The Food and Drug Administration recently ordered 23andMe to stop selling its popular DIY genetic screening service which, with a simple saliva swab, promises to provide, the FDA notes, “health reports on 254 disease and conditions,” “carrier status,” “health risks” and “drug response” as a “first step in prevention… [that] takes steps toward mitigating serious diseases.” In the FDA’s warning letter to Google-backed 23andMe, dated November 22 and released on Monday, officials charged that the kit is mostly intended to be used as a “medical device” – which is a big no-no since the Saliva Collection Kit and Personal Genome Service (PGS) are not approved medical devices.

While it might come as a surprise to some that a Silicon Valley darling – 23andMe is headed by biotech entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki, “the soon to be ex-wife of the Google co-founder Sergey Brin” – is under fire from the FDA, it turns out that “spit kits” have drawn the ire of the agency for years. Conflict between 23andMe and the FDA dates back to at least 2009, according to the recent warning letter. In what could fairly be described as an exasperated tone, the FDA states that it has tried working with the company so that the kit would not have to undergo some of the more cumbersome approval processes required of most medical devices, even proposing “modifications to the device’s labeling.”

Over the past four years, the FDA stated in the letter, the agency has had “more than 14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings, hundreds of email exchanges, and dozens of written communications” with 23andMe and claims to have provided the company “with specific feedback on study protocols and clinical and analytical validation requirements, discussed potential classifications and regulatory pathways (including reasonable submission timelines), provided statistical advice, and discussed potential risk mitigation strategies.” The FDA charges that instead of addressing this criticism, 23andMe ramped up marketing efforts: “We have become aware that you have initiated new marketing campaigns, including television commercials that, together with an increasing list of indications, show that you plan to expand the PGS’s uses and consumer base without obtaining marketing authorization from FDA.” Because of this, “23andMe must immediately discontinue marketing the PGS.… ”

Why has it taken four years for the FDA to drop the hammer? And why aren’t other direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies getting pounded by the FDA?

Concerns about these types of tests have been raised since at least 2004, when the American College of Medicine Genetics board of directors issued a policy statement warning that “genetic testing should be provided to the public only through the services of an appropriately qualified health-care professional,” saying their use is “potentially harmful” because of “inappropriate test utilization, misinterpretation of test results, lack of necessary follow-up, and other adverse consequences.”

The FDA maintains that it has been monitoring the field and has issued letters to companies offering these services, saying they “have been on our radar for some time.”

“Others have continued discussions with us or decided to get out of the marketplace,” an FDA spokeswoman tells Newsweek, whereas 23andMe has “escalated over the years into out-and-out medical claims.”

The company has issued a mea culpa of sorts, saying in a statement that it recognizes “we have not met the FDA’s expectations regarding timeline and communication regarding our submission. Our relationship with the FDA is extremely important to us and we are committed to fully engaging with them to address their concerns.”

When pressed for further comment, 23andMe’s publicists said they could not speak beyond what was already in the statement.

The company has 15 days to fix these problems or give the FDA a timetable for when it will fix said problems. If 23andMe doesn’t to that, the company might face “seizure, injunction, and civil money penalties.”

Michael S. Watson, executive director of the American College of Medical Genetics, tells Newsweek that the FDA’s decision is “reasonable.” Studies have found that patients armed with personal diagnostics might not pursue proper follow up treatment or might undergo unnecessary, dangerous prophylactics – such as preventive double mastectomies, he says. Genetic testing should be coupled with counseling, he says, so patients get the full picture not included in test results – namely, that having a gene doesn’t necessarily mean it will cause a disease.

The decision last year by the Supreme Court to deem Obamacare constitutional was thought to be the last word on the subject. But the legal battles are far from over.

On Tuesday, the Court agreed to hear two challenges to the part of the law that mandated non-religious institutions to cover contraception in their employees’ insurance plans. Conservatives who oppose the birth control requirement like the odds that the Justices will back them this time.

At the heart of the case is the conundrum raised by Governor Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in last year’s general election. In response to a heckler, Romney replied, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

The court will hear two cases (Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius) brought by the owners of two for-profit businesses who argue they should not have to cover certain birth control medication and devices that go against their religious beliefs. Despite a consensus in the medical community that the medication is suitable, the business owners believe these medications are abortifacients.

Both cases are complex and the court will go through several steps to reach its conclusion. First, the court must decide whether corporations have religious freedom rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). If the answer is yes, the court must then decide whether the contraception mandate is a substantial burden on the corporations’ free exercise of religion.

If the answer to that question is yes, it must decide whether the government has a compelling reason to impose such a burden. And if the answer to that final question is no, then the businesses prevail. On all three questions, conservatives think the odds are in their favor.

“I’m hopeful and confident that the Court will rule in favor of Hobby Lobby,” said Joshua Hawley, who is working for Hobby Lobby on the case and is a former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts. “As a matter of statutory interpretation, the court will rule that indeed hobby lobby qualifies for religious freedom, for protection. It will ultimately rule in Hobby Lobby’s favor.”

“I don’t usually predict the Supreme Court,” said Michael McConnell, a conservative legal scholar and former judge on the Tenth Circuit. “I will say that the private parties, the companies, have a pretty strong case.”

Perhaps the most controversial and important question facing the court is whether corporations have free exercise rights, either under RFRA, the statute, or the First Amendment. The constitutional question is somewhat sticky, but on both left and right, experts feel the Court might decide corporations have religious rights under RFRA.

“I think Hobby Lobby has a very good chance winning on the statutory question,” said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law expert at UCLA School of Law.

On the liberal side of the spectrum, the idea that corporations have the same rights as people is horrifying. “Corporations don’t pray, they don’t express devotion to a god, they don’t have a religious conscience,” said David Gans, the director of the civil rights program and left-leaning Constitutional Accountability Center.

“These claims are particularly troublesome because the owners of the corporations are effectively trying to impose their religious beliefs on their employees who may not share these religious views and want access to a full range of contraceptives.”

In trying to guess which way the Court will leap, some proponents of corporations’ religious rights, including one Tenth Circuit judge, point to the Justices highly controversial Citizens United decision, which lifted restrictions on corporate electioneering based on the free speech rights of corporations, though the constitutional question in that case included the value of speech to listeners, which is absent from the current question of free exercise.

“It’s Citizens United on steroids,” Winkler said. “Not only are corporations people, but they are devout people who pray and have their own religious beliefs.”

The implications of corporations holding devout beliefs could be wide-ranging. What if a corporation doesn’t believe in gay marriage? What if they feel the minimum wage goes against scriptural teaching? In each case, the courts would have to find the religious interest more compelling than the government interest, but it’s possible these cases could open the door to all manner of corporate exemptions from federal laws.

In June of 2012, the Supreme Court surprised many by upholding most of the Affordable Care Act in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts. As the court prepares to hear its second challenge to the law, Court-watchers are looking at the chief as well as Justice Anthony Kennedy, the most common swing vote, in order to divine which way the court will go.

McConnell points to two recent religious freedom cases, both unanimous, in which Roberts penned the opinion for the court. In the first case, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, Roberts gave a “broad interpretation” of RFRA. “That would be the best single case of evidence,” McConnell said.

But there is at least one case which could indicate some hesitancy on the part of the chief justice to ascribe individual, religious feelings to corporations.

In 2011, Roberts wrote a humorous opinion for a unanimous court in which he mocked AT&T for seeking an exemption from a federal law as an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” The communications giant had argued that since Congress defines the noun “person” to include corporations, “personal” should also refer to a corporation.

“‘Personal’ ordinarily refers to individuals," he wrote. “We do not usually speak of personal characteristics, personal effects, personal correspondence, personal influence or personal tragedy as referring to corporations.” Roberts couldn’t resist a final jab at AT&T, ending his opinion with the observation, “We trust that AT&T won’t take it personally.”

If it’s so hilarious to Roberts that corporations have feelings, is it obvious that they should have religious beliefs? “That AT&T case may be a sign of Roberts’ thinking,” Winkler said. “The emphasis on the AT&T case was on the right to privacy being thought of in very personal terms. Religious liberty is the same kind of right in some ways, a very personal right.”

The circuit courts have split on the cases and virtually every question raised in them. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Green family, which owns the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby, while the Third Circuit denied the right of the Hahn family, which owns the Conestoga cabinet-making company, to deny coverage of certain medications.

The Court’s decision, expected in June, will decide whether thousands of women employees – and the wives and dependents of male employees – will be denied coverage for certain contraception medications or devices.=

The conservative bent of the Court means the smart bet seems to be on the corporations rather than the government. But the Court, and Roberts, surprised everyone when it upheld most of the law last June.

The whole lesson of the ACA case was that speculation can be seriously misleading, Gans said.

The votes are in, and your tribute is chosen. After launching a quickie website encouraging Americans to support their favorite turkey -- a Sophie's Choice between five-month-old males Caramel and Popcorn -- the White House officially pardoned Popcorn in a ceremony on Wednesday at the White House. A nearly two-foot-tall Bread Breasted White domesticated turkey, Popcorn weighs about 38 pounds; his favorite food is corn and his favorite song is Beyonce's "Halo." Naturally. 

Both Popcorn and Caramel were given a free pass by President Barack Obama, though only Popcorn participated in the official ceremony. The presentation of a turkey to the president allegedly started in 1947 under President Harry Truman, but George H. W. Bush was the first to pardon the birds from slaughter in 1989.

President Barack Obama pardons the 2013 National Thanksgiving Turkey "Popcorn" with is daughters Sasha (3rd R) and Malia (R) during an event at the White House in Washington, DC, November 27, 2013. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Popcorn, the National Thanksgiving Turkey, from Badger, Minn., walks on the North Portico at the White House in Washington before being pardoned. This is the 66th anniversary of the National Thanksgiving Turkey presentation by the President. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

At two feet tall and about 38 pounds, two full-grown Broad Breasted White domesticated turkeys are paraded before members of the news media in the Crystal Ballroom of the Willard InterContinental November 26 in Washington, DC. The birds were raised by the National Turkey Federation Chairman John Burkel of Badger, Minnesota. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Crystal Ballroom of the Willard InterContinental. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Crystal Ballroom of the Willard InterContinental November 26, 2013. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Crystal Ballroom of the Willard InterContinental November 26, 2013. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Barbara Laing takes a drag on a menthol cigarillo, maneuvering her maroon power chair between chalky piles of feral turkey feces strewn across the yard. Mr. Darcy, a teacup Yorkshire terrier in a skeleton jumpsuit, shivers by her feet, yipping as more and more turkeys, the ones responsible for the poop, perch on Laing’s leafless red maple.

A few brown birds peck at the now-naked dirt in front of her house. A few more linger in the street. Drivers honk. Passersby snap photos. (Sometimes, onlookers even throw the turkeys bagels.) Laing sighs, wondering how to get rid of the 100 or so turkeys that have laid waste to her home and neighborhood for more than a decade.

“There’s no more grass because they eat it all,” Laing, 70, said of the rafter, which roosts nearby at Staten Island’s South Beach Psychiatric Center. “And they s*** all over the place.”

The heavy turkeys sit in her flower beds, fatally smashing the petals. They feast on the increasingly meager fruits of Laing’s fig, pear, and cherry trees. Their waste so extensively litters the lawn that it gets caught in the wheels of Liang’s power chair and tracks into her house. The mailman, Wharton, has refused to deliver letters because there’s simply too much guano on the ground.

“We don’t get no help,” she said.  

Laing and her neighbors, which include her parents, sister and cousin, are again pressing public officials to remove the turkeys that wander away from the grounds of the state-run mental hospital to roost on her block. They congregate around 4 p.m. every day and turn the quiet residential street into a fowl “bed and breakfast,” Laing laments.

“When the sun comes up, they all come down from the tree, screaming,” she tells Newsweek. “Then, they walk all the way down to the psych center. And that’s where they hang out all day.”

Alas, getting rid of the turkeys – the ancestors of which were allegedly dumped by a resident on South Beach’s campus about 15 years ago – has proved more difficult than it would seem, raising the spectre of other troublesome urban bird management controversies in New York and elsewhere.  

New York's Department of Health, which runs the hospital, and the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, have tried since 2008 to use non-lethal methods – such as oiling the turkeys’ eggs and installing “no feeding” signs – to control the population. (Though the rafters are said to be related, the hospital’s request is separate from Laing’s entreaties; officials there say that the birds pose health and safety risks to patients and staffers.)

As the benign deterrence tactics didn’t work, the DEC asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services to remove the birds, which, of course, is a euphemism for dispatching them to the slaughterhouse. The first round-up took place in August 2013, when about 90 turkeys were sent to “poultry processing,” according to pro-turkey activists.

In September, animal welfare advocates brokered a deal with the USDA to ship about 28 Galliformes to a sanctuary deep in the Catskills. But in October, USDA agents collected another several dozen turkeys and sent them to “poultry processing”, which is not a refuge but an abbatir, turkey defenders say.

David Karopkin, a law student who leads GooseWatch NYC, “an advocacy group committed to the preservation of New York City’s Canada geese,” said the reapings reflect poor wildlife management practices. Since the Miracle on the Hudson, when a jetliner was forced to land in the Hudson River after a goose flew into its engine, the USDA has culled geese citywide to prevent airstrikes against planes flying out of both John F.  Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports. Karopkin claims the methods don’t work and that city just wants to do away with the problem birds.

“First it was just geese. Now it seems to be spreading to other animals,” he said of the killings. “People get very upset about the poop and their park being taken over but the problem is, they’re not really doing anything substantive about it.”

“Within a month or two, there will be more because – guess what – they fly.”

Even Laing and her family members don’t want the turkeys to die, despite them being ongoing nuisances.

“We’ve seen a lot of these turkeys grow up from babies,” she said. “There’s another one that’s hopping around with a broken leg, staying in the leaves over here to keep warm. We haven’t been raking these leaves so that turkey will stay warm.”

“We’re not cruel people,” she said. “Why don’t they put ‘em in the woods?”

The USDA contends that the turkeys can’t be put in the woods, as the state environmental agency determined that “these aren’t just wild turkeys” but “appear to be a hybrid of some domestic turkeys.”

“They’re not wild turkeys? Then what are they?” retorts Laing, who has grown tired of the bird battle, especially as she’s recovering from illness and a recent leg amputation. “Of course they’re wild turkeys. Nobody takes care of them.”

The USDA maintains that the turkeys can’t just be transferred, leaving few options if a sanctuary doesn’t step up to save them. Euthanize them and throw the corpses away, or slaughter them and give the meat to a homeless shelter.

“If the meat tests fit for human consumption, it will be donated to charity,” the USDA spokeswoman told Newsweek.

It’s unlikely the turkeys will make it to tables in time for Thanksgiving or any holiday this season. Even if they prove to be contaminant-free, the director of a local food bank said she has no interest in serving them to her patrons. The meat is now being kept in a freezer until a decision has been made about how to dispose of it. 

This week’s American military pushback against China will trigger a major crisis that could, as long promised by President Obama, force America to “pivot” much of its attention to Asia. Or it could be a one-shot action that will fizzle quickly, as did earlier attempts at rebalancing towards the Pacific.   

On Monday, without notifying the Chinese authorities, two American B-52 bombers flew into a contested area over a chain of uninhabitable islands in the East China Sea where China and Japan have repeatedly clashed recently. This directly challenged a zone Beijing unilaterally set up just days before, as a Chinese official defined it, to “defend our airspace.”

Beijing had declared the area an air defense identification zone (ADIZ), demanding that any aircraft must clear its flight pattern with Chinese authorities before flying into it. On Wednesday Japanese commercial airlines JAL and ANA defied China by flying their planes through the zone unannounced. No incidents were reported.

“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. (In Beijing, officials said Wednesday that China monitored the U.S. bombers, but decided not to challenge them.)

While declining to describe the American maneuvers as a “provocation,” Liu pointed to some of the larger issues underlying this incident, including the yawning gap between American military capabilities and those of China. “The U.S. is monitoring China constantly, using satellites and ships,” he said. “We don’t have such technology.”

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke on the phone with his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, on Monday, reiterating a public statement earlier in the week that said the Chinese decision to set up an air defense zone in the area “constitutes an attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea.” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel added his weight by delivering a similarly robust message.

In Tokyo, the new American ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, said in her first public remarks since arriving there two weeks ago that Beijing’s “unilateral actions” will only “undermine security” in the region. In what was widely perceived as a signal of America’s renewed commitment to its defense treaty with Japan, the Kennedy scion, who has achieved rock-star status in Japan since she was tapped as ambassador by Obama, visited a U.S. Air Force base earlier.

Although American officials have refrained from taking sides in the various territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas, Washington officials had made clear that the defense treaty includes an island chain in the area, known as Senakaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese. China considers the archipelago part of its territory, as does Taiwan. Tokyo, which has long administered the islands, also claims sovereignty.

“We are determined to defend our country’s air and sea space,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the Japanese parliament in Tokyo on Monday. “The measures by the Chinese side have no validity whatsoever for Japan,” he said.

Beyond the rhetoric, and America’s show of force on Monday, many in the region wonder whether Beijing can be so easily deterred. Several Asia hands noted the timing of China’s ADIZ announcement over the weekend. It came just as America’s closest Middle Eastern allies expressed their dismay over an agreement with Iran, and following Obama’s course reversal in Syria. China may have reacted to what it perceives as an American withdrawal from commitments to allies, they say.

More broadly, officials in the region wonder about the content of the Obama administration’s declared policy of pivoting to Asia. Washington’s intention to direct its attention to the Pacific region was announced in 2010, but has yet to materialize much beyond Washington’s academic circles, they say. “Some of us have been wondering what the follow-through was going to be, and the fact is, there hasn’t been much,” one high-ranking East Asian diplomat said, asking for anonymity so he could speak freely.

Beijing, which harbors its own frustrations over an earlier unfulfilled Obama promise of a “strategic partnership” between America and China, has beefed up its military in recent years. More than some of his predecessors, President Xi Jinping has surrounded himself with military men and has increased military spending significantly.

Last year China started sending military and civilian vessels to Scarborough Shoal, a rocky islet 120 miles west of Subic Bay in the Philippines, which China claims as its territory. Manila at first sent naval vessels to challenge the intruders, but America, which is obliged to defend the Philippines in a defense treaty, declined to join battle. Instead, as China escalated its assaults, Washington tried to mediate. Eventually, after China threatened to cut off commercial ties, Manila gave up, and China now controls the area.

A similar scenario has started to gel in the group of East China Sea islands. Although uninhabitable, the atoll is rich in minerals, fishery, and oil. In recent years, and increasingly in 2013, Chinese military craft, sometimes disguised as fishing boats, entered the zone, prompting Japan to dispatch naval vessels to ward them off.

The confrontations with China have strengthened Japanese nationalism, as espoused by Abe. He, too, has increased investment in the military, even when attempting, under “Abe-nomics” to cut government spending elsewhere.

And then, over the weekend, China declared the airspace over the archipelago a zone in which all aircraft must coordinate their flights with Beijing in advance. The move was widely seen as the beginning of what some called a “great power clash of historic proportions,” and a Chinese attempt to push America out of the region.

But will the American display of force be enough to deter further Chinese aggression? Yann-huei Song, a professor at Taipei’s Academia Sinica, said that “since the U.S. had sent the signal to China already, the Pentagon will not do it again” for a while. Instead, he told me, Washington will now “wait and see how China reacts.”

Beijing, he predicted, will try to “save face” by making bold statements. But it will decide on any further moves only after Japan and America make clear how they intend to react.

Taiwan’s claim of sovereignty over the islands further complicates American policy in the region. Taipei’s national security council issued a statement saying its claim to the islands is “unaffected” by Beijing’s announcement and that it would “continue to defend our sovereignty over the archipelago.”

A while back the Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou, proposed a “peace initiative,” calling for mediation between all the competing claimants. America’s challenge, according to Song, would be “to maintain its neutral position on territorial sovereignty.”

But Beijing may well use Taiwan, its old nemesis, to divide America’s allies. Since Beijing has always seen Taiwan as part of China, never recognizing the island’s sovereign aspirations, it could use Taipei’s claim over the archipelago to further its attacks against Japan.   

Critics of Obama’s Asia policy in Washington doubt that Monday’s action will change many minds in Asia. “If this is just one flight, it won’t be enough,” said Michael Auslin, an Asia scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

He cited press reports, based on Pentagon sources, saying the unarmed B-52s made their sortie as part of a “routine,” long-preplanned exercise named Coral Lightning. “We should have said that we flew there in order to directly challenge the Chinese ADIZ,” said Auslin. America should also have added a Japanese military contingent to the sortie, he added.

Beijing’s attitude, as one East Asian diplomat put it, is, “Push with a bayonet, and if you encounter fat, push harder.” The big debate throughout the region and beyond is whether the American action on Monday was a firm enough response to China’s aggression or whether is it merely “fat.”

Follow Benny Avni on Twitter: @bennyavni

Do corporations have religious rights? And if profit-making corporations enjoy religious rights, do those rights trump the legal rights of employees?

This week the United States Supreme Court opened a big can of constitutional worms by agreeing to hear two cases that raise these issues. The corporations are challenging, on religious freedom grounds, a congressional requirement that under Obamacare, health insurance plans include access to all legal forms of birth control at no additional cost.

It is surprising that the high court took up the issue, since it has never found that profit-making corporations enjoy religious rights. The Constitution’s framers, who intensely distrusted the corporate form, would be flabbergasted by this news, as would the Supreme Court justices who in 1878 first defined the limits of religious rights.

The suggestion that a business formed to earn profits enjoys First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion is legally, logically, and philosophically absurd.  

Corporations are legal “persons,” but they are not people. Under the law, corporations are artificial persons, distinct from their owners, as I teach in my Syracuse University College of Law class on the principles of property and tax.

Since corporations possess neither a brain nor what believers call a soul, they can neither worship deities nor deny their existence, and thus cannot possess religious beliefs, much less exercise them.

In a clever bit of lawyering, attorneys for the David and Barbara Green family of Oklahoma City conflate the legal interests of the family and the corporations they own, which employ more than 13,000 full-time workers. The Green family argues that their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion extends to the more than 500 Hobby Lobby craft stores and Mardel Christian book stores their corporations own.

Corporate documents articulate the Greens’ particular Christian beliefs. Their fidelity to those beliefs is demonstrated in numerous policies, such as closing on Sundays and negotiating contracts with trucking companies that bar carrying alcohol in trailers that have just delivered goods to their companies’ stores.

But Hobby Lobby and Mardel are not the Greens.

The whole point of corporations is that they exist separately from the human beings who own them, notes Professor Lynn Stout, who teaches corporate law at Cornell University. This legal barrier insulates owners from liability for corporate debts and misconduct, a privilege rarely granted before 1800 but now readily available by filling out state government forms and paying modest fees.

In this case, the Greens rely on the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by a nearly unanimous Congress. It declares that “laws ‘neutral’ toward religion may burden religious exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious exercise [and] governments should not substantially burden religious exercise without compelling justification.”

Rights, however, are never absolute, as the Supreme Court has often ruled.

Judge Joe Heaton of federal District Court in Oklahoma City who was appointed by George W. Bush, ruled against the Greens and their companies last year. “Hobby Lobby and Mardel are not religious organizations,” Heaton held. “Plaintiffs have not cited, and the court has not found, any case concluding that secular, for-profit corporations such as Hobby Lobby and Mardel have a constitutional right to the free exercise of religion.”

A strong counterargument to the Greens is that they would discriminate against women who want the ability to choose a morning-after pill or IUD; that is discrimination on the basis of gender and differing religious views. “The Free Exercise clause protects the beliefs of the employees as much as it protects the beliefs of the employers,” Kathryn S. Benedict wrote recently in the Columbia Journal of Law and Gender.

But the most important issue the court has taken up is whether corporations, as “persons,” have religious exercise rights.

Without any hearing, the Supreme Court created the doctrine of corporations as legal persons in an 1886 railroad property tax case. The official Supreme Court reporter, Bancroft Davis, who had been a railroad president, issued a brief statement on behalf of the chief justice stating that corporations were persons for purposes of the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment.

Before the American Revolution only a handful of corporations were created in the colonies, most of which would today be regarded as charities or public utilities. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against tax favors for a corporation, the British East India Company.

Still, creating a property right for corporations makes sense, Stout says, because “corporations exist in perpetuity as privileged owners of property.”

Stout thinks the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court granted corporations the right to spend money influencing elections, is a logical, but debatable, extension of corporate property rights because it lets corporations spend money to defend their property interests.

But she cautions that while “corporations have constitutional rights, it should not be assumed that corporations have identical rights to human persons.” Corporations, for example, do not possess a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The high court first ruled on the boundaries of the First Amendment’s “free exercise of religion” clause in 1878, when it considered the bigamy conviction of George Reynolds, the personal secretary to Mormon leader Brigham Young. Reynolds argued that his prosecution, a test case in a Utah Territory court, violated his First Amendment right to free exercise of religion because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embraced polygamy (a doctrine it renounced in 1890).

Reynolds lost. “Laws are made for the government of actions,” the Supreme Court held, “and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice?”

In a 1989 Oregon case over jobless benefits denied to a Native American who used peyote, a narcotic, as part of a religious ceremony, the Supreme Court also limited the religious free exercise clause.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who says he bases his decisions on the “original intent” of the Constitution’s framers, wrote that while the government may not interfere with belief or statements of belief, the Reynolds case and “subsequent decisions have consistently held that the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability.”

Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by President Nixon, held in a 1982 case that a Pennsylvania farmer was required to withhold Social Security taxes from employees despite his religious beliefs. “While there is a conflict between the Amish faith and the obligations imposed by the Social Security system, not all burdens on religion are unconstitutional,” Burger wrote. “The state may justify a limitation on religious liberty by showing that it is essential to accomplish an overriding governmental interest.”

Burger noted this holding would not apply to a purely religious organization, like an Amish church. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act exempts religious organizations, notably arms of the Catholic Church, from its birth control provisions, but not profit-making corporations.

On a question that may be especially significant to the current case, Burger held that “it would be difficult to accommodate the social security system with myriad exceptions flowing from a wide variety of religious beliefs.”

The same point could be made about exceptions to insurance coverage – the particular view of the Greens on birth control is just one of many religious objections to that. Indeed, what about owners of corporations who are Christian Scientists and reject all medical care?

In other words, under long-standing Supreme Court rulings the Greens can believe, and preach, anything they wish. They are personally free to use or avoid birth control. However, under the 1878 Supreme Court ruling and others since, the Greens are not free to exercise their beliefs in a manner that violates a reasonable and neutral government standard.

So, if the Greens converted to a new religion, they would not be allowed to appease the gods by sacrificing virgins.

It is like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Picture this: Three feuding brothers stand at the back of an auction room and watch anxiously as famous pictures their father gave them go under the hammer.

Or this: Four super-rich celebrity art collectors ready their checkbooks to spend tens of millions of dollars in a race to snap up some of the last remaining pictures of the artist they love.

Or this: A clutch of curators of American 20th century art cross their fingers and pray that an important American art collection hurriedly put on sale is bought by Americans so the pictures stay in the country.

All three scenes, so redolent of the “every picture tells a story” style of the master artist and illustrator Rockwell, will spring to life next week when pictures that have long been hanging in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., are sold in New York.

Saying GraceCourtesy Sotheby's The pictures up for sale are some of Rockwell’s best known and loved. There is Saying Grace, painted as a cover for The Saturday Evening Post in 1951. It was inspired by a reader’s letter about a Mennonite family seen praying at a restaurant and depicts a gray-haired woman and a young boy locked in silent prayer at a diner, while cigarette smoking youths look on in skeptical rapture. It is expected to raise up to $20 million.

Almost as famous is The Gossips, a 1948 Post cover, that shows 15 sets of neighbors looking at each other, aghast, as they eavesdrop on a shared telephone line. For many, the painting conjures up a familiar scene across America 60 years ago.

“I have vivid memories of my grandmother sitting on the chair with one hand on the receiver, looking out the window and listening in on the conversation of her neighbors,” said Douglas Hunt, an art analyst at Art Experts, an art appraisal company. Sotheby’s, who is selling the Rockwells to the highest bidders on December 4, estimate The Gossips will fetch up to $9 million.

Together with Walking to Church and four lesser-known works, the quality of the pictures suggests they will reach a record price. “They would certainly be works on the caliber of the greatest works of our collection,” says Laurie Norton, director of the Norman Rockwell Museum.

Sotheby’s expects the haul of Rockwell pictures to raise more than $24 million, which is a conservative estimate. “It’s unusual to have the best of the best,” said Elizabeth Goldberg, director of American art at the auction house, “and this certainly falls into the category of iconic masterworks.”

The GossipsCourtesy Sotheby's Some believe the pictures will sell for even more. Deborah Solomon, a Rockwell biographer and art critic, thinks the total price will reach about $41 million. Asian collectors of Rockwell have expressed great interest, said Goldberg. “We just brought the pictures to Hong Kong, and it was incredible to see the response. Even though these pictures are quintessentially American, there is something about them that everybody responds to.”

Banging heads with international art collectors, and each other, will likely be the most prominent and devoted American collectors of Rockwell – Steven Spielberg, director of ET, George Lucas, who made Star Wars, the Walmart heiress Alice Walton and the Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot.

They are all keeping mum about their intentions, but Rockwell scholars suggest the pictures are so exceptional and rarely come on the market that the auction is bound to draw the painter’s most passionate collectors. The sale is expected to blow past the previous record for a Rockwell picture: $15.4 million for Breaking Home Ties, which went for three times the Sotheby’s estimate in 2006.

The sale will also finally resolve a bruising family feud and two expensive lawsuits that have lasted for two decades.

Rockwell painted the pictures for The Saturday Evening Post, one of approximately 320 covers for the magazine over 47 years, when Kenneth J. Stuart was the magazine’s art director. “Everything I am, everything I have ever done, everything I hope to be I owe to Ken,” Rockwell wrote.

But, according to some, the relationship between the two was not always so sweet. Solomon said they had a huge blowup in 1949 when Stuart removed the image of a horse from Before the Date, a cover Rockwell had painted. The rift grew larger as Rockwell began to feel overwhelmed by tight deadlines and editorial tampering.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas lend their Norman Rockwell collections to the Smithsonian for a show.Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty Images The nature of the relationship came under scrutiny in 2001, when Stuart’s sons and the Post’s parent company, Curtis Publishing, became embroiled in a lawsuit over who owned the paintings that were used as Post covers. Stuart’s sons, Ken Jr., William, and Jonathan, claimed Rockwell had given the paintings to them. Curtis said that was impossible since Rockwell did not own the pictures; commissioned by the Post, they were Curtis Publishing’s property.

“I know that Curtis bought it,” said Joan SerVaas, president and attorney for the Post. “I don’t have any record of Curtis transferring to Ken Stuart.” After a protracted legal battle, a Connecticut judge eventually ruled in favor of the Stuart brothers.

Meanwhile, the Stuart brothers were engaged in a legal feud between themselves. According to Ken Jr., shortly before his father’s death in 1993, Ken Sr. named him executor of his estate, which at that time included between 15 and 20 Rockwell paintings.

Saying Grace hung in a living room in the Stuart home in Connecticut and Walking to Church was on the wall of a guest bedroom. The Gossips, Ken Sr.’s favorite, was hidden in an attic for safekeeping, because the house was not secure enough for such a famous work of art, explained Ken Jr.

According to Ken Jr., shortly after their father died, the brothers began to quarrel. “It was a lot of sibling rivalry that just bubbled to the surface,” he said.

William and Jonathan, who wanted to sell the paintings right away, sued Ken Jr., who wanted to wait for the pictures to become even more valuable. Years of court battles ensued until William, the middle brother, developed serious health problems. Hoping to settle the matter quickly, the brothers decided to sell the paintings, which had been loaned to the Norman Rockwell Museum where they were enjoyed by millions of visitors.

Walking to ChurchCourtesy Sotheby's The day of the auction may prove awkward for the three brothers. The chill between Ken Jr. and Jonathan, the youngest of the siblings, has persisted and they have communicated only by email in recent months. Still, the sale will bring closure to a long, miserable period for the Stuarts, who will split the proceeds three ways. “I’m glad to get Norman Rockwell out of my life,” said Ken Jr., 71.

But the Rockwells in question may soon be out of the lives of ordinary Americans, too. Even if the paintings are bought by one of the Big Four Rockwell collectors and remain in the United States, there is no guarantee they will continue to be accessible to the general public.

Which of the Big Four – if any – will walk away with the pictures is anyone’s guess, but Solomon said Perot, who used to be a newspaper delivery boy, might have an emotional connection to them. However, she would prefer Lucas to buy them as he is planning a museum of illustration in San Francisco where the pictures would likely be put on display.

SerVaas said that while the Post, riven by financial troubles, neglected much of the artwork it bought, it would be a shame if such important pictures by an American master of everyday American life were to end up behind closed doors where American eyes cannot see them.

“I wish we could have been better stewards of this artwork,” he said. “But does that mean that it should be yanked off the walls and sold?”

Assuming the government can fix the Healthcare.gov website, millions of Americans will have to do something they’ve never done before: shop for a plan. This is where it gets tricky. Yes, insurance is good to have. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good value for everyone. And whether it is or not isn’t easy for individuals to calculate.

Actuarial firms calculate risks all the time. So we asked one, Milliman, Inc., to run the numbers. The company looked at the chances of accruing significant medical bills in 2014 for an uninsured adult under the age of 65, and the results are revealing. While everyone worries about catastrophic expenses, they don’t happen very often.

What’s the chance of accruing medical bills of more than $100,000 next year? Roughly 2 percent. About 24 percent of adults are expected to face medical bills of more than $10,000 in 2014. That’s a lot of money for most people, but it’s not much different from the cost of health insurance. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, health insurance premiums for individuals cost about $9,068 per year on average.

The remaining three quarters of the population will incur medical bills that are less than what they pay for health insurance, which is what makes the insurance business the kind of business that investors like Warren Buffett like so much (about two-thirds of his $60 billion personal fortune comes from insurance).

In fact, Milliman estimates a 7 percent chance that an adult incurs nothing at all in health expenses next year. And note that these are for billed amounts. It’s often possible for individuals to negotiate a medical charge and wind up paying a lower amount. Medical bills for the uninsured are usually marked up by around 30 percent because providers know they won't always get paid in full.

When choosing coverage, it’s smart to take your age and state of health into account. But for some people, opting for the minimum coverage may be the best bet. 

Google the word “Thanksgiving” and the Internet would have you believe it’s all about Thanksgivukkah, hellish travel plans, an arguably even more hellish Black Friday, football and how Miley Cyrus is going to ruin your holiday. Of course, we all learned about the creation myth of Thanksgiving in elementary school: The Pilgrims gathered with the Wampanoags in 1621 to celebrate their first harvest. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Thanksgiving was largely a New England holiday honoring the tenacity of the Pilgrims, but by the 19th century it had evolved into a national affair celebrating the family.

The woman behind this transformation was the oft-forgotten Sarah Josepha Hale, a leading female voice of the 19th century — a Martha Stewart meets Michelle Obama meets Oprah. It was her tireless, decades-long campaign that helped secure Thanksgiving’s role as a national holiday.

Sarah Josepha HaleAlamy Born in 1788 in Newport, New Hampshire, Hale became a novelist and poet (she penned “Mary Had a Little Lamb”), a women’s rights activist (she donated money to open Vassar College) and the famed editor of Godey’s Ladies Book, the influential women’s magazine that became the most-read publication of the 19th century. From women’s fashion to interior design to cooking, Godey’s defined women’s role in the home. At the same time, Hale used the magazine to deliberately expand the “woman’s sphere,” advocating for the issues closest to her heart, including female education, women in medicine and property rights for married women.

Hale also spent decades lobbying to have Thanksgiving declared a national holiday. In an era when women’s roles were increasingly defined as wives and mothers (men, meanwhile, belonged in the public sphere), Hale’s ideal Thanksgiving would celebrate home and family — a holiday in which women could brandish their domestic influence. Women not only prepared the elaborate and festive meals but sat at the head of the table, literally taking their place as head of the family. (Hale set the culinary tone as well: Her 1827 novel, Northwood, included a chapter about a New England Thanksgiving feast, including the roasted turkey, cranberry sauce and pies.)

In a 1837 Godey’s editorial, Hale wrote that Thanksgiving:

might, without inconvenience, be observed on the same day of November, say the last Thursday in the month, throughout all New England; and also in our sister states, who have engrafted it upon their social system. It would then have a national character, which would, eventually, induce all the states to join in the commemoration of ‘In-gathering,’ which it celebrates. It is a festival which will never become obsolete, for it cherishes the best affections of the heart -- the social and domestic ties. It calls together the dispersed members of the family circle, and brings plenty, joy and gladness to the dwellings of the poor and lowly.

For the next three decades, in a sort of early version of a wildly successful social media campaign, Hale lobbied the American public to declare a national Thanksgiving Day. She wrote thousands of letters to politicians and influential people across the country. She petitioned five consecutive presidents (Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan and Lincoln) and crafted editorial after editorial in the pages of Godey’s arguing for the importance of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Her position at the helm of Godey’s gave her the legitimacy and audience she needed, and her gender meant she could speak as an expert about the importance of a holiday uniquely focused on “women’s work”: the family, food and giving thanks.

In her September 28, 1863, letter to Lincoln, which is in the Library of Congress, Hale began:

Permit me, as Editress of the "Lady's Book", to request a few minutes of your precious time, while laying before you a subject of deep interest to myself and -- as I trust -- even to the President of our Republic, of some importance. This subject is to have the day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival.

You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive [sic] fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution...

On October 3, 1863, Lincoln answered Hale’s pleas and proclaimed not one but two Thanksgiving holidays, the first on August 6 in celebration of the victory at Gettysburg, and the second on the last Thursday in November. With the Civil War raging, Thanksgiving symbolized not only a national holiday at a time when the country was divided by war, but also a holiday that honored the importance of family.

In 1939, Thanksgiving was set to fall on November 30, and the business and retail worlds worried that the holiday’s late date would affect Christmas shopping sales, especially in the midst of the country’s economic recovery. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded by changing the holiday’s date  to the third Thursday in November. Americans were outraged; 16 states refused to make the change. Two years later, in 1941, Congress established the fourth Thursday in November as the Federal Thanksgiving holiday. Hale’s lifelong quest — to turn Thanksgiving into a unifying holiday about family, as significant and widely observed as Independence Day (the only other national holiday of her era) — was fulfilled.

Historically, different generations have redefined Thanksgiving: For the Pilgrims, it was about gratitude to the Wampanoags (which was later critiqued as the settlers’ white oppression of Native Americans); for Hale, it was about celebrating family and expanding the domestic sphere; for Lincoln, the holiday helped unite the nation during wartime, and for FDR, it was a solution to economic issues. Today, consumerism often trumps Thanksgiving’s emphasis on family, especially with major retailers like Walmart, Kmart, Target and Macy’s now opening earlier on Thanksgiving (and some refusing to give their employees the day off). Yet Thanksgiving continues to evolve. Today, men are in the kitchen with women (or sometimes on their own) preparing elaborate meals. Many families integrate their own cultural foods and traditions into the celebration of Thanksgiving. This year’s Thanksgivukkah — a combination of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, which inconveniently began on the Wednesday before this year — is the most recent example. And in the midst of all this change, Thanksgiving remains true to Hale’s vision; it is our national holiday of thanks and celebration for the joys of home and family. Oh, and all of this.

Like many musicians, artists, and filmmakers in the 1950s, Leonard Bernstein, the flamboyant conductor of the New York Philharmonic and composer of West Side Story, was forced to defend his political views, his friends, and his right to freedom of expression.

At a time when the NSA has all Americans under permanent surveillance, the virulent campaign by the FBI to discredit such a lauded American musician by smears and innuendo is an object lesson in how the powers of the state can be abused under the guise of protecting citizens from outside dangers.

While many of his friends ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Bernstein became embroiled in the Red Scare witch-hunt when he applied for the routine renewal of his passport in 1953. He found the State Department had been in contact with the FBI, which had a bulging dossier on his public statements, political affiliations, and personal friendships. The passport office demanded he make his political views clear in a formal deposition.

The result was a humiliating document, written with the help of a lawyer, in which Bernstein abjectly apologized for past associations and pointed the finger at well-known leftists. The full transcript of his absurd confession is included in a new collection of Bernstein’s correspondence, The Leonard Bernstein Letters, published by Yale and edited by Nigel Simeone.

Bernstein’s attempt to squirm out of the bear trap into which he had fallen is cringe-worthy. Unlike many who risked their careers by invoking the Fifth Amendment to deflect Congress’s attempts to explore their political beliefs, Bernstein blabbed: “Although I have never, to my knowledge, been accused of being a member of the Communist Party, I wish to take advantage of this opportunity to affirm under oath that I am not now nor at any time have ever been a member of the Communist Party.”

He said a conference he attended at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, to welcome Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich to America led to an accusatory article in Life magazine, which “convinced me that my name and my good intentions were being improperly exploited by cleverly camouflaged organizations which concealed their true objectives and Communist aims.”

He also named names. A petition he signed for the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to break off relations with Franco’s fascist Spain elicited this weaselly half-accusation: “I recall no connection with [the brigade] and believe that Paul Robeson communicated with me about the use of my name on this occasion. I met Mr. Robeson one time while we were both backstage during a concert.”

Robeson, a fervent supporter of leftist causes and a world renowned African-American singer and actor, had been blacklisted in 1950 and was obliged to retire. For Bernstein to disavow his friendship with such a prominent and talented artist illustrates how treacherous the FBI’s pressure could be.

Also included in the letters is a long footnote charting the persistent interest shown in Bernstein by J. Edgar Hoover’s federal agents. Several of Bernstein’s friends had already appeared before Congress, among them one of America’s best-loved composer, Aaron Copland, an intimate friend and musical mentor of Bernstein. Copland, who appeared before Witchfinder-General Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate on May 25, 1953, recalled in his memoirs, “My impression is that McCarthy had no idea who I was or what I did.… It occurred to me…as McCarthy entered that it was similar to the entrance of [the conductor] Toscanini – half the battle won before it begins through the power of personality.”

When Bernstein’s close friend David Diamond was summoned before HUAC, he nervously asked Copland, “What if I am asked a question about Lenny?” to which Copland sagely replied, “You say what you feel you have to say.”

In July 1953 Bernstein was confronted with his liberal past when applying for that passport renewal. According to his biographer Barry Seldes, Bernstein was “drawn into living hell” and provided “a humiliating confession of political sin,” but it came in handy when Bernstein need to persuade the American Legion, an anti-communist campaign group, to approve his writing a score for the anti-trade union corruption movie On The Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan, with a screenplay by Budd Schulberg and starring Marlon Brando.

Bernstein’s confession did not end his pursuit by FBI agents. A year later, he was subject to another investigation, this one provoked by William F. Tompkins, assistant attorney general in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration. In a memo sent to Hoover titled “Leonard Bernstein. Security Matter – C[ommunist]. Fraud Against Government,” Tompkins urged Hoover to investigate Bernstein further, alleging he had not been honest in his mea culpa, adding, “this matter should be handled immediately.”

The snooping continued even after John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960. Kennedy’s special assistant, Kenneth O’Donnell, asked for “name checks concerning eighty individuals in connection with the Advisory Committee on the Arts” that included Bernstein, and in 1962 the New York office of the FBI sent the Washington Field Office a photograph of Bernstein with a memo titled “Unsub[stantiated]: American musician alleged to be Soviet agent.”

In March 1963, Hoover received a letter about Bernstein from one of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Brooklyn, New York. “It has been brought to my attention that Leonard Bernstein, the noted conductor of the new Lincoln Center in New York City, has Communistic tendencies. For this reason I am writing to you with the hope that you will be able to enlighten my Community (two thousand sisters of St. Joseph) and me with the truth.… May God bless you for your wonderful work.”

Hoover opened his reply with, “My dear Sister… ” and explained that FBI files must remain “confidential and available for official use only.… I trust you will not infer either that we do or do not have information regarding Mr. Leonard Bernstein.”

In 1967, with the permissive society and the Civil Rights movement in full swing, an internal FBI memo declared: “Mr. Bernstein has been active in the civil rights movement and in 1965 Harry Belafonte organized a group of musical and literary artists to take part in the Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, march. Bernstein was one of the artists who made up this delegation.” When President Lyndon B. Johnson’s aide, Mildred Stegall, asked for a routine security check to be made on Bernstein, she was sent that memo.

Bernstein found himself under scrutiny again in January 1970, when it was reported he had held a fundraising party in his apartment to provide legal defense funds for the revolutionary Black Panthers, a socialist African-American party Hoover believed to be “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The FBI leaked information and smeared Bernstein and his friends who took up the Panthers’ cause. It took a whole 10 years before Bernstein caught up with the damage done to him by federal agents.

“I have substantial evidence now available to all that the FBI conspired to foment hatred and violent dissension among blacks, among Jews and between blacks and Jews,” he said in a statement quoted by The New York Times in October 1980. “My late wife and I were among many foils used for this purpose, in the context of a so-called ‘party’ for the Panthers in 1970 which was neither a party nor a ‘radical chic’ event for the Black Panther Party, but rather a civil liberties meeting for which my wife had generously offered our apartment.

“The ensuing FBI-inspired harassment ranged from floods of hate letters sent to me over what are now clearly fictitious signatures, thinly-veiled threats couched in anonymous letters to magazines and newspapers, editorial and reportorial diatribes in Israel, plus innumerable other dirty tricks. None of these machinations has adversely affected my life or work, but they did cause a good deal of bitter unpleasantness.”

Even in 1971, almost 15 years after McCarthy died, Bernstein continued to be an FBI target, egged on by the paranoia and vindictiveness of the new president, Richard M. Nixon. Two internal bureau memos were sent to Charles D. Brennan, assistant director of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI, relating to what was dubbed, “Proposed plan of antiwar elements to embarrass the United States government.”

Bernstein was commissioned to write a commemorative Mass for the opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to honor the assassinated president. The memo described a “plot by Leonard Bernstein, conductor and composer, to embarrass the President and other Government officials through an antiwar and anti-government musical composition to be played at the dedication.”

Bernstein was denied permission to visit Daniel Berrigan, a Roman Catholic priest serving time in jail for protesting the Vietnam War, to discuss the new work. On the day of the commemoration, Brennan received from the FBI a reminder of Bernstein’s purported intent, quoting a report in the conservative weekly Human Events (President Ronald Reagan’s favorite reading), that quoted verbatim from the FBI’s original memo headed, “Bernstein intended to embarrass the President with an anti-administration bombshell.”

Nixon conveyed his view of Bernstein and the liberal views of the arts to his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, who was to serve jail time for his part in the Watergate burglary cover-up. “As you, of course, know those who are on the modern art and music kick are 95 percent against us anyway,” he wrote in a letter dated January 26, 1970.

“I refer to the recent addicts of Leonard Bernstein and the whole New York crowd. When I compare the horrible monstrosity of Lincoln Center with the Academy of Music in Philadelphia I realize how decadent the modern art and architecture have become. This is what the Kennedy-[Sargent] Shriver crowd believed in and they had every right to encourage this kind of stuff when they were in. But I have no intention whatever of continuing to encourage it now.”

The FBI dogged Bernstein even into the Ford administration. In response to a routine security clearance request in November 1974, the bureau reiterated the whole of their 20 years of unfounded accusations, even though they had made little effort to investigate properly or substantiate Bernstein’s alleged Communist sympathies.

“Mr. Bernstein, who you advised is a conductor…has been the subject of various security-type investigations conducted by the FBI since the early 1950s based on information that he had affiliated with or supported in some manner 15 organizations cited as communistic or subversive,” it wrote. “Leonard Bernstein … has been active in the civil rights movement.… On May 12, [1971,] Leonard Bernstein and his wife hosted a fundraising party in support of Philip F. Berrigan and five co-defendants charged with conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up heating systems in Federal buildings in Washington, D.C.”

What the FBI omitted to tell the enquirer was that the prosecution of Berrigan and the other members of the “Harrisburg Seven” collapsed for lack of evidence.

The hounding of Bernstein was not an isolated incident. During the Cold War the FBI destroyed the lives and careers of many, not only the famous, often on hearsay or a whim. They adopted the very methods practiced by the Soviet secret police they claimed they were saving Americans from.

Perhaps Bernstein’s most fascinating work is his light opera Candide, adapted from Voltaire’s satirical novella in 1956. In the original, Voltaire describes in a single sentence the human condition in a way that anticipated the anxious Cold War climate that followed hard upon America’s victory against Nazism in World War II.

It also stands as an epitaph to those many Americans who were chased, impugned, browbeaten, bugged, and destroyed by state forces wrongly applied: “Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts flourish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares, and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any experienced in a town when it is under siege.”

Your Thanksgiving dinner could be going to your thighs in more ways than one. Since low doses of antibiotics have been used to promote weight gain in food animals since the 1950s, it should come as no surprise that America’s obesity epidemic may be linked to use of these drugs.

For many years scientific studies have illustrated the connection between weight gain and antibiotics, due to their bacteria-killing action. One as early as 1954 found that Navy recruits given daily doses of penicillin to prevent strep infections gained 4.8 pounds over seven weeks compared with the 2.7 pounds gained by participants given a placebo. 

More recently, researchers have focused their attention on the possibility that antibiotics could be making children fat. New Zealand researchers conducting a large international survey found that boys treated with antibiotics during their first year of life reported higher body mass index (BMI) between the ages of 5 and 8 than boys who had not been similarly treated. A smaller Danish study found the use of antibiotics in infancy increased the risk of higher-than-average weight gains in childhood. Meanwhile, New York University researchers discovered that when infants were given antibiotics before the age of 6 months, they were 22 percent more likely to be overweight at 38 months than infants who had not been exposed to the drugs. Despite the relatively small weight gains in these children, the findings are significant.

Nearly one in five American children is considered obese. While they may not face major health issues now, that could easily change in adulthood. Obese children are more likely to become obese adults with a higher probability of certain illnesses, including diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers. And though it may appear that non-obese but still overweight children do not face as bleak a future, children with higher BMI are more likely as adults to have an increased risk of heart disease, the number one cause of death in America.

As first lady Michelle Obama and others have pointed out, overweight children are a major health concern – but can antibiotics really be blamed?

One thing is clear: Antibiotics change the makeup of your insides. In a recent French investigation, researchers discovered that use of the antibiotic vancomycin, which was developed to treat penicillin-resistant infections, could be linked to a 10 percent BMI increase – directly connected to what the authors of the study call the “gut microbiota.”

Our digestive system is a group of organs, which includes the stomach and the colon, and together it harbors nearly 100 trillion bacteria – our gut microbiota. These bacteria make an invaluable contribution to our metabolism by helping to break down complex carbohydrates and starches. They are also crucial to the development of our immune systems and thwart the growth of harmful bacteria. They even produce vitamins and hormones that direct the storage of fats. Many scientists believe our gut microbiota, which weigh up to four and a quarter pounds when taken en masse, act as an organ in-and-of themselves.

But they are not the usual bodily organ. If collectively the array of organs in our digestive tract is, let’s say, a shopping mall, then gut microbiota operate as a black market within its shadow. The purpose of each is much the same – both are fundamentally concerned with the metabolizing of food – but the finer details of gut flora and how they accomplish their digestive work have long escaped observation. This means scientists don’t clearly understand how gut flora influence weight gain and loss.

For instance, it has never been possible to culture every species of bacteria and learn what roles they perform in the gastric tract. Recent advances in genetic sequencing, though, have enabled deeper investigation and this has resulted in an explosion of information. It is now understood that gut microbiota collectively contain 3.3 million genes, a hundred times the number of human genes. Our bodies, then, host an apparently separate self – one that may, for all we know, determine how well we process our food and in so doing, regulate how much we weigh.

In order to better characterize the function of gut flora, scientists have begun to analyze individual bacterium as well as the composition of the whole in the hopes of understanding precise effects on digestion and metabolism. In one study, for instance, researchers discovered that a less diverse community of gut bacteria goes hand in hand with increased obesity and insulin resistance. In fact, obese individuals with lower levels of microbial richness tended to gain more weight than those with higher levels of microbial diversity. In another study, researchers transferred the gut microbiota from human twins into adult, germ-free mice. The twist here is that each set of twins were all unmatched pairs in which one twin was thin, the other fat. The mice receiving material from the overweight twin soon became overweight, while the mice receiving material from the lean twin remained lean.  

So while some scientists are asking whether it is possible to purposefully manipulate the composition of gut microbiota to improve human health, other scientists are worrying about the unintentional manipulation of the composition of gut microbiota. The diversity of your gut bacteria is impacted anytime you take an antibiotic prescribed to cure an illness. Not only does the medicine attack the intended target, pathogenic bacteria, but it also kills some of the bacteria living in your digestive tract. So each instance of taking an antibiotic changes the composition of your gut microbiota. The million-dollar question is if this is temporary fluctuation or permanent change?

Consider that in the early 20th century, Helicobacter pylori was a microbe found in almost all stomachs, but by the turn of the 21st century, fewer than 6 percent of children in the U.S., Sweden, and Germany were still carrying the organism. In an article published in Nature, Martin Blaser suggests a compelling argument in favor of antibiotics as the reason behind this dramatic shift: A single course of antibiotics that treat middle-ear or respiratory infections in children eradicate H. pylori in up to half of all instances.

The changing ecosystem within our guts, which to a large extent may be caused by overuse of antibiotics, leads to a greater potential for gaining weight. If, as the FDA suggests, up to half of antibiotic use is unnecessary and inappropriate, then as individuals and as a society we need to seriously rethink the many ways and instances in which we use this popular and plentiful class of drug. In fact, choosing from dozens of antibiotics available, doctors currently write upwards of 150 million antibiotic prescriptions each year.

Yet the harm done may not be from the pills we ourselves directly swallow. Just short of 15,000 tons of antibiotics were used to promote growth in domestic food animals during 2011 alone. Between 1950 – when antibiotics began to be widely used to fatten animals – and 2000, obesity rates in the U.S. increased by 214 percent. Currently, more than a third of all adults are considered obese while in the past three decades the number of obese children has tripled. Yet, for all we know, the obesity epidemic may be replaced by something even worse.

Most of the antibiotics commonly used for animals belong to the same classes as human antibiotics, including tetracyclines and sulfonamides. The animals ingesting these antibiotics become fat – which we like, because larger animals mean more meat for the table – yet at the same time these animals also develop antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which they then transmit to humans through the food supply.

When these resistant bacteria enter human guts, exactly how do they interact with our own existing microbiota? The answer to this question is still unclear, but what is known is this: Whether or not these bacteria choose to colonize there, they still may cause infections and still may transfer their resistance to the other bacteria in our digestive tract. In so doing, have they transferred other properties as well? With each bite of meat from an animal treated with growth-promoting antibiotics, we very well may be developing an inability to properly digest food and an incapacity to make necessary hormones and vitamins on which our bodies rely.

Meanwhile, the danger caused by antibiotic resistant bacteria grows. Each year, at least 2 million people acquire serious infections with resistant bacteria, while at least 23,000 people die. Not only have infections from resistant bacteria become increasingly common, but some bacteria are developing resistance to multiple classes of antibiotics. This amounts to a major loss with doctors undermined in their ability to fight infectious diseases

In a speech she gave last year, Dr. Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization, offered this dire warning: “A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.” Obesity resulting from overuse of antibiotics may be the least of our worries.

Thanks to high-end workout gear line Lululemon, yoga is no longer just a spiritual discipline: It’s an aspirational branding opportunity. The company, founded in 2000, has a massive, cult-like following of juice cleanse–guzzling, elite gym-going women who wear Wunder Under leggings ($98) and Virasana blanket wraps ($148) inside and outside of the yoga studio to signify how rich, hip, and healthy they are. Healthy, of course, is code for thin – 67 percent of U.S. women wear a size 14 or larger, but you’d be hard-pressed to find Lululemon’s largest size, 12, or even a 10 in most stores.

Billionaire founder Chip Wilson is famously dismissive of larger customers: He has said the extra fabric it takes to make plus-size clothes would hurt his business and that part of the reason his company had to recall thousands of indecently sheer yoga pants last spring was because customers were trying to squeeze into too-small clothes. One former Lululemon staffer recently said the company purposely refrains from restocking larger sizes. Earlier this month, Wilson sparked national outrage when he told Bloomberg TV that some of his pants pill because not all women are Lululemon-worthy. “Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work,” he said. “It’s about the rubbing through the thighs.”

Some viewers were offended, but competitors in the activewear arena were thrilled. Many of them are inspired by Lululemon’s high-tech style but hope to attract the average American women instead of excluding her.

The activewear market is a $30 billion industry that’s growing two times as fast as the overall apparel industry, according to NPD, a consumer market research firm. (Lululemon’s projected revenue for 2013 is around $1.6 billion.) Plus-size women hold 28 percent of women’s apparel purchasing power, but spend only 17 percent – maybe that’s because 62 percent of plus size woman say they have a hard time finding the styles they want.

If they can’t find them (or fit into them) at Lululemon, they might try Threads 4 Thought, a sustainable apparel line that recently advertised its new yoga line ThreatsActive as “Never Sheer, Always Flattering, for Every Woman, No Matter the Body Type,” a not-so-subtle jab at Lululemon’s embarrassing recall. “Hopefully it’s clear without being too offensive,” laughed co-founder Eric Fleet, who added that he didn’t agree with Wilson’s strategy and “wasn’t sure that it’s going to work out for them.

“Any brand should want to appeal to as many women as it can, instead of alienating them,” he said.

According to Tasha Lewis, a professor of fiber science and apparel design at Cornell University who has been following the post-recall marketing strategy, Athleta, which was acquired by Gap Inc. in 2008 and carries sizes up to XXL, is Lululemon’s biggest threat. She says it strategically places its stores in close proximity to Lululemon’s. Athleta hasn’t sent out any snarky emails and wouldn’t comment directly on Wilson’s most recent comments, but a spokesperson noted the brand’s Give-It-A-Workout-Guarantee, which allows women to bring back clothes if they, say, pill.

Some founders of independent, plus-size-only brands were more straightforward about what they feel is the real issue: fat stigma and shame. Women who wear Lululemon aren’t just buying pricey yoga pants; they’re buying into a lifestyle that larger women think they don’t deserve.

“Society constantly tells plus-size women that we don’t have a place in the conversation about fitness and health, and in branding around fitness and health,” said Jen Wilder, who launched plus-sized athletic wear line Cult of California in 2012 after working as the manager of retail sales at Equinox Gym and noticing that women above size L had to raid the men’s section. She had also started dating her now-husband, an avid hiker, and didn’t feel confident in the baggy sweats available to her.

“I really wanted to look cute,” she said. “I wanted the outfit with the matching bra that goes with the tennis shoes. It was important for my self-esteem.”

So she started designing galaxy-print high-rise (capri leggings $69) and zip-up sports bras ($45) sexy enough to wear post-gym and sturdy enough for curvy women; for example, her leggings have double inseam panels so friction doesn’t open the seams. Her clothes are even made from the same fabric as Lululemon gear. But Wilder said since most women don’t aspire to stay plus-size – “They hope the size they are isn’t going to be the size they are next year” – she gets backlash about her prices. She’s closing shop soon because she makes more money working for retailers like Bebe, that pay big bucks but aren’t interested in plus-size attire.

Stacey Goldstein, founder of Lola Getts Active, agreed that most major retailers don’t want to “offend their skinny customers” by advertising plus-size offerings, and said even big brands like Athleta stock limited sizes and rarely use plus-size models. “When stores don’t take the time to fit in plus-size women,” she said, “the woman knows she’s an afterthought.”

Goldstein wants Lola Getts, which offers empire-waist tanks ($59) and T-shirts with neon trim ($63) for women size 14 and up, to be as aspirational as Lululemon. “We want the customer to get that same community feeling as her skinny counterparts,” she said. The Lululemon fiasco has been great for business, she said; in the last 10 days, she has seen a 5 percent increase in sales that she directly attributes to Wilson’s comments. “It’s obvious that the plus-size woman is a force to be reckoned with,” she said. “She wants a healthy, active life. And she wants to look good.”

Does Lululemon care about potential competitors who welcome the women the company has rejected? Lululemon didn’t respond to requests for comment, but it seems unlikely. In some ways, Wilson’s comments enhance the brand’s enviable aura of unattainability. Lululemon is for the confident woman who doesn’t care if her pants are see-through: all the better for showing off her toned thighs.

Since July, a computer in Pittsburgh has been doing nothing but looking at millions of pictures, 24/7. Each minute, it flips through another thousand images of mundane, everyday things like cars and airplanes, turtles and geese. And little by little, this machine is learning about what it sees.

The Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) at Carnegie Mellon University is part of a rapidly expanding new model of computing in which relying on human input is so 1990s. Computers of this new era, scientists say, can think and recognize the world for themselves. In about four months of running through images, NEIL has already identified 1,500 types of objects and gleaned 2,500 concepts related to the things it sees. With no input from programmers, NEIL can tell you that trading floors are crowded, the Airbus A330 is an airplane, and babies have eyes.

“The more it goes on, the more it will learn and come close to a child [in intelligence],” Abhinav Gupta, an assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, tells Newsweek. Gupta and his two doctoral student partners call the machine “never ending” for a reason; they’re curious to see how long it can keep building on the information it learns, which they compare to the “common sense” knowledge humans acquire all the time.

Gupta’s work is part of a field known to robo-researchers as computer vision. It began in the 1970s, when military scientists became interested in whether computers could recognize airplanes or tanks on the battlefield. The first attempts, says Pietro Perona of the California Institute of Technology, focused on edges. Because a digital image is just numbers, it would be a big deal if a machine could find “the distinguishing patterns of lines,” Perona tells Newsweek.

By 1995, machines were laboring to process a single image, says Lisa Brown, a computer vision researcher at IBM, who earned her Ph.D. at that time. “Is the road at an angle? We were just trying to answer that,” Brown recalls.

As the technology became more advanced, computers could be programmed to understand categories of objects – lamps or coffee mugs, for example – based on shapes and textures. Humans typically recognize 30,000 categories of objects out of a growing number of perhaps more than 1 million, Perona says.

Today, computer vision is becoming a bigger part of our lives. Facebook and Google Glass, for example, have the power to recognize faces. In the future, scientists predict computer vision will help doctors spot tumors, enable military bombs to find their targets, and allow retailers to find out just what kind of handbags you prefer to post on Pinterest.

But there’s one problem: Nobody wants to sit around all day labeling “face,” “tumor,” “Prada” for each new image variation. That would make computer vision too expensive (and exhausting) to be practical. That’s where artificial intelligence comes into the picture. In the past 10 years, the race has been to find better, faster ways to help computers learn visual recognition on their own.

“Initially, we were not sure whether this would happen,” Gupta says. But in the end all it took was a small trick: using Google image search, where the pictures come already labeled and by the millions. After Gupta’s group plugged in the initial algorithms and told NEIL what to learn about, machines did the rest. NEIL and its 200 central processing units have combed through millions of pictures, analyzing scenes, objects, attributes and the relationships between them.

The only time NEIL needs help, they say, is when it runs up against tricky homonyms. Pink is a color and a pop singer; apple is a fruit and a company. NEIL can’t tell the difference until a human being intervenes. But, “this is the first step in common-sense knowledge,” Gupta explains.

A world of humanoid robots that can understand the environment and interact with us may not be far off. Voice recognition is in your smartphone. Machines can mimic the properties of taste. At MIT, a whole department called Brain and Cognitive Sciences is devoted to understanding the neurological programming that lets humans learn, and the faculty is full of computer scientists.

Meanwhile, at IBM, Brown says one of her colleagues is building a robot that can learn by sight and sound and is intended to help elderly people. It could understand, for example, “This is the medicine I need to take in the morning,” she says.

“What we’re trying to figure out,” Brown says, “is how to learn how to learn.”

Late November augurs the start of the high school basketball season and with it, in our increasingly sports-obsessed ecosystem, national high school basketball rankings. USA Today provides a preseason Top 25, as do the prep-centric websites MaxPreps.com and Studentsports.com.

These three publications agree upon two things: (1) Findlay Prep, based in Henderson, Nev., is either the No. 1 or No. 2 high school boys basketball team in the nation and (2) Findlay Prep is not a high school.

“I understand what they are,” says Ronnie Flores, who oversees the rankings at StudentSports.com and has the Findlay Prep Pilots at No. 2 in his preseason poll. “I understand that Findlay Prep is not a high school. But if another school agrees to play Findlay Prep, then I don’t get into the morals of it.”

Let’s take a 20-second timeout.

Since Findlay Prep was founded in 2007, the Pilots have compiled an astounding 189–13 record. At some point in each of the past six high school basketball seasons it has been ranked No. 1 nationally.

In that same period, all of the lads who have played for the Pilots have qualified academically for college. In fact, 100 percent of Findlay Prep’s basketball players have earned Division I basketball scholarships, which is no different from saying that 100 percent of the students who attend Findlay Prep have earned Division I basketball scholarships, which we could say without hesitation, if only there were a Findlay Prep to attend.

Confused? Good. That means you’re paying attention.

To borrow a term from the digital retail age, Findlay Prep is not a “brick-and-mortar” high school. Oh, sure, Findlay Prep has students – 11 in all this season, hailing from four continents and seven sovereign nations. Two of the students happen to be seven-foot tall. And Findlay Prep has teachers, to a degree. The “school’s” full name is Findlay Prep of the Henderson International School, the latter designation referring to a private school whose teachers instruct Findlay Prep’s 11 ballers and whose campus provides a basketball gym (for a price, of course).

But here’s something you should know about the Henderson International School: It accepts students for grades one through eight. The Findlay Prep students attend a high school that is bereft of high school peers, and all 11 of them reside in the same $425,000 home that is located less than a mile from the aforementioned school.

What is Findlay Prep, actually? It’s Real World: Las Vegas meets the most daunting AAU basketball team you ever saw. It is, fittingly in this desert oasis to end all desert oases, a mirage.

“I call it a ‘destination school,’ ” says ESPN college basketball analyst Seth Greenberg, a former college coach. “They’re taking kids from all over the country, all over the world, and providing them with outstanding and specialized instruction, while also preparing them academically for college. But should they be ranked as a regular high school? No.”

Findlay Prep is the progeny of its namesake, Cliff Findlay, a physically and figuratively larger-than-life character in Sin City. At six-foot-eight, Findlay stands out in a crowd, and even if he did not, billboards and signs around Las Vegas promoting one of his myriad car dealerships (Findlay Chevrolet, Findlay Honda, Findlay Kia, etc.) would guarantee that the 64-year-old’s name rings a bell. A former UNLV basketball player whose father flew 63 missions in P-38s in World War II (hence, Pilots), Findlay appears to have a genuine desire to finance his own basketball Brigadoon minus all the bother and blather of high school athletic federations or the NCAA.

Hence, Findlay Prep’s students, unlike foreign students who transfer in to traditional high schools, do not have to sit out one year before playing. Conversely (even though Findlay Prep is sponsored by Nike), Findlay Prep is ineligible to compete within the Nevada state high school system or to play for a state championship. Instead, this season the Pilots will fly missions to Los Angeles, where they will play in the Staples Center; Vancouver, British Columbia; Honolulu; Memphis, Tenn.; Dayton, Ohio; Springfield, Mass.; Lubbock, Texas; and Toronto.

All of which, considering the pedigree of student who matriculates at Findlay Prep, is no different from attending a prestigious high school for the performing arts. Already five of Findlay Prep’s alumni have made their way to NBA rosters, including Anthony Bennett, whom the Cleveland Cavaliers made the No. 1 overall pick in last June’s draft (Bennett has, thus far, played miserably).

The existence of academic institutions that at least appear to exist primarily to showcase prestigious athletics teams dates all the way back to Groucho Marx’s Professor Wagstaff and Huxley College. But institutions such as Oak Hill Academy in West Virginia and Huntington Prep in Virginia, both of which are also perennially ranked in the Top 10, have been prep mainstays for decades. The difference between such institutions and Findlay Prep is that the former have a veneer of the tail wagging the dog. Findlay Prep is a tail with no dog.

So how come publications that know better continue to rank them?

“Clearly, what Findlay Prep is doing exists somewhere between high school and college basketball,” says Jason Hickman, the national basketball writer at MaxPreps.com. “There’s no question it’s totally unfair when it comes to ranking them.”

Hickman, 36, was raised in a small town in southwest Washington and attended “a tiny school of 100 kids.” He made the basketball team, he says, because “they needed the bodies,” and he understands that an organically grown high school champion can become the stuff of legend, of Norman Dale and Jimmy Chitwood. But he also understands that those days are over.

“To do something like Hickory High School on a national level, just to be ranked in the Top 25, that’s a once-in-50-years prospect,” says Hickman. “The Findlay Preps of the world are destroying all that.”

Then again, you cannot return back past midcourt without committing a backcourt violation. And you can’t unteach people how to dunk.

“It’s the present and the future,” says Flores. “Readers are more interested in who are the top high school players as opposed to the top high school teams, anyway, because they care more about recruiting. And coaches, well some of them, want to be able to say that they beat Findlay Prep or Montverde Academy,” the current No. 1.

Not that they will.

And so the result is Findlay Prep, the nation’s No. 1– or No. 2–ranked high school basketball team without a high school.

“I see myself as a writer who covers high school basketball,” says Hickman. “I’m not the judge, jury, and executioner here. When high school teams stop playing Findlay Prep, we’ll stop ranking them.”

With aching ankles and leaden thighs, I pressed my hands on top of my knees to hoist myself up above the last slippery boulder. Finally, there it was: the pinkish, other-worldly towers of Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, perched above an aquamarine lagoon. Sounds of avalanches filled the freezing air, and snow from the previous day’s blizzard reflected the pristine, azure sky. Still short of breath, I understood immediately why it had recently been named the eighth wonder of the world.

Days earlier, while waiting in line for the border agent at the Chilean crossing to stamp my passport, a newspaper printout taped to the wall caught my eye. “Torres del Paine Declared the Eighth World Wonder,” its headline screamed out below a black and white photograph of the mountain range. That was my incentive, the motor that propelled my shaky legs forward through more than 37 miles of dense forests, rocky streams and melting hanging glaciers.

I got another much-needed boost when staff at the refugios, heated lodges spread out over the Torres del Paine circuit, boasted of the recent recognition, proud to be part of the eighth wonder of the world. For the duration of the hike, other travelers and I were part of the club, too. We felt pride and a little privilege. We were special.

A week later back in my hotel room, I did a little research and found that Torres del Paine is special, but maybe not as special as I’d been told. I found at least a dozen other places that have been called the world’s eighth wonder.

The TripAdvisor-owned travel site www.virtualtourist.com bestowed the honor of wonder of the world to Torres del Paine, based on a web campaign in which common folks cast their votes. Other candidates included Bora Bora, the Empire State Building and the Colombian Coffee Cultural Landscape.

Nevertheless, with pomp and ceremony, the Chilean Ministry of Economy hosted an event earlier this month inside the park, during which it announced the VirtualTourist award. Many of the country’s tourism and forestry officials attended the event.

"Torres del Paine is in fact the First Wonder of the World, but was simply the eighth to be chosen," said Félix de Vicente, the Economy, Tourism and Development Minister.

While the original seven wonders – the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the Temple of Artemis – are not in dispute, the new seven wonders are. And online, where the discussion rages, no landmark or idea is too small to be a wonder, nor does the distinction between natural and man-made seem to matter.

According to a 2007 online contest CNN says generated "server-crushing traffic in its final hours," the new Seven Wonders of the World included the Christ the Redeemer Statue in Brazil, the Great Wall of China, the Colosseum in Italy, Petra in Jordan, Machu Picchu in Peru, Chichén Itza in Mexico and the Taj Mahal in India.

Self-proclaimed wonder authority Howard Hillman tweaked that list to include the Galapagos Islands and the Grand Canyon.

Other lists add the Great Barrier Reef, Mount Everest, Victoria Falls, Aurora Borealis, and Mexico’s Paricutin volcano.

A running vote to name "an eighth wonder of the world" in The Guardian lists the Internet, Harry Potter, the Sydney Opera House, and Stonehenge as candidates. Angkor, in Cambodia, is leading with 17 percent of the votes.

Houston’s Astrodome, the annual wildebeest migration from the Serengeti and the Pink and White Terraces of Lake Rotomahana in New Zealand have all been dubbed the eighth wonder of the world at one time or another.

The eighth wonder of the world has become an existential land grab, the subject of countless web contests resulting in arbitrary awards that are nonetheless bestowed with solemnity by an ever-expanding circle of interested parties.

Torres del Paine is beautiful, thrilling. It is possible, during a five-day hike there, to get caught in a blizzard, be knocked off one’s feet by 70 mph Patagonian winds, see rainbows, hear avalanches, come face-to-face with a glacier rising more than 50 feet above the water, and lose count of the waterfalls along the route.

But is it the eighth wonder of the world? I can’t be sure until all the voting is in.

In two weeks, Bettina Wulff will testify in the trial of her estranged husband, Christian Wulff, the former president of Germany who stands accused of taking bribes. The hearing is the latest in a long line of embarrassing incidents that casts doubt on whether leaders of the most powerful nation in the European Union are as honest as they claim to be.

Germans think of themselves as upright and impeccably honorable. The general view is that Mediterranean countries are poorly run and mired in scandal while northern European countries play by the rules. The trial of the disgraced Wulff, however, has turned that notion on its head.

For once it seems Germany is operating like a banana republic. “We’re sitting on our high horses, telling new democracies they need anticorruption legislation,” said Professor Doctor Hans-Joachim Mengel, a professor of political science at the Berlin’s Free University, “but we ourselves don’t need it, ‘because you can trust our politicians.’ ”

Wulff, 54, stands accused in a court in Hanover of corruption and influence peddling. He was forced out of office last February. As soon as he was in trouble, Bettina, his wife, a blonde former public relations executive 14 years his junior, left him.

Five years ago, as prime minister of Lower Saxony, according to prosecutor Clemens Eimterbäumer, a square-jawed 43-year-old who looks like a young Bruce Willis, Wulff accepted a $1,036 bribe from David Groenewold, a movie producer. Groenewold paid for a hotel stay, a baby-sitter and the entrance fee to the VIP tent at the Munich Oktoberfest.

Subsequently, Wulff wrote to the engineering and electronic giant Siemens asking for financing for a film Groenewold planned to make. This, Eimterbäumer and his team suggest, amounts to corruption.

A president brought low by a gift of just $1,000. Is this just ultra-honest Germany paying pedantic attention to the rules? On the contrary. Though the gift is the only charge Wulff is facing, it’s just one aspect of a web of mutually beneficial friendships between the former president and corporate executives.

“The people’s reaction to Wulff's trial is, Only 770 euros? That’s ridiculous,” said Gregor Hackmack, co-founder of the parliamentary watchdog group Abgeordnetenwatch. “Direct bribery like the crime Wulff is accused of is very rare in Germany.”

But, he added, “There are different levels of corruption. Many politicians accept gifts from business leaders. They accept dinner invitations from them.”

A string of mysterious business dealings led to the scandal that forced Wulff to resign in February last year. There was a Christmas trip to Coral Springs, Fla., which included a stay at the luxurious McMansion of a German scrap-metal multimillionaire, Egon Geerkens.

When Green members of Lower Saxony’s state parliament quizzed Wulff about it, he insisted that he and Geerkens had no business dealings. But they did, indirectly. Geerkens’s wife had given the Wulffs a $675,000 loan toward a mortgage to buy a home. It was widely suspected the loan really came from Geerkens himself.

The house the Wulffs bought, in the village of Großburgwedel outside Hanover, looks much like any other suburban home, though the taxpayers of Lower Saxony paid for bulletproof windows, steel doors, and a panic room. When Wulff became president, the couple moved to Schloss Bellevue, the magnificent 18th century Berlin palace that has served as the president’s official residence since 1994.

Then there was the Nord-Süd-Dialog, a private conference in Hanover, Lower Saxony’s capital. Wulff’s speaker and his “Siamese twin,” as Wulff once called him, Olaf Glaeseker, accepted 17 holiday trips from an event planner, Manfred Schmidt, then used government contacts to arrange sponsors for Schmidt’s Nord-Süd-Dialog.

When asked whether the state government was involved in the conference, Wulff’s office flatly denied it. Glaeseker claims that Wulff, the patron of the conference, knew about the arrangement with Schmidt. When Glaeseker goes on trial himself on corruption charges in Hanover next month, Wulff will be called as a witness.

After Wulff became president, his business dealings became the focus of intense press attention, not least from the muckraking tabloid Bild, with Wulff insisting he’d done nothing wrong. Wulff told Bild Editor-in-Chief Kai Diekmann not to run a story and allegedly left a threatening message on his voicemail: “There will be a war.”

When prosecutor Eimterbäumer demanded that Wulff’s presidential immunity from prosecution be lifted, he was left with no choice but to resign.

Wulff’s trial, which opened in Hanover on November 14, isn’t just the gripping story of a fallen political star caught with his hand in the till. It has also brought unparalleled attention to the perennial cozy relationship between German politicians and the business sector.

Siegfried Kauder, a Christian Democratic Union member of the Bundestag until this year, described how businessmen tend to “create a comfortable atmosphere for the politicians they’re interested in. They invite you to concerts and good restaurants. It happens not just in [German] federal politics, but in the European Parliament, the state parliaments, and at the local level as well.”

One way companies ensure legislators are sympathetic is to offer highly paid speaking gigs. Since the 2009 election, parliamentarian Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democratic Party candidate for chancellor in the elections this September, has earned at least $950,000, in addition to his Bundestag salary of $133,680, mostly by giving speeches.

Nine other Bundestag members have earned over $200,000 through extracurricular work. “Of course, in reality the speech payments are for completely different services,” said Hackmack.

Dr. Günter Krings, deputy leader of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union faction in the Bundestag, disagrees. “I’ve never experienced corruption among members of the Bundestag,” he said. “Of course, some members are close to the private sector, but that has not yet amounted to cases of bribery."

But in Germany, a country that prides itself on doing things by the book, the thought of politicians being less than honorable is worrisome. “We Germans always tend to think that here in Germany everything is always done correctly,” said Konstantin von Notz, a lawyer and Green Party MP. “What we have is mostly not pure corruption, but it's still not okay and that makes it problematic.”

The intimacy between politicians and business interests affects both parties. There is a revolving door between politicians and the businesses they once regulated. As the chancellor, Social Democratic Gerhard Schröder vigorously supported the construction of a North Sea pipeline from Russia to Germany.

Immediately after losing the 2005 election, he joined Nord Stream AG, the Russian-German company building and operating the pipeline. Today he’s chairman of the company’s Shareholder Committee.

And this year, Eckart von Klaeden, a CDU member of the Bundestag and state secretary to Chancellor Angela Merkel, resigned to become chief lobbyist for the carmaker Daimler. Even so, he remained a member of the CDU’s governing board.

Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst makes his inaugural address during a service of worship in Limburg Cathedral. REUTERS/Wolfgang Radtke/KNA-Bild Meanwhile, Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst of Limburg added to growing public disaffection with Germany’s leaders by spending $42 million of church money lavishly renovating his official residence, which included a $20,000 bathtub. The bishop lied about expenses, too, traveling first class on a flight to India, then claiming under oath he had sat in business class.

Tebartz-van Elst also faced a trial, for lying under oath, a charge he recently settled by paying a fine of $27,000. Von Eckert, for his part, has bowed to pressure from party colleagues and resigned from the CDU board, but remains under investigation.

Pope Francis swiftly suspended Tebartz-van Elst, but German leaders have no means of dealing with their unethical colleagues. “For elected politicians, buying votes and carrying out political acts as a result of receiving gifts are the only things explicitly prohibited by law, and that’s something that can almost never be proven,” explained Michael Koss, chair of the political team at Transparency International’s German branch.  “Members of the executive are subject to closer regulation.” That’s why Wulff and Glaeseker are on trial.

Only one German lawmaker has ever been prosecuted for corruption. Indeed, Germany is one of a handful U.N. member states that hasn’t ratified the U.N.’s anticorruption convention. Even so, since stringent laws apply to public-sector workers – they may not accept gifts worth more than $37.50 – most Germans have never encountered corruption.

But the wind is changing. For instance, prosecutors are also investigating whether von Klaeden used his position as a participant in car industry discussions at the chancellery to Daimler’s advantage.

“The prosecutors have become braver and now have the confidence to launch investigations of politicians, even though they know that the government can shut down their investigations or move them to different jobs,” explains Hackmack.

“In the past, the attitude was always, Here in Germany we do everything correctly, why would we need to investigate corruption?

“The exciting thing right now is that the prosecutor is daring to put Wulff on trial even though the case concerns a pretty small sum.”

The case against Wulff will dominate the headlines when his wife testifies on December 12. He met her in 2006 and they married two years later. As first lady, Bettina was widely disliked. She was seen as a schemer who wanted to become Germany’s Hillary Clinton. She gained further notoriety when she sued Google over its auto-complete function, which automatically added escort and prostitute to her name whenever anyone searched for her. Google agreed to remove eight of the 3,000 search results she demanded be deleted.

Recently she published her memoirs, a cringe-inducing volume in which she muses over such weighty topics as having sex when bodyguards are posted outside the door.

By the standards of Western Europe and North America, German politics is remarkably clean: Heads of government don’t own major media outlets; top campaign donors are not rewarded with plum ambassadorships; parliamentarians don’t engage in mass cheating on their expenses. Indeed, Transparency International ranks Germany 13th in its latest Corruption Perceptions Index, above the U.K., the U.S., France, and Italy.

Still, amid the recent scandals, there’s a growing recognition that Germany needs stricter anticorruption laws. Thomas Kutschaty, justice minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, has spent years campaigning for such legislation. “The amount of resistance I got in the beginning was pretty intense,” he recalls. “But as time has gone on, I’ve received more support. Now I’m even convinced that the new coalition government will take on this issue.”

On November 27, the CDU/CSU and the SPD announced they had succeeded in striking a deal to form a new government. With a combined strength of 504 MPs, the new administration will have an overwhelming majority in the 631-member Bundestag.

“In the intersection between politics and business, not everybody is an angel,” said Mengel. “We need proper anticorruption laws for the same reason that we have laws banning murder: most people would never consider killing anybody, but you need to formalize the fact that it’s not allowed.”

“All the parliamentary groups in the Bundestag would like to pass stricter anticorruption laws, but it’s very hard to define where to draw the line of what’s allowed and not allowed. Some people refuse to even accept a cup of coffee,” said Krings.

Among ideas promoted by parliamentary groups is a three-year cooling-off period between a politician leaving office and taking up a position covering the same area in the private sector.

Wulff rejected a plea bargain offered by Eimterbäumer because he wants his name cleared. If convicted, he faces up to three years in jail. But a guilty verdict is far from certain and Hackmack notes, “If Wulff is declared innocent, people will say, ‘Not even this case was real corruption. We don't need to do anything.’ ”

Whatever the outcome, German politicians will start paying closer attention to who is inviting them to dinner or an overnight stay. They could end up losing the roof over their heads.

Wulff no longer lives in the house he bought with the dubious loan that set the whole scandal in motion. When he and Bettina separated earlier this year, he moved into a modest apartment.

I am of the school that believes you should be able to prepare and cook an entire three-course meal with just a sauté pan, a good chef’s knife, and a glass of decent wine. Any other tools are merely clutter. When I saw the Hamilton Beach Breakfast Sandwich Maker advertised, I shook my world-weary head and sighed: Honestly? If you want a breakfast sandwich, go to your nearest drive-thru. Don’t fill your cabinets with another piece of metal and plastic destined for a garage sale.

Then I found myself thinking about the appliance morning after morning as I rushed to cook scrambled eggs, make toast, heat sausages and pour juice – all before the school bus chugged past our stop. I had used two different pans and a toaster, and it wasn’t even 7 a.m.

Suddenly I needed an egg sandwich, and I needed it in my house – now. I could practically taste it: My sandwich would have eggs from happy hens, smoky Canadian bacon, and a slice or three of mild English cheddar, and perhaps a squirt of Sriracha to jolt me into a state of wakefulness.

And within 16 minutes of the sandwich maker’s arrival in my home, that’s exactly what I had: A piping hot parcel of breakfast to call my own.

The Hamilton Beach Breakfast Sandwich MakerHandout The process is simple. The machine has two stacked rings. The upper one, on which the egg cooks, has a removable bottom. I placed half an English muffin, bacon, and cheese in the bottom ring. Then I lowered the top ring in position and cracked an egg into it. At this point, I recommend piercing the yolk to keep it from exploding all over the machine when you close the lid. (I also recommend you read the manual, which apparently also recommends piercing the yolk.) I topped the raw egg with the other half of the English muffin, closed the lid, and waited for four minutes, nervously staring at my watch, wondering how this could possibly work. I then slid out the cooking plate beneath the egg, and the magic occurred: The still-runny egg met the melted cheese, and breakfast-sandwich fusion occurred.

The process is well thought-out. When you forget to pierce your egg yolk (as I did) and it oozes all over the machine’s hinges, instantly baking on them (as mine did), it takes only a wipe with a paper towel to remove the mess. The rings are also dishwasher-safe, which is a rare feature in the world of household electronics.

Not everything about the machine is perfect, however. Some advanced planning is needed: Any meat you put on the sandwich has to be cooked first. I fried some Canadian bacon, but precooked sausage patties, which can be quickly heated in the microwave, are another tasty option.

Making breakfast for a crowd is time-consuming, as you have to wait for the machine to reheat between sandwiches. One Saturday morning I attempted to feed four boys under the age of 10. They quickly became restless and whiny, until I had the bright idea to let them help make the sandwiches. In the end, it only took 25 minutes, and the little savages all agreed it was worth it.

To earn a place in my cupboard, this machine, no matter how washable and cute, needed to do more than just make breakfast sandwiches, so I attempted to make a classic Reuben. The rye bread was the wrong shape (oval), so I rounded off the edges to make it fit. I buttered the bread, layered corned beef, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut, and I added more cheese so the top layer of bread would stick. I then topped it with another piece of buttery rye. The result was worthy of a decent New York deli, even if it was a bit on the petite side.

Whatever kind of sandwich you decide to make, there is one inviolate rule: It must contain cheese. Cheese is key, because it acts like glue – really tasty glue. Sure you could make a sandwich without cheese, but don’t try to eat that sandwich while driving and then complain to me that you have egg yolk and bacon all down the front of your sweater.

That’s a nugget of advice my husband wishes was in the instruction manual. 

People often complain that life is complicated. They’re wrong. With the acceleration of information, the changing economy, the intricacies of global interconnectivity, and the massive upheaval in digital communications, life is not complicated, it’s complex. This important distinction is more than mere wordplay, as explained by Duncan Green, strategic advisor for Oxfam GB and author of From Poverty to Power: “Complicated means if you study it hard, you can predict what happens when you intervene. In contrast, a complex system has so many feedback loops and uncertainties that you can never know how it will react.… ”

Complexity is why every meeting you schedule is rescheduled, and why your attempts to pin down drinks with a friend slide all over the social map. Planning is less effective in the whirl of complexity, and that includes the very act of getting away from it all. In our era of vanishing jobs and crashing markets, setting a distant date on the calendar looks a lot like wishful thinking. Thankfully, from the vexation of complexity has materialized a new option to chart our turbulent world: Flash Travel.

Last-minute, mobile-app-driven hotel booking is a rising trend, reforming the landscape of the hospitality industry. Leaving laptops behind, forgoing search and compare on their home computers, more travelers are just going mobile (phone). Market research firm PhoCusWright projects that by 2014, 20 percent of hotel bookings will be made by tablet and mobile phones. Projections like this make the flash travel app a hot market, and 2013 has been their year. Pioneering U.S. brands like Hotel Tonight offer last-minute deals on hotel rooms that have attracted millions of mobile users, and nearly $50 million in venture capital. In Europe, flash travel app providers like Hot Hotels and Blink are fighting to capitalize on the lure of last-minute travel in the attraction-dense landscape of the Continent. Just around the globe, Hotel Quickly, flush with Hong Kong venture capital, is staking out South East Asia, perhaps the most mobile-friendly, smart-phone-drenched market in the world. Clearly, as the world changes, the way we travel through it is also transforming.

The popularity of Flash Travel stems from its simplicity. The typical flash travel business model is a free mobile app. Once credit card information is entered, (sometimes by snapshot, to avoid the annoyance of typing numbers) users select their city and are presented with three to five vetted hotels. A few taps, and they’re booked. Whether reservations are made on the morning of the flight, or in the cab at midnight, flash travelers are relieved of the burden of searching and the pain of planning, and get a chance to embrace the fun of spontaneous travel. Services like Hotel Quickly play up that last part with whimsical touches like a “shake it” feature: Just shake your phone to be booked into the closest place available. Services often feed information based off the user’s GPS location, showing the closest hotels. Most of them accept reservations made within minutes of check-in, and all of them offer some pretty serious discounts on hotel rooms. Great for the users, but this last aspect has some in the hotel industry intoning notes of impending gloom.

As flash travelers seize the deals found by living without reservations, the traditional hotel industry trembles. True, vacant rooms are the bane of the business, and dumping them off on third-party providers like Hotel Tonight is providential. But selling them off cheap might be a way of selling tomorrow, too. In the worst-case scenario, the dim future of the hotel industry is one where reservations are a fond memory. Wary of missing last-minute bargains, more travelers have stopped booking ahead. Like an army of barbarians armed with smartphones, they lay siege to hotels by waiting until the last minute to book. Brand loyalty will disappear as users chase whatever hotel offers the best bargains. Hotels will be chaos, and hospitality will suffer as reservations, the predictive indicator of service needs, becomes irrelevant. In this future, the atomized blast of flash travel ushers in a dark, wasted landscape of withering hospitality, played out on the bleak tundra of a crumbling industry model.

Tomas Laboutka, co-founder and CEO of South East Asia’s Hotel Quickly, feels differently. Sitting in his crisp, tailored shirt, while sunlight shines on the sparkling skyscrapers of Bangkok just outside his office window, the dashing entrepreneur talks about a much brighter future for the hospitality industry. “In our region, the customers are leapfrogging to mobile directly—bypassing the online experience,” he says. “Hotel Quickly allows hotels to manage their inventory in real time, through the most relevant channel. We are mobile only… we do not cannibalize the other channels. Also, we rotate the inventory, unlike other flash sales. Loyalty customers will not wait for the last minute if they want to book a particular hotel.”

Perhaps he is more optimistic than others in his line because of his location. Bangkok is the most visited city in the world, set in the heart of what is fast becoming the most mobilized place on the planet. Because wired Internet portals like home computers are not as prevalent here, mobile phones, smartphones, and tablets have become most of the populations’ primary Internet device. GfK, one of the world’s largest research companies, estimates that smartphone sales in the South East Asian region are up 78 percent, year-on-year. GfK’s studies found that in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines, $13.7 billion worth of phones were sold between July 2011 and June 2012. Spark this mobile fire in a landscape dripping with cultural attractions, fused together by cheap flights, annually lit up with expats on extended regional tours, and Hotel Quickly or some sprightly competitor might blow up in a flash of profitability.

According to a report by the American Hotel & Lodging Association and Smith Travel Research, by 2015 the hotel industry will pay $7.5 billion in commissions annually to businesses that help sell hotel rooms, up from $3.8 billion in 2010. With an increasingly mobile-driven populace travelling through the madness of an ever more complex world, large parts of that profit will be made through last-minute hotel providers. Whether Flash Travel will be a blessing or a curse to the industry is impossible to predict. Travel, like every part of our world, is a complex business.

Tomorrow remains unknown… but there is a Hotel Tonight. 

He was wandering through the dusty camp somewhere inside Syria like a shadow, his small, disfigured head covered by a blue sweatshirt. When he turned his scarred face towards the sun, it revealed a skull with a hole for a mouth, ears flattened by fire, and skin melted like candle wax.

The small boy’s head was covered by third-degree burns. Only his eyes – somber, dark – were left untouched.

He was only 11 but looked younger, a broken boy called Abdullah, who had watched a rocket fall from the sky like a terrible star. Because of the bombardment last year in Hama, because of the war in Syria, Abdullah’s world will never be the same.

What is it like to be a child in Syria? What is it like to wake up knowing you are not safe? That you cannot go to school? That your fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins may be killed in battle, or executed simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time?

If you are a Syrian child, you are not exempt from being targeted. You can be marked for death as you walk to school – if there is a school. You can be sniped at, the target of rockets while waiting in a breadline, or bombed while hiding in your house.

Your mother and sisters can be raped or taken, and no one can protect them. You lose your friends and your right to go to school. You become stateless.

You walk the streets of your village, knowing that the majority of children killed in this war were killed by bombs in their own neighborhood. Or you can be forced into armed conflict or tortured. Even babies have been documented as tortured in this war.

Or like Abdullah, a second of hiding in the wrong place means you are maimed for life.

A child being treated by the nurses after a bombing by the government army. Giulio Piscitelli/Contrasto/Redux The Syrian war is entering its 33rd month. Every day is more desperate, bloodier, and the world gets more tired of hearing about it. But it does not stop the killing.

According to the Oxford Research Group, a London think tank, out of 110,000 killed by the end of this past August, 11,420 were children 17 years old and younger.

The primary cause of death reported for 71 percent of those children was explosives. Air bombardment killed more than 2,000. Small arms fire killed another 2,000.

The terror of being a child in Aleppo, in Homs, in Hama, in Idlib, in Deraa – where the uprising started when children who scrawled anti-Assad graffiti, “As-Shaab / Yoreed / Eskaat el nizam!”: “The people / want / to topple the regime!” were beaten and tortured – means you get accustomed to the sound of shelling or, worse, aerial bombardment.

“Once the war started,” Abdullah said, “there was nowhere to hide.”

Earlier this week, U.N. chief Ban Ki-Moon described the upcoming Geneva II conference scheduled for January 22 as “a vehicle for a peaceful transition that fulfills the legitimate aspirations of all the Syrian people.”  But hope for many of these people is a remote emotion, already lost during the early days of the conflict.

War turns people into numbers and dehumanizes them. It steals their memories, their communities, and their chance of a better life. The French psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, who writes on resilience and its effect on victims (he himself was a child soldier during World War II), strongly believes individuals can recover from such traumas. He also said, “War scars like no other thing. Especially children.”

For Abdullah and the hundreds of thousands of other Syrian children at risk, a political solution to end the war is probably the last chance to regain their lives. But even then, the conflict will leave lasting damage.

For three years, many children have been out of school. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), those who have become refugees feel intensely isolated. Not just from their old lives – leaving behind their pets, their family, their toys – but from the host community where they are living.

“What happens to a generation of bored, uneducated kids?” asked Sybella Wilkes from UNHCR. “It is a dangerous test, if we let the situation continue as it stands, with children out of school, lonely, working punishing hours, and disenchanted with their lot in life.”

This week, UNHCR published a report on what can be expected if the war continues: “The Future of Syria: Refugee Children in Crisis.” The most heartbreaking detail is that there is a generation of children who are increasingly removed from the patterns of normal life and behavior.

“There is a lost generation issue here,” said Kilian Kleishmidt, a UNHCR worker based in Zaatari, which with a population of 113,607 is the largest refugee camp in Jordan – 55 percent of whom are under 18 years of age.

“You can really see the war through the kids and their behavior. They are completely out of control. Lost in space. There is very little in the community remaining that puts limits on them.”   

A girl who returned from school cries upon seeing her house destroyed after a jet missile hit the al-Myassar neighborhood of Aleppo February 20, 2013. REUTERS/Muzaffar Salman Kleishmidt said they are exposed to things children should not be forced to see. They have lost family, have witnessed horrific violence, and are often left to fend for themselves. Some are forced to work, others resort to criminal violence out of desperation. With fewer men in the camp – many of them are fighting in Syria – he sees young boys forced into the role of adult.

“They don’t behave like kids. They think they are men,” he said. “This is just the kids inside the camp. This is the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of thousands of kids outside of camps.”

For the children of an estimated 2 million refugees that have fled Syria (a total of 9 million are displaced), there is a kind of walking death. They have no school, because in Lebanon and Jordan schools are already full. Syrian children study in Arabic; in Lebanon they learn English and French. Even if there was room, they would have difficulty getting transportation from their camps.

They have been isolated from friends and family back home. Conversations with them trigger a sense of aching loss. Their drawings are of bombs and devastation. The most basic need of a child – to feel safe – has been removed. “They have lost their innocence,” said Kleishmidt.

Abdullah lives in a camp somewhere inside Syria, a place of thousands of dusty tents surrounded by broken barbed wire. There is a school of sorts, but the life he knew is gone forever. He wanders through days in a kind of dull monotone, looking for people he knew in Hama, searching for friends.

He said, “I miss school.” But it is painful for him to talk, so he asked his father to tell the story of the “terrible day.”

As his father spoke, Abdullah’s mother sat with a fat baby girl who was wearing a diaper and T-shirt. She tried to sing to her, but as the story of Abdullah got more detailed, she began to cry.

A Syrian man carries his sister who was wounded in a government airstrike hit the neighborhood of Ansari, in Aleppo, Syria, Sunday, Feb. 3, 2013. Abdullah al-Yassin/AP Abdullah and his family come from the rural countryside near Hama, the fourth largest city in Syria, which was known as a center of anti-Ba’ath Party activities. In 1982, in an attempt to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, more than 56,000 were killed in what became known as the Hama massacres. It is difficult to find someone in Hama today who has not in some way been tainted by that tragedy.

But for nine years of his life – until the war started – Abdullah lived like any other kid. Then he grew up fast. His father, a laborer, made the decision not to leave Hama immediately and to remain with his five children. “Because no one believed it could go on this long,” his father said.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, around dinner time, “when the worse thing happened.” It was October, harvest season. “I was playing on my computer before the bombing started,” Abdullah recalled. “It was still warm outside.”

Then Abdullah remembered a sound that was louder than thunder. “It was horrible.” In a moment of misguided terror, he ran outside.

It was a terrible call. The little boy was outside when the bomb landed near the house, and he took the full impact.

He said the bomb was a “bottle bomb” and looked like fire coming out of the airplane. He remembers no more after that. His 13-year-old brother also was injured; he had his spleen removed, but did not sustain burns.

“There could be any number of culprits. A lot of different air-dropped bombs were being used in civilian areas at the time, and they’re all capable of causing such a horrific injury to a small child,” said Robert Perkins, an explosives expert at Action on Armed Violence, a nongovernmental organization in London. “Most of them resemble bottles or barrels. It’s impossible to know for sure.”

However, Perkins added, one explosive weapon in use in Hama at the time is a fuel-air bomb dubbed the ODAB-500. They are often called vacuum bombs because they create a massive fireball that sucks all the oxygen out of an area.

“In an open space they can kill anyone within a [30-yard] radius,” said Perkins. “They’re devastating weapons, and there’s no justification for using them in populated areas.”

Abdullah had some medical care, but not enough.

“The doctors say he will need dozens of operations,” said his father. “Is that a life for a child?” There was silence in the tent because there was no comfort to give.

When I left, the mother, who had a 10th grade education, silently handed me the baby girl. She asked if I could take her home with me.  “Can you keep her safe?”

Janine di Giovanni is Newsweek’s Middle East editor and a Syria consultant to UNHCR.

China has big plans for planes. As recently reported in a Fortune cover story, its state-owned aviation plants are pouring billions of dollars into a determined effort to break their dependency on the West. Working on a timeline that astounds business analysts, China is charging hard to produce their version of best-selling jetliners like Boeing's 737 and Airbus’s A320 by 2014. Their goal is noble, and the art of slinging a behemoth piece of metal filled with people into the sky is an Olympian task. But China’s triumph, when finally realized, will perhaps be less Herculean, and more like Hally Porter.

That last line probably made J.K. Rowling’s lawyers see red, because China ripped the Harry Potter series off like a Hogwarts prom dress, and all those Hally Porter bootlegs (as his name has often been charmingly and intentionally misspelled) reveal an alternate universe of business ethics. For those in China who don’t hold patents, bootlegging is largely a crime of spelling. We laugh at Hike sneakers, and people who watch Break So Bad on their iPed. But is it a laugh at 30,000 feet, when you’re flying in a Boning 747?

China started bootlegging planes in the 1990s, as part of a military escalation inspired by Desert Storm. After watching the U.S. Army’s firmament-melting war machine hammer Iraq into sand, the Chinese decided to get their military act together. Part of that meant putting U.S. stuff together. At the time, the world had one stealth jet model: the American F-117 Nighthawk. During NATO bombing runs over Serbia in 1999, bad weather and blind chance let a Hail Mary missile snatch one from the sky. When flaming pieces of the mythical “invisible plane” fell to earth, proud peasants hauled car-sized chunks of shattered imperialism back to their farm. In lands far away, an obscure opportunity was grasped, and Chinese spies materialized in the Balkans. They tracked down pieces of the fallen, mythical plane from farm to farm. Dispensing lump sums for lumps of F-117 Nighthawk, they harvested the crashed American craft, shipping what remained to the land of Hally Porter.

The Chinese labored for more than a decade to bootleg the F-117 Nighthawk. What remains indisputable today is that China’s Chengdu J-20 is one of only three other stealth jet models on Planet Earth. And it, uh, kind of looks like the F-117.

The Russians have the other stealth jet. China managed to rip them off, too, in part because 1996 was not a great time for The Bear. Buckled by the collapse of communism and strapped to pay the rent, it made a terrible deal with China, which paid poor Russia $2.5 billion for a license to assemble the premier Russian fighter jet, the SU-27. Blatant theft followed. “When the license was sold, everyone knew they would do this,” said Vassily Kashin, a Russian expert on the Chinese military, in The Wall Street Journal. “It was just a risk that was taken. At that time it was a question of survival."

Russia survived and China built about 100 planes before halting production. They told the Russians their plane had become irrelevant. Maybe that’s because China had refabricated every single aspect of the SU-27. Three years later, a practically identical plane was produced in China. Russians probably think of it as the “F.U.-27” In the global market, the Chinese regularly undercut Russian models by $10 million – with planes copied from Russia.

That’s good news for bargain hunters like Egypt and Pakistan, but Third World jet shoppers should watch out, because a trail of broken parts litter runways from Burma to Zimbabwe. The model in question is the MA-60, reverse engineered from Russian military jets. It is China’s first commercial plane to hit the international market. The reason these jets didn’t hit China’s domestic market is because they kept hitting the ground, very hard, with Chinese people in them. So many MA-60s malfunctioned that Chinese airlines ran away from the things. Left with a batch of reverse engineered death traps on their hands, the Aviation Industry Corporation of China decided to hustle. It tossed MA-60 planes to dear friends throughout the Third World.

When Air Zimbabwe bought two, China threw in a third. Deeply discounted, or sold with very low interest rates, MA-60s were bundled in as part of political-favor packages. One was even given as a gift to the King of Tonga, with full ceremony, in 2009. By that time, the rep of the MA-60 was so bad that New Zealand suspended tourism aid to the tiny country. The literal breaking point for China’s commercial aviation vanguard model came on this past June 10. The day started with an MA-60 snapping in half while landing in Indonesia. Later in Burma, another persnickety MA-60 skidded off the runway. Nobody died in either crash, but Burma subsequently grounded all its MA-60s. When your safety record is too scary for the Burmese, you have problems.

These aren’t problems China isn’t desperately trying to fix. This summer, I was in a bar in Bangkok, drinking with a jet plane pilot. Let’s call him Michael. An American stationed in Asia, Michael regularly flies sheiks, CEOs, and other players from the vast wealth throughout the region. He has been places and has stories. One happened a year back, when he was paid to fly a metallurgist from Singapore through the night, toward destinations unnamed. They landed in darkness at the hugest hangar Michael had ever seen. Inside were eight planes. They were green – the metal looks like that on unpainted jets, bought factory fresh from Boeing. Four of these planes were intact, but the rest were meticulously dismantled into a universe of pieces spread in vast spirals that disappeared into the distant immensity of the hangar. The imported Singaporean metallurgist jumped out to join the Chinese engineers busily bootlegging away. Armed with protractors, rulers, clipboards, and smartphones, this minor army of reverse-engineering geniuses was measuring the dissected planes, right down to the length and thickness of screws. The metallurgist had been flown in to break down the metallic compounds, helping to build what, one day, might be that Boning 747.

There’s not much to do about all of this. Bootlegging is just China’s way, in what is increasingly their world. And in all fairness, Chinese planes aren’t the only ones falling apart – 2013 has been a nightmare year for Boeing’s much hyped Dreamliner jet. It began in January when the entire fleet was grounded, due to continual technical problems. Boeing eventually fixed those, but some bugs won’t die. In July, a Dreamliner sold to an Ethiopian airline burst into flames at Heathrow airport, forcing both runways to be shut down. More recently, two Dreamliner flights from Japan had to turn around mid-flight due to malfunctions, while another malfunctioning Norwegian airlines model was grounded in Thailand.

So let’s hope China rips off the right stuff.