling people like them for decades, for centuries, that they are perpetually less. I wonder at raising them in a place that made my mother decorate bricks as baby dolls for want of toys. My grandmother says that when she was a child, she and her siblings entertained themselves by making small graves in their front yard and surrounding them with twig fences.

week, alongside Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, in the Central Asian leader's capital Astana.

The Kremlin promotes the idea of World War Two as a heroic victory that united the Soviet state against fascism - and still unites Russia today against a similar threat they say has resurfaced in Ukraine.

The 28 were immortalised - posthumously decorated as Heroes of the Soviet Union - and Soviet children learnt about their last stand in school.

Yet historians say the story is not true.

According to the Soviet mythology, 28 soldiers from the Red Army's 316th Rifle Division, mainly recruits from the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Soviet republics, stood unflinching against the advancing might of Hitler's Wehrmacht.

When, in June last year, Russian State Archive director Sergei Mironenko, citing historical documents, said the story was in fact a myth, he earned a sharp rebuke from Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky.

The USSR suffered the heaviest losses in the war - more than 20 million civilians and military - though scholars dispute the exact toll.

Nazi Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939 - the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret protocol, they agreed to carve up Poland between them.

Mr Putin and other officials have repeatedly talked about the need to counter the "falsification of history" or "rewriting history". They oppose interpretations of World War Two or other episodes of Soviet history that deviate from officially approved narratives.

Mr Medinsky, the culture minister, defended Panfilov's 28 Men, saying "even if this story was invented from start to finish, if there had been no Panfilov, if there had been nothing, this is a sacred legend that shouldn't be interfered with. People that do that are filthy scum."

t was accused of smearing the memory of WW2 veterans by asking whether residents of wartime Leningrad could have been saved by surrendering the city to Nazi forces.

Under this law, Vladimir Luzgin, a blogger from Perm region in the Urals, was fined 200,000 roubles ($3,200; £2,500) for reposting an article about the war on the Russian social network VK (VKontakte), the daily Kommersant reported in July.

The court said Luzgin had falsified history by stating "that the communists and Germany jointly attacked Poland, unleashing World War Two, or in other words, that Communism and Nazism co-operated honestly".

as justified.

the punishment of Luzgin w

n February 2013, President Putin ordered a single history syllabus for schools, offering a standardised narrative. A new state "History" TV channel was launched that year too.

In another incident, last year, the authorities in Sverdlovsk region banned the works of two British historians - Antony Beevor and John Keegan - saying they were imbued with Nazi propaganda. The Vedomosti daily described (in Russian) the order to remove the books from public libraries as "full of nonsense from start to finish".

Many Russians may not know how the state embroidered the tale of Panfilov's men - but many may not care either.

Falmata was forced to make a choice - marry a fighter, or go on a “mission”.

Life in the camp was incredibly monotonous. Wake up, pray, eat, clean, pray, eat, and clean - all day long. There were daily religious lessons, long hours reciting verses from the Koran.

almata was approached by armed men and instructed to prepare herself for something important. Her feet were to be decorated with henna. Her hair was to be straightened. Was she being prepared for her wedding, she wondered. Was she going to be married off to a fighter after all? “My friend Hauwa had agreed to get married as a way of trying to stay alive,” Falmata says. “She wanted to find a way to escape.

Two days later, she was approached by fighters. A bomb was forced around her waist.

Falmata was told that if she killed non-believers, she would go straight to paradise.

In their hands were small, homemade detonators. On the way, the three of them discussed whether to carry out the “mission” or abandon it. Should they just do as they were ordered, or try to make their escape? They decided not to carry out the attack.

“A lot of the people we meet who have been in these camps haven’t had much education before, neither Western nor Islamic,” says Akilu.

Sanaa Mehaydali is thought to have been the first female suicide bomber in modern history. The 16-year-old killed herself and two Israeli soldiers in a suicide attack in southern Lebanon in 1985.

s that hundreds of young girls have been forced to carry out attacks in the past three years, in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

She had not gone far before she met two men on the side of the road. What she didn't know was that they, too, belonged to Boko Haram - but a different unit. Falmata was kidnapped for a second time.

The first time a girl was forced by the group to carry out an attack was June 2014. The bombing of a military barracks took place shortly after the notorious kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls, who became known as the Chibok girls.

She says at first it was mainly young men who carried out suicide attacks - ones who were inspired by Boko Haram’s ideology and rhetoric.

n] military offensive got more intense, the pool of young men volunteering dropped significantly, so Boko Haram started kidnapping and coercing young girls for suicide missions.

It was the same daily cycle - eat, clean, pray, recite Islamic verses for hours, sleep.

d of 2017, 454 women and girls had been deployed or arrested in 232 incidents, Pearson says. The attacks killed 1,225 people. Pearson is the author of a study about Boko Haram’s use of female suicide bombers.

ny actually learn about the Koran for the first time w

. They find that religion is a coping strategy.”

A belt of explosives was attached to her stomach. But this time she ran into the forest as soon as the fighters left her.

On the way she joined a group of hunters who allowed her to travel with them across the woods.

Fatima Akilu has met a number of youngsters like Falmata. She says that when they return, they need time to re-establish family bonds. “She’s been away from her family for too long and she might have changed during this time. But her family may also have changed and have traumas of their own.”

She had tasted freedom, but this would turn out to be short-lived. So why didn’t she detonate her suicide belt and end it all? “I wanted to live,” she says. “Killing is not good. It’s what my family taught me and what I believe in too.”