On a spring afternoon last year at an outdoor café in San Francisco, two denizens of the tech community sketched out their strategy for a startup. Like most 28-year-olds in Silicon Valley, they had smarts and dreams. One was a passionate, fast-talking New Yorker, the other a shy computer whiz from Syracuse, New York, and together they formed the classic hacker-hustler team behind many of the valley’s Next Big Things.

They had been emailing each other about the idea for months, with growing conviction of its awesome potential. It addressed a well-known problem, one that afflicts the tech industry but also banking, media, advertising and film. Corporations needed it. Individuals would love it. It might even be disruptive, as they say. That afternoon, over lunch in the California sun, they committed to an ambitious business plan. That summer, they would keep their day jobs at media and advertising companies, but devote many off-hours and weekends to the startup. The savvy talker, who had worked in communications at Citigroup and Thomson Reuters, joined professional clubs, sought out older advisers, arranged meetings and worked at creating buzz that just might pique investors.

The programmer toiled at the computer, coaxing an algorithm, often alone.

Four months later, the hustler won the project’s first investor, a woman who works at one the world’s biggest hedge funds. It was a small sum, but the entrepreneurs quit their jobs the next day, setting up camp in a donated corner of another startup’s loft office above San Francisco’s Union Square. The new digs mercifully provided free food.

In the ensuing months, the pair eschewed new clothes, walked instead of Ubered and assembled a small, mostly unpaid staff. They found pro bono lawyers with startup expertise, signed contracts, designed and revised their PowerPoint pitch a dozen times and met with more than 50 potential investors. The programmer tested the algorithm. They had 1,500 clients wait-listed for a beta launch. They attracted interest at five large technology companies, including Twitter. They told investors their project was the next Pinterest—the way screenwriters tell movie moguls their scripts are the next Titanic.

Nine months after that day at the café, they launched their startup last month.

In a community like Silicon Valley, where six- and seven-figure investments are routinely tossed at ideas that sometimes succeed but more often flash-bang and fizzle out like meteors, they were getting only paltry sums—about $400,000 shy of the $525,000 they were hoping for in “pre-seed,” early investment money.

There is, though, one thing these two founders are missing, and it is almost the sine qua non of the fabled Silicon Valley startup. They don’t have penises.

Dana Settle, 27, the youngest partner at the Mayfield Fund, one of the oldest venture capital funds in Silicon Valley, sits in a meeting to decide which new companies to fund with the more than $2.5 billion dollars they manage, Nov. 20, 2000.Bob Sacha/Corbis

Gang-Bang Interviews

The legendary names of Silicon Valley are well known, and for the most part, the men behind the names look like this: geeky, in jeans and T-shirt, maybe with a hoodie, maybe shaving, maybe a college dropout, coding since early pubescence in the upper-middle-class parental basement. They walk into a venture capital firm on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park or in San Francisco's SoMa district, and they walk out with a million dollars. A few years later, if all goes well, an IPO makes a lot of people richer.

Computer programmer Lauren Mosenthal and her partner, Eileen Carey, came to California attracted by that kind of possibility. The only problem with their dream is that Silicon Valley has never produced a female Gates, Zuckerberg or Kalanick. There are a few high-profile female entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, but despite the very visible success of corporate titans Meg Whitman, Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, who signed up with companies after they took off—their numbers are relatively minuscule.

Despite that discouraging fact, the two women spent their 20s deep inside the valley’s bro community—a culture that has been described as savagely misogynistic. In inverse ratio to the forward-looking technology the community produces, it is stunningly backward when it comes to gender relations. Google “Silicon Valley” and “frat boy culture” and you’ll find dozens of pages of articles and links to mainstream news articles, blogs, screeds, letters, videos and tweets about threats of violence, sexist jokes and casual misogyny, plus reports of gender-based hiring and firing, major-league sexual harassment lawsuits and a financing system that rewards young men and shortchanges women.

There was the young executive of a company valued at $250 million who got up in front of an audience at a conference billed as diverse and joked about “gang-bang interviews” and how he got his start by sending elusive CEOs whose attention he needed “bikini shots” from a “nudie calendar” he’d made of college women. It’s the sort of place where one of the valley’s “most-eligible bachelors,” Gurbaksh Chahal—an entrepreneur with companies valued at hundreds of millions of dollars—is shown on a home security video beating his girlfriend for half an hour. (He received no jail time, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and received 25 hours of community service and three years’ probation.) It’s a community in which the porn-inspired, “drading” college tweets of Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, go public; where a CEO’s history of domestic violence has no repercussions but female executives get fired for tweeting about sexist jokes they overhear. It’s a place where companies routinely staff conference booths with scantily clad “code-babes” and where women are so routinely sexually harassed at conferences that codes of conduct have become de rigueur—and the subject of endless misogynistic jokes on Twitter.

It is still the kind of place where investors can tweak women who ask them for financing with barbs like “I don’t like the way women think. They haven’t mastered linear thinking.” This was how one investor turned down Kathryn Tucker’s pitch for RedRover, an app that helps parents find kid-friendly things to do, which has since launched in New York, San Francisco and Atlanta.

Three high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits were filed in 2014 against Tinder, the virtual town square of hookup culture, and two of the biggest venture capital firms—Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and CMEA Capital. The complaints include a senior CMEA partner harassing a series of executive assistants like a character in Mad Men, replete with sexual nicknames, trapping them in his office and frequently referring to porn and pubic hair. At Kleiner Perkins, former partner Ellen Pao says partners countenanced harassment and retaliation from a fellow partner, and excluded women from client dinner parties because they “kill the buzz.” At Tinder, a male co-founder (and ex-boyfriend) sent abusive texts and yanked co-founder Whitney Wolfe’s title because, she alleged, he told her having a woman on a board “makes the company seem like a joke.” Tinder and CMEA settled under confidential terms within months. That CMEA partner is no longer with the firm, and Tinder temporarily suspended the executive involved. The suit filed by Ellen Pao—who is now at Reddit—is headed to trial this spring. Kleiner Perkins has denied the allegations and stated that Pao “twisted facts and events in an attempt to create legal claims where none exist.”

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley. In that sense, Silicon Valley culture echoes the Wolf of Wall Street culture in the ’80s and ’90s. But while Wall Street today seems tamer—thanks to lawsuits and diversity consultants in every corner—in Silicon Valley the misogyny continues unabated. A combination of that very traditional Wall Street wolf-ism among Northern California’s venture capital boys’ club and the socially stunted boy-men that the money men like to finance has created a particularly toxic atmosphere for women in Silicon Valley.

This matters for tens of thousands of reasons, but on the broadest level, since digital technology is our era’s Industrial Revolution, fortunes being made now and business models and corporate cultures forming today will be with us for a century to come—and women are for the most part sidelined. Zuckerberg, Gates, Thiel, Musk—these are our Carnegies and Morgans and Rockefellers, whose names will be on museum wings and university halls 100 years from now. And there’s not a female among them.

Venture capitalists often blame the dearth of women graduating in computing and math and engineering, but that is only part of it. As Jodi Kantor wrote in aNew York Times article tracing the fates of the Stanford class of 1994, many women with such degrees simply bailed out, while their male counterparts went on to make fortunes as the Internet exploded.

A recent report on women entrepreneurs by the Kauffman Foundation identified the chief challenges to female entrepreneurship. Researchers interviewed 350 female entrepreneurs, and most cited “lack of available advisers” at the top of their list. Female professional attrition is only one reason for the scarcity of mentors for younger women. Another is that women who stay in the game beyond their late 30s may be less subject to sexual harassment than their younger counterparts, but they are sidelined by virulent ageism in the industry that especially—but not solely—afflicts women.

Younger women, setting out on careers in tech, are furious. One group wrote a scathing “Open Letter to Tech” last year complaining about regular “rape-y emails” and professional exclusion.

Shanley Kane is a young tech industry observer and founder of Model View Culture, an acid-penned, widely read website on which she routinely exposes and excoriates the white brogrammer establishment. In an interview with MIT Technology Review in December, she said venture capitalists talk about the need to get 10-year-old girls into science in order to bring up the numbers of women they will fund, but don’t fund the ones already in the industry. “We are not getting hired, and we are not getting promoted, and we are being systematically driven out of the industry,” she said.

Asked what women should do, Kane wasn’t encouraging: “I don’t have a lot of advice. There’s not a whole lot you can do to keep your career from being crushed by misogyny.”

From left, Lauren Mosenthal and Eileen Carey are co-founders of Glassbreakers.Ashley Jones

Kicking Glass

Every successful startup pitch begins with a problem, followed by a solution and an estimation of how many people will pay for it. Carey and Mosenthal are well versed in the problems women in tech face, and that’s how they came up with the idea for their startup, which they called Glassbreakers.

Glassbreakers is a peer-mentoring platform for companies that want to retain and promote women, and it’s also for individuals because it matches women in the same profession with other women at relatively similar levels so they can share tips, contacts and skills. Based on a “software as a service” business model, it relies on an algorithm Mosenthal continues to refine to produce a product that’s a bit like a dating site, matching people by location, career goals, background and needed skills. “Glassbreakers is a $100 million-a-year opportunity for investors, given how many organizations lack the resources to build mentorship programs but are seeking a solution,” Carey says.

But there is “added value,” as she puts it in her pitch to investors: community-building for working women. “A more connected female workforce is a stronger one,” she says.

Founders Jaclyn Baumgarten, left, and Ari Horie discuss a project during a meeting with entrepreneurs at the Women's Startup Lab in Menlo Park, Calif., May 27, 2014.Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group/MCT/Sipa USA

That’s an added value close to Carey’s heart. She hails from a family of East Coast feminists, and her aunt, Noreen Connell, was a member of the New York Radical Feminists, a National Organization for Women leader and Bella Abzug comrade-in-arms who co-wrote a 1974 sourcebook for rape victims. Carey is named after her mother: “I’m Eileen Junior.” She admits she has only rarely experienced sexual harassment or even sexist behavior. “Women our age expect feminism,” she says, sitting in a sunny, donated corner room in the loft offices of Prism Skylabs, a retail analytics company. “We expect to be treated equally. That shit would never fly around me.”

But she knows bias and harassment are endemic in her profession. When she hears such stories, she encourages the women to report the men, but she understands why they don’t. She has no such qualms herself. “I have seen people sexually harass people, and I have reported it to HR or their bosses,” she says.

Glassbreakers’s peer-mentorship model is different from the traditional mentorship model, Carey says. It aims to mitigate the effect of female professional attrition on younger generations of women coming up. “Traditional mentorship, established in male-dominated industry, is between very senior and very junior people. But the problem for women in the workforce is that there are many more mentees than mentors. Also, the tech industry is changing so fast that women even five or 10 years older may have very little of practical use to share with younger workers.”

Around 1,500 women signed up for last month’s launch, which was confined to the Bay Area. Customers who sign up provide information about their skills and professional goals, and thanks to Mosenthal’s algorithm, they will find three names in their inbox and the user decides whether to make the connection. The two plan to eventually tailor Glassbreakers platforms for women in other industries.

After their first investment, the women raised $100,000, including their combined personal life savings of $15,000 each. Carey says she met with around 50 potential investors, and if the launch goes well, and she can show both significant interest and that the product works without glitches, this month she will be heading out on her first “seed round”—startup lingo for pitch meetings with venture capitalists aimed at raising enough money—she wants $1.5 million—to keep going for 18 months.

The road to launch wasn’t easy. Investors did not pony up the pre-seed financing goal. The company made it to the interview stage of the coveted Y-Combinator tech incubator but no further. Carey says those setbacks were balanced out by promising signs, including the ardent support of older influential women, like the woman who ponied up their first investment.

She also picked up some male investment interest, including funding from Ben Parr, founder of the DominateFund and formerly of Mashable, who invested $20,000 in Glassbreakers just before the launch. "I’ve been talking to women about this problem for years,” Parr says. “A lot of men would write this off. If they build the community, the possibilities and opportunities are enormous—especially for Glassbreakers within workplaces.

Conference attendees at TechCrunch Disrupt at Pier 48, Sept. 8, 2014 in San Francisco.Steve Jennings/Getty

Asking for It

“We are confident women!” It’s a mantra Carey repeats, half-earnestly, half-smiling, as she prepares for a pitch meeting. CEO Carey does those alone; Chief Technology Officer Mosenthal will come only when and if the investors want to talk technology. Carey says that having two of them in the room when she’s asking for money “breaks the energy.”

But asking for money didn’t come naturally—and that’s part of the problem for women in tech. It’s not all sexism but also a culture in which women don’t easily brag or bring the same swagger to fund-raising pitches that the boys do. She and Mosenthal bootstrapped (startup talk for self-financing) for months. Even after she had her rap down for the pitch, she had to be coaxed across the line. In August, she met at a Starbucks with a woman affiliated with a major hedge fund. Over the course of an hour, Carey explained the Glassbreakers platform. The woman, who invested her own money and prefers to remain anonymous (she doesn’t want her company involved), clearly “got” the problem. At some point in their conversation, the woman gently advised Carey that it was important to come out and ask for money.

“At the end of the meeting, she asked straight out, ‘Are you going to ask me to invest in your company?’” Carey says. “And I said yes.”

That investor ponied up less than $10,000 but says she likes Glassbreakers as a business prospect because of various corporate initiatives, such as Intel's recently announced $300 million, five-year commitment to women's leadership and diversity. “That’s a trend that will be very favorable for a technology like Glassbreakers,” the investor says.

The effect of that investment on Carey and Mosenthal was exponentially greater than the relatively small dollar figure. “Next day,” Carey says, “we quit our jobs.”

Carey’s unease about asking for money doesn’t surprise Vivek Wadhwa, a Silicon Valley investor, diversity coach and author of Innovating Women. Wadhwa says shaky self-confidence is one of the chief things holding women back. It’s not just about the money, though. Wadhwa says women not only are reluctant to overstate their accomplishments and goals; they habitually understate them. “Often I have to say to them, Why are you underselling?” he says. “When I coach women, I tell them how wonderful they are. Women won’t make the ridiculous projections about their companies that the guys will. They won’t say the really stupid thing the nerds do. They are a lot more realistic and practical and humble.”

Stanford engineering graduate student Serena Yeung, second from left, meets up with other male engineering students Arturo Escaip, left, Subodh Iyengar, right, and Rathul Sheth, second from right, on the Stanford University campus in Stanford, Calif., May 30, 2012.Paul Sakuma/AP

Gender-gating

No amount of confidence changes the fact that the valley’s big venture capitalists are almost entirely male. The top five don’t have any female senior partners, and VC partners are 96 percent male. Twenty years ago, the partners were 97 percent male.

A new generation of millennials starting their firms have hardly changed the system. Some of the wealthiest men in the New Billionaires club are Peter Thiel (who financed Zuckerberg) and David Sacks—two guys who spent their formative years at Stanford in the 1990s writing anti-feminist screeds for their school paper. According to Kantor in The New York Times, “In the pages of [Stanford’s] The Review, they defined feminism in negative terms—alarmist, accusatory toward men, blind to inherent biological differences. Feminists ‘see phallocentrism in everything longer than it is wide,’ Mr. Sacks wrote. ‘If you’re male and heterosexual at Stanford, you have sex and then you get screwed.’”

Speaking to the Times, Sacks regretted his collegiate anti-gay screeds, but didn’t seem too concerned about the juvenilia directed at women, nor the status of his female co-eds, the majority of whom dropped out of the business.

VCs are not funding women. According to a study by Babson College, only 2.7 percent of the 6,517 companies that received venture funding from 2011 to 2013 had women CEOs. Meanwhile, the Kauffman report found that female-run startups produce a 31 percent higher return on investment than startups run by men.

One problem with the male-dominated system is that top partners have almost never been exposed to women as professional peers. Their interaction with women is limited to their wives and daughters, and maybe executive assistants.

Male VCs who don’t have female professional peers are especially difficult to pitch on products that serve a female market. “Dozens of times, women have come and told me, I pitched to a firm and what do I hear over and over, ‘Oh, I will go home and ask my wife about it,’” says Trish Costello, an entrepreneur and founder of Portfolia, a venture capital investment platform designed for women. She is also CEO emeritus and co-founder of the Palo Alto–based Kauffman Fellows, a global training institute for venture capitalists.

A prominent venture capital investor from one of California’s top firms, who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want his firm “singled out,” called the absence of female partners “embarrassing” but said it’s directly related to the smaller percentages of women graduating from the engineering schools. “There is no question that diversity of opinion adds to the acumen of the group,” he said. “One of the most passionate business reasons we have to expand the investment to include a handful of women is that they are often not represented in the partnership dynamic around the table on Monday when we are discussing investment ideas.”

But the investor insisted that potential, not gender, was the key to which ideas, of the 10,000 that get pitched to his firm annually, end up being among the 12 that get financed. He added that of those pitches, 20 percent come from female entrepreneurs—which he said tracks with the percentage of women in engineering programs. The investor sits on the boards of two women-run firms that his company financed, and both female CEOs find the focus on their gender “patronizing.”

This is such a touchy subject for the all-male partnerships that few investors want to discuss it—on the record or not. A spokeswoman at Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment, and Peter Thiel’s firm, the Founders Fund, did not respond to messages.

To be fair, there are many reasons Glassbreakers might not appeal to a Founders Fund or Andreessen Horowitz, or any of the dozens of other all-male VC partnerships on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, reasons that have nothing to do with sexist bias. It’s not likely to be a Facebook, or even a Houzz, the home-remodeling site launched by an Israeli husband and wife, financed by Sequoia and now valued at $2.3 billion. Glassbreakers is by definition “gender-gated,” thereby excluding 50 percent of potential users. It also presumes that many women do feel the need for female mentorship, when in fact there is quite possibly a significant cohort of working women who think they are getting along just fine without another woman’s advice.

That said, if the Glassbreakers launch shows a market for the product, it will almost certainly have a longer life than Red Swoosh, a now-forgotten Travis Kalanick file-sharing enterprise that venture capitalists threw millions at, and which, when it sold for $19 million, enabled the young founder to buy a San Francisco mansion and Uber.

Should the Glassbreakers team fail in the next 18 months, odds are much worse for them than for men that they will not get more funding. Wadhwa often talks about the importance of “pattern recognition” among VCs. The male bankers simply have an idea of what a successful startup founder looks like, and young women like Carey and Mosenthal simply don’t fit.

“Women don’t look like winners. So they can’t fail, while boys in the club can,” Wadhwa says.

To avoid this, Carey has vetted the venture capitalist firms she will approach, seeking those that have funded other female startups, and making sure that they have some women in senior, decision-making roles. “Of the VCs we have had the highest engagement with, three are women-led firms,” Carey says.

The financing gap between male and female entrepreneurs is massive. VCs typically fund women at the lowest levels—$100,000. The Kauffman study found the majority (nearly 80 percent) of female entrepreneurs didn’t get venture capital but used personal savings as their top funding source. Carey found a network of women, some of whom are or have been venture capitalists or who have started companies. Among their bits of wisdom was one that is antithetical to the swaggering male startup CEO who is sure he’s going to be the Next Zuck. “Talking to these women, we learned you have to ask,” Carey says. “Don’t pretend you know something. If you are honest about what you don’t know, people are more responsive.”

But the advice that bothers her most, Carey says, has to do with how to deal with her own gender. “We are very fortunate and haven’t faced discrimination in our lives,” Carey said of herself and Mosenthal. “I’ve never been told I would not be able to do something or that it would be harder to do because I was a woman. So it’s been strange going through this experience and being told that because we are women it will be harder for us to fund-raise. The hardest part has been hearing that and digesting it and accepting that our gender would be a barrier for entry. I never thought it would be this real.”

Sheryl Sandberg visits the Facebook France offices, April 14, 2014.Elodie Gregoire/REA/Redux

“This Really Happened”

Heading out on her first financing round, Carey is well aware of the worst things that can happen to a young woman seeking money for a startup. The stories are rampant—in fact, every woman entrepreneur who’s been around Silicon Valley has one. For brevity’s sake, we present one from entrepreneur and venture capitalist Heidi Roizen.

Early in her career, Roizen was working “on a company-defining deal”—involving, potentially, millions of dollars—with a major PC manufacturer. “The PC manufacturer’s senior vice president who had been instrumental in crafting the deal suggested he and I sign over dinner in San Francisco to celebrate,” Roizen has written. “When I arrived at the restaurant, I found it a bit awkward to be seated at a table for four yet to be in two seats right next to each other, but it was a French restaurant and that seemed to be the style, so down I sat. Wine was brought and toasts were made to our great future together. About halfway through the dinner, he told me he had also brought me a present, but it was under the table, and would I please give him my hand so he could give it to me. I gave him my hand, and he placed it in his unzipped pants.

“Yes,” she said. “This really happened.”

Every Silicon Valley entrepreneur who spoke with Newsweek has a story somewhat like this—varying only in degree of brazenness. One young woman had worked for a year on a startup with an older male financial mentor. When she was ready to head out for a round of funding, he took her to dinner—a meeting at which she expected to be introduced to VCs or told which ones he’d arranged for her to meet with. Instead, over wine, he confessed that he was having a midlife crisis and that he was in love with her. No finances would be forthcoming.

Roizen stayed in the business and is now one of the industry’s legendary female entrepreneurs. Wadhwa says women must approach male VCs with caution and awareness: “Women don’t get it. The young women don’t seem to understand the reason why they get their calls returned so easily and get small amounts of funding is they are dealing with hungry men. These are disgusting perverts. Some of them used to be my friends—sexist jerks. And I know how they speak behind the scenes.”

To head this off, Carey recently dyed her blond hair mousy brown and dresses down, not up. Now she meets with investors only after researching them or getting references from other women. “We are vetting them left, right and center. We don’t take meetings over drinks. I do know a guy who raised a million dollars and got blackout drunk every night with the VC. That’s not how we work.”

Carey says the slightest sexist overtures dent her confidence. “When an investor kisses me on the cheek on the way out, I feel like shit for weeks afterward.”

Google employees eat lunch in a cafeteria adorned by artwork created by Google employees, in Mountain View, Calif. Jan. 6, 2006.Eros Hoagland/Redux

Viagra but No Abortions

The Glassbreakers women are launching a product for women, designed to solve a problem women understand better than men, in an economic sector that has traditionally produced products shaped by the minds of young men for young men. It’s inarguable that white, upper-middle-class young men have applied the new technologies to make things that reflect their desires and culture and foisted them on the world. Women who complain about sexist video games get death threats from legions of boyfans conditioned by formative years on the Xbox controller to believe it’s their right to rescue—or maybe assault—wasp-waisted half-naked damsels in distress. And the anonymity of the Internet has proved relatively more menacing to women.

None of these ill effects are deliberate, but they are built into designs and products created almost solely by one gender. As recently as 2011, for example, Apple made a Siri who could find prostitutes and Viagra but not abortion providers.

Reviewing the movie The Social Network, the writer Zadie Smith wrote that everything about Facebook is “reduced to the size of its founder. Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to.” Ultimately, she wrote, The Social Network wasn’t “a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called ‘Mark Zuckerberg.’ It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.”

Frustrated, women in Silicon Valley seem to be segregating themselves in women-only venture funds or starting gender-gated funds.

Costello says that the sexual harassment lawsuits and the public talk about endless ugly events is a sign that things are changing. “We are in a major time of shift. There is no other time when women have been better educated, earning a majority of undergraduate and graduate degrees and serving in equal numbers in nearly all professions. The control of personal wealth is about equal, as baby boomer men are dying earlier and women are inheriting money from their parents and husbands and have their own assets from working. If we can access 2 percent of that money controlled by women, we don’t need to be begging on Sand Hill Road.”

Correction: This article originally misspelled the last name of Ben Parr.

Updated | AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan said on Wednesday it had received no assurance that one of its pilots captured by Islamic State insurgents was safe and that it would go ahead with a proposed prisoner swap only if he was freed.

The fate of air force pilot Muath al-Kasaesbeh was thought to be tied to that of Japanese hostage Kenji Goto, a veteran war reporter who is also being held by the insurgent group.

A video was released on Tuesday purporting to show the Japanese national saying he had 24 hours to live unless Jordan released Sajida al-Rishawi, an Iraqi woman on death row for her role in a 2005 suicide bomb attack.

The Japanese government is now analyzing a purported new voice recording in which Goto says al-Kasaesbeh will be killed if a swap for al-Rishawi is not carried out by sunset on Thursday, a spokesman for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's office said.

Government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said Jordan was ready to release al-Rishawi if Kasaesbeh was spared, but made clear that she was still being held until the pilot was freed.

"It's not true she has been released. Her release is tied to freeing our pilot," Momani told Reuters. He made no mention of Goto.

Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said on his official Twitter account that a Jordanian request for proof that Kasaesbeh was safe and well had gone unanswered.

The Jordanian comments have raised concerns in Japan that Goto might no longer be part of any deal between Amman and Islamic State. But CNN quoted Judeh as saying that "of course" the Japanese hostage's release would be part of any exchange.

Kasaesbeh was captured after his jet crashed in northeastern Syria in December during a bombing mission against Islamic State, which has captured large tracts of Syria and Iraq.

The voice on the video said Kasaesbeh had a shorter time to live than Goto. Japan confirmed the existence of the video at 11 p.m. (1400 GMT) on Tuesday.

People walk past television screens displaying a news program, about an Islamic State video showing Japanese captive Kenji Goto, on a street in Tokyo January 28, 2015.Yuya Shino/Reuters

"Twenty-four hours have passed since we confirmed the image of Mr. Goto, but there hasn’t been any information of any particular big movement," Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishidatold reporters.

He said Japan would continue to do its best to secure his release, staying in contact with Jordan.

Momani said Jordan's priority was to secure the release of the pilot, who hails from an important Jordanian tribe that forms the backbone of support for the Hashemite monarchy.

Several hundred people, including Kasaesbeh's relatives, gathered in front of the office ofJordan's prime minister on Tuesday, urging authorities to meet Islamic State's demands.

Al-Rishawi has been held in Jordan over her role in a suicide bombing that killed 60 people in the capital Amman.

MOTHER'S PLEA

A spokesman at Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's office said he had no immediate comment on the Jordanian statement.

The hostage-taking presents Abe with his biggest diplomatic crisis since he took power in 2012, and there has been a flurry of unconfirmed reports in Japanese media that a swap deal involving Goto might be in the works.

Goto's mother, speaking shortly after the presumed deadline had passed late on Wednesday, said: "My emotions are all over the place.

"A time limit has been set, and that has made me nervous," Junko Ishido told reporters at her Tokyo home.

She had earlier urged the Japanese government to do its utmost to save his life and reiterated that her son was not an enemy of Islam.

Abe said Tuesday's video was "despicable". He called on Jordan to cooperate in working for Goto's quick release, but promised that Tokyo would not give in to terrorism.

Goto went to Syria in late October. According to friends and business associates, he was attempting to secure the release of Haruna Yukawa, his friend and fellow Japanese citizen who was captured by Islamic State in August.

In the first of three videos purportedly of Goto, released last week, a black-clad masked figure with a knife said Goto and Yukawa would be killed within 72 hours if Japan did not pay Islamic State $200 million.

The captor resembled a figure from previous Islamic State videos whose threats have preceded beheadings.

A video on Saturday appeared to show Goto with a picture of a decapitated Yukawa, saying his captors' demands had switched to the release of al-Rishawi.

Tuesday's video featured an audio track over a still picture that appeared to show Goto holding a picture of a now bearded Kasaesbeh.

Officials involved in the crisis say Tokyo knew for months that Islamic State militants were holding two Japanese men captive, but appeared ill-prepared when the group set a ransom deadline and purportedly killed one of them.

Israel said on Thursday it received a message from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah that it was backing away from further violence, a day after the worst deadly clashes in years erupted along the border.

The Israel-Lebanon frontier, where two Israeli soldiers and a Spanish peacekeeper were killed in an exchange of fire between Hezbollah and Israel, appeared quiet early on Thursday.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said Israel had received a message from a U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon that Hezbollah was not interested in further escalation.

"Indeed, a message was received," he said. "There are lines of coordination between us and Lebanon via UNIFIL (the U.N. force)and such a message was indeed received from Lebanon."

In Beirut, Hezbollah officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

"I can't say whether the events are behind us," Yaalon added in a separate radio interview. "Until the area completely calms down, the Israel Defense Forces will remain prepared and ready."

The Israeli soldiers were killed when Hezbollah fired five missiles at a convoy of Israeli military vehicles. The attack appeared to be in retaliation for a Jan. 18 Israeli air strike in southern Syriathat killed several Hezbollah members and an Iranian general.

The peacekeeper in southern Lebanon was killed as Israel responded with air strikes and artillery fire, a U.N. spokesman and Spanish officials said.

The Dalai Lama sat backstage at a theatre in Rome last month, waiting to come on as the star attraction at the Summit of Nobel Peace Prize winners. He was flanked by two of Italy’s most senior politicians. There was time for a little small talk. Walter Veltroni, former mayor of Rome and candidate for prime minister, asked him how he coped with jet lag. Deploying his familiar syntax-free English, the Buddhist leader replied, “Travelling the world – time difference – no problem.” Then he moved on to more intimate matters. “But bowel movement does not obey my mind. But this morning – thanks to your blessings – after 7 o’clock – full evacuation. So now I am very comfortable.”

Bowel movements apart, this final fixture of 2014 had been clogged with problems. The Nobel summit is held in a different city every year, and, for months, preparations had been under way to stage it in Cape Town, marking the first death anniversary of the most feted of all the laureates, Nelson Mandela. The Dalai Lama, with his vast global popularity, would be the star turn – but, as the date approached, it emerged that the South African government of Jacob Zuma would not grant the Tibetan a visa.

Should the show go on without him? Supporters of the exiled lama said no: how could an event intended to celebrate the courage of the Nobel peace laureates fall into line with the cowardly action of a government being squeezed by China? Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama’s old friend and himself a laureate, fumed, “I am ashamed to call this lickspittle bunch my government”.

A new political party in the Tibetan diaspora, the Tibetan National Congress, took up the cause. “They swamped laureates with mails demanding the event’s cancellation,” said Dave Steward, executive director of South Africa’s FW de Klerk Foundation. Nine laureates and 11 affiliated organisations announced they were pulling out, forcing South Africa to concede defeat. At the 11th hour, however, Rome offered to host it instead.

But even the Eternal City did not give Tenzin Gyatso, to call him by his Buddhist name rather than his title, an easy ride. Midway through the programme, 300 mostly Western Buddhists were flown out to Rome for free from their base in the north of England by the dissident organisation they belong to, the International Shugden Community (ISC).

They took up position close to Parco della Musica, where the summit was being held, and banged drums and waved placards, chanting, “False Dalai Lama – give religious freedom!”

But the Dalai Lama gave no sign of having his equanimity ruffled either by the South African rebuff or the noisy denunciations outside the hall in Rome. “These demonstrations,” he told me backstage, with a shrug, “they are like an established routine.” In the West we may think of His Holiness as a gentle old fellow, with an infectious tendency to giggle. But his affability masks a heart of steel.

The audience members wear a 'blindfold', a symbol of darkness and ignorance, during an initiation ceremony held by the Dalai Lama in New York in 2013. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty

Canny religious leaders often affect robes of humility. Pope Francis, whose refusal to meet the Tibetan leader in Rome added another discordant note to the proceedings there, has cultivated the bearing and manner of a rather loveable old parish priest when he is addressing his millions of followers. It’s one of the reasons for his great popularity.

The Dalai Lama long ago perfected a similar performance. He invariably describes himself as a “simple Buddhist monk”. But in his saintly simplicity he has not only survived more than 50 years of exile but has done more than any other individual to establish the cause of Tibetan freedom – whether independence from China or merely autonomy – in the outside world. He has also done more than any other Buddhist to make the Buddha Dharma, the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, accessible to non-Buddhists, trailblazing a 30-year collaboration with scientists on the effects of meditation.

Despite being increasingly restricted in the countries he can visit and the dignitaries he can meet on account of China’s growing diplomatic muscle, he has played a Moses-like role in holding his scattered people together, steering them towards a functioning democracy for the first time in their history. Tibetan Buddhists are divided between four main schools; their interludes of unity over the millennium since they were ruled by a series of great kings have been rare. If they are now more united than they have been for a millennium, despite the theft of their land and the insults of the hostile group demonstrating in Rome, the steely guidance of Tenzin Gyatso must take the lion’s share of the credit.

King of Nothing

This is all the more remarkable because the sources of the Dalai Lama’s legitimacy are pretty tenuous. With Pope Francis it’s quite simple. He is the reigning monarch of Vatican state, the bishop of Rome and the latest successor to the throne of St Peter’s. He attained that position by democratic election in the conclave of his fellow cardinals, guided, the devout believe, by the Holy Spirit.

The Dalai Lama, by contrast, is the king of nothing. He is a high monk (or ‘lama’) in the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. He is also the acknowledged successor to the 13th Dalai Lama, who tried and failed to unify and modernise the Tibetan state and who died in 1933. Three of the Dalai Lamas, including the present one, have staked a claim to being the unifying religious kings of Tibet. But the claim has always been open to challenge because Tibet never became a fully-fledged nation-state.

The same fuzziness applies, strangely enough, in the religious sphere. The world at large might think of the Dalai Lama as the Buddhist Pope, and in terms not only of his fame but also his charisma and the popularity of his writings, the claim seems to make sense. But it’s a concept that means nothing to anyone within the Buddhist world. He has no authority over the Buddhists of Japan or Burma or Sri Lanka or Vietnam.

His mystical legitimacy – of huge importance to the faithful – stems from the belief that the Dalai Lamas are manifestations of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, ‘the God of Love’ as one early translator rendered it, who is said to have the welfare of Tibet in his care. Yet despite this exalted claim, the Dalai Lama’s status and authority within Tibetan Buddhism are far from clear-cut.

A diagram published by the Tibetan government-in-exile places the Dalai Lama as the head both of Tibetan Buddhism and of Tibet’s non-Buddhist Bon religion. Elsewhere it refers to him as “the head of state and the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people”. Yet, going by the facts, neither claim bears examination. If he was the head of Tibetan Buddhism, how could he not be the head of the Gelug school to which he belongs? But in fact the same source identifies the head of the Gelug school as “the Gaden Throne Holder” who “lives in South India” – an eminence called Thubten Nyima Lungtok Tenzin Norbu, whom few people outside Tibetan religious circles have even heard of.

Tibetans gather during an armed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959 in front of the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama's former home, in Lhasa. After the Chinese invasion, the Dalai Lama fled with some 100,000 supporters to northern India. Keystone/AFP/Getty

So Tenzin Gyatso is not the head of the Tibetan state, because that state has only rarely attained visible form. He may or may not be a divine manifestation, but he is not really the head of Tibetan Buddhism because Tibetan Buddhism has no head. A senior Western lama commented carefully, “It’s a precious myth that Tibet was a united society under the Dalai Lamas . . . The conception in some circles of the Dalai Lama as the head of Tibetan Buddhism is of recent coinage and involves many difficulties”.

Who exactly is this man? What combination of chutzpah, charisma and tempered steel have kept him firmly and lovably in the public eye for more than 50 years?

Land of Snows

He is a product of one of the most curious cultures the world has ever seen. Tibet, “Land of Snows”, was never the undiscovered Shangri-la of romantic fancy, despite its great altitude and its location behind the mighty wall of the Himalayas. On the contrary, its history was formed by its perilous proximity to three formidable powers: India, the fountain head of Buddhism; China, the Middle Kingdom with its thousands of years of history; and Mongolia, cradle of Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde.

Rarely have Tibetan armies distinguished themselves in the field. Yet down the centuries the country retained a rough and ready integrity and identity: it was never rolled over and threatened with absorption by outsiders, in the way China has so busily absorbed it since the invasion of 1959. That’s because in two separate waves, separated by some 700 years, it became the repository of all the Buddhist wisdom and scholarship and ritual accumulated in India since the historical Buddha’s enlightenment in the 6th century BC.

For centuries Buddhism was a major force within India, where the religion was born, but the caprice of Indian rulers, who tended to pillage the monasteries when short of cash, and the glittering attractions of Hinduism, and finally, and cataclysmically, the arrival of Muslim warlords, threatened it with extinction. Tibet saved the day, offering asylum to Buddhist teachers and their teachings, rather as Britain and the US offered a home to Jewish artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazism and enjoyed a major infusion of creativity as a result.

In its new home Buddhism sank deep roots, attaining a more dominant position than it had ever enjoyed in India. Its monasteries became the richest and most powerful institutions in the land, the equivalent of feudal estates in medieval Europe or Japan; at its height, up to one-fifth of the population were monks, and competition between the different schools and the leading monasteries produced a great corpus of teaching and generation after generation of gifted and charismatic teachers.

This fact did not go unnoticed abroad. In consequence, Tibet became a teacher-nation. It neither threatened its neighbours with war, nor – in the long run – fell subject to them. Instead, its greatest teachers entered into symbiotic relationships with mighty foreign rulers. Kublai Khan, the fifth Great Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, who went on to become the Emperor of China, pioneered this relationship, appointing a Tibetan monk called Phagpa his imperial preceptor, his ultimate source of authority on religious matters.

The relationship was called cho-yon or “priest-patron”; it helped insulate Tibet from attack, it served to perpetuate, right down to the present, the intellectual and spiritual richness and self-confidence of its teachers and monasteries; and it provided a unique model of how to engage with, and even ideally control, mighty rulers with far greater military power at their command.

Did the young Dalai Lama, who was born in 1935, dream of forging such a relationship with Mao Xedong? He was invited to Beijing in 1954, travelling the 2,000 miles from Lhasa by mule, animal-skin coracle, jeep, train and a pre-war Dodge owned by his predecessor, at the head of a 500-strong delegation. “The prospect of the adventure that lay ahead was very thrilling to a young man of 19,” he wrote in his memoirs. In Beijing, he wrote, “I began to get very enthusiastic about the possibilities of association with the People’s Republic of China. The more I looked at Marxism, the more I liked . . . I expressed a wish to become a [Communist] Party member . . . I felt sure, as I still do, that it would be possible to work out a synthesis of Buddhist and pure Marxist doctrines”.

Young Dalai Lama at Usersky-Danzan temple in Mongolia in 1939, aged three. Keystone/AFP/Getty

He had a dozen meetings with Mao, some of them with only an interpreter present, and on at least one occasion the Great Helmsman gave the monk reason to believe that his enthusiasm was reciprocated. “He presented himself without warning at my residence,” he wrote. “He wanted to speak to me privately . . . he surprised me very much by speaking favourably of the Lord Buddha. He praised him for being ‘anti-caste, anti-corruption and anti-exploitation’.”

Whatever Mao’s reason for such effusions, the Dalai Lama’s hopes were dashed at their final meeting when he told the Tibetan bluntly, “Religion is poison”.

“I felt a violent burning sensation all over my face,” he wrote, “and I was suddenly very afraid”.

He had every reason to fear: barely five years later the People’s Liberation Army fulfilled Tibetans’ worst apprehensions, pouring across the Tibetan plateau and seizing control. The Dalai Lama fled for the border. All dreams of co-operation were dead. The decades of exile were under way.

The Lama At Home

The main street of McLeodganj in northern India is a narrow, twisting ribbon leading steeply down the mountainside, flanked by restaurants, souvenir stalls and hotels, and shortly after dawn on 3 December it became a swift-­moving stream of pilgrims: maroon-robed monks in parkas and woolly hats, Tibetan matrons in their brightly striped aprons, an old nun with an aluminium walking stick, a European woman with long grey dreadlocks, a gaggle of young nuns sharing a hilarious joke. All were heading to the town’s main temple for the first session of the Dalai Lama’s teaching of an important text.

Buddhism does not hold with evangelism in the Christian mould: lamas only teach when requested to do so, and this time the Dalai Lama was responding to requests by a Buddhist sangha or congregation in Mongolia, where the religion has enjoyed a mighty revival since the decline of the Soviet empire. And Mongolians, too, were joining the human stream rolling down the road: tall, burly figures with imposing bellies, some in long brocade coats of shocking canary yellow or blue or pink or wearing Stetson or Trilby hats. By the time it arrived at the gates of the temple, the human trickle had swollen into a flood.

More than four thousand assembled well in advance of the Dalai Lama’s arrival: practically the entire Tibetan population of the town, as well as ­hundreds of Mongolians, Indians, Europeans, Japanese, Chinese and Americans. On the dot of 9am he stepped out of his car in the courtyard, accompanied by a monk in an orange hat shaped like a horse’s mane and flanked front and back by more Tibetans wearing business suits.

Otherwise in excellent health for a man on the verge of his ninth decade, his knees are shot after a lifetime of sitting crosslegged, so he was helped up the steep steps to the prayer hall, which was crammed with pilgrims. At the front of the hall he gently knocked heads with two senior lamas – the polite greeting for lamas of similar rank – then seated himself on an ornate throne before a large golden Buddha statue and got down to work.

He greeted the Mongolians and thanked them for coming such a long way and then – with the help of multi-lingual interpreters – got straight to the heart of the matter, the kernel of Buddhist teaching. “What we don’t want is suffering,” he said. “What we want is happiness. So we must avoid the causes of suffering, and seek the causes of happiness.”

The Dalai Lama tends to speak in simple, even simple-minded, terms when he addresses non-Buddhist audiences in English. But even here, tackling an ancient and abstruse Tibetan text before an assembly of believers and in his own language, the words and concepts were simple and direct. “Our negative karma comes from grasping at an illusory self,” he continued. “This grasping can only be tackled by understanding selflessness and emptiness. Neither listening to or reciting mantras nor visiting temples will cure this grasping. You have to understand the teaching, and apply it in meditation.”

The spiritual leader's security was tightened during his visit to the U.S. in 2013. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty

Four thousand pilgrims listened in perfect silence. Here, one felt, was a man doing what he was put on earth to do – holding these four thousand in the palm of his hand; underlining key points with fluid gestures of his bare right arm, cracking the occasional gentle joke, quietly addressing the big crowd as if he was talking to a single student in his own room.

He spoke for four hours for four successive days, without notes and with no indication of strain. But halfway through the first morning, in response to a question from a Mongolian, he said something discordant and strange. “Dolgyal is a fake reincarnation, born from distorted prayers,” he said. “Dolgyal practitioners are waiting for me to die,” – then laughed till his shoulders shook.

False Dalai Lama

The reference was to a Buddhist sect – the same one to which the demonstrators in Rome belonged, banging drums and shouting abusive slogans – which has been doing all it can to make his life uncomfortable for many years. And judging by his frequent references to them – the subject came up on each day of the four-day teaching – they are having some success.

It is a controversy nearly 300 years in the making, but it is hotting up: since 2013 the Buddhists organised in the International Shugden Community have dogged the Dalai Lama’s steps on all his trips outside India. If the object is to puncture his image of universal popularity and hijack his news coverage, they are having considerable success. Last November, for example, the Associated Press reported, “The Dalai Lama made two public appearances in the Boston area that drew protests from a group accusing him of human rights abuses and discrimination . . . Throughout the events hundreds of protesters followed, holding banners outside the hotel that said ‘False Dalai Lama, Stop Lying’ and ‘Dalai Lama Give Religious Freedom’.”

What’s it all about? As the Dalai Lama spelled out on the first day of his teaching, Buddhism is focused on the insights into suffering and happiness which the Buddha articulated 2,500 years ago. The religion, uniquely among the world’s great faiths, has no  place for a creator god. But in its Tibetan form it has accumulated belief in a vast, baffling panoply of spirits and deities which are held to influence human life.

Among these is a particular spirit called Dorje Shugden, also known as Dolgyal, depicted wearing a broad-brimmed yellow hat and the maroon and yellow robes of the Dalai Lama’s Gelug sect and brandishing a serpentine dagger, with a roaring lion at his feet. He is a wrathful deity, whom many pious Tibetans down the centuries have taken care to propitiate in their prayers, to avoid provoking him. Because otherwise, it is believed, he can do serious damage – such as killing people.

In 1973, a lama called Zemey Rinpoche published a slim volume called the Yellow Book which spelled out the damage of which Dorje Shugden was capable. “The Protector has punished those who corrupted the Gelug order . . . with various episodes of . . . untimely death,” the monk wrote, and his book was a pithy and gruesome collection of stories about how other high Tibetan lamas who had “corrupted [the Gelug school] with other tenets and traditions” – who had taken teachings from the other three Tibetan schools as well as the Gelug – had got into trouble with the authorities, or embroiled in lawsuits and thrown into jail, then later died suddenly and without medical explanation. All these unlucky events, the author maintained, were products of the wrath of Dorje Shugden in his role as supernatural protector of the Gelug.

Shugden Buddhists protested against the Dalai Lama, accusing him of religious persecution, and human rights violations in December 2014 in Rome. Baris Seckin/Anadolu Agency/Getty

It is a strange little volume which conveys the impenetrable exoticism of much of Tibetan Buddhism, despite the transparent teachings of the Buddha himself. But it had a particular meaning for the Dalai Lama, then aged 40. The stories it collected all came from his own senior tutor, Trijang Rinpoche. On this teacher’s advice, the Dalai Lama had himself been propitiating this dangerous spirit – along with innumerable other esoteric rituals – as part of his daily four hours of meditation and spiritual exercise. Since its foundation in the 16th century, the Gelug had become the dominant school of the four, and the Shugden practice, which required shunning the so-called “contamination” of other schools’ teachings, was taught as a key method for increasing its dominance, at the expense of the others.

But it was precisely for this reason – its proud exclusivity – that the previous Dalai Lama, who died in 1933, had rejected the Shugden practice: he saw his task not as leading the Gelug to domination but to bringing the Tibetans together as a united people. And the Yellow Book’s publication opened the present Dalai Lama’s eyes to the perils that Dorje Shugden presented. With China now in control of all Tibet, and with the Tibetan population split between exiles and those who had stayed behind, unity was more elusive than ever – but also vital, if the diaspora were not to shatter into dozens of feuding fragments. “The Dalai Lama reacted strongly to this book,” a Tibet scholar, Georges Dreyfus, wrote. “He felt personally betrayed . . . he felt that [it] was a . . . betrayal of his efforts in the struggle for Tibetan freedom.” And now he showed his steel: publicly condemning the book’s author, banning him from teaching, and ordering Tibet’s main monasteries, all now relocated in India, to stop their Dorje Shugden practice. “He researched the history of the practice,” said a scholar close to the Dalai Lama, “and realised it was inconsistent with mainstream Buddhist practice, and felt it was his responsibility to blow the whistle on the myth”.

It was a brave, dangerous step: an assertion of his power which risked alienating many of the most senior people in his entourage – as well as infuriating this dangerous spirit and incurring horrible consequences. “For 400 years Dorje Shugden has been a controversial spirit,” the Dalai Lama told me in Rome. “I and many Tibetan Buddhists have spirits as friends and helpers but not to worship. I myself propitiated the spirit for many years but finally I decided to drop it. The practice is very sectarian – it’s like Sunni Muslims versus Shia, those who believe in it are fundamentalists. Perhaps they will attain high spiritual insight thanks to Dorje – but I don’t think so.”

Waiting To Die

Forty years after this public repudiation, Dorje Shugden has yet to strike the Dalai Lama dead, which explains his belly laugh about “Dolgyal practitioners waiting for me to die”. But it caused a rift which shows no sign of healing, as the protests by the International Shugden Community do not allow him to forget. Claims by the Dalai Lama’s camp that Shugden followers have been responsible for murders and assaults on people loyal to the Dalai Lama, and that the group has “continued its campaign at the behest of, and with substantial funding from” the Chinese authorities, are strongly rejected by ISC.

The Dalai Lama’s condemnation of Dorje Shugden in the 1970s came at a decisive moment. Bamboozled and manipulated by Mao, his youthful hopes of establishing a modus vivendi with China shattered by the 1959 invasion, he turned his attention west: having the first of eight meetings with Pope John Paul II, whose bruising experience with Soviet communists gave them a common interest. And, gradually, he found a way of putting non-Buddhist westerners at ease, avoiding all complicated Buddhist terminology and speaking in simple spiritual generalities.

It wasn’t always like that. “On a visit to the UK many years ago he made an appearance with Bishop John Robinson,” a senior western lama who was present at the time recalled. “He’s a very fine teacher and he taught on the Madhyamaka, the Middle Way philosophy, but it went down like a lead balloon. So these days instead of explaining about, say, the 10 traditional dharmas, he talks about peace and love and democracy. And he immediately holds people’s hands – it’s a great dating technique – and giggles.”

Footage of the Dalai Lama during the early years of his exile shows a figure of poker-faced severity – all steel. But the decades of frustration and acclaim, during which he serenely rose above both Chinese abuse and Dorje Shugden’s death threats, have softened him. His genial persona has turned him into one of the most improbable celebrities of the age – one of the half-dozen best known faces in the world, a cuddly oriental mascot regarded with devotion by millions who know little about his beliefs. But with his steel at the ready when required. 

Humanitarian crises stemming from violent conflict, climate change and health epidemics will affect 62 million children this year according to UNICEF, which launched its largest appeal for funds ever on Thursday.

The agency is seeking $3.1 billion in funding for its Humanitarian Action for Children 2015 appeal, $1 billion more than last year, to help children in 71 countries living in dangerous circumstances and facing a “new generation” of crises. About three million more children are being targeted in this year’s appeal, compared with 59 million in 2014.

One in every 10 kids worldwide, or 230 million children, live in a country experiencing armed conflict. UNICEF directs its appeal funding toward children that are suffering through the most complex and challenging crises like the Ebola outbreak, which at its peak required supplies to be airlifted to the sick, and also the intensely complex and dangerous security situation in Syria.

“What we’ve seen with both the conflicts in the Middle East and the Ebola outbreak is that the needs of children have increased exponentially,” said Afshan Khan, UNICEF’s director of emergency programs. “The jump in $1 billion in funding from last year’s appeal represents the increasing needs [of children] but also UNICEF’s increasing capacity to make a difference in children’s lives.”

The largest portion of UNICEF’s appeal, almost $1 billion, will go towards assisting Syrians affected by the country’s civil war, now entering its fifth year.

More than half of Syria’s population has been displaced since fighting broke out between pro-government troops and an amalgamation of opposition forces in 2011. Approximately 7.6 million Syrians have been displaced, and an additional 3.8 million have fled the country, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.

UNICEF hopes to divide its funding for Syria between the 4.2 million adults and children living in Syria, and roughly 3 million Syrians living in neighboring refugee host countries.

About 95 percent of Syrian refugees live in five neighboring countries—Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon—where refugees have relocated to some of the poorest districts.

Funding for Syria will also go toward safe water, sanitation, education and vaccinations, as an outbreak of polio or measles in a camp or crowded shelter would “spread like wildfire,” said Khan.

“I was struck by how difficult it was for Syrian kids who had been used to having toys, to having access to education, to having a home, to now be living in tent without many of the basic amenities they had in Syria,” said Khan, who recently returned from a trip to Lebanon and Syria.

The conflict has taken nearly 3 million children out of school, leading many refugee children living in Jordan work to provide money for their family. A quarter of the schools in Syria have been damaged or destroyed, and are being used as shelter or targeted for attacks, said Khan.

UNICEF is also seeking $500 million for countries affected by the Ebola outbreak, which will go toward scaling up efforts to isolate and treat every Ebola case and prevent further outbreaks. More than 22,000 people have been infected with Ebola and 8,795 have died in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, according to the World Health Organization since the outbreak started last year.

UNICEF is also requesting $26.5 million to assist in Nigeria, which is reeling from a spate of deadly attacks perpetrated by the militant group Boko Haram. In April 2014, the group kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in northeastern Borno state, 219 of whom remain missing, amid reports that many have been sold off or forced to marry their captors.

Disturbing photos showing child soldiers being trained by Boko Haram were published by a Nigerian media company on Twitter on Sunday - the group allegedly boosts its membership numbers by recruiting children. ISIS also recruits and indoctrinates children, in addition to subjecting them to torture, sexual abuse and death.

“When we talk about a new generation of crises, what we’re seeing is children increasingly targeted. That means recruitment of children, child soldiers. It’s the case in South Sudan, in Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Increasingly, we have recognized there’s a real importance need to address the issue of child protection,” said Khan.

Making sure families have access to social services and a means of earning an income and putting children in education and giving them options other than picking up a gun are some ways of driving down rates of child soldier recruitment and indoctrination," said Khan. 280 child soldiers were released by a South Sudanese militia on Tuesday, the first step in releasing roughly 3,000 children, the BBC reports.

UNICEF is also seeking $32.45 million for Ukraine, now nearly a year into intense fighting between pro-Russia rebels and government troops. The agency is also appealing for “hugely underfunded and forgotten crises” in Niger, Afghanistan and Palestine.   

Malaysia has declared the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 an "accident", its Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) said on Thursday.

The Boeing 777 aircraft disappeared on March 8 last year, carrying 239 passengers and crew shortly after taking off from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing.

Months of searches have failed to turn up any trace.

"We officially declare Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 an accident ... and that all 239 of the passengers and crew onboard MH370 are presumed to have lost their lives," DCA director-general Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said in a statement.

The announcement is in accordance with standards of annexes 12 and 13 in the International Civil Aviation, said Azharuddin. It will allow families of the passengers to obtain assistance through compensation, he said.

Malaysia Airlines was ready to proceed immediately with the compensation process to the next-of-kin of the passengers on the flight, he said.

International investigators are looking into why the Boeing jet veered thousands of miles off course from its scheduled route before eventually plunging into the Indian Ocean.

Malaysia is also conducting a criminal investigation.

"Both investigations are limited by the lack of physical evidence at this time, particularly the flight recorders," said Azharuddin.

"Therefore, at this juncture, there is no evidence to substantiate any speculations as to the cause of the accident."

The DCA plans to release an interim report on the investigation into the missing jetliner on March 7, a day before the first anniversary of the disappearance, a minister said on Wednesday.

"This declaration is by no means the end," said Azharuddin, adding that it will continue with the search for the missing plane with assistance from China and Australia.

Malaysia airline's crisis worsened on July 17 when its Flight MH17, on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

North Korea demanded $10 billion in cash and half a million tons of food in 2009 as a precondition of holding a summit with the South, former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak said, adding that he refused to pay anything for holding talks.

A predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, held the first summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in 2000 and was credited with bringing in a period of warming ties, an achievement that was tarnished later by a revelation that he helped channel $500 million to the North.

The two Koreas remain technically at war because their 1950-53 war ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.

Lee, president from 2008 to 2013, said in a book to be published next week that he rejected the North's terms.

"The document looked like some sort of standardized 'summit bill' with its list of assistance we had to provide and the schedule written up," Lee said. Reuters obtained an advance copy of chapters on North Korea on Thursday.

The document referred to a list sent from the North "as a condition for a summit" that included 400,000 tons of rice, 100,000 tons of corn, 300,000 tons of fertilizer and $10 billion in capital the North would use to set up a bank.

"We shouldn't be haggling for a summit," Lee wrote.

Kim Dae-jung's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, met Kim Jong Il for a second summit in 2007.

Kim Jong Il continued to push for a summit with the South before he died in late 2011, but it did not materialize because he refused to acknowledge a 2010 torpedo attack on a South Korean naval vessel, Lee said in the book.

Lee, a conservative who pushed Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program, left office without meeting the North's leader.

The Cheonan was torpedoed in 2010, killing 46 sailors. South Korea blamed the North which denied any involvement.

Both Kim Jong Il's successor, Kim Jong Un, and current South Korean President Park Geun-hye said this month they were open to the idea of talks.

North Korea on Friday demanded the lifting of sanctions imposed by Lee's government after the 2010 sinking as a condition for resuming dialogue.

With Netflix’s House of Cards returning next month and an increasing number of TV networks making entire series available online, there’s no better time for researchers to shine a light on binge-watching. At the University of Texas at Austin, researchers surveyed hundreds of millennials to find out what psychological factors lead people to watch three or more TV episodes at a time. What they found was troubling—people who binge-watch are more likely to be depressed and lonely, two factors that are also in harmful binge behaviors such as eating and drinking.

Doctoral students Yoon Hi Sung and Eun Yeon Kang and professor Wei-Na Lee first publicly announced their findings today and will present them in full at a conference in Puerto Rico in May. They questioned 316 people between the ages of 18 and 29 about participants’ TV-watching habits and psychological states. One question, for instance, was, “How often do you feel alone?” Going into the project, the authors figured that if loneliness and depression are tied to binge drinking and eating, which other researchers have found, then maybe even something as entertaining as binge-watching isn’t so different.

“It all started out with this word binge,” Lee says of their research. “The word binge has this negative connotation,” she says, except for when it comes to watching TV. “That got us curious.”

Seventy-five percent of study responders said they binge-watched, doing so mostly on streaming websites such as Netflix and Hulu. Comedy and romance were the most binge-watched genres; some of the most popular shows for binge-watching were Orange Is the New Black, Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill and Desperate Housewives.

The authors, who concede that they too binge-watch, were correct: they discovered a correlation between binge-watching and loneliness, depression, and having self-regulation deficiency, which is an inability to control compulsions.

For people who feel lonely or depressed, the authors suggest, binge-watching allows them to escape from negative feelings. And the more episodes someone watches, the longer that person can escape. Experts call this an avoidance coping strategy.

“This should no longer be viewed as a ‘harmless’ addictive behavior,” the researchers conclude in the paper.

Original programming on streaming sites seems made for binge-watching. Netflix has been dropping an entire season’s worth of new episodes at once since the American premiere of Lilyhammer in 2012; House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black and the Netflix version of Arrested Development all premiered the following year. Since then the practice has become the norm for Internet-native shows; Transparent, on Amazon Prime, which debuted a pilot in February 2014 and made the rest of its episodes available all at once in September, won a Golden Globe for best comedy TV series earlier this month.

Of course, Netflix and Amazon don’t have the monopoly on binge-watching; “complete series” DVD box sets still exist, and increasingly, TV networks—including AMC, FX, MTV, Comedy Central, CBS and HBO—are getting into the online streaming game. HBO, for example, made headlines last October when it announced that people would no longer need a cable subscription to access its online content.

The University of Texas researchers are joining a growing field of academia taking on entertainment. One study from last June suggested that binge-watching increases a viewer’s risk of early death. In September, a communication research expert told the Huffington Post that it’s hard to break from a marathon viewing because humans are hardwired to watch for changes in environments, including images on a computer screen.

If their findings are well received in May, the University of Texas researchers say, they could move forward with a larger sample size or look at what point binge-watching is harmful to a viewer’s psychological state.

Even by the standards of the British Royal family, the case of Prince Andrew and the underage sex slave is a peculiar one.

An American woman called Virginia Roberts – now a married, 31-year-old mother of three – has filed an affidavit in a Florida federal court in which she swears in gruesome detail that the late press baron and pension fiddler Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine recruited her to satisfy the sexual needs of billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein and his friends. Those friends, according to Roberts, included the Duke of York, now fifth in line to the throne, and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz (best known for getting Claus von Bulow’s conviction for murdering his wife overturned). Buckingham Palace have denied everything more than once. Dershowitz is suing. From 1999 onwards, when she was just 15, Virginia spent much of her time on Epstein’s Boeing 727 – nickname, the “Lolita Express” – on an unsavoury kind of world tour that included, she says, an orgy with Andrew on Epstein’s private island of Little St James, or “Little St Jeff”, as it became known.

One of the many extraordinary things about this sordid story that Jackie Collins would blush to create – aside from the fact that Andrew chose to refer to it at the World Economic Forum in Davos, of all places, but then was unable to keep his cool when asked if he would be making a statement under oath (he walked out of the room without answering) – is that Andrew would be friends with Jeffrey Epstein in the first place. But then again, as both Bill Clinton and Stephen Hawking have been to Little St James as part of Epstein’s circle, he was hardly alone.

Around Epstein the question hovers: who exactly is this man who makes such powerful friends and how does he do it?

The 62-year-old registered sex offender comes from a gritty background in Brooklyn, with no university degree and no clear explanation for his many millions. As he mixes with princes and premiers and lives in multiple mansions his web runs wide and deep in politics, science, academia and business, as well as royalty.

Some presidents and princes, having acquired a taste for the trappings of high office or monarchy, find it hard to resist the allure of the private jet. There were obviously other attractions for Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton – the private island in the Caribbean described by former staff as “like a five star hotel where nobody paid”, the pretty girls offering massages, the on-tap chat about theoretical physics – but with his 600 flying hours a year to play with, usually with guests on board – Epstein had a lot of flight leverage. Which is why in this unseemly saga, just as Prince Andrew is being forced to issue what feel like daily denials about accusations of having sex with an underage girl at Mr Epstein’s many houses, eye-­popping names surface in the Caribbean sea. 

Stephen Hawking, attending a conference paid for by Epstein, was pictured at a barbecue on the “island of sin” as it has become known. With him in one picture were David Gross, an American physicist and Nobel laureate and Harvard professor called Lisa Randall. Two other Nobel laureates, Gerard t’Hooft and Frank Wilczek, have visited too. As has Professor Lawrence Krauss, and on other occasions his great friend, scientist Martin Nowak, who moved from Princeton to Harvard and with whose research he has funded.

Epstein mixes with the elite of the science world because he was a calculus and physics teacher. Born and raised in Coney Island, he attended some classes in physics and mathematical physiology of the heart, though he never graduated from anywhere. When he taught at Dalton School (a private school in New York) between 1973-75, part of the Epstein mythology goes, a parent was so impressed with his Dead Poets Society-type enthusiasm, mathematical ability and imagination that he suggested he move to Wall Street. So after a stint at Bear Stearns, he became a financial advisor to the extremely rich – it was said that only billionaires need apply – though only one client, Les Wexner, owner of Victoria’s Secret, was known by name. His friends would always insist he was incredibly clever and free-thinking while others find him “arrogant” and “awkward”.

Within a matter of years the schoolteacher-turned-tycoon was living the life of the American billionaire, with a villa in Palm Beach, a ranch in New Mexico, an apartment in Paris, as well as Little St James and what looks like the largest private house in New York. Last time I walked past it, in the snow, the pavements were covered with ice everywhere apart from outside his house; the pavement is heated to make sure they never freeze over.

But even amongst this extreme wealth and luxury, the financier in casual clothes – he never wears a suit – was never a high profile socialite, or keen on much interaction. Then Ghislaine Maxwell came into his life. Where Epstein might gravitate towards scientists, she served up Prince Andrew, as it were, in whose circles she’d mixed for years. Thus it was that Epstein and Maxwell went shooting at Sandringham. Epstein could talk science for hours, but his manners were unusual in a host – staff on Little St James said he only picked at food, never drank, and got up at dawn, whereas Ghislaine had her father’s bombastic charisma. Leaving aside the question of whether she served as his madam, and joined in the underage sex herself (as has been alleged), she certainly oiled the social wheels for him. So in Little St James Lord Mandelson and his boyfriend Reinaldo came to visit. Other friends included Donald Trump and Kevin Spacey.

For years the court of Jeffrey Epstein, courtesy of Ghislaine Maxwell, was thriving with the power-brokers, thinkers and players. But as one who knew them both for years says, “Ghislaine used the fact she knew other powerful people to seduce powerful people. But  it boils down to this: what exactly did these men see in this private-jet, private-island owning weirdo? They didn’t want to play scrabble so what do you think?”

Updated | Britain has summoned the Russian ambassador after two Russian military bombers were intercepted over the English channel by the UK Royal Air Force on Wednesday afternoon. The Russian aircraft, identified as Tupolev Tu-95s which have the ability to carry nuclear bombs, were spotted flying low near the coastal towns of Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch, according to local newspaper the Bournemouth Echo.

The Ministry of Defence, said the RAF scrambled their Euro Typhoon fighter jets to direct the pair of Russian planes away from the Dorset coast. A spokesperson for the ministry was quick to highlight that the Tu-95s were spotted flying “close” to UK airspace, however “at no time did the Russian military aircraft cross into UK sovereign airspace”.

Experts have said that yesterday’s event could indicate that Russia is testing the RAF's reaction speed. Bournemouth East MP Tobias Ellwood told local press he will personally be “investigating” the incident, and expressed concern at the increasing appearances of Russian military in international airspace: “This is a worrying advancement of their probing of air space but not totally unsurprising given Putin’s recent actions.”

This is the second time in three months that Russian Tu-95 airplanes, which are nicknamed Bear, have been intercepted by the RAF - they last appeared off the coast of Scotland in November.

Other European countries have experienced an even steeper rise in Russian military air force presence near or in their airspace, with Baltic and Nordic countries reporting the highest numbers.

According to aNewsweek investigation Russia’s infringements in Baltic skies have become so frequent that by October 2014 Lithuania had scrambled jets 132 times, compared to 2010 when they had to do so four times.

According to NATO, in 2014 allied aircraft intercepted Russian planes over 400 times, with 150 of these interceptions being carried out by NATO’s Baltic Air Policing Mission - almost four times as many as in 2013.

The increase in these incidents has exacerbated tensions between the West and the Kremlin whose relationship has been deteriorating since Russia annexed the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula in March last year.

A report by UK-based thinktank the European Leadership Network also found that the rising numbers of Russian military aircraft in European skies has increased the risk of collisions with civilian flights.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in December that Russia stepped up patrol flights in retaliation to NATO presence above and around Russia. Putin also pointed out that, unlike the U.S., Russia had not sent patrol flights into international airspace before 2014.

Russia’s representative in NATO Alexander Glushko told news agency Interfax, that Russia’s aerial patrols had in fact not not increased at all, but the number of NATO planes sent to intercept Russian pilots had.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A gas truck explosion decimated large parts of a maternity hospital on the western edge of Mexico City on Thursday, killing one woman and a child and leaving dozens injured, Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said.

The head of national emergency services earlier said that seven people had died, but the death toll was revised down by Mancera, who said there had been confusion around the number.

One of the people who was believed to have died was actually in very serious condition, he added.

The explosion destroyed around 70 percent of the hospital and injured 66 people, 22 of them seriously, Mancera said. Three people have been detained for their roles in the gas truck explosion, and two of them have been hospitalized, he added.

Several babies were found alive under the rubble. Scores of rescue workers continued digging through the concrete and twisted metal for survivors.

People seeking information on family members gathered around police lines that were set up to keep bystanders away from the chaotic scene. Some of the injured were evacuated by helicopter, and aerial footage showed firefighters scrambling over the skeletal wreckage of the building.

"I am so worried about my sister. She's supposed to have given birth. We brought her in yesterday," said Monserrat Garduno, a 32-year-old nurse. "They won't let us pass. I want to know how she is."

Ambulances waited at the scene to treat survivors. Around 100 people were in the hospital at the time of the explosion, according to a city official.

A leak in a hose from the truck, which was fueling the hospital's tanks, was believed to have triggered the explosion, officials said.

"They tried to stop the leak, but it was not possible," Mancera said.

President Enrique Pena Nieto expressed sadness and solidarity with the families of the victims on Twitter.

Many areas of Mexico City have no mains gas supply, and rely on deliveries from gas trucks. Mancera said the gas truck company involved had been working in Mexico City since 2007.

In November 1959, the American author Truman Capote read in The New York Times about the brutal murders of a well-to-do Kansas farmer, and his teenage son and daughter. He spent the next three years reporting and researching the story, and three more in editing his copious notes. The result was In Cold Blood, a piece of narrative non-fiction that marked the dawn of a new era of American journalism.

The publication, in 1966, of “343 cool, clear, controlled, crescendoing pages,” made the cover of Newsweek in a report that marvelled at the $2m-dollar financial avalanche of book and movie rights those pages had already triggered.

“I had this theory about reportage,” Capote told Newsweek. “I’ve always felt that if you brought the art of the novelist together with the technique of journalism – fiction with the added knowledge that it was true – it would have the most depth and impact.”

Images have emerged of al-Qaeda-affiliated “Islamic police” on patrol in the Libyan city of Benghazi, once hailed by British prime minister David Cameron as an “inspiration to the world”, but now the scene of a power struggle between al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS).

Al-Qaeda-backed Ansar al-Sharia has released images of what they claim to be a convoy of its new police” force, featuring new Toyota 4x4s flying jihadist flags, saying they are preparing to enforce Sharia law.

The group is battling for control of the city against the Islamic State’s Barqa branch and General Haftar’s Operation Dignity forces who are aligned with the internationally recognised government.

The pictures of the convoy have captions which explain that the jihadist group are on a police patrol in the streets of Gwarsha and Harawi - two districts of Benghazi where the group have notable influence. Newsweek could not independently verify the images.

“Since these Salafist militias have entrenched themselves in these eastern cities [in Libya] there has always been the effort to push for the establishment of Islamic law,” says Kayla Branson, North Africa analyst at global political risk consultancy the Risk Advisory Group.

“Benghazi is still quite contested between Operation Dignity forces and Salafist militias,” she added. “I understand that Ansar al-Sharia’s training camps and offices were in or around Harawi and Gwarsha, so they do have a certain level of influence [there] but not necessarily control.”

This battle with rival militias, such as IS Barqa, which seized control of the eastern town of Derna last November, has seen Ansar al-Sharia widely publicise their activities in Benghazi through social media in recent weeks as they attempt to assert their authority in contested districts.

“It’s a projection of power, a projection of influence,” says Charlie Winter, researcher at the anti-radicalisation thinktank Quilliam Foundation, of the videos.

“They are trying to give the sense that they, even if they don’t have full control of these areas, they are in enough control of them to have their own police force in them. It’s all about giving a sense of ubiquity.”

The al-Qaeda-affiliated group released images claiming to show new "Islamic police" vehicles in Benghazi.Twitter

However, Mohamed Eljarh, Libyan analyst and non-resident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Centre for the Middle East, says that the group may be trying to disguise the fact that they’re losing ground. “In reality, the army units and forces of Operation Dignity in the city have the upper hand and they have been putting them under a lot of pressure,”he says. “As a result, they are trying to have a war of propaganda.”

Earlier this month, Ansar al-Sharia confirmed that its leader, Mohamed al-Zehawi, was killed near the city’s airport in clashes last October,

Last January, the United States designated the group as a terrorist organisation and has claimed that the jihadist group was responsible for the deadly raid on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in 2012, in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other American nationals were killed.

The country is currently divided between two rival factions in its western and eastern regions following the removal of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 by rebels backed by a coalition including France, Britain, United States and Italy.

One faction is linked to the internationally-recognised government in the east, which is based in the city of Tobruk, and the other is allied to the Islamist-backed Fajr Libya (Libya Dawn) who took control of Tripoli last summer.

Eljarh says that the proliferation of jihadist groups such as Ansar al-Sharia and IS Barqa, coupled with the country’s descent into a bloody civil war between rival factions, is partially the result of the international community’s inaction following its role in ousting Gaddafi from power.

“Basically, part of the blame for the current crisis in Libya is on Libyans themselves for their inability to overcome their differences, for their inability to start their own institutions and establish a democratic government and rule of law in the country,” he argues.

“On the other hand, part of the blame is on the international community, particularly the coalition that took part in toppling the Gaddafi regime. Why? Because they took a backseat as soon as the Gaddafi regime was overthrown and decided to leave Libya to its own devices.”

“Libyans had no experience, no expertise, no capacity, to take this country forward and now we see the results of that on the ground.”

This week, ISIS’s branch in the capital Tripoli launched an attack on the Corinthia hotel, regularly frequented by westerners, killing nine people - including five foreign nationals.

People with full-blown psychopathy are generally remorseless, callous, don’t take responsibility for their actions, lie and manipulate others, says Sheilagh Hodgins, a professor at the University of Montreal and at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.

Most end up in the criminal justice system, where they are subjected to periodic punishment like other incarcerated people, she says. But new research co-led by Hodgins suggests that not only does punishment have no corrective effect for these people, they also mentally process it in a completely different way than anybody else, even other violent criminals.

The results of the study suggest that those with psychopathy don’t understand or process punishment in a normal way and that different rehabilitation techniques should be undertaken at a young age for people with behavioral problems that might signal psychopathy, Hodgins says.

In the study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, the researchers looked at 32 violent offenders with antisocial personality disorder, 12 of whom also had pronounced psychopathy, and compared them to 18 mentally healthy non-criminals. Marked differences were seen in the brains of the 12 psychopathic criminals compared to the other antisocial offenders and healthy civilians.

These divergences were picked up by a functional magnetic resonance imaging, which analyzes the activity of neurons. While in the scanner, participants completed a matching game in which, midway through, they began to be assigned a diminishing number of “points” for choosing certain shapes, a type of “punishment” that normal and non-psychopathic offenders picked up on, which led them to change their behavior. But the psychopathic participants didn’t alter their actions; unlike others, they didn’t seem to understand that by failing to change, they were hurting themselves (in the context of the game). And this failure to respond to punishment translates into their actions in normal circumstances, she says.

In normal people, punishment or censor shows people that their actions harm others and will not be tolerated, Hodgins says. And this signal is usually sufficient to change behavior. But not so in psychopathy, which entails “seeing rewards everywhere, but no negative consequences,” she says.

Psychopathic people showed different activation patterns in the areas of the brain known as the posterior cingulate and insula, which are involved in learning from punishments and rewards, and involved in changing behavior when unexpected outcomes occur, she says. These people also had reductions of the brain’s gray matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles, regions involved in empathy as well as in the processing of pro-social emotions like guilt and embarrassment.

Hodgins says the study suggests that more work needs to go into understanding how to treat these people early in life; as kids, they pretty much all have marked behavioral problems. “I think the solution is to invest all of our money in children,” she says.

Although she doesn’t have a particular program in mind, because a proven method doesn’t exist, she said that “we need to figure out a way to get [people with psychopathy] to see punishment as a signal” to change their behavior. 

The price of crude oil has crashed in the past few months. That’s bad for the clean energy sector, right?

Actually, not necessarily. Not only do falling oil prices have limited impact on clean energy, but the latest price volatility only underscores how unstable petroleum sources remain and so accentuates the value of clean sources.

There are two principal reasons why the clean energy industry will not be swamped by the petroleum glut.

To begin with, while all commodities in the energy industry are to an extent intertwined, oil and renewable energy do not directly compete with each other. Oil is primarily used to produce transportation fuels, while renewable energy is used to generate electricity.

The International Energy Agency points out that diesel and other petroleum-based fuels constitute only 5 percent of global power generation today compared to 25 percent in 1973. Fluctuations in oil prices, therefore, will have little impact on renewable energy sources like solar, wind and biomass in advanced economies, ensuring that the economic proposition of those resources remains highly compelling in the long run.

Second, over the long run there is an important price difference between energy derived from technology-based sources like solar and wind and that derived from commodity-based sources such as coal and oil. Over the long run the cost of energy from the former invariably declines as technology innovation proceeds. For example, a recent energy cost analysis by investment firm Lazard confirms that the cost of energy from utility-scale solar and wind farms has become widely competitive with electricity produced from conventional fuels like coal, natural gas and nuclear, even without subsidies in some markets—with the cost of utility-scale solar falling 80 percent and wind energy falling 60 percent in the last five years.

On the other hand, commodities-based sources, which are finite and expensive to locate, extract, ship and refine, are inherently subject to price volatility. While the U.S. shale boom driven by advancements in fracking technology has generated expectations of cheap U.S. gasoline, it is also one of the contributors to the recent volatility in oil prices. And no one knows for sure how long the production boom will last, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration projecting that even under favorable conditions U.S. shale oil production will peak by 2020 and then decline.

To be sure, the oil price crash will cloud the near-term market outlook of a few clean energy technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs) that do compete with oil-based transportation. However, over the long-term the scale up of EVs too appears inevitable. Oil prices can only go up while most clean energy technologies are only at the beginning of a rapid price decline due to manufacturing and efficiency improvements.

In short, oil prices won’t likely affect renewables and clean energy. On the contrary, last year—when global clean energy investment increased by 16 percent to $310 billion even as oil prices plummeted—proves how strong the clean energy industry really is.

Devashree Saha is Senior Policy Analyst and Associate Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program, andMark Muro is Senior Fellow and Policy Director, Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. This article first appeared on the Brookings Institution website.

Ukraine’s military has lost control of the Donetsk airport, and the rebels have launched another offensive. Fortune could yet smile upon Kiev, but as long as Russia is determined not to let the separatists fail, Ukraine’s efforts likely will be for naught.

As I pointed out on Forbes.com, “Only a negotiated settlement, no matter how unsatisfying, offers a possible resolution of the conflict. The alternative may be the collapse of the Ukrainian state and long-term confrontation between the West and Russia.”

Ukraine’s most fervent advocates assume anyone not ready to commit self-immolation on Kiev’s behalf must be a Russian agent. However, there are numerous good reasons for Washington to avoid the fight.

1)Russia isn’t Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.

While the Obama administration has resisted proposals for military confrontation with Moscow, a gaggle of ivory tower warriors has pushed to arm Ukraine, bring Kiev into NATO and station U.S. men and planes in Ukraine. These steps could lead to war.

Americans have come to expect easy victories. However, Russia would be no pushover. In particular, Moscow has a full range of nuclear weapons, which it could use to respond to allied conventional superiority.

2)Moscow has more at stake than the West in Ukraine.

Ukraine matters far more to Moscow than to Washington. Thus, the former will devote far greater resources and take far greater risks than the allies will. The Putin government already has accepted financial losses, economic isolation, human casualties and political hostility.

3) Alliances should enhance U.S. security, not provide foreign charity.

It’s impossible to blame Ukraine for wanting the West to protect it. But it makes no sense for the allies to do so. Adding Ukraine to NATO would dramatically degrade U.S. security by transforming a minor conflict irrelevant to Washington into a military dispute between America and Russia.

4)Security guarantees and alliance commitments often spread rather than deter conflict.

NATO advocates presume that membership would dissuade Russia from taking military action. Alas, deterrence often fails. In World War I alliances become transmission belts of war.

5) U.S. foreign policy should be based on the interest of America, not other nations.

The greatest distortion to U.S. foreign policy may come from ethnic lobbying. There’s nothing wrong with having affection for one’s ancestral homeland, like Ukraine. But U.S. foreign policy should be designed to benefit America, not other nations.

Some advocates for Kiev argue that Ukraine deserves support since France helped the American colonists win their independence. But France intervened in the American Revolution because Paris believed it was in France’s interest to weaken Britain. Going to war with Moscow would offer Americans no similar benefit.

6) It’s Europe’s turn to act.

If Ukraine matters geopolitically, it is to Europe. But most NATO members continue to shrink their militaries. It is time Europe did the military heavy lifting.

7) A negotiated settlement is the only solution.

Unfortunately, weaker parties often must make accommodations. During the Cold War, Finland maintained its domestic liberties by not antagonizing the Soviet Union.

The world is similarly unfair to Ukraine today. Military victory is unlikely. Stalemate threatens Ukraine with economic crisis.

The allies hope that sanctions will force Russia to concede. But Vladimir Putin won’t retreat voluntarily.

Massive public discontent could spark a popular revolution. However, foreign penalties more often cause people to rally around their governments. As of last month, Putin’s popularity was at 85 percent.

Moreover, the prospect of Weimar Russia should cause Ukrainians and their friends in the West to be careful what they wish for. A Russia in crisis likely would not be democratic and docile.

Moscow could say no. If so, it is better to find out now than to do so only after suffering through an extended Cold War lite.

The Ukraine-Russia conflict is an unnecessary tragedy. Thankfully, the ongoing battle doesn’t much threaten America. However, the only ending in something other than disaster is likely to come through negotiation. Instead of acting as a belligerent party, Washington should focus on shaping a diplomatic solution.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. This article first appeared on the Cato Institute website.

Over 50,000 people are expected to take to the streets in central Madrid this Saturday in a huge show of support for the Spanish far-left, anti-establishment party Podemos.

The march will be the party’s first major event in the capital, though they have previously rallied in Sevilla, Valencia and Barcelona. Spain’s Interior Ministry have estimated that tens of thousands will attend.

The party has urged as many people as possible to join them in the short walk from the Plaza Cibeles to Puerta del Sol in central Madrid. The demonstration will be an indirect homage to the anti-unemployment protesters who followed the same route four years ago. Nearly nine million Spaniards across the country took part in these marches which are referred to as 15M due to the fact they began on 15th May.

According to Podemos’s charismatic leader Pablo Iglesias, who has made the transition from politics professor to prime ministerial front-runner in the space of a year, attendees to the Madrid march will not be required to carry banners with the party’s slogans. Instead Iglesias has called on Spaniards to attend “as they are” in order to “bid goodbye to the political class”.

Although Podemos were not immediately available to comment on the Interior Ministry’s estimates, Iglesias has previously urged supporters to attend in such numbers so as to “fill up Puerta del Sol”, the square at the centre of Madrid which can accommodate just over 10,000 people.

A total of 250 buses of Podemos supporters are due to arrive in the Spanish capital to take part in the march, according to party sources quoted in El Confidencial, with nearly 4,000 locals opening up their houses to accommodate visitors who have travelled from other parts of the country.

Podemos have rapidly gained public support since they were formed a little over a year ago, thanks to their anti-establishment image and anti-austerity rhetoric.

In November the party topped opinion polls for the first time, receiving 27.7% of public support, edging out both conservative Partido Popular and the socialist PSOE - Spain’s two main parties.

Podemos was a strong supporter of Greece’s anti-austerity political party Syriza during this month’s parliamentary election, even marking Syriza’s win with a rally in Valencia. Iglesias has used the results in Greece to further emphasise Podemos’s position as the next anti-establishment party who will “reconquer southern Europe’s sovereignty”.

President Barack Obama’s decision earlier this month to ease restrictions on travel from the United States to Cuba has already increased demand from travelers, and travel websites are responding. Kayak, a travel search engine, announced on Thursday that it will now include Cuba hotel and flight information to its search results, a move that its competitors have yet to make.

“Cuba travel information is now on Kayak, and specifically, Kayak users can search for both flight and hotel information,” Chief Marketing Officer Robert Birge tells Newsweek.

That decision, Birge says, came as a result of user demand. Since the government’s announcement on January 15, Birge says, “we’ve gotten quite a few requests.”

Kayak’s Cuba search results will be somewhat different from results for other travel destinations. Usually, Kayak includes booking links with results, but because many travel restrictions are still in place for Cuba, those results will not include booking links.

People looking to travel to Cuba can now use Kayak to find “data for 300 hotels” and information on flights to Havana, Santiago de Cuba and other cities. Because regular commercial flights do not operate between the U.S. and Cuba, Kayak users will have to book travel directly through charter companies. Those companies, which are licensed to coordinate travel in Cuba, operate out of cities such as Miami and Tampa, Florida, and use aircraft and crew from commercial carriers.

Priceline, a similar site, does not currently have Cuba information in its results. “Offering consumers the opportunity to travel to Cuba is something we’re keeping an eye on,” a spokeswoman says.

Orbitz, another travel website, is keeping an eye on Cuba as well. “It’s going to take a bit for us and others to be able to sell travel to Cuba,” says Chris Chiames, the company’s vice president of corporate affairs. Chiames adds that Orbitz is currently in negotiations with the Office of Foreign Assets Control and that it hopes to add Cuba to booking options by the end of 2015.

Last month, President Obama announced that the U.S. and Cuba were resuming diplomatic relations. Two weeks ago, the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Commerce announced revised travel and financial regulations, which went into effect January 16.

To travel to Cuba, Americans must be going for one of 12 reasons, such as family visits or professional meetings. “Under the new rules, Americans will not need specific licenses to certify they fit in those categories,” The New York Times reported.

A spokesman for Miami International Airport says its number of chartered flights to Cuba has not yet increased from this period last year, but Bob Guild, vice president of Marazul Charters, Inc., which flies from Miami, says the requests are pouring in. “We have just been inundated,” he says.

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The wife of a Saudi rights activist, who was sentenced to 1,000 lashes last year, said Thursday her husband's health had worsened after the first round of flogging and that he could not possibly survive the full punishment.

Raif Badawi, a blogger and founder of the "Free Saudi Liberals" website, received 50 lashes on Jan 9. The second round has twice been postponed on medical grounds.

"Raif's health condition is bad and it's getting worse and worse," said Badawi's wife, Ensaf Haidar, who lives with her three children in Canada.

"I am very concerned about him. It is impossible for a human being to withstand 50 lashes every week," she told a news conference in Ottawa, speaking through a translator.

Badawi was arrested in June 2012 for offences including insulting Islam, cyber crime and disobeying his father, which is a crime in Saudi Arabia. He was sentenced last year to 10 years in jail, a fine of 1 million riyals ($266,000) and the flogging.

The United States has urged Riyadh to cancel the lashing.

The questioning of an eight-year-old boy for “defending terrorism” by police in Nice, France after he made a comment in school about siding with the Charlie Hebdo attackers has been condemned as “unacceptable” by the country’s main Islamaphobia watchdog.

The boy, identified only as Ahmed, was asked if he was Charlie, in reference to the satirical magazine attacked by masked radical Islamists, three times by his teacher, to which he replied that he opposed the cartoons because of its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad and he was on the side of the attackers.

He had also caused concern at the school when he refused to acknowledge a minute’s silence for the 12 victims killed in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

“It is very shocking that a school, teachers and headmaster can treat a child like this,” said Elsa Rayk, a spokeswoman for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), which has picked up the boy’s case. “It is obviously a reflection on the society in which we live and the hysterical atmosphere since the terrorist attacks in Paris.”

“What is shocking is that they put a lot of pressure on this child, also physical and psychological violence against this child and we know it is because this child is Muslim and it is unacceptable,” Rayk added.

The boy’s lawyer Sefen Guez Guez told French broadcaster BFMTV: “A police station is absolutely no place for an eight-year-old child.”

“He [the boy] answered, ‘I am on the side of the terrorists, because I am against the caricatures of the Prophet’,” said Guez, adding that the country had gone into a state of “collective hysteria” since the Paris attacks on the offices of a satirical magazine and a kosher grocery.

Guez also wrote on his Twitter account that, when asked by French police what the word “terrorism” meant, the boy replied: “I don’t know.”

Fiyaz Mughal, Director of Tell MAMA, a British organisation that monitors anti-Muslim attacks, argued that the questioning of children by French authorities could lead them “in the very direction which the actions are trying to stop” later in life.

“Sadly, what this child may need is support to understand the impacts of what he is saying and to try and ensure that he can understand what is happening. Isolating him may just become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Mughal also suggested that the actions of French authorities would further alienate North African Maghrebi communities within France, reinforcing “us versus them” attitudes.

“The community impact of this kind of action is significant. The North African Maghrebi community, who are of French origin, will now be saying in effect ‘don’t say anything, don’t do anything’ so they are going into shutdown mode. This is disengaging that very community from feeling or being part of France. This is a problem.”

“It just reinforces ‘them against us’ and that’s the very thing that the killers tried to do. The authorities are overreacting and reinforcing [these attitudes].”

In the week following the assault on the magazine’s offices on 7 January, 54 people were arrested across France for ‘defending terrorism’.

The country has strong laws against hate speech but the crackdown following the attacks has sparked widespread debate about the boundaries of free speech. Inciting terrorism carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison while doing so online can bring up to seven years.

In the second Paris attack, five people were killed on a kosher grocery by radical Islamist gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, who later pledged allegiance to the Islamic State [ISIS] in a posthumous video message.

French police were not immediately available for comment.