It’s easy to slip into hyperbole when looking at John James Audubon’s The Birds of America. Is it the most beautiful book ever produced? I don’t know: Was Helen the most beautiful woman in ancient Greece? The Gutenberg Bible probably played a bigger role in the history of Western civilization, but Audubon’s work feels more alive. In 1820, he set out to paint every bird in North America; he captured, also, the land itself, a United States still in its nascence, “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,” as Robert Frost called it, a wild land aflutter with Carolina parakeets, its North Atlantic coast watched over by the great auk.

The original work was an act of audacity: Audubon could not find subscribers in North America for his project and had to travel to England for a receptive audience. And republishing the book today is equally audacious, in this age when those who read are likely to be doing so on their Kindles. But that is what W.W. Norton & Company has done with the Bien Chromolithographic edition of Birds of America, which weighs 33 pounds and retails at $350.

American flamingoBirds of America

This is the first time the Bien edition of Audubon’s book has been republished since its original issue. The most famous edition of Birds of America­– the one that became the most expensive printed book ever sold when a copy was snagged at a London auction for $11.5 million in 2010 – is the “double elephant folio” (i.e., huge) of Robert Havell, published over 11 years, starting in 1827.

According to a 2008 price guide for Audubon editions, between 180 and 200 Havell editions were printed. By contrast, only 75 full Bien editions were executed. It is the product of a collaboration between Audubon’s son, John Woodhouse Audubon, and Julius Bien, a lithographer who came to New York City from Germany. It was published by Roe Lockwood & Son right before the Civil War; that conflict seems to have halted the project, thus accounting for the scarcity of the Bien editions.

Bald eagleBirds of America

But this is not a flightless bird. As Joel Oppenheimer -- an Audubon expert and art conservationist largely responsible for the new Norton edition -- explains in his introduction, “When it was first invented and employed, chromolithography was considered a groundbreaking advancement in printmaking capable of reproducing the subtle qualities of a painting in a print.” So while not nearly as large as the prized double elephant folio, the Bien edition was actually intended to surpass its famed predecessor in its faithfulness to the watercolors painted by John James Audubon. Audubon fils wrote in 1859 that “[t]his Edition, in softness, finish, and correctness of coloring, will be superior to the first.”

But beyond – and above –  the particulars of history are the birds themselves, infused with new life by Audubon’s paint, seemingly straining to rise from the page. A black skimmer hits the water. In the distance, a ship is visible, as well as a church steeple on an island – civilization encroaching. A belted kingfisher feasts on fish. Two red tailed hawks battle over a bloodied hare, the still-untouched American landscape looming rough and handsome behind them.  

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, came out with guns blazing against a deal reached Sunday morning in Geneva to slow Iran’s nuclear development program, calling the agreement a “historic mistake,” while a government official made clear that Israel will not abide by the pact.

Under the six-month deal between Iranian officials and the P5+1 -- the U.S., Britain, China, Russia, France and Germany -- Iran agreed to halt some elements of its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of certain sanctions. But will the agreement make a military confrontation between Israel and Iran closer, or push it away?

Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, Yuval Steinitz, a close Netanyahu confidant, said the government will now assess its future moves, and told me that the Geneva interim agreement with Iran is “a bad deal that would allow the Iranians to continue enriching uranium, and this time do it with international legitimacy.” Given the pressure that Iran is currently under, Steinitz added, “it was possible to reach a much better deal that would start dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, not only freeze it.”

Yair Lapid, Israel’s finance minister whose centrist party, Yesh Atid, is the largest partner in the ruling coalition, implicitly criticized Netanyahu’s, saying, “We lost the ear of the world.” In an interview with Army Radio he too said the agreement was a ”bad deal,” indicating that this view is widely held in Israel’s military and political circles.

A former official at Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission who also worked for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, Ephraim Asculai explained that at the end of six-month period, the deal can be extended for another six months. “That’s a long time,” Ascuali told me, adding that even now, with its known capabilities, Iran can conduct a nuclear test within four to six months if it so decides.

And the Geneva agreement, Asculai noted, does not cover possible undeclared nuclear facilities, which several world experts believe Iran has. “You can do a lot with a small hidden enrichment facility,” he said. Adding that the agreement is vague on inspection of sites related to the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program – including the Parchin base, to which the IAEA has long sought access.    

Much of Israel’s opposition to the deal derives from the feeling that its concerns were overlooked while agreements were tacitly reached behind Jerusalem’s back. After the Sunday signing in Geneva, unnamed U.S. officials confirmed to the website Al-monitor and to the Associated Press that, since the summer, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns has been secretly meeting in Oman with his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, and other Tehran officials.

BuzzFeed quotes cabinet minister Silvan Shalom as saying that Israel knew about the secret channel from its own sources. Indeed, its existence was first reported, from unnamed Jerusalem officials, by Israel’s Channel 10 a week earlier. The television report, however, misidentified the American interlocutor, naming Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, indicating that the Israeli sources were kept in the dark, and while they may have gotten a whiff of the secret channel, likely from Saudi intelligence sources, they were blind to such details as the identity of the officials conducting it.

Another source of Israeli anger is the belief that the Obama administration is rushing toward a deal with what it believes to be a “moderate” Iranian leader, President Hassan Rouhani, even as Tehran continues to preach the elimination of the Jewish state. Last Wednesday, as representatives of Iran and the world’s six leading powers flew in for the Geneva talks, Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s Spiritual Leader who has the final say over nuclear policy, predicted that Israel will disappear, calling the “Zionist regime” the “sinister, unclean rabid dog of the region,” and saying that Israelis “cannot be called human beings.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said on several Sunday news shows that such sentiments are “unacceptable.” But the initial response from an unnamed “senior U.S. official” arriving in Geneva was that while Khamenei's statement made her “uncomfortable,” it may have resulted from “decades of mistrust” between America and Iran. “Many people in our society say difficult things about Iran and Iranians” she added.

In the Hanukkah holiday, starting Thursday, Jews commemorate an uprising in 160 BC against Antioch IV, who tried to destroy them. Israelis point to a long history in which generations of their enemies dehumanized and then tried to eliminate them. The Iranian regime is the latest link in that history, which explains why Israelis are so much more edgy that others over the possibility that Iran would obtain arms that could allow Khamenei's wish to come true. And to prevent that, Netanyahu has long said, Israel is keeping all its options open.

Follow Benny Avni on Twitter: @bennyavni

The federal government is making it increasingly difficult, and prohibitively expensive, for journalists to get files that agencies want to keep secret, despite President Obama's pledge of transparency.

That's bad news for authors, editors, producers, writers, and publishers, as well as anyone else interested in democratic government. But it is great for ineffective, inefficient, and corrupt federal officials.

Federal agencies routinely flout the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, the so-called Open Government Act of 2007 that strengthens the 1966 law, and Obama's 2009 executive order directing agencies to err on the side of disclosure, not secrecy, a host of journalists, public-interest advocates and lawyers tell Newsweek.

Specialists in Freedom of Information Act requests say there has been a general tightening up and an increase in denials for both records and fee waivers for journalists. They attribute this to Freedom of Information staff budget cuts and the absence of pushback from Congress.

And what of President Obama's directive?

"All Obama's executive order did was give agencies that were good about disclosure something to back them, while requiring nothing of the bad actors" who gin up reasons to withhold, says Bradley P. Moss, a Washington lawyer who specializes in access to government records.

Moss and others cite the Central Intelligence Agency as obstinate, releasing hardly any information and refusing to comply with laws requiring machine-readable documents, like spreadsheets. The CIA only releases copies of records on plain paper.

An egregious example of flouting the law is a recent, undated Justice Department ruling denying a fee waiver to Dennis McDougal, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of 10 books, including investigative biographies of Jack Nicholson, Hollywood mogul and Democratic Party power Lew Wasserman and Times publisher Otis Chandler.

McDougal wants Drug Enforcement Administration records of David Wheeler, a shadowy entertainment industry figure who died in 2001. Wheeler was known to hang out in the DEA's San Diego office and make time with secretaries. McDougal (and others) believe he gave agents damaging information on his competitors and, in return, was allowed to run his criminal enterprise.

Such records seem to meet the legal standard of information "in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding" of government operations.

Sean R. O'Neill, chief of the Justice Department appeals staff, denied McDougal's fee waiver request stating, "It appears that you seek the information to further your commercial interests." O'Neill did not respond to a request for an interview.

Corporations asking for government files to learn what competitors are up to are commercial interests that must pay for document searches, but the law treats authors and other journalists differently because they represent the public interest. Big companies and their lawyers flood agencies with such requests and pay the required fees.

O'Neill told McDougal he had not shown how the records would "shed new light" on government operations, so he must pay $1,900 just to have 17 files searched with no promise that any documents would be released.

And, O'Neill wrote, McDougal had not established that he was a journalist likely to get his work published, even though the research is for a biography of Bob Dylan, for which McDougal is under contract with Turner Publishing.

Moss, who does not represent McDougal, says such responses are now commonplace: "Federal agencies have essentially been nitpicking [Freedom of Information Act] requests to find ways to deny fee waivers and access to files."

A new tactic is claiming government documents are "personal" rather than public records or that the records are of no interest to the public. That forces journalists to give up or sue, which, with appeals, can take years and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Two officials denied requests by author Greg Muttitt for his 2012 book Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, on what lawyer Kel McClanahan calls "the bizarre position that no one in America would care about this because they have more pressing issues" to consider.

(Disclosures: McDougal and I use the same literary agent, and I am editing an anthology for Muttitt's publisher, but learned of these matters independently.)

The federal government is also refusing to disclose records and grant waivers from small circulation periodicals on the theory that they cannot "contribute significantly to public understanding."

Those rejected range from IndyMedia.Santa Cruz.org, a one-person California blog, to High Country News, an environmental magazine with 25,000 paid subscribers and a much wider influence because of its award-winning watchdog reporting on government since 1970.

Writer Matt Jenkins says High Country News paid the Coast Guard for the records because the cost was less than an hour's fee for a lawyer, but he said the assertion that its circulation made it insignificant should offend everyone who believes government derives its powers from the people.

These rejections seem to clearly violate the 2007 Openness Promotes Effectiveness in Our National Government Act that makes disclosure, not secrecy, the legal principle. That law provides that "any person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the public" and has an audience qualifies for fee waivers. The 2007 law makes no mention of audience size.

McDougal says he cannot afford a legal fight so he hopes to persuade a lawyer to take his case pro bono. "As a practical matter," McDougal argues, "we have given the right to define what a journalist is to bureaucrats.... By O'Neill's definition Thomas Paine would not have qualified as a journalist when he wrote Common Sense, which arguably incited the American Revolution, because Paine did not publish a newspaper or even a book, just the 18th century equivalent of a blog."

Unlikely as it may seem, there's hope for the word natural. In recent years, marketers who create copy for grocery-aisle packaging have turned the once respectable adjective into a term as meaningless as low-fat or new - a sneaky label for processed foods with ingredients that often sound like something out of bad science fiction.

But don't despair. Consumer advocates are fighting to reclaim the word, using not only civil action but also a newly introduced bill in Congress that for the first time would legally definenatural. Already some of the biggest names in food and beverage manufacturing are tiptoeing away. PepsiCo Inc. and Campbell Soup Co., among others, have quietly deleted the natural label from products like Naked Juice and Goldfish - the snack cracker brought to you by those ostensible tillers of the soil at Pepperidge "Farms."

In the absence of rigorous oversight, the makers of purportedly natural products have multiplied into an industry worth more than $40 billion annually. Compare that with the relatively modest $32 million a year U.S. market value for certified organic products. As far as that goes, the term organic itself was similarly up for grabs in the much of the United States until 1990, when Congress finally authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to set some standards.

Agricultural purists spent decades railing against the use of chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides. By the time Congress took action, the nationwide market for organic products had already grown to $1 billion a year. And although California created its own certification program in the 1970s, the term organic could still mean pretty much anything you chose in most other parts of the country.

Even now, with a market grown to many times that size, use of the natural label remains wide open. The word still has no legally binding definition for federal regulators or for jurists weighing claims of false advertising. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration offers only vague guidelines on the question, apologizing that "it is difficult to define a food product that is 'natural' because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth."

Despite the lack of a clear definition, however, more than 100 lawsuits have been filed in recent years against companies for allegedly misrepresenting their products as natural. Although some of those lawsuits have been quashed, others have led to multimillion-dollar settlements. Payouts on that scale are a sign that the word must mean something.

But what? Not even staunch proponents of natural living seem quite sure. Just ask Donald Vincent, 38, an organic hobbyist and self-described "green-neck" in the western Colorado town of Montrose. Natural is one of those words whose definition seems so obvious that most people never think about it, and Vincent starts to say it's anything untouched by the human hand - and quickly stops. If you find an acorn and plant it in the ground, have you made it unnatural?

He tries again. If it contains no synthetic ingredients and can be digested completely by the compost heap out back, it's natural, he says - and that goes for genetically modified organisms, too. Many natural-food enthusiasts would dispute that last part. They passionately distrust GMOs, which tend to be manufactured by corporate giants like Monsanto and now pervade the U.S. food supply. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 95 percent of all sugar beets - one fifth of the country's total sugar supply right there - comes from altered seed - as do much of the corn, soybeans, and other produce sold in big natural-food stores like Whole Foods.

Vincent says he has no problem with that. "We cannot differentiate between farmers grafting an apple tree to a different root to make it a healthier tree and scientists changing the DNA of a seed to make it more disease-resistant," Vincent says. "Both plants will produce food that will presumably taste good and give us the nutrients we all need. It is either all natural, or it is all unnatural."

Others say the whole industry is effectively a lost cause. "I threw the word natural out the window a few years ago," says Dana Price, 38, currently an inventory manager at Oregon Growers, a supplier of jams, fruit butters, honeys, and other niche products. After a decade working with companies like Trader Joe's and Wild Oats, he says he's disgusted. He blames the profit motive. "So many of the trusted names in organic have been bought out by bigger nonorganic conglomerates," he says. "The whole-food industry is a serious mess, and the only thing I really trust is the farmer's market. I don't even care if what they sell is organic."

Whatever Price may say, he hasn't entirely given up on the idea. He agrees with Vincent that if the label says "natural," consumers should be able to pronounce all the listed ingredients. And both men are convinced that "partially hydrogenated" has the ring of something that should be banned under the Geneva Conventions. (For what it's worth, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced earlier this month that it's taking steps toward eliminating "partially hydrogenated oils," a.k.a. trans fats, from the country's food supplies.) And despite any minor disagreements the two may have over questions of diet, they share an even more important conviction: Words should do more than just sound nice.

By the end of last week, Russia was odds on favorite to win a tug of love it has conducted for weeks with the European Union.

The former Soviet Republic of Ukraine is giving increasingly strong indications it will forgo a pact that would have opened it up to trade, and social and cultural opportunities in the West, leaning instead toward President Vladimir Putin, who dreams of reviving a grand Cold War-era Moscow-controlled Eurasian alliance.

At the center of the drama is Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovich, a leader with an authoritarian streak who nevertheless would sooner get all the benefits of good relations with Europe than live under Putin’s thumb.

Last week, however, he signaled that his fear of domestic political rivalry is stronger, and that he’d rather crush two formidable opponents – a popular former prime minister he has jailed and an even more popular former boxing heavyweight champion – before they can run against him in the next presidential election.

The venue of the would-be showdown was going to be a European Union gathering in Vilnius, Lithuania, starting on Thursday. By the time European leaders arrive there, Kiev will have made a final decision on whether it wants to join five other former Soviet republics and sign an association agreement that will put Ukraine on a path to EU membership, or join Putin’s project, known as the Eurasian Union.

“I hope we go with Europe,” a Kiev diplomat told me recently, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was unauthorized to express such opinions publicly. He said nevertheless that the country's inner political battles could endanger the European pact, and that much depends on the president’s calculations.  

On November 21, the Ukrainian government announced in a statement it would  suspend all preparations for signing the agreement. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said in a statement that the Union “takes note of the decision,” adding her “disappointment.” In a sign that the decision is not final, however, Yanukovich was quoted in press reports as saying that he would “work further” on the “path to EU integration.”    

Yanukovich’s dilemma was that if he wanted to sign the EU association pact, he’d have needed to immediately release from jail the pro-Western former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, or at least send her for medical treatment outside the country. The EU has made that demand as part of a number of conditions Kiev must meet before it can sign the agreement that could eventually lead to full EU membership.

Tymoshenko, the pro-Western leader of the 2004 Orange Revolution with blonde hair plaited around her head, who turned the country’s back on Moscow, is just one candidate who may run against Yanukovich in the 2015 presidential contest.

The other is former heavyweight champion and current member of parliament Vitali Klitschko. Along with brother Wladimir, the Klitschkos are world famous. The brothers are Ukraine’s most cherished national icons. After announcing last month he intends to run for the presidency, Vitali Klitschko immediately shot to the top of the polls, ahead of both Tymoshenko and Yanukovich.

Currently, however, neither of the two challengers is eligible for the contest. Tymoshenko was sentenced by a Yanukovich-controlled court in 2011 to a seven-year prison term. Klitschko, who has a home in Germany and pays taxes there, is barred from running by a constitutional provision.

“Ultimately, Yanukovich would rather run against himself,” said David Kramer, the president of Freedom House, who as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State oversaw America’s relations with Russia, the Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc countries in Europe.

The EU has set several conditions before Ukraine can sign the pact, including a major overhaul of its judicial system. By far the biggest sticking point is the fate of Tymoshenko. After demanding she be released from prison, the EU is now merely asking that at the very least Kiev should let her leave the hospital in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, where she’s currently incarcerated, and be allowed to receive medical treatment in Germany.

On Thursday the Kiev parliament, dominated by Yanukovich supporters, voted down six resolutions, proposed by the opposition, to compromise with Europe over Tymoshenko’s release. Parliament speaker Volodymyr Rybak, nevertheless, told leaders of all factions to continue negotiating, leaving the door open for a last-minute compromise.

Negotiations with Kiev “are ongoing,” Ashton’s spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic told me last week, indicating the EU assessment on whether Ukraine has fulfilled the conditions for joining the association agreement will not be made until the last minute.

But uncertainty, and growing doubts over Kiev’s maneuvering, further soured relations with the foreign investors it so desperately needs. As the battles between rival factions in Ukraine heated up in recent weeks, the country’s debt was demoted to junk status by the big Western rating agencies.

Signing the “most ambitious agreement the EU has offered to a partner country would have further enhanced the reform course of Ukraine and sent a clear signal to investors worldwide as well as to international financial institutions that Ukraine is serious about its modernization pledge,” Ashton said in a statement.  

Meanwhile, Putin is working hard to form a Moscow-controlled trading pact between Russia and eastern European and central Asian countries that were Moscow’s satellites before the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has threatened to impose export tariffs and inflict other punishments if they join with the EU. For Putin, Ukraine is the most important piece of the puzzle, by far, in establishing his dream alliance and restoring Russia to its former Soviet glory.

“Ukraine is crucial for Putin’s Eurasian Union project,” said Lilia Shevtsova, a Moscow-based Kremlin expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She calls Putin’s project a “Kremlin survival mechanism that needs the existence around Russia of a galaxy of satellite states.” Without Ukraine, she added, the alliance would be nothing but a “limping galaxy.”

Then there is the Kremlin’s eternal fight against the West. “Putin sees everything in zero-sum terms,” said Kramer. If Ukraine signs the association agreement with the EU, he added, this would mark “a huge foreign policy setback for Putin.” But Russia is a “declining power, and its future is rather bleak,” he said. Moscow does not have as much leverage over Ukraine as Putin thinks. “Putin is increasingly out of touch with reality,” he said.

Putin, however, has raised Russia’s profile around the world recently, most notably by dominating the diplomacy surrounding the Mideast’s central battle, in Syria, and he has established himself as a formidable opponent of the West in several other world crises, too. Now Kiev’s top player seems ready to reward Moscow’s efforts to win hearts in its “near abroad” as well.

As for America, it has largely co-opted Putin in many of those battles, including the crucial battle over the future alignment of Ukraine, where, according to Kramer, Washington “has been standoffish and decided to let EU take the lead.”

Last week, the Senate passed a resolution, initiated by Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, that called on Ukraine to release Tymoshenko, and on the EU to explicitly demand her unconditional release from prison. Earlier, Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State charged with European affairs, said, “We join the EU in urging Ukraine’s leaders to make the right historic choice for their 45 million citizens.”

Most Ukrainians seem to agree. “We can’t be a democratic country with political prisoners,” Klitschko told the BBC last month. Vowing to overcome the stumbling blocks to his presidential run, the former champ said, “My main goal is for Ukraine to be a European, modern country with European standards of life.”

Yanukovich may privately agree, but for now the price of admission – which may include losing his own political power – seems too steep for his political pocket.

Women in Iran may be forced to wear the hijab – a scarf covering their head – but that doesn’t stop the country’s restless youth from keeping a watchful eye on Western fashions and trends. As young Iranians strive for sartorial freedom -- and fewer restrictions on the way they interact with the opposite sex -- they can face fines, imprisonment, and torture. But many still make small rebellious gestures: They put on a bit more makeup, wear colorful clothing, reveal bare arms, push their headscarves back and do things behind closed doors that are countercultural, or even banned.

This photographic project presents a window into the disobedience, both public and private, that can be found in Tehran. It’s a world I can identify with: As a young woman growing up in Iran, I adopted the dual life that everybody there leads. I had a public face but a private life. I emigrated to Canada when I was a teen, which allows me a unique perspective: I can be an insider when I’m in Iran, while my experiences in the outside world permit me added objectivity in looking at my subjects. Through these images, I try to explore the tension between the way people want to dress and behave, and the laws, enforced by the “morality police,” that constrain those desires. At a time when the country might seem mysterious to many Americans, I hope this project offers Western audiences a rare glimpse into the lives of ordinary people in Iran.

Yassi and a friend on their way to a reception at a gallery in Tehran’s north. Being bold and eye-catching can draw the attention of the morality police, but many girls still choose to put on bright lipstick and dress distinctively. Kiana Hayeri

In Jolfa, one of Tehran’s trendier neighborhoods, people gather for a religious and mourning event called Ashura-Tasua – and use the time to socialize.Kiana Hayeri

Repeatedly ignoring the urging of staff to pull her veil back up, Maryam enjoys her time at a café with her hijab fallen to her shoulders. Kiana Hayeri

Any kind of gambling is banned in Iran under Islamic laws, but a group of young men and women gather once a week to play poker behind closed doors. They take turns hosting the game so that they don't attract attention. Kiana Hayeri

A young couple share a moment during a night out at a friend’s house. Under enforced Islamic laws, any relationship with the opposite sex outside of marriage is a sin and therefore must be punished. Kiana Hayeri

Some cafés refuse to serve a hookah to women, but Sheida and friends found one in northern Iran where they could smoke. Kiana Hayeri

Women are not allowed to swim in public, even fully clothed. But Sheida and Behnoosh escape the hot and humid night and hit the Caspian Sea with their manteaus and scarves on.Kiana Hayeri

Dressed fashionably in black, youth watch a religious parade during Ashura-Tasua, which provides a good excuse to socialize on the streets. Kiana Hayeri

As she puts on her boots, Melika argues with her dad over the time she must be back home from dinner. Aside from the restrictions imposed by the government, many youth have to deal with limitations their family puts on them. Kiana Hayeri

Ebrahim gazes at his niece as she cleans up after dinner. The women are expected to do all the housework within traditional and religious families. While women are becoming more powerful and educated, chauvinism still exists among more traditional families. Kiana Hayeri

Inside the Shah-Abdol-Azim shrine in Ray, Iran. Kiana Hayeri

At far right, the trendy Ati Saz building complex is isolated by highways and a poor neighborhood seen in the foreground. Kiana Hayeri

After a long day of studying, Melika dazes on the couch in the living room. Kiana Hayeri

An underground theatre troupe rehearses their newest play. Depending on the content, some plays and art exhibitions (and all dance productions) must remain underground and be performed behind closed doors, as existing Islamic laws view them as inappropriate. Kiana Hayeri

Parmida, a ballerina, prepares. Ballet is banned in Iran due to its Western influences, but it continues to be performed behind closed doors. The authorities shut down Parmida’s studio but she still practices in a basement. Kiana Hayeri

Getting ready to go out in Tehran. Kiana Hayeri

A 14-year-old girl with dyed blonde hair at the Tasua parade in the Jolfa neighborhood. Kiana Hayeri

After plenty of fits and starts, the interim deal reached between Iran, the United States, and four other nations creates hopes for ending decades of international saber rattling about Tehran’s nuclear program. But now comes the really hard part: permanently limiting Iran’s enrichment capabilities in the future, which the U.S. Congress insists on and Iran will almost certainly balk at. 

First, the good news: The United States paid a fairly low price for the six-month agreement. The total value of the sanctions relief is about $6 billion; that only mitigates two months of oil revenue lost to Iran because of the trade restrictions that remain in place; Tehran also agreed to keep oil production at the level of 1 million barrels a day, compared with the pre-sanctions level of 2.5 million. In other words, Iran will keep feeling the pain from sanctions even under this deal.

That contributes to another benefit – as the Obama administration has noted, the system for imposing sanctions remains in place. If Iran drags its feet or otherwise fails to meet its obligations under the temporary deal, the United States can immediately put the full force of sanctions back in place. And immediate means immediate – if Obama decides at 1 p.m. that Iran has violated the terms of the agreement, full sanctions can be back in place by 1:01.

And the restrictions Iran has accepted are good. It agreed to halt all enrichment of uranium to below weapons grade (not hard for Tehran to accept – it had largely begun to do that already). It will stop the operation of cutting-edge centrifuges that can enrich more quickly, thus limiting the ability to rapidly reverse course should a final deal collapse. It will halt construction of a reactor in Arak, which, were it to become operational, could produce plutonium. It will allow daily inspections of its enrichment facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And on and on.

The result, experts say, is that the deal should alleviate some of the international anxiety in the Middle East. “Although some countries have criticized the interim deal," wrote the Soufan Group, a private security intelligence group, in a brief to clients yesterday, “some regional tensions will be reduced as Iran’s nuclear program remains largely frozen.”

So, what’s the problem? The negotiators have only six months to come up with a final deal before this temporary pact expires, and there remains an enormous make-or-break issue on which there are no signs of a possible compromise.

This comes down to the concept of requirements permanently limiting Iran’s enrichment capabilities in the future. The United States – and particularly members of Congress – have argued that any final agreement must lock Iran into an extensively monitored, limited enrichment program that would prevent it from ever shifting its nuclear efforts toward building a bomb. And that is unlikely to sail in Tehran.

“Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamanei,’’ the Soufan briefing said, “is believed to insist that Iran’s option to ultimately develop a nuclear weapon is not permanently precluded, and the Iranian side is likely to insist that its enrichment is not curbed much further than it is in the interim deal.”

 The Iranian rationale is understandable: The United States has repeatedly threatened war on the country for decades, and there is a strong faction within the leadership in Tehran that believes a complete capitulation on its future ability to develop weapons will be invitation to an American invasion. On the other hand, the government clearly understands that, should it use its energy program to manufacture nuclear weapons now, it will be inviting immediate war. This reality leaves Iran frozen in place – afraid of posing a nuclear threat now, but also afraid of declaring it will never be a nuclear power in the future.

 That is the delicate issue that the United States faces, but given the decades of warnings that Iran was just years from developing nuclear weapons, Obama will likely have the same difficulty persuading hard-liners in the Senate that a permanent deal can avoid imposing a permanent prohibition against a nuclear weapons program as President Hassan Rouhani will have with the hard-liners in Tehran.

In other words, with the Iranian deal, the Obama administration has won the metaphorical opening game of the season. It’s a long way from there to victory at the World Series.

Update: The Supreme Court said on Tuesday that it would consolidate two of the cases challenging the contraception mandate, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialities, and hear both in court. Read the full order. 

What if your boss treated gay employees differently because his church preaches that homosexuality is wrong? What if he could refuse to cover your kid’s measles vaccination because he believes the shots cause autism, or AIDS treatments because he thinks the disease is God’s revenge for sinful behavior?

The Supreme Court is poised to hear a case tomorrow that could give employers an unprecedented right to deny coverage of specific medical treatments to which their employees are legally entitled -- mental health services, blood transfusions, cancer treatments, and more --  based on their personal beliefs, no matter how dangerously misguided those beliefs are. Unsurprisingly, the issue boils down to controversy over a woman’s right to choose.

The Supreme Court will likely agree Tuesday to hear Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius, a case brought by the arts and crafts chain that opposes the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit because its founders think some common forms of birth control cause abortions, a misconception widely debunked by the medical community. The court's ruling will have critical implications, not only for women’s access to contraception but for the rights of bosses to curtail the medical care of their employees.

“Preventive care, including birth control, is basic health care for women – and the decision to use birth control is a conversation between a woman and her doctor, not a woman and her boss," says Cecile Richards, president of  Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "Today there are people trying to take this right away from women – by letting corporations and employers make medical decisions for their employees, based on their personal beliefs. A woman and her doctor, not her boss or Washington politicians, should decide what health care choices are right for her."

The ruling’s repercussions will extend far beyond contraception. For the first time, the courts could decide that employers have the right to choose which medical procedures your insurance covers, based on their personal beliefs.

"Once you get to the question of can a for-profit company practice religion, you've really opened up a quagmire," says Judy Waxman, the Vice President of Health and Reproductive Rights at the National Women's Law Center. “This is an important decision for women, but it goes far beyond women.”

Since August 1, 2012, insurance companies have been required to give all women free access to standard forms of birth control, along with other preventive care treatments deemed crucial by the independent Institute of Medicine, like wellness visits, cancer screenings and vaccinations. This contraception mandate was backed by the medical and science communities as well as popular opinion: 70% of Americans think insurance companies should cover the full cost of birth control, just as they do for other preventive services; meanwhile, 99% of sexually active American women ages 15-44 have used birth control, and 60% take it for medical reasons that have nothing to do with sex, including  treatment for ovarian cysts, hormone replacement after chemotherapy and endometriosis.

The mandate includes a generous religious exemption, which allows around 350,000 churches, religious schools, and houses of worship to use their right to religious freedom under the First Amendment to withhold the benefit to their employees.

But 46 for-profit businesses and corporations -- ranging from Eden Foods, a health food company, to construction firms and a publishing house -- have challenged the contraceptive coverage benefit in federal court, claiming that their personal beliefs deserve more protection than the medical needs of individual employees. The circuit courts have been split -- some companies received preliminary injunctions allowing them to refuse coverage, others were dismissed outright -- so the Hobby Lobby decision will decide whether the “religious expression” of corporations should take precedence over federal law.

"The idea that an individual employer should decide what kind of health care his or her employees need is really offensive," says Susan Berke Fogel, Director of Reproductive Health for the National Health Law Program. "Everyone should be able to make their own health care decisions based on what works best for them. That's the larger implication here: what does it mean for each of us to live our lives in the most healthful, productive way that we choose?"

The deal signed between Iran and the world’s leading powers in the small hours of Sunday morning is a potential game changer for the geopolitics of the Middle East. But getting to yes – even on the heavily hedged and conditional deal signed in Geneva – was a long and nerve-racking process, which involved several back-channel negotiations running in parallel.

Track One was the official talks between Iran and the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K., France and Germany, which have been under way since September.

But the Associated Press revealed Sunday there have also been Track-Two talks – diplomatic term for officials speaking unofficially – going on directly between the U.S. and Iran for at least six months. Those talks focused on the technical details of just how much Iran was willing to concede for a lifting of sanctions – and thrashed out the five points that eventually became the core of the Geneva accords:

1. Iran should stop enriching uranium above 5 percent and dilute its stock of 20 percent–enriched uranium

2. It should suspend all uranium enrichment; it must destroy 9,000 of its 16,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges

3. It must suspend work on a heavy-water reactor at Arak

4. It must accept more intrusive nuclear inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

But there were also several other, unofficial, back-channels in motion. One was a meeting of top generals from Iran, Israel and China at the private Chateau de Selore in the Burgundy region of France, moderated by former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and ex-French defense minister Michele Alliot-Marie. Those talks focused on one of the thorniest unanswered questions of the Geneva talks – building trust between Iran and Israel – who was not at the negotiating table in Geneva.

Israeli hard-liners like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu derided Sunday’s deal as dangerous and destabilizing. “Today the world has become a much more dangerous place,” said Netanyahu. “The most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world.”

But Doron Avital, a rising star of the Israeli center-left Kadima party and a former commander of Israel’s Special Forces, took a much more dovish line at the Selore meeting. “Iran is turning West,” said Avital. “They seriously need a deal. The climate is changing.”

The Selore talks also addressed another Iranian sticking point, the issue of intrusive nuclear inspections. But China’s increased engagement in the inspections process helped to ease Iranian nervousness about becoming another Iraq, where the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors found no evidence of wrongdoing did not the prevent the U.S. from going to war.

The deal’s bitterest opponents, Netanyahu and the Saudis, also waged a back-channel war against the deal. Veteran Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar al Sultan penned an impassioned denunciation of détente with Iran in The Wall Street Journal; top American backers of Netanyahu are also mobilizing opposition to easing sanctions against Iran in Congress.

The final deal was essentially struck bilaterally between Washington and Teheran – and originally contained no mention of Arak. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius insisted, with Israeli backing, that the reactor be shuttered - derailing talks at the beginning of November.

Fabius’s insistence on including Arak in the final deal – based on his own closeness to Netanyahu and to pressure from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, both large investors in France – eventually strengthened the agreement reached in Geneva, according to Jean-Christophe Iseux von Pfetten, a consultant to the Chinese government who hosted the Selore talks.

“After all the French might have been wise about nurturing Israel’s viewpoint, otherwise this interim deal becomes useless,” he said.

“Thug” is an immensely pleasing word to say. It has what linguist Ben Zimmer describes to Newsweek as a “blunt monosyllabic sound,” which it shares with many of our most beloved four-letter imprecations: the f-word, the c-word. And it is wholly unambiguous in meaning. If, during my bygone days of teaching public school in Brooklyn, I asked a fellow pedagogue, “Hey, is it me, or has Frank been showing up to first period looking like a thug?” she would know exactly what I meant: puffy jacket, a pendant golden cross or dollar symbol, a flat-brimmed Cincinnati Reds or Colorado Rockies hat cocked to the side.

I don’t use the word anymore, but I see it all the time. It’s been appearing with especially high frequency in the discourse around the so-called Knockout Game, in which young men of color supposedly prowl the streets of American cities, hoping to fell unsuspecting pedestrians with a single blow of the closed fist. The extent to which anyone is actually playing this game is unclear – the clenched hand, after all, is probably the oldest weapon in humanity’s arsenal. The New York Times, for one, notes that“the attacks in question might be nothing more than the sort of random assaults that have always occurred.”

Yeah, maybe. But what fun is that? The city’s tabloids have stoked more than their share of fear: “Knockout game thugs target Jews,” said the front page of Sunday’s New York Post, just a day after leading with “‘Knockout’ thugs slug B’klyn man.” Meanwhile, the New York Daily News’ (disclosure: I once worked for the paper) Mike Lupica – once famously derided by Times columnist Michael Powell as “a tough-guy typist” – penned a column in Monday’s paper subtitled “Thugs’ knockout pure terror.”

The New York Post for November 24, 2013. nypost.com There is little doubt about who these thugs are, or are supposed to be. It has been nearly twenty years since a group of rappers headed by Tupac Shakur released Thug Life: Volume 1. Shakur, the Los Angeles rapper who would be gunned down in 1996, proudly sported a “Thug Life” tattoo, as does today the singer Rihanna across her knuckles. According to an analysis of the word by Lakshmi Gandhi of NPR, the word “thug” has been referenced in the lyrics or titles of close to 5,000 rap songs. The thug has thus become a postmodern urban phantasm, capable at once of selling records and frightening your children. He is safe inside your iPod, but take care that his corporeal iteration does not show up in your pristine corner of Pleasantville.

After the Florida vigilante George Zimmerman killed the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin about two years ago, there were suggestions that the shooting was justified because Martin was a “thug,” this being less a function of something the youth had done than an essential quality of his person. A writer for the conservative website The New American opined, “he was a thug of a sort, a thug wannabe, if you will. At the very least, he was thuggish, even if he may not have been a full-blown thug.” The eradication of this thuggishness was thus, in the writer’s opinion, pretty damn close to a public service.

Similarly, the New York Post recently branded as “thugs” the Central Park Five, young men of color who’d been wrongly accused of raping a white woman in 1989. That they had not done it did not matter; their thuggishness has remained intact. Meanwhile, the conservative demagogue Michelle Malkin calls President Obama our “thug in chief,” a popular refrain of the far right, which cannot forgive the President his skin tone.

Zimmer (who writes about language for The Wall Street Journal in a column called “Word on the Street”) explains to Newsweek that “thug” has had “a decidedly negative connotation throughout its history in English.” It was first used pejoratively in the 19th century to describe highway robbers in India who belonged to the Thuggee cult, thus insinuating itself slowly into the lexicon as a broad term for criminal behavior. And thugs have been “knocking out” innocent folks for some time: Zimmer points to a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary from an 1895 newspaper article about “election Thugs” “engag[ing] ‘knockers-out’, who...belabour and disable voters as they are entering the booths.”

But while the word has always described a criminal, today it seems to describe a criminal of particular hue. That’s why Adelle, a 17-year-old student from New Jersey passing through Lower Manhattan, says she will not brand people “thugs.” She knows what the word signifies, describing a criminal in “dark, baggy clothes.” But it is also “demeaning,” she adds, needless robbing subjects of their dignity.

Danielle Belton, who writes for The Root and blogs as The Black Snob, agrees, comparing it to a tamer version of the n-word. “Thug has been used to dehumanize black men and boys,” she tells Newsweek, lamenting that for some black children, “the thug label can come as early as kindergarten…And once you get that label, you're pretty much stuck with it.”   

As the word becomes increasingly fraught, some have tried to rescue it from ignominy, deploying the label for both social commentary and laughs. The popular web series Thug Notes, for example, has the unapologetically gangsta “Sparky Sweets, Ph.D.” opining on classic literature, branding Moby-Dick a “big-ass book” and calling the titular hero of Beowulf “the baddest motherf--er in the whole world” and the monster Grendel a “l’il ‘ol bitch.” There is also the blog Thug Kitchen, whose recipe for Thanksgiving cranberry sauce opens with “Put down the f—ing can opener. Trust me on this sh-t.”

The team behind Thug Notes told Newsweek, “For us, the term ‘thug’ refers to living a lifestyle in spite of what the larger powers of society want you to do. The themes of thug life are similar to the themes of many classic books we cover: they represent a rebellion against institutional conventions.”

Yet fear exerts a powerful grip on the imagination. A recent post on Philadelphia Magazine’s website shows a black man purportedly punching a white woman, suggesting that the Knockout Game had come to the City of Brotherly Love. Writes one commenter below the post, “NEGROES BEHAVE THIS WAY. THEY ARE SO DAMNED DUMB THEY STILL BLAME WHITE AMERICA FOR THEIR GHETTO LIFE.” Many of his fellow readers agree with the assessment.

Kwai, 20, is from the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, where several incidents of the Knockout Game have supposedly taken place. He has sand-colored skin and a hoodie pulled low over gentle eyes; it is impossible not to think of what an older Trayvon might have looked like. Kwai says that anyone can be a thug, which for him is a person “looking to cause some trouble.” But he does acknowledge that the word is often used to disparage African-Americans: “We get it more often.” He has heard of the Knockout Game and finds the whole thing “so pathetic.”

“It’s starting to make me feel irky around my own race,” Kwai complains. “That sucks.”

I stopped using the word about two years ago. Maybe I should have stopped sooner; maybe there is no good reason to stop at all. I just know that it made me feel weird. Words are tools, deployed skilfully by some, crudely by others. Increasingly, I saw “thug” as a tool to bludgeon the dispossessed. That could just be my bleeding-heart sensibilities getting the best of me. Surely, there’s a word for my kind, too. 

The world of Apple products suddenly got a lot deeper, as in 3D.

Apple Inc. officially confirmed on Sunday that it had acquired PrimeSense; sources say Apple spent around $360 million to purchase the Israeli 3D sensing technology company.

Founded in 2005 and based in Tel Aviv, PrimeSense scored big in 2010 with its Kinect device, a motion-sensing companion to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game console that detects the motions of  players and translates that into gameplay on the Xbox.

The company’s 3D sensing technology has been used in interactive displays for PC and mobile, and has spread to other industries, including retail, health care and robotics.

PrimeSense’s technology can scan, analyze and calculate images to create highly realistic 3D models, and a look at Apple’s patent portfolio suggest it has already thought of many applications for this kind of 3D imagery.

One Apple patent describes a system involving multiple sensors and cameras that would allow an iPhone or iPad to capture 3D images. One sensor would capture a polarizing image, while two other sensors would capture two different non-polarizing images, and Apple's system would intelligently combine the images into a 3D composite. Apple and PrimeSense could build cameras and sensors that could accurately capture enough information about the shapes, surfaces and depths of objects to reconstruct those images in 3D.

Last May, Apple published a series of patents relating to 3D face and object recognition technology that would allow users to take a picture, and the software would be able to distinguish between the 2D and 3D elements of the image so that it could identify objects and shapes. Facial recognition, working in conjunction with Touch ID, could help Apple create a two-step authentication method that could better thwart theft or piracy. In the same way TSA agents scan X-ray images for objects, Apple’s patent could find objects in a 3D image, which would be particularly beneficial for security, but also education and the medical market--for instance, doctors examining 3D MRI scans on their iOS devices could see important details with greater clarity thanks to PrimeSense’s 3D sensors.

One more wrinkle to consider: 3D avatars. Apple asks iOS users to use their Apple ID, a bland username and password combination, to purchase movies, movies or applications through the company’s iTunes Store or App Store. The Apple ID is also used for the iOS Game Center, which keeps track of a user’s achievements across downloaded games. What if, instead of an Apple ID, Apple users could create customizable Apple Avatars, which would represent themselves within online or gaming environments?

Apple’s patent would allow users to create 3D models of themselves, customizing features like hair, eyes, nose, eyebrows, glasses and more; with PrimeSense, it’s possible Apple could create this model simply by looking at you with its special 3D cameras. Avatars seem geared toward kids and families, but the idea would give all iOS users a better sense of identity, while making the Apple brand (and identification procedures) a little more fun.

Microsoft has demonstrated how PrimeSense’s 3D tech could augment the TV experience, but since a new Apple television would require drastic changes across its international retail stores — which probably won’t happen in 2014 — it’s more likely 3D sensors will first be optimized in mobile products like the iPhone and iPad (and iWatch?).

It’s possible Apple could build a new 3D camera system with PrimeSense’s technology in nine months — in time for the 2014 iPhone or iPad — but releasing this technology next year may not be  a good move strategically.

Apple traditionally changes the exterior design of its iPhone every two years, which suggests we’re due for a thinner and lighter iPhone in 2014. But incorporating PrimeSense’s 3D tech would require substantial changes to the iPhone’s internal design and camera design, and would almost surely have a negative effect on the iPhone’s or iPad’s battery life. Adding 3D cameras to the next line of iPhones and iPads might not make sense short-term, but Apple fans should get excited about taking 3D pictures in 2015.

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Mitt Romney’s divisive remarks about America’s 47 percent continues to cast a long shadow over the Republican Party – and 2016 presidential hopefuls are trying to outrun it. Two frontrunners for the GOP nomination are raising an issue that has long been the preserve of the Democrats: the poor and how best to help them.

A year after Romney failed to unseat President Obama, ambitious Republicans seeking to make themselves into national figures and redefine their party are distancing themselves from the former Massachusetts governor and his inability to come across as a guy who cares about the down and out.

“A national candidate for the presidency, if they’re smart, would raise it and make it a part of their conversation and make it a party of their platform,” said Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Because the poor are citizens. They vote, they are engaged, they are aware of what’s happening to them.”

Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, says he’s only focused on his 2014 re-election bid right now, but his new book and national publicity tour – including a number of stops in Washington, D.C. – put him firmly on the 2016 map. At an event at the D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute last week, Walker took aim at Romney’s counter-productive rhetoric toward the poor.

He zeroed in on two comments from Romney in his new book, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge: the first are the infamous comments caught on video at a fundraiser and released by Mother Jones magazine in August last year.

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what ... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims,” Romney told the people at his $50,000-per-plate fundraiser. “My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

The second was Romney’s comment that he’s “not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

Republican strategist Ford O’Connell says the 47 percent line has become a buzzword, reminding voters that Republicans hate poor people. “That is something that is strapped, right or wrong, to the Republican brand,” he said. “If [Republicans] want to win the White House or to get into a position of power again, they’re going to have to break that label.”

Walker repeatedly distanced himself from these comments. “Most people in my state who are temporarily living in poverty, who are temporarily dependent on government, don’t want to be,” he told the audience at AEI. “The American dream is not to become dependent on the government.”

Republicans often blame government programs for turning Americans into dependent and ambitionless moochers. From there, it’s a short step to calling them moochers outright, as Romney did when he thought the cameras weren’t watching. Walker’s remarks walk that back significantly.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Romney’s running mate, is also rehabilitating his image, and a new anti-poverty plan will be a central feature in his political makeover. The Washington Post recently ran a story about Ryan with sources divulging how uncomfortable he felt about Romney’s 47 percent comments.

“[F]our advisers who worked with him on the campaign said he was mortified by Romney’s 47-percent remarks. Two of those advisers said Ryan spoke directly to Romney about it in mid-September 2012,” the Post reported. According to the story, Ryan wanted to focus on poverty from the moment he joined the ticket, but the Romney campaign just couldn’t make it happen. Ryan hasn’t ruled out a 2016 run and he certainly sees the need to shake the 47 percent label.

The Post story is just the beginning of Ryan’s planned comeback. He also has a book in the works and, more importantly, is planning to unveil a major anti-poverty plan in 2014, 50 years after President Lyndon Johnson’s famous War on Poverty was launched.

Thus far, details of the plan are scant, but there’s little reason to think they will increase the federal government’s safety net. “Paul wants people to dream again,” Bishop Shirley Holloway, who ministers to the poor in Washington, D.C., and received a visit from Ryan, told the Post. “You don’t dream when you’ve got food stamps.”

“I’ve been very heartened to hear and to see Paul Ryan raise this conversation,” said Steele. “Since my days as a county chairman I’ve made this argument, and it drives me nuts that the party whistles past” the poverty issue, he said. “We’ve gotten sidetracked by other conversations that have nothing to do with our core argument, and that is economic empowerment, ownership and opportunity.”

Romney’s 47 percent comment was harmful to his campaign, but it did not create the impression that he lacked sympathy for the plight of poor Americans; it merely reinforced it. Months before the comment surfaced, polls already showed that Romney had a big empathy gap with voters. In other words, people didn’t think Romney cared about them.

After the election, a report by the Republican National Committee noted that “The perception, revealed in polling, that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party” and is “a major deficiency that must be addressed.”

A multi-millionaire whose background included buying companies, laying off workers and selling those companies on again, sometimes to fail, Romney was the wrong champion for the GOP if its goal was to come across as the party of the working poor and middle class. But Democrats feel it wasn’t just the aloof Romney who was easy to portray as uncaring and out-of-touch; they believe it was the Republican Party as a whole that had abandoned the poor.

From Ryan’s safety net-slashing budget plans to Republicans’ broader attempt to cut programs like food stamps, reducing assistance to the poor has given the GOP its reputation as the party of the rich.

“The GOP problem with low income Americans isn’t the legacy of Mitt Romney; it is their fundamental philosophy that the number one job for government is to help the wealthy,” said Democratic strategist Bill Burton. “At a moment when wage disparity is bigger than it’s ever been in the history of the world, it is something that Americans are more acutely aware of than they have ever been.”

“Romney was just a symptom of the overall disease infecting the Republican Party,” Republican strategist Mark McKinnon said. “The fatal flaw in the GOP brand today is that average Americans don't think Republicans care about people like them.”

The current fight over the budget and Farm Bill, both currently being negotiated between House Republicans and Senate Democrats, highlights the GOP’s problem. If no budget agreement is reached because Republicans, led by Ryan, refuse to accept any tax increases, Democrats will be able to attack them for refusing to ease painful spending cuts by closing tax loopholes for the rich.

Same goes for the Farm Bill, where Republicans want to cut the food stamps program, which helps feed one in seven Americans, by nearly $40 billion.

“It doesn’t look good,” O’Connell said, conceding that the public perception of the battle over food stamps is not helping Republicans shake their bash-the-poor reputation. “Republicans need to take a look at their policies,” he said. “But, at the end of the day, the optics of ‘Do you care about me?’ is what’s killing them.”

That’s where he thinks Ryan and Walker are on the right track: build relationships with poor communities so they will be receptive to your ideas. “You have got to begin that process now and really make inroads,” he said.

Steele sees it slightly differently: If Republicans want to cut programs, they need to explain why they are doing it. “One of the problems Republicans have is they start chopping without explanation, without putting context, so they become easy prey to those who say, 'You hate poor people and you want to kick them off food stamp programs,’” he said. “If the goal is to help transition people to a better way of life that they define for themselves…we need to talk with clarity about how we do that.”

In Wisconsin, Walker is implementing a new work requirement for able-bodied food stamp recipients without children. Estimates show the changes could push tens of thousands of poor people out of the program.

But Walker defends the reform in his book. “Our critics say that I must hate poor people because I’m making it harder to get government assistance,” he wrote. “The opposite is true. I love the people of my state so much that I don’t want them to be permanently dependent on the government.”

Both sides acknowledge that Democrats have the upper hand when it comes to the issue of poverty, but Burton, who arguably helped create that advantage as a senior adviser to the anti-Romney super PAC Priorities USA Action in the 2012 election cycle, doesn’t think Democrats should rest on their laurels.

“I believe there is an opening for Democrats to make a case on some of these core progressive issues and it’s important that we do so,” he said, noting that Democrats often shy away from poverty issues. “I’d love to see the rise of a band of Democrats in government who are more sensible but just as vociferous on issues for the poor as the Tea Party is on issues of taxes and debt.”

You might not recall hearing about an undocumented Nepalese man who was picked up by U.S. border cops in south Texas a year ago. His case didn’t make the news at first, perhaps because federal health officials wanted to avoid a panic. But earlier this year, when a Wall Street Journal reporter finally broke the story, it was clear right away why the feds were nervous. The detainee was suffering from a particularly nasty disease – contagious, tough to treat, and potentially deadly. It was the superbug they call “extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis,” XDR-TB for short.

Ordinary tuberculosis is bad enough. Once the leading cause of death in the United States, the airborne disease still ranks second only to AIDS in worldwide fatalities from contagious illness, with 1.3 million dead last year alone, according to the World Health Organization. Of people infected by the bacterium, only 10 percent or so will ever develop an active case of tuberculosis. But those victims will need six months or more of continuous, closely supervised anti-TB drug treatment. Without that, the odds are two out of three that the disease will eventually kill them.

Worse yet, the threat is evolving – not only in the developing world, but also inside the United States, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded nearly 10,000 cases of TB last year. Tuberculosis germs are tough, and if a patient’s course of treatment is interrupted, drug-resistant strains can develop and infect other individuals. The same can happen when health-care providers prescribe the wrong medicine, the wrong dose, or too short a course of treatment. And the necessary drugs and medical services are too often in short supply in some poorer areas, even in our own country.

The danger is real. Last year, according to the WHO, an estimated 450,000 people around the world developed multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) – that is, a variant strain that can’t be cured by the first-line drugs routinely used against ordinary tuberculosis. Treatment of those cases requires an extended course of second-line drugs, which tend to be more expensive and a lot tougher on the patient’s underlying health – when they can be obtained at all.

As if that concern isn’t serious enough, badly treated cases of MDR-TB can give rise to the even more virulent XDR-TB, like the strain that infected the Nepalese traveler. According to the WHO, nearly 10 percent of the world’s MDR-TB patients are suffering from extensively drug-resistant variants of the disease. For those victims at least two of the most-prescribed second-line drugs are as useless as first-line drugs are for victims of ordinary MDR-TB. Their only hope is at least two years of high-priced, high-risk treatment. Even then the prognosis is poor.

MDR-TB has been present in the United States for many years, and although it remains comparatively rare, it’s not going away. There were 127 cases reported in 2011, the most recent year for which complete figures are available, and epidemiologists are convinced that a significant share of them were homegrown, not imported. XDR-TB has been even scarcer, with only 63 confirmed cases in the past 20 years.

But public-health experts are concerned about a major drug-resistant outbreak in the U.S. It’s a genuine risk among the nation’s poor, especially those without access to basic medical care. And there’s no way to ignore the massive inmate populations of America’s prisons and immigrant detention centers – overcrowded and underfunded facilities that are petri dishes for all sorts of communicable diseases. Many of those convicts and asylum seekers ultimately go free, whether or not they’re sick.

Government policies are supposed to protect the public, but the system isn’t foolproof, and some cases slip through. Protection against TB depends on a complex coordination of state, local, and tribal health departments, each receiving expert guidance and resources from the CDC. The task is to spot cases of the disease as promptly as possible, and then to comply with U.S. standards requiring public-health workers to ensure the patient receives and takes the necessary drugs, often on a biweekly basis and continuing for a year or more.

The trouble is that America is such a transient society. Despite the need for uninterrupted treatment, local health authorities are handicapped in efforts to keep track of tuberculosis patients who relocate. The country’s public-health apparatus is fragmented, and often when a case crosses from one jurisdiction to another, there’s no way to make the handoff, or even to locate and warn people who may have been exposed in transit.

On top of everything else, there’s the problem of money. TB treatment is time-consuming and expensive, even for the most routine, nonresistant occurrences of the disease. Nevertheless, budget hawks in Congress have cut the funds the CDC receives for allocation to state TB programs. Compounding the damage, cash-strapped state and municipal governments have reduced their own public-health funding.

Heroic public-health professionals across the country are somehow finding ways to surmount many of these difficulties. Eventually, however, a crisis seems all but inevitable. Public health is always “local,” in the sense that it’s primarily about individuals, their loved ones, and communities. But preventing epidemics requires a broader vision and long-term investment. Unfortunately, budget cutters seem blind to human costs.

Polly Price is a professor at Emory Law School. 

There's a White House website that actually works: the 2013 National Thanksgiving Turkey games.

Don't worry, this is no death panel: Caramel and Popcorn, both male turkeys who enjoy pop divas, will be pardoned by President Obama on Wednesday.

Before then, you can vote online for whomever you think should be the National Thanksgiving Turkey. Do you prefer a more garbled gobble with longer notes (Popcorn) or a "quick, clear and frequent" call (Caramel)? A steady, deliberate walk (Caramel) or a proud strut (Popcorn)? Choose carefully, and may the gobble be ever in your favor.

Lara Logan, the CBS correspondent behind the since-discredited 60 Minutes report on the Islamist assault in Benghazi that killed U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, is taking a leave of absense from the program, along with producer Max McClellan.

Logan has been taking heat since the October 27 report, which featured an eyewitness account from security contractor Dylan Davies that was later discredited. CBS officially retracted the report earlier this month, with Jeff Fager, the head of the network's news division, saying"when you come forward and admit a mistake, people will understand."

CBS sources tell the New York Times that Fager is meeting with staffers this afternoon to discuss the Benghazi story and Logan’s leave of absence. In a memo sent to employees, and published by the Huffington Post, Fager said “I pride myself in catching almost everything, but this deception got through and it shouldn’t have.”

Fager’s memo also included a summary of findings on the Benghazi story, including that Logan and McClellan “did not sufficiently vet Davies’ account of his own actions and whereabouts” on the night of the attack. Fager also notes that “the wider reporting resources of CBS News were not employed in an effort to confirm [Davies'] account," and says Logan's "assertions that Al Qaeda carried out the attack and controlled the hospital were not adequately attributed in her report." 

Both Logan and McClellan have had distinguished careers at CBS. Said one CBS News colleague, Max McClellan “has no political agenda. He is one of the most straight ahead people you will ever meet. He’s not just respected, but liked. People have a high regard for him. I have a high regard for him.” 

Logan’s leave comes the same day as a report that she will no longer be hosting the Committee to Protect Journalists’ press freedom awards dinner, and after both Newsweek and Gawker raised questions about her husband’s involvement in the Benghazi report.

As part of a partnership with Goodreads, Newsweek is outlining information from Goodreads Choice Awards 2013 finalists in five separate categories, providing summary and review details on everything from the latest hot memoir to the most critically acclaimed piece of historical fiction. 

Here are the Goodreads Top 10 history and biography finalists, plus a Goodreads review and some entertaining reviews from Amazon. Go vote for your favorite!

THE BOYS IN THE BOAT - Daniel James Brown

Goodreads Top Review:

"If I told you one of the most propulsive reads you will experience this year is the non-fiction story of eight rowers and one coxswain training to attend the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, you may not believe me. But you’d need to back up your opinion by reading this book first, and you will thank me for it. Daniel James Brown has done something extraordinary here. We may already know the outcome of that Olympic race, but the pacing is exceptional. Brown juxtaposes descriptions of crew training in Seattle with national races against the IV League in Poughkeepsie; we see developments in a militarizing Germany paired with college competitions in depression-era United States; individual portraits of the “boys” (now dead) are placed alongside cameos of their coaches; he shares details of the early lives of a single oarsman, Joe Rantz, with details of his wife's parallel experiences." -Trish
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“In a perfect world, this would be #1 on the bestseller lists, Daniel James Brown's name would be a household word, and this would be made into an Academy Award winning movie. It is that good... I should mention that even the bibliography is incredible.” (Babbo)

THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY - Denise Kiernan

Goodreads Top Review:

"Most of the adult non-fiction I have read in recent years has been pretentious, badly written and highly overrated by reviewers. And this one is outstanding. From the first page, it reads like a well written novel--only it tells a true story. It's the story of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a city created by the government to develop the atomic bomb program. Thousands of men and women come to live and work in Oak Ridge from all over the country, but only a few actually have any sort of idea of what their work is about. It is not until the first atomic bomb is dropped on Japan that the secret comes out--security is that fierce." -The Library Lady
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“This book is a perfect example of the sorry state of book publishing these days. The author has done great research and has lots of interesting information, but her book is in desperate need of editing. Lots of things are repeated 2 or 3 times. A tighter organization would have helped a lot. OK, I know editing is expensive and that publishing's profits are rapidly diminishing, but the demise of editing is a great loss to the reading public.” (Kathleen W Shepherd)

DIRTY WARS - Jeremy Scahill

Goodreads Top Review:

"[R]egardless of stripe, if you want to read a clear and documented (sometimes too documented, at the cost of pacing) look at how America has come to be on a 'perpetual war footing', where the entire world is the battlefield, grab this book. There is plenty of outrage to go around." -Elmwoodblues
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“The good: this is extremely well researched, detailed, and informative. The bad: the subject matter is depressing. I lean to the left and I have to say my opinion of Obama took a big hit while reading this.” (S. Bowman)

“The book will scare the hell out of you. This book discusses many dirty secrets the US Government has employed in the war on terror.” (Allen Smith)

MANSON - Jeff Guinn

Goodreads Top Review:

"The most striking quality of this book was its tremendous readability; it proved a real page turner. I am a fan of true crime journalism, stories, etc., but I had no real interest in the Manson case beforehand. The author, Jeff Guinn, sure converted me quickly." -Kara
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“This is the story of a pathetic little man who would have been nothing but another deadbeat freeloader had the stars not aligned, had he not found pathetic gullible followers. But he did, and he became both infamous and famous, and more lives were destroyed than only those murdered by Manson and the family.” (Just My Op)

THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT - Rick Atkinson

Goodreads Top Review:

"This book continues Atkinson’s monumental study of the Allied armies in North Africa and Europe. Here we see the planning of the Normandy invasion to the capitulation of German forces. There are judgments as to generals. Patton gets high marks. Eisenhower is shown as a work in progress, a man who would grow into the job. Montgomery’s own words paint him in buffoonerous hues but Atkinson still offered that Monty, while “careless with the truth,” nevertheless “was as responsible as any man for victory in Normandy.” -Tony
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“Sing song. Lots of it. Accompanied by the increasing presence of obese sentences - usually in the form of one or two lengthy complete sentences, illogically conjoined with an "and" to form a monstrosity. I haven't seen anything this bad since Adam Zamoyski's "Moscow 1812, Napoleon's Fatal March" (HarperCollins 2004).” (Don Reed)

JIM HENSON - Brian Jay Jones

Goodreads Top Review:

"Jones' biography abounds with details like the challenges of recording scenes with Muppets on locations away from the studio, or re-designing a puppet's eyes so she looks softer, or re-creating a whole character, like one pig (just like many others in the batch) who becomes Miss Piggy. Stories within stories. Fascinating. ou bring your own memories to this book, and you find yourself saying, "I remember when...." -Ken Bronsil
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“I did quite a lot of youtube searches while reading this book. I had so much fun reading about the birth of the characters I know and love so well, that I had to pause and watch them. My Netflix queue has ballooned considerably as a result of reading this book. And I'm not ashamed one bit about being a 30-something supposed adult checking out Sesame Street Old School DVDs from the library yesterday.” (Jessiqa)

FROZEN IN TIME - Mitchell Zuckoff

Goodreads Top Review:

"Mitchell Zuckoff seems to be making a habit of looking into the travails of crash victims. His prior book, Lost in Shangri-la , followed three survivors of a WW II era plane crash in New Guinea. They faced the usual sorts of dangers, a step back to the Paleolithic, and a diverse assortment of possible ways to die; cannibals, elements of an enemy army, all sorts of predatory and/or poisonous critters, microscopic invaders that could ruin your day, and help see that it is your last. The whole world was watching and cheering for their safe return. Reversing his orientation a bit this time Zuckoff, in his latest WW II opus, Frozen in Time, has substituted brutal cold, and a particularly unwelcoming landscape for those other hazards." -Will Byrnes
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“The descriptions of the downed airmen in Greenland's icy landscape were enough to make a person shiver; likewise the descriptions of what the crew did to stay alive were vivid and well-explained. I would have given it five stars but I didn't love the subject matter or the subject place.” (Looking for the Rainbow)

EMPTY MANSIONS - Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

"Huguette Clark was born to nearly unimaginable wealth and privilege. Her father, William A. Clark, was a copper baron who made several fortunes, particularly in mining and railroads, booming industries during America's Gilded Age. At the time of his death in 1925, he had a huge fortune to leave to his heirs, including his youngest child, Huguette Marcelle Clark. Huguette married once, but got divorced after approximately a year. She then turned to a very private life, far from the social whirl of New York's elite. Over time, fewer and fewer people heard from her, and hardly anyone saw her. She lived in a grand apartment on New York's Fifth Ave., with her mother, an extremely valuable art collection, as well as her beloved collection of dolls, miniature houses, and Stradivarius violins. She owned extensive properties, including a mansion with an estate in New Canaan, CT that she never lived in or furnished, and a grand mansion and grounds in Santa Barbara, CA." -Kris
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“As a miniaturist, I am anxious to learn the outcome of Huguette's doll houses and I do wish this book had gone into more details of the houses and their contents.” (Martha Bates)

ONE SUMMER - Bill Bryson

Goodreads Top Review:

"I suppose Bill Bryson’s latest effort is a piece of historical journalism. It digests and packages a slice of American history for the idly curious (which is Bryson’s readership –I never miss a book). With the advantage of historical distance we are made nostalgic for a moment we never experienced. Indeed, almost no one alive can actually remember it. To people Bryson’s age (which is roughly my age plus a nickel or a dime) the names and events from the late 1920’s buzzed around our childhood ears in the conversations of our now departed parents and grandparents. But to anyone younger than 40, most of this stuff is completely unfamiliar. I don’t know exactly why the period from April to early October of this particular year suggested itself to Bryson –he might as easily have chosen any six-month period between 1925 and 1929. Yet, as he says, it was 'one hell of a summer.' It compares with other famous summers in American history, little epochs in which we see Americana in high tide. 1942 and 1967 come immediately to mind."-Randy Auxier
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“This book is so filled with interesting trivia about the years in and around 1927 that it makes your head swim. But it is engaging and interesting stuff filled with Americana that I never really knew much about. A great read. We're proud to call Bill an 'Iowan'!” (William Kuhlman)

EIGHTY DAYS - Matthew Goodman

Goodreads Top Review:

"On November 14, 1889, muckraking reporter Nellie Bly left New York City on the first leg of a round-the-world race to beat Phileas Fogg's time of eighty days. Fogg, you will remember, was a fictional character created by French author Jules Verne. Bly would not know until she reached Hong Kong that she was also in a race with a real person, another American writer named Elizabeth Bisland. Bly had three days to get ready, Elizabeth about twelve hours, Bly was traveling east, Bisland west. Bly's trip was funded by her employer, Joseph Pulitzer's The World newspaper, Bisland's by The Cosmopolitan magazine, for which she wrote freelance. The two women could not have been more unlike, as the trip was all eager Bly's idea and reluctant Bisland was fairly dropped in it by her editor. Both publications were in it to raise circulation." -Dana Stabenow
Read the full review.

Our Favorite Amazon Review:

“I learned that before the railroads, there were 27 times zones in the state of Illinois and 38 in Wisconsin. Boston was 12 minutes ahead of New York. It was the railroad companies, not the government, who got together and instituted the four time zones we have today which happened on November 18, 1883.” (Alan A. Elsner)

Two American B-52 bombers flew into a contested area in the East China Sea this week, directly challenging a zone Beijing unilaterally set up just days ago in order to, as a Chinese official sees it, “defend our airspace,” escalating the already heightened tensions in Asia.

The U.S. planes flew Monday evening over a chain of uninhabitable islands where China and Japan have repeatedly clashed recently, without notifying the Chinese authorities. China earlier set up the area they called an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), demanding that any aircraft must clear its flight pattern there with Beijing before entering it.

“It’s the right of every country to defend its airspace,” China’s ambassador to the United Nations, Liu Jieyi, told me. Setting up an ADIZ is “a normal arrangement” in international affairs, he added. “Just imagine the reaction if Chinese jets [flew unannounced] over New York or Washington,” he said. He insisted that the new Chinese-set zone does not restrict commercial flights.

Nevertheless, Liu cautioned against “making too much” of the flight of the B-52s, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. But while declining to define the American aircraft maneuvering as a “provocation,” Liu nevertheless pointed to some of the larger issues underlying the latest incident, including the wide gap between American military abilities and those of China.

“The U.S. is monitoring China constantly, using satellites and ships,” he said. “We don’t have such technology.”

Washington immediately denounced China’s announcement over the weekend that it planned to set up a new ADIZ over the contested area. The new move “constitutes an attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea,” said Secretary of State John Kerry. “Escalatory action will only increase tensions in the region and create risks of an incident.”

Although American officials have thus far refrained from taking sides in the various territorial disputes in the East China Sea, Washington officials had already made clear America’s defense treaty with Japan covers an island chain in the area which China considers to be part of its airspace, but which Tokyo has long administered.

Japan also denounced the provocative nature of the Chinese announcement. “We are determined to defend our country’s air and sea space,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in the Japanese parliament on Monday. “The measures by the Chinese side have no validity whatsoever for Japan,” he said. South Korea and Taiwan, which also claim sovereignty over areas that China now included in its ADIZ, also condemned the move.

The hottest contest is an area known in Japanese as the Senakaku Islands and that China calls Diaoyu. Although uninhabitable, the atoll is rich in minerals, fishery and oil. In recent years, and increasingly in 2013, Chinese military crafts, at times disguised as fishing boats, entered the zone, prompting Japan to dispatch its military craft to warn them off.

The confrontations with China have raised Japanese nationalist sentiments. China, meanwhile, has vastly increased its military expenditure to raise its regional influence to match its burgeoning economic prowess.

Pentagon officials defined the Monday flight of the two Guam-based B-52s as “routine.” The unarmed bombers took part in a long-planned military exercise dubbed “Coral Lightning.”

No other U.S. planes entered the zone, and the planes returned to their Guam Anderson Air Force base without incident. The Chinese foreign ministry, however, was not notified of the flight in advance, as required by their new ADIZ rules.

Follow Benny Avni on Twitter: @bennyavni

When 200 of CGI Federal’s top managers gathered at the luxurious Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in southwestern Pennsylvania on a brisk day in early November 2009, they found time for business -- and high jinks.

During the two-day event, managers presented PowerPoint slides celebrating the phenomenal success of CGI Federal, a major technology contractor, in winning lucrative government contracts. Most attendees stayed in the resort’s Chateau Lafayette hotel, a replica of the Ritz-Carlton in Paris, and at a formal dinner under the elaborate chandelier in the ballroom, George D. Schindler, the president of CGI Federal, spoke of the company’s big profits that year and its bright future.

The fun came during a team-building exercise following a boozy lunch in conference rooms not far from the hotel’s Lady Luck casino. Managers were split off into small groups and asked to solve math-laden riddles. For each correct answer, they received a bicycle part. The goal was for the teams, around 20 or so, to assemble children’s pink and blue bicycles, then race their tasseled bikes up and down the carpeted corridors of the hotel.

“People were riding these bikes drunk through the hallways of the resort,” recalls one former manager who attended the event, while others were “duck-walking” the children’s bikes, which were too small for most adults to sit on. Amid “a lot of hooting and hollering,” the manager recalls, the hotel staff was laughing. “Some people were bombed out of their minds until 2 a.m. It was greed and opulence, and it was on the taxpayers’ dime.”

He was wrong about one thing: taxpayers didn’t pay directly for the event for CGI Federal, the American arm of Montreal-based CGI Group that is known these days as the main company behind the glitch-plagued Healthcare.gov website, the engine of President Barack Obama’s health care law. Through a lucrative government contract, CGI Federal is the principal contractor assigned the daunting job of building the federal online insurance marketplace -- a large, complex website intended to help millions of ordinary Americans obtain health insurance that instead has become a byword for technological failure.

American taxpayers are among the main drivers of earnings at CGI, whose stock market value is $11.6 billion. For its recently-ended fourth quarter, the company’s revenue grew nearly 53 percent, to $2.38 billion. That put its total revenue for its fiscal 2013, which ended in September, at more than $9.8 billion, with nearly $442 million in profits.

CGI Federal and its parent company, CGI, do behind-the-scenes work, often with “Top Secret” clearance, for hundreds of American and foreign government agencies -- from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and State Department to the Kyrgyzstan Border Service and World Anti-Doping Agency. But the questions swirling around the company go beyond how it mangled the showpiece reform of Obama’s presidency. Some investors and analysts are expressing concerns about potentially aggressive bookkeeping, weak disclosure practices and corporate governance issues.

In recent months, Deutsche Bank and at least one hedge fund, 683 Capital Management in New York, have been asking if the company is double-counting revenues. Mike Yerashotis, an analyst at Veritas Investment Research, an independent equity research firm in Toronto, writes in recent research notes that investors should have a “healthy degree of scepticism” about CGI’s earnings. Yerashotis, a chartered financial analyst, cites a “red flag” around complex accounting issues, including deferred revenues, contract losses and work in progress.

Other issues predate the Obamacare debacle. In November 2011, a whistle-blower sued the company, claiming that an internal CGI Federal “Rat Pack” planned a “shell-company scheme” designed to get around U.S. Housing and Urban Development restrictions on subcontractors processing federally subsidized low-income housing payments -- effectively defrauding the U.S. government. In an 2010 email, a CGI manager drolly dubbed the scheme the “flying nun,” a reference to the 1960s television sitcom featuring actress Sally Field as a nun with a shady past. CGI Federal manages more than 25 percent of the nation’s Section 8 low-income apartments and houses, earning some $50 million a year from the business.

“Wheeling ’n Dealin’”

CGI had humble beginnings, and those early years provide some clues as to how CGI Federal ended up getting ripped in headlines for the Obamacare flop.

Established by Serge Godin, now the company’s executive board chairman, in Quebec City in 1976, CGI began with small local projects, including a contract for data-processing at an Alcan aluminum smelter in Godin’s French-speaking hometown of Saguenay, a town of nearly 144,000 residents 285 miles north of Montreal.

The nascent field of information technology was on the verge of booming, and Godin jumped in, expanding CGI’s workforce, gobbling up smaller Canadian technology companies and landing contracts with Bell Canada, the National Bank of Canada and Quebec’s pension plan.

But Godin, who grew up one of nine children and now owns a champion harness-racing horse named ‘Wheeling ’n Dealin’, had bigger plans. He had long dreamed of jumping the border to get into the lucrative U.S. market. In 2004, after decades of smaller acquisitions of Canadian companies, he got his chance: CGI snapped up a faltering Fairfax, Va.-based technology and consulting company called American Management Systems for $858 million in cash. AMS, eventually renamed CGI Federal, was founded by five former Defense Department officials who had worked under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during Kennedy and Johnson.

The deal was a turning point for CGI, doubling its size in the United States overnight. More importantly, it gave CGI -- until then generally locked out of bidding on U.S. federal contracts due to U.S. restrictions on foreign contractors -- a valuable U.S. subsidiary it could use to court American agencies for business. CGI, whose initials stand for Conseiller en Gestion et Informatique, began using the phrase “Consultants to Government and Industry” in corporate materials.

Riding its self-described “buy and build” strategy -- and determined not to be a Salieri to the Mozart of Accenture -- CGI Group in 2010 bought Stanley Associates, an Arlington, Va.-based contractor to the nation’s defense and intelligence agencies. The $1 billion deal doubled again CGI’s U.S. operations and made Godin, who owns some 31 million shares in the company, including a majority of CGI’s voting stock,  a billionaire, according to securities filings. Still, there was a divide between Montreal-based CGI Group and its fast-growing U.S. subsidiary CGI Federal, as the parent company’s “hand’s off” approach largely left the growing U.S. subsidiaries to their own devices. “Montreal wasn’t really involved in Federal’s business,” says a former executive.

Godin stepped down as chief executive of CGI Group in 2006, handing the day-to-day responsibilities to Michael E. Roach, but he still wields enormous power over the company, according to current and former insiders.

Former executives say the company still very much reflects his unusual management philosophy. CGI has a slim policy manual and relatively little in-house training for its staff -- unusual for a company that now has 69,000 employees across 400 worldwide offices. Under a “make your own job” ethos, CGI Group generally does not give employees job descriptions or job titles; instead, it lumps their skills into a database and requires them to find their own projects within the company. As part of that “manage yourself” mandate, CGI doesn’t even track sick days, and its three-week “bench policy” requires an employee to find a new project in that time-frame or risk being fired. Most employees are identified as “consultants,” and are compensated through profit-sharing plans. All that traces back to Godin’s favorite saying: “Nobody ever washes a rental car” -- if you own it, you will take care of it.

“Everyone is kind of self-employed,” says Gordon Divitt, a senior executive consultant at CGI in 2007 who was chief information officer at Interac, a Canadian ATM company for which CGI ran technological plumbing. “You’ve got to manage yourself, which is very unusual at a company this size.” Godin, he says, espoused “a philosophical approach, rather than a traditional hierarchical approach.”

Many big corporations have “mission statements,” essentially feel-good boilerplate outlining their raison d’etre. CGI has a “Constitution,” with “chapters” laying out “Fundamental Texts.” The unusual manifesto-style document, available on CGI’s website and referenced in securities filings, extols what the company has long called “The CGI Dream: ...to create an environment in which we enjoy working together and, as owners, contribute to building a company we can be proud of.”  “Serge believes CGI is truly unique,” says a person close to Godin.

Despite its atypical management philosophy, CGI Federal sought to cultivate a more mainstream image, in line with that of competitors like Accenture, Cap Gemini and IBM’s government-contracting division. CGI Federal staffed up on former government managers and executives from the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies. In 2008, it created the CGI Institute for Collaborative Government -- a think-tank with policy specialists at George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University and Virginia Tech.

The institute reflects CGI’s growing vision of itself as being embedded in the government agencies it serves. Mark Abrahamson, the former executive director of IBM Center who served as an informal consultant to the CGI iteration, says contractors like CGI “get really attached to their mission -- they think they’re working for the public good and providing a public service.” A senior technology executive familiar with CGI puts it more bluntly: “They think they’re part of the government.”

AMS provided most of the executive and managerial manpower at CGI Federal, which almost overnight had a new book of federal contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services, Los Angeles County and other agencies. At the helm was Schindler and his team -- the ardent cyclists at the Nemacolin event in November. In January, the company promoted Schindler to president of U.S. and Canada for CGI Group, giving him a larger role overseeing CGI Federal within the parent company.

But with its history of botched federal contracts, including a $60 million screw-up for the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, the overseer of retirement accounts for 4.6 million current and former federal employees, AMS has also supplied some headaches.

These days, says one insider briefed on the matter, CGI “doesn’t want to be associated with the AMS culture.” Asked about cultural differences, a CGI Federal spokeswoman said that there weren’t any and called both companies “introverted” and “heads down.” Asked to elaborate, the spokeswoman pointed to the “lack of advertising” by both companies.

But Peter Bourke, an American consultant who helped the two companies integrate, saw something different. “With the merger, both companies had the interesting challenge of merging two different cultures,” he writes in a CGI “case study” on his website.

The Double-Dip Sundae

Last year, CGI got into the Asian and European markets when it acquired Logica plc, an Anglo-Dutch technology firm, for $2.7 billion -- its biggest acquisition, one that made it the world’s fifth largest information-technology company. Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a lobbying group, thinks CGI’s sights are set even higher: “What they would like to be is a Lockheed Martin -- the largest government contractor” in its industry.

Before this deal, most CGI employees were in Canada and the United States, with some in India, but it now had access to many more educated, lower-cost technology workers in Hyderabad and Bangalore.

With CGI’s global reach expanding, one Logica business the company jumped into was a Dutch crime-watch service called Burgernet, a “citizen’s network” that resembles a neighborhood watch group on technological steroids, with deep ties to the state.  In a promotional video for Burgernet, two hoodlums on a red moped in the outskirts of Amsterdam snatch a brown purse from a woman pushing a baby in a stroller. A bystander witnessing the crime whips out his cell phone and calls a special Dutch government center to report the theft. A blond-haired dispatcher quickly texts a “keep-an-eye-out-for-these-guys” message to local shopkeepers and residents, and loops in the police. Calls fly back and forth, as “Pot,” a white-coated butcher, and “Mr. Smit,” a young man glancing out his apartment window, ring the center to report sightings.

The scenario, set to dramatic, campy music, is a striking example of how CGI, like most federal contractors, views the deep intertwining of business and federal agencies. CGI touts Burgernet (the name has nothing to do with hamburgers--it refers to the Dutch word for “citizen”) as “a great success,” with more than 1.3 million people in 382 cities and towns across the Netherlands signed up.

Logica is a very good business, in other words, but is it as good as CGI says it is?

In the past 15 months, CGI has three times made accounting adjustments to the deal adding up to $1.1 billion, according to an analysis of securities filings by Yerashotis, who covers the company for Veritas Investment Research in Toronto.  

The adjustments mean CGI can record an additional $1.1 billion in pre-tax earnings, from related increases in revenue and decreases in expenses. That is something investors like, because earnings are a key driver of a company's stock price. But Yerashotis, who first flagged the issue last March, argues in a Nov. 14 research note that the economic picture behind CGI's earnings may be different: that the adjustments will not produce a corresponding amount of cold, hard cash -- a key metric to the health of corporate earnings.

Yerashotis suggests that while the move appears to be legal, it might make CGI’s earnings -- and share price -- appear stronger than they really are.

In a Nov. 14 research note, Bryan Keane and Ashish Sabadra, equity analysts who cover CGI for Deutsche Bank and have a “sell” rating on the stock, wrote that “we continue to question the quality of the company’s earnings,” and 638 Capital, a hedge fund in New York, has similar questions, according to a person briefed on the matter. The fund declined to comment.

Skeptical analysts have honed in on increases for accounting purposes regarding money related to contract work Logica has completed but for which it has not yet submitted bills -- so-called deferred revenue. Making the increases allows CGI to shrink that liability as Logica gets paid, and record a corresponding increase in income -- even though there is no corresponding additional cash coming in from those contracts because Logica already accounted for that revenue prior to its acquisition by CGI. In his research note, Yerashotis flags that gap, noting that over its last fiscal year, CGI’s earnings before interest and taxes nearly doubled, while its free cash flow appears to have increased by only 58 percent.

The disconnect could potentially dim prospects for shareholders, who probably know that CGI has never paid a dividend on its stock.

In their report, the Deutsche Banks analysts ask if CGI is effectively “double-counting revenues.” Deutsche Bank declined to make Keane or Sabadra available for questions.

None of that seems to worry most equity analysts. In recent weeks, more than a dozen brokerage firms have raised their target price on CGI’s stock. Scott Penner, who covers the company for TD Securities and is also a chartered financial analyst, has slammed the Veritas and Deutsche Bank analyses. Logica’s accounting prior to its acquisition, Penner wrote on Sept. 3, “was clearly a more aggressive way of recognizing revenue… yet Veritas (and now this broker)” -- meaning Deutsche Bank -- “spins it as CGI being more aggressive.”

A spokesperson for Ernst & Young in Montreal, which audits CGI, did not return calls requesting comment.

Asked about the accounting questions, Lorne Gorber, CGI’s senior vice president for global communications and investor relations, says doubters “don’t know our company. These guys are outliers… they’re looking at complex accounting issues, and investors have to wait and see” as the integration of Logica is completed “and assume the progress we’ve made will stand for itself.”

Rescued by The Flying Nun

In early 2010, CGI Federal managers in Fairfax, Va., caught wind of some potentially devastating news: HUD, one of its biggest government clients, was considering limiting the number of Section 8 low-income houses and apartments for which any one federal contractor could process payments. The biggest threat was the agency’s plan to put out to bid contracts that CGI Federal -- and others -- already held, and to limit profit margins at winning contractors to 10 percent.

At the time, CGI ran the technology governing payments for 25 percent of the nation’s Section 8 stock -- 275,000 multi-family houses and apartments. Working with local public housing authorities, as required under HUD rules, CGI Federal had generated up to $50 million a year in fees from processing Section 8 payments and performing annual inspections, among other tasks, and CGI wanted more of that business -- as much as three-quarters. At stake amid the HUD limits was $625 million in revenues over four years, according to a confidential April 8, 2010 memo.

Section 8 housing is largely a grim business in blighted urban areas. Nonetheless, CGI Federal’s profit margins on the business were large. According to a confidential three-page internal document obtained by Newsweek and dated January 28, 2010, they ran as high as 51.7 percent, more than four times the 10 percent profits cap that HUD wanted. Another worrisome point for CGI Federal: HUD’s Inspector General found that some public housing contractors, including those affiliated with CGI Federal, had over-billed the Section 8 program by tens of millions of dollars. 

In the face of this threat, some CGI Federal managers came up with an idea. “I don’t know whether this is possible or allowable, but can we create new entities for selected jurisdictions that are a joined (sic) venture of a PHA and a CGI subsidiary,” wrote Panos Kyprianou, a director of consulting services in CGI in a confidential email dated January 29, 2010 and obtained by Newsweek. “If this holds then we can get away with the unit restrictions as these entities will somehow be independent from CGI.” 

In other words, could CGI set up entities it secretly controlled, put public housing authorities in front of them, and then hide behind them when bidding on Section 8 contracts? “In other words,” Kyprianou wrote, “can we hide behind a subcontractor?”

CGI already had close ties to some public housing authorities, into which it has effectively embedded its employees. One example: the Oakland branch of California Housing Initiatives Inc recently listed Andrew Hill of CGI Federal as its contact person on its website. The link has since been removed. 

In his email, Kyprianou dubbed the proposal “flying nun” -- a reference to the 1960s sitcom about a seemingly virtuous nun with a dirty past. “The idea was to use shell companies to do the bidding, get the award and them fold them into CGI,” says one former manager. “Our business model was going to be screwed unless we used sleight of hand.”

Marybeth Carragher, a CGI vice president of consulting, replied to Kyprianou’s email that same day: “I was thinking exactly -- well almost exactly -- that scenario.” She added that she wanted to “mock up a few potential scenarios for working around” the proposed HUD restrictions.

CGI says in a statement that an alleged contracting scheme “never existed; nor was it ever contemplated.”

A spokesman for HUD in Washington, D.C. did not return calls requesting comment.

A Man Called HUD

Benjamin Ashmore, a former HUD manager hired by CGI Federal around 2009, alleges that he was fired in 2011 when he objected to behind-the-scenes proposals to skirt HUD restrictions. He filed a whistle-blower lawsuit in late 2011 that asserts CGI Federal devised a “director shell company scheme” -- a front for hiding behind public housing authorities. His lawsuit, which is wending its way through Federal  District Court in Manhattan, also alleges that CGI violated Securities and Exchange Commission fraud rules.

CGI Group argues in court papers that no SEC violations are involved because its unit, CGI Federal, is not a publicly traded company, but a judge rejected that argument.

Ashmore’s complaint alleges that CGI created an in-house team of managers to address the HUD restrictions. Formally dubbed the “Rapid Action Team,” or RAT, the group openly called itself “The Rat Pack” in a undated slide that features photographs of CGI employees next to ones of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Hollywood’s other original Rat Pack members.

In a statement, CGI Group said that “the alleged contracting scheme that Mr. Ashmore describes never existed; nor was it ever contemplated.”

Ashmore, now the founder, president and chairman of the National Family Civil Rights Center, an advocacy group with offices in Washington, D.C. and New York, says that when he left HUD to join CGI, he was “impressed with CGI and excited to join the company. It was like being dazzled by the Emerald City from afar.”

He says things turned sour when he saw what he alleges was a shell-company scheme. “Being at CGI was like peering behind the curtain and realizing that the Wizard of Oz was just a charlatan… behind the curtain, greed, deception and profits replaced common sense and ethical obligations to clients.”

Asked about Ashmore’s lawsuit, Garber says simply, “we’ll let the courts do their work--that’s what the whistle-blower function is intended to do.”

Steubenville, Ohio is now officially ready to move on from last year’s infamous teen rape case, in which a 16-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by two high school football players. Or at least that’s the message from Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, even though half the school officials indicted this week are charged with failing to report another alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl.

After Steubenville High School football players Ma'Lik Richmond and Trent Mays were convicted in March of raping a 16-year-old West Virginia girl after a drunken party in August 2012, DeWine assembled a grand jury to review whether additional crimes were committed. It met 18 times and heard from 123 witnesses. This week, the jury indicted four school officials, including Steubenville City Schools superintendent Mike McVey, who was charged with multiple felonies for obstructing justice.

A volunteer football coach was also indicted, on several misdemeanor charges, including providing alcohol to minors, along with a strength coach and elementary school principal who were both charged with one count regarding Reporting Child Abuse or Neglect, a fourth-degree misdemeanor.

The indicted employees were immediately placed on administrative leave and are due in court December 6. Two others -- the Steubenville schools' information technology director and his daughter -- were also indicted by the grand jury last month, the latter on charges unrelated to the rape case. Both pleaded not guilty.

DeWine told reporters yesterday it was unlikely there would be more charges and that it was time for Steubenville to seek closure.

“This community has suffered a great deal. I know they desperately need to be able to put this matter behind them,” he said. “All of us, no matter where we live, owe it to each other to be better neighbors, classmates, friends, citizens.

“We must treat rape and sexual assault as the serious crime of violence that is. When it’s investigated, everyone has an obligation to help find the truth — not hide the truth, not tamper with the truth, not obstruct the trust, and not destroy the truth.”

The statement is less measured that it appears, given that half the new charges are related to a separate matter: the reported rape of a 14-year-old girl in April 2012, many months before the nationally publicized case that hit the headlines.

McVey’s charges include a misdemeanor charge, alleging he made a false statement in April 2012. Gorman’s charge of failing to report possible child abuse is also from April. The Attorney General’s office confirmed that both charges were related to the alleged April rape but declined to comment on how or whether the cases of the 16-year-old and the 14-year-old were related.

Bob Fitzsimmons, the lawyer who represented “Jane Doe” in the nationally publicized case that landed Richmond and Mays in juvenile prison for at least a year, confirmed to Newsweek that he also represents the younger girl, whose family hasn’t filed charges. He declined to comment further.

The original April 2012 incident did receive some local news coverage, but not until the fall, when “those searching the Internet after the rape allegations surfaced in August also unearthed a months-old conversation among Steubenville baseball players and wrestlers about a possible April attack involving a 14-year-old student," as the Cleveland Dealer reported in September 2012. According to the paper, the girl’s family didn’t file a police report until she read that “conversation” online.

Multiple sources in Steubenville, who would only speak off the record, said the alleged sexual assault also involved Steubenville High School athletes and took place at a team coach’s house.

Yesterday’s official news release said the new charges were “regarding the Steubenville teen rape case” -- in the singular -- and, despite repeated requests from this reporter, the Attorney General’s office won’t speak on the record about any possible connection between the two incidents.

Alexandria Goddard, the legal consultant widely credited with bringing the August 2012 case to light, has covered the case of the 14-year-old on her blog, Prinnifed, including screencaps of teenagers allegedly referring to the assault (Example: “It wasn’t rape they were just making love!!!”). She told Newsweek the case has probably been further obfuscated because locals were divided on whether it was “truly consensual,” even though the legal age of consensual sex in Ohio is 16 and the purported victim just 14.

Others said the girl may have been pressured to keep quiet. At the time, Steubenville area radio host David Bloomquist, known as "Bloomdaddy,” said he thought the 14-year-old was making it up. "I guess the best way to sum up what I'm saying is this: It's easier to tell your parents you were raped than, 'Hey mom or dad, I got drunk and decided to let three guys have their way with me.'" he said.

"It's time to let Steubenville move on," Attorney general DeWine said yesterday after announcing the final four indictments. The grand jury is clearly eager to do so. But it will take more than definitive proclamations of closure to change the way people -- both in Steubenville and across the country -- talk about sexual assault and consent.

Quora Questions are part of a newly launched partnership between Newsweek and Quora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. Read more about the partnership here.

Answer from Amy Zegart, a Stanford professor, Hoover senior fellow, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and  author of Spying Blind. 

Absolutely. I’ve been conducting research into “spytainment” for several years now and believe that while blurring the line between fact and fiction makes for great entertainment, it comes at a hidden cost: Americans are steeped in misperceptions about what intelligence agencies actually do.

For example, in two national polls I commissioned last year and this October, I found that most Americans don’t know what the NSA really does. About one-third thought NSA officials were responsible for interrogating terrorists. They aren’t. Some 27 percent believe the NSA builds spy satellites. It doesn't. And half of the respondents didn’t know that the NSA engages in codebreaking. It does. A lot. The NSA was established by an order of President Harry Truman in 1952 with codebreaking as its core mission.

Further, 39 percent of the respondents in the October poll believe that metadata – the information the NSA collects as part of its bulk phone records program – includes the content of phone calls. It doesn’t.

Even our national figures are getting in on the game. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has twice suggested in public that he would turn to the fictitious intelligence operative Jack Bauer of 24 to resolve legal questions about interrogation methods.

And the relationship between Hollywood and the intelligence community in Washington is cozier than ever. The CIA has pitched storylines on its website; the Pentagon has set up an entertainment liaison office in LA; and Zero Dark 30 director Kathryn Bigelow got better access to operational details of the Osama bin Laden raid than most intelligence officers or members of Congress.
 
The February 2012 TV show, Act of Valor, used real U.S. Navy SEALS to act out a fake plotline with real tactics. In Bigelow’s Zero Dark 30, the opening frame reads: “Based on first-hand accounts of actual events.” Sounds and feels like a documentary, right? It isn’t. In fact, the film makes factually incorrect assertions that left many Americans confused about whether torture was used to obtain Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

And though 43 percent of Americans could correctly name James Clapper as the director of national intelligence, the figure jumps to 74 percent when asked to identify the celebrity who caused a global stir when she twerked on nationwide TV (Miley Cyrus).

That’s when you know American spy agencies have some major PR work to do.

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