"With our souls, with our blood, we sacrifice for you, Bashar!" Syria's civil war is over—or at least it should be!—after a resounding electoral victory by the country's no-longer-embattled president. Bashar al-Assad won a walloping 90 percent of the vote, easily securing another seven-year term. It was so easy, in fact, they didn't even bother holding the election outside the territories directly controlled by Assad's soldiers! (That chant for Assad, by the way, is very similar to the one Mercury staffers have to recite before our weekly editorial meeting.)

Boko Haram, the Al-Qaida-styled militia behind the kidnapping of scores of girls defying fundamentalist Islamic law by attending school, faces fresh accusations it brutally sacked several villages in Nigeria—killing hundreds—all while being propped up by rogue members of the country's military command staff.

A top police official from India's new leadership, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, said something horribly callous and untrue about the twinned epidemics of gang-rape and apathy plaguing the country: "This is a social crime which depends on men and women. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong."

Vladimir Putin, pathologically compelled to continually prove his handsome manliness and bare-chested vitality, told the French some things about women, Hillary Clinton in particular: "It's better not to argue with women," he said when asked about Clinton's condemnation of Putin's Ukraine adventurism. "When people push boundaries too far, it's not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman."

"No apologies" will come for Barack Obama's decision to trade five Guantánamo prisoners for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, no matter what naysayers think of Bergdahl's conduct before he was captured or the implications (potentially overblown) for "national security."

The congressional chorus of boos, however, may yet expand to Democrats—some of whom seemed terse and unconvinced after a sensitive, confidential meeting with the White House meant to better explain why the swap happened when it did.

Canada's conservative government has answered a court ruling casting down the country's anti-prostitution laws. It wants to criminalize the selling of sex in places where kids 18 or younger might be present (AKA everywhere that's not a dangerous back-alley) or in advertisements (again, something that isn't a dangerous back-alley).

It wasn't a coverup! It was just "a pattern of incompetence and neglect"! After an internal investigation into what's been a decade of deadly defects in General Motors' smaller cars, the company decided to fire 15 people and punish five others.

Three mounties were shot to death last night by a young Canadian whose Facebook page betrayed a love for Megadeth—and now the town of Moncton, in New Brunswick, is in the midst of a manhunt and lockdown.

I don't know what this means, this story about "negative" deposit rates, beyond the loud and clear notion that the European Union's economy is in deep, deep doo-doo.

A distraught man on a cross-country road trip let his girlfriend's corpse ride shotgun for two days so he could bring her back home to Michigan.

Gossip site TMZ has (allegedly) been creepily clutching its own copy of Justin Bieber's racist jokes video for more than three years—using it to blackmail the singer into making personal appearances and handing them exclusive stories and "scoops."

YOU NEVER HAD MOVES THIS FRESH. BUT DON'T FEEL BAD! NEITHER DID I!