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Maureen O'Reilly beams with pride as she shows a visitor around Grafton, N.H., a town so small it doesn't even have a traffic light.

"Have a look at this," O'Reilly says, pointing to a postcard view of hilly rural New England. "How beautiful is this? It's really pretty in the fall, really, really pretty."

But behind the beautiful view, locals are dividing into opposing camps. About 50 libertarians have moved into Grafton from around the country, splitting the town over their push to shrink its government.

Grafton has an annual meeting called Deliberative Session. It's a big day for local politics. About 100 people cram into the firehouse, town officials sitting up front.

The goal is to debate the budget before it goes to a town-wide vote. But after the Pledge of Allegiance, things break down.

People argue over how to conduct the meeting. The moderator loses control. Police remove a man. After an hour, Skip Gorman is fed up.

"It's still a wonderful town and there's lots of camaraderie," Gorman says. "But there's a group of people who have moved here for the sole purpose of being obstructionist."

"I'm not here to obstruct anything," counters John Connell. "I will vote in favor of liberty and justice at every opportunity."

How did Grafton come to this? About 15 years ago, a prominent libertarian hatched the idea of moving libertarians to New Hampshire, with the hope of having a big impact in a small state. They called it the Free State Project, and a handful of Free Staters settled in Grafton because the town has no zoning ordinances.

O'Reilly was surprised by how quickly Free Staters started pushing their agenda.

"Almost seems as if they walked in the door and started running for office and hold positions," she says. "It's not the typical way someone who's a New Englander does things."

Free Staters say Grafton should withdraw from the school district, cut the $1 million budget by 30 percent over three years, and carve Grafton out as a "U.N.-free zone."

Tony Stelick, a Free Stater who lived in Poland under the boot of Stalinism, remembers a government that slowly gained more and more power. He says locals who oppose Free Staters are unwittingly voting themselves towards fascism.

"They don't know where they going," Stelick says. "I been there. I know where they going."

Even though Grafton has always had a libertarian streak, Free Staters are a minority and locals have mostly blocked their agenda. Still, Olson is confident they could shift the balance if they reach out to locals.

"I think most of the people in town are actually supportive of small government," he says.

Since Free Staters came to town, the real change in Grafton has been more emotional than political. Things have become divisive, and a little ugly. O'Reilly says she's thought about moving, leaving behind the beautiful views and the house her husband built.

"Yeah, that's what's hard," she says. "I would hate to ask him to do it. But if it goes the way they want it go, I don't want to live here."

On a sweltering August day in 2012, the mayor of a tiny Spanish town, fed up with the country's economic conditions, did something drastic. It was the height of the economic crisis and most Spanish politicians were away on summer vacation.

With dozens of supporters, Mayor Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo of Marinaleda marched into the local supermarket in a neighboring town.

"Aren't you all hungry? Let's go shopping!" he yelled as they piled food into metal carts. They walked out without paying, distributing everything to the poor.

Marinaleda, with a population of 2,700, sits in the southern Spanish region of Andaluca where unemployment tops 35 percent.

Several more times that summer Sanchez Gordillo led mass burglaries of area supermarkets, becoming a household name across Spain: the Robin Hood of Andaluca. Sporting a Che Guevara-style beard and a Palestinian scarf, the image of this 62-year-old mayor appears on t-shirts worn by Spanish hipsters.

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Military radar indicates that the missing Boeing 777 jet may have turned back, Malaysia's air force chief said Sunday as scores of ships and aircraft from across Asia resumed a hunt for the plane and its 239 passengers.

There was still no confirmed sighting of debris in the seas between Malaysia and Vietnam where it vanished from screens early Saturday morning en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The weather was fine, the plane was already cruising and the pilots didn't send a distress signal — unusual circumstance for a modern jetliner to crash.

Air force chief Rodzali Daud didn't say which direction the plane might have taken when it apparently went off route.

"We are trying to make sense of this," he told a media conference. "The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back and in some parts, this was corroborated by civilian radar."

Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said pilots were supposed to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if the plane does start to return. "From what we have, there was no such distress signal or distress call per say, so we are equally puzzled," he said.

Authorities were checking on the suspect identities of at least two passengers who appear to have boarded with stolen passports. On Saturday, the foreign ministries in Italy and Austria said the names of two citizens listed on the flight's manifest matched the names on two passports reported stolen in Thailand.

The Two-Way

Malaysian Jetliner Has Been Missing For More Than 24 Hours; Search Goes On

Think of the budget plan released Tuesday by President Obama as a magic wand. If he could wave it and make every line come true, how would the U.S. economy look?

Like this:

Wealthier Americans would be paying more in taxes, while poorer ones would be getting new tax credits. More roads would be under construction and scientists would be receiving more funding. Smokers would be paying more in taxes to allow four-year-olds to attend preschool.

Obama's focus is on job creation, job training and education — and he would pay for changes by imposing higher taxes.

But Republicans don't see a magic wand. They view the White House budget as a club that will beat down the economy with heavier taxes.

The Obama plan "would demand that families pay more, so Washington can spend more," House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Tuesday in a statement. "Republicans believe in a different vision."

On Monday, Ryan released a report suggesting that the government eliminate funding for many poverty programs he says have failed.

So are the two economic visions really so different? How?

Alan Viard, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former staff economist for the George W. Bush administration, said he does see immense differences between Obama's and Ryan's fiscal plans.

In effect, Obama would tweak the budget to try to shrink income disparities. But Ryan, he says, would radically change the budget by instituting structural changes in taxes, anti-poverty programs and entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

In that sense, Obama's plan could be seen as a less dramatic approach in that it would stay closer to the country's existing path, Viard says. "There's nothing 'socialist' in Obama's budget. It's a commitment to the status quo, with minor changes that he would consider improvements."

It tilts the economy more in the direction of taxing the rich to help the poor in the short term, he adds, but without changing big entitlement programs for the long term.

Obama Budget: A Blueprint With Little Chance Of Passage