Islamists have produced tectonic political shake-ups across the Middle East, with a rippling effect worldwide. Islamists now take many forms, from moderates in Tunisia to militants in the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Together, the disparate factions have arguably altered the Middle East more than any trend since the modern states gained independence over the past century. They have redefined politics and even borders.

The turmoil and transformation have in turn redefined security challenges for the outside world too. In early 2015, Americans overwhelmingly—by 70 percent—identified the Islamic State as the main threat to the United States, according to a poll by the University of Maryland. The next two top threats—the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (13 percent) and Iran (12 percent)—also involved Islamist movements.

Islamism is now one of the most powerful forces of the 21st century.

By 2015, Islamists generally fell into two broad camps: Political parties vying for position within systems. And extremists using violence or waging war to change the system from outside. Some factions have tried to be both. But by 2015, political groups and extremist militias have also become rivals for influence, and sometimes even enemies.

The Beginning

The first Islamist movement actually goes back almost a century. Islamism evolved in five phases. It has not been a straight trajectory. Each phase reflected the scope of change in size, political purpose, priorities, and tactics.

Modern Islamism originally emerged in response to multiple crises in the vacuum created by the Ottoman Empire’s collapse and as an alternative to the dominant ideologies of either East or West. Often in the context of European colonialism, Islamist leaders argued that the outside world was out to exploit, control, or destroy Muslim lands. The only way to defend the faith was to fight back, politically, socially and physically.

Modern Islamism began with a tiny cell in 1928, when a 22-year-old schoolteacher mobilized six disgruntled workers from Egypt’s Suez Canal Company. It was originally a social and religious movement. But Hassan al Banna’s little group grew into the Muslim Brotherhood, the first popular Islamist movement in the Arab world. It eventually spawned more than 80 branches worldwide.

The brotherhood created the startup model that initially focused on fusing Islam with public services, such as schools, clinics, cooperatives, social clubs, welfare providers and religious support groups. The public services evolved into mini-states-within-states, taking on distinct political agendas for changing the rest of society too. Many other Islamist movements later duplicated the formula.

The first phase peaked in the 1970s, as secular ideologies failed to deliver. The turning point was the 1973 war, when Arabs fought for the first time in the name of Islam.

Egypt’s attack on Israel was code-named Operation Badr after the Prophet Muhammad’s first victory in 623 A.D. The Arabs again lost militarily, but they won political goals, including the principle of land for peace. Islam became a winning way to mobilize the public and fight a regional war.

By 1979, Islam also redefined regional politics. Iran’s fiery revolution coalesced disparate opposition groups under the banner of Islam. Led by a septuagenarian cleric, the coalition ended dynastic rule dating back more than 2,500 years and then created the world’s only modern theocracy.

For the first time since the faith was founded fourteen centuries earlier, clerics ruled a state. Islam was suddenly a modern political alternative, too.

The seizure of Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mosque by a fundamentalist cell reflected the growing rejection of modernization based on Western ways, which had been the model in many countries since their independence decades earlier. During the two-week takeover, extremists declared the monarchy to be illegitimate. They proclaimed the rule of the Mahdi—the Muslim redeemer—until French forces were brought in to help retake Islam’s holiest shrine.

The drama led regimes across the region to redefine modernization in more Islamic terms. Shaken to the core, Saudi Arabia’s monarchy ceded greater ground to Wahhabi clerics. Even strictly secular regimes reacted. Under President Anwar Sadat, Egypt altered its constitution to ensure that Sharia, or Islamic law, was the basis of all legislation.

The second phase played out in the 1980s. It witnessed the rise of suicide extremism and mass violence. The trend started among Shiites, for whom martyrdom has been a central tenet for fourteen centuries. It soon spread to Sunni militants, for whom it was not a long-held belief. The violent tactics by religious extremists began to redefine modern warfare.

The embryonic cells of Lebanon’s Hezbollah initiated suicide bombings with attacks on American and Israeli targets in the early 1980s. As of early 2012, the largest single loss of U.S. military lives since World War II was still the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine peacekeepers’ barracks in October 1983 that killed 241. Two American embassies in Beirut were also destroyed, as were several military facilities of the occupying Israeli Defense Forces.

Among Sunnis, two militant movements seized the headlines away from the Palestinian Liberation Organization, an umbrella group for several secular factions. Islamic Jihad was launched in the early 1980s. Its manifesto called for elimination of the “Zionist entity” and creation of a Palestinian state governed by Islamic law.

It dispatched dozens of human bombs against Israeli soldiers as well as civilians. Hamas emerged in 1987 during the grassroots uprising known as the Intifada, literally the “shaking off.” Hamas, too, soon started dispatching suicide warriors.

Throughout the 1980s, thousands of Sunnis from all twenty-two Arab nations also poured into South Asia to challenge the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. It was the first modern militant jihad. Many of these militant Arabs, including Osama bin Laden, later took their skills and passions home to launch local jihads.

In all three cases, militant groups justified violence as a response to intervention by outside armies or occupation by foreign powers. Again, from their perspective, violence was a reaction. The 1980s was a particularly deadly decade.

The third phase was marked by the rise of Islamist political parties in the 1990s. The emphasis shifted from the bullet to the ballot—or a combination of the two. Islamists began running within political systems, no longer simply sabotaging them from the outside. In the process, Islamists had to move beyond simplistic slogans to develop multi-issue action agendas.

Algeria was the trailblazer in 1991, as the Islamic Salvation Front began to beat more than fifty parties in the Arab world’s first fully democratic election. The Front was seen as a party of doers, in contrast to the corrupt and lethargic party that had ruled since independence three decades earlier.

The experiment was derailed before the final runoff in 1992, when the Algerian army seized power. Backed by tanks on the streets of Algiers, the new junta nullified the vote, outlawed the Front and imprisoned its leaders. An underground militant faction, the Armed Islamic Group, soon launched attacks on government targets. Over the next decade, more than 100,000 Algerians died in a civil war between the military regime and extremists.

Yet Islamic parties elsewhere continued the experiment, further spurred by two global shifts: The Cold War’s end altered the balance of power in the Middle East—and political calculations in the process. The first wave of democratic elections elsewhere—which empowered hundreds of millions of people, from Russia to Romania and from South Africa to Chile—inspired pursuit of individual empowerment.

In 1992, after a decade underground, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah led the Shiite party into Lebanese elections. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood ran for parliament in 1995, after a decade of competing under cover of other political parties. Jordan’s Islamic Action Front became the largest opposition party elected to parliament. From scenic Morocco and sleepy Kuwait to teeming Yemen, Islamist parties captured the imagination of many voters.

The fourth phase began after Al-Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001, which were as traumatic for many Muslims half a world away as for Americans who witnessed attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the Arab world, hundreds of millions found themselves tainted by a man and a movement they neither knew nor supported.

Muslims were also increasingly victimized, as extremists expanded their suicide attacks from Morocco on the Atlantic to Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf. Almost 3,000 people died on 9/11, but militants killed more than 10,000 of their brethren in suicide bombings and other attacks over the next decade. The extremist strategy backfired. In Arab eyes, the many forms of militancy proved costly, unproductive, and ultimately unappealing.

“Every mother in Saudi Arabia or any other Gulf country wants her son or daughter to carry a laptop rather than a rifle or a dagger,” reflected Khaled al Maeena, editor of Arab News, in Saudi Arabia in 2009. “The appeal of death and destruction doesn’t carry much significance anymore because the jihadis have failed to provide anything constructive.”

During the first decade of the 21st century, the Arab response was a kind of counter-jihad—a rejection of extremist movements and tactics to achieve political goals. The response took many tangible forms. But among the most imaginative were the Islamist debates on university campuses, within civil society, among exiles, and even among jailed Islamists about the most effective means of change.

The so-called prison debates—notably in Egypt and Libya—eventually led Egypt’s Islamic Group (al Gamaa al Islamiyya) to renounce violence in 2002 and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group to reject terrorism in 2006. A string of public opinion polls after 2007 tracked the steady decline in support for destructive jihad.

Key clerics also shifted positions. On the 9/11 anniversary in 2007, Sheikh Salman al Oudah, a Saudi cleric who had long been bin Laden’s earliest role model, wrote an open letter denouncing the Al-Qaeda chief.

“How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed, maimed, or banished in the name of Al-Qaeda?” he wrote. “Will you be happy to meet God almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent people on your back?”

A  New Phase

In 2011, the raucous Arab uprisings triggered a fifth phase. It began after unprecedented displays of peaceful civil disobedience in the world’s most volatile region. Within a single year, a rippling wave of uprisings opened political space for Muslim movements that had struggled for decades—in one case, almost a century—just to get in the door. Many of their leaders had spent their careers simply trying to stay out of jail.

Earlier phases were often a reaction to repressive regimes, regional conflicts, or foreign intervention. The new phase has more of a proactive mission.

Polls in 2011 uniformly showed that the majority of Arabs wanted a greater say in their political life. The quest was framed more often as for “social justice” and “dignity”—local catchphrases for self-determination, political participation, free speech, accountability, and equitable justice—than as a quest for liberal democracy.

But in post-uprising countries, public opinion surveys also uniformly found that the majority favored parties that were shaped either moderately or strongly by Islamic values. The shift did not necessarily mean strict Islam as the only organizing principle of life, politics, education, social mores and dress. Each country or culture had its own dynamics and issues. The shift could also mean reform in a conservative package.

As the polls indicated, the election of Islamist parties reflected a shift extending beyond the devout. Many Arabs wanted to use their faith as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself—or as a way to find answers rather than being the answer itself.

Politically, Islam offered a comfortable space and legitimacy to search for solutions compatible with global trends. For many it was no longer about creating an ideal Islamic state. It was more about synthesizing Koranic values with ways of 21st century life spawned by the Internet, Facebook, and satellite television.

The outside world viewed the shift as a drift toward Islamism. But many within the region instead saw the Islamists being pulled toward democracy. “Without Islam, we will not have any real progress,” explained Diaa Rashwan of Cairo’s Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

“If we go back to the European Renaissance, it was based on Greek and Roman philosophy and heritage. When Western countries built their own progress, they didn’t go out of their epistemological or cultural history. Japan is still living in the culture of the Samurai, but in a modern way. The Chinese are still living the traditions created by Confucianism. Their version of Communism is certainly not Russian.

“So why,” he mused, “do we have to go out of our history?”

The Islamist Politicos

By 2012, more than 50 Islamist parties or movements had mobilized tens of millions of supporters for elections in several Arab countries. They won the right to form governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. Others were also gathering steam in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Kuwait. Altogether, they accounted for more than half of the Arab world’s 350 million people.

None of the Islamists was ready to rule, however. Most were as surprised as the ruling autocrats at the speed and breadth of the uprisings. The Islamists joined in initially to avoid being excluded or marginalized. They scrambled to develop practical plans to govern. None had specific blueprints.

“It’s been an extreme crash course for us,” Muslim Brotherhood foreign policy adviser Essam al Haddad told The Wall Street Journal a month after Egypt’s 2012 parliamentary election. “Remember, for 60 years we were working underground and now we’ve come out into the light and are staring directly into the sun. We’re all blinking and rubbing our eyes, like the Chilean miners. To adapt to this takes time, and we don’t have time.”

As Islamist parties did well at the polls in 2011 and 2012, they became both more assertive and more ambitious. Many exhibited a heady arrogance, presuming an exclusive right to shape the new order. Their rise to power was, in turn, unsettling for both secular groups at home and an outside world that still associated Islamism with fanaticism.

The growing array of Islamist political parties constituted a whole new bloc—separate from the purely militant movements. The distinctions among them were often nuanced. But the groups shared at least four common denominators.

First, many political parties did not embrace theocratic rule, even as they pushed strong Islamic agendas or values. None were moderate in any Western sense, although a few were progressive in an Islamist context.

For most parties, there were no political templates. Iran’s Shiite Islamic republic was not a model, nor was the Sunni religious monarchy of Saudi Arabia—even for groups that took aid or inspiration from either. And whatever the rhetoric, re-creating the caliphate or restoring the purity of life from the Prophet Muhammad’s time in the seventh century was not what they were really after.

Turkey and Malaysia were more attractive as models to emulate, although often for their economic prowess and international ties. Despite its ultra-conservative Salafi values, Egypt’s Nour Party cited Brazil as a model and praised President Luiz Lula da Silva, a socialist, specifically for making Brazil one of the world’s top 10 economies. “We want to copy the Brazilian experiment here,” said Nour spokesman Nader Bakkar. “We want to push small and medium-size enterprises, too.”

Islamist parties instead began—with the emphasis on began—to adapt to 21st century realities, even if sometimes naively or clumsily. Many were struggling to figure out how to create jobs and pick up the garbage with the same fervor that they once simplistically preached “Islam is the solution” to virtually any issue.

Second, most of the 50 political parties renounced terrorist tactics. Sunni Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon were critical exceptions. Both competed in democratic elections endorsed by the international community but both also continued to arm and actively deploy their militia wings.

But most Islamist parties condemned the political absolutism of Al-Qaeda franchises for discrediting their faith and making life more difficult for the faithful. Indeed, militants murdered far more Muslims than Westerners.

Many parties still used scathing language about Israel that was unacceptable to the international community. Most supported the Palestinians in one or more forms of “resistance” against Israel. But most leaders and followers also opposed another war with Israel or terrorist tactics against members of other faiths.

After Egypt’s 2012 election, the two winning Islamist parties pledged to maintain all of Cairo’s international treaties. The decision was a stark contrast to the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat by Islamic militants after he signed the first peace treaty with Israel.

Third, political Islam was defined by an increasingly wide spectrum. And no one vision dominated. Indeed, the Islamists’ diversity—when the strictly observant believe in only one true path to God—was striking. Goals varied widely. Indeed, the Islamists rarely spoke with one voice even within movements.

Some parties, notably in Egypt, were actually rivals. Together, two Islamic parties won some 70 percent of seats in parliament in 2012—and then began to snipe at each other. Conservative Muslim Brotherhood officials described their Salafi rivals as inexperienced and extreme, while members of the ultraconservative Salafi Party said that the brothers had compromised their Islamic principles.

Islamist parties have even demonstrated willingness to work with secular and centrist parties, some as partners. After winning a plurality with 41 percent of the popular vote, Tunisia’s Ennahda party opted to form a new government with two secular parties. In one of the oddest alliances, Hezbollah formed a coalition with a right-wing Christian party in 2006 that lasted for years.

Whether to widen their power base or ease suspicions, some Islamist parties demonstrated that they were not going to do what was done unto them—at least for now.

Fourth, Islamist groups were under pressure to give priority to reality over religion in the early 21st century. The same demographics that contributed to street protests against geriatric autocrats—over 60 percent of the Arab world’s 350 million people were under the age of thirty—also fueled internal challenges to geriatric Islamist leaders.

The younger generation often did not buy into intolerant, inflexible, or impractical positions. In some cases, as in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, key players split. Islamist parties faced further fractures when they didn’t address the challenges of daily existence.

Dire economic realities also forced a sobering, if sometimes reluctant, pragmatism. As Egypt’s transition began in 2011, a Gallup poll found that 54 percent of Egyptians listed jobs and economic development as their top priorities. Less than 1 percent of Egyptians said that implementing Islamic law was their top priority. The results were similar regardless of party affiliation.

A month after winning more than 45 percent of seats in parliament in 2012, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood approved in principle a proposal to borrow $3.2 billion U.S. from the International Monetary Fund. The decision was a flip-flop for the Brotherhood after years of criticizing the West and distancing itself from Western institutions.

The decision reflected recognition that ideological purity was a luxury the group could not afford. “All of a sudden, we found ourselves for the first time, and after a very, very short learning process, asked to take a position that would affect everybody’s lives,” Haddad told The Wall Street Journal.

In the early 21st century, the forces of globalization—from trade and tourism to the Internet—also made it tougher for Islamist parties to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Some parties, notably those in Egypt and Tunisia, could literally not afford to turn totally inward.

After winning more than 25 percent of seats in Egypt’s parliament in 2012, the Salafi Nour Party proposed creating a new field of medical tourism to make Egypt, again like Brazil, into a center for lower-cost health care—even for Americans.

The Islamist Implosion

The fifth and current phase has proved to be the most tumultuous. Between 2012 and 2014, political parties that had been willing to work within systems to create a new order either lost popularity or imploded altogether. Simultaneously, extremist militias uprooted political systems entirely elsewhere. The trend basically flip-flopped: Moderates were increasingly replaced by militants.

The reversal was reflected in Egypt, the most populous Arab country. In 2012, two Islamist parties—the Muslim Brotherhood and the more fundamentalist Nour Party—together won more than 70 percent of the first democratic elections for parliament since the monarchy was ousted in 1952. The Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi, also won the first democratic presidential election in Egypt’s long history.

But within six months, a constitutional court ruled that the parliamentary election results were invalid on a technicality. Egypt’s military then dissolved the entire body in mid-2012. The courts also restored some of the emergency powers of arrest and detention granted during autocratic rule. To prevent the courts from further eroding the new government’s power, President Morsi degreed that the presidency was above the judiciary until a new parliament could be elected.

Over the next year, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood came under growing pressure from the military. The public also showed signs of growing disillusionment, frustration, fear and anger. In the spring of 2013, petitions were circulated demanding Morsi’s removal. In late June, millions took to the streets to protest.

On July 3, the Supreme Military Council, led by General Abdel Fattah el Sisi, ousted Morsi. He and most of his inner circle were arrested. The brotherhood party was declared illegal; its assets were seized. Morsi, in office just a year, was tried for treason and espionage. In mid-2014, Sisi was elected president, returning Egypt to the military rule that had dominated since 1952.

In Tunisia, the Islamist party also faced setbacks, if not as severe. Ennadha won a plurality in the first elections in 2011. It formed a coalition with two secular parties to rule while a new constitution was written. But it failed to improve the economy, create jobs or deal with growing security issues.

Three years later, in 2014, it came in second in parliamentary elections to Nidaa Tounes (the Call of Tunisia). The Islamist movement opted not to run a candidate in presidential elections, to avoid the confrontation in Egypt. The presidency was also won by a Nidaa Tounes candidate who had been a top official under the two autocratic presidents that ruled Tunisia between independence in 1956 and the 2011 uprising.

The decline of Islamist groups in both countries coincided with the rise of militants. In Egypt, Ansar Bayt al Maqdis, or Supporters of the Holy House, emerged after the 2011 uprising. It operated out of the Sinai Peninsula and at first targeted Israel. But after the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013, it took on Egyptian security forces too. In late 2014, key leaders of Ansar declared loyalty to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

In Tunisia, the threat came from the new Ansar al Sharia, or Supporters of Islamic Law. It was formed shortly after the uprising by political prisoners released held by the autocratic regime. It mobilized protests against cultural targets, including a television station and an art gallery, in 2011. It grew increasingly violent, with links to the attack on the U.S. Embassy and an American School in 2012, and the assassination of two secular politicians in 2013, arms smuggling and tensions along the border.

Reflecting the diversity among Islamists, the government led by moderate Islamists in Ennadha designated Ansar al Sharia a terrorist group in 2013. It authorized security forces to confront, detain, and shoot members that engaged in violence. The growing tensions contributed to Ennahda’s decline at the polls in 2014. Many Tunisians voted for security, political and economic, over political uncertainty and internal tensions.

The fifth phase was also defined by the rise of the most aggressive and ambitious Islamist militia in modern times. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria grew out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2004. It surged among Sunnis in Iraq’s Anbar province. But it lost ground beginning in 2007 after a new U.S.-backed force called the Sons of Iraq mobilized local tribes against it. It appeared to be marginalized.

But the turmoil following the 2011 Syrian uprising eventually opened up space for ISIS to take root among Sunnis in neighboring Syria. In 2013, it changed its name to ISIS. Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, ISIS seized large chunks of Iraq and Syria in 2014—and declared the new Islamic State, a modern caliphate. By 2015, it had also won the allegiance of extremist militias in Egypt, Libya and Pakistan.

Key Positions

Women’s Rights: In Islamist parties, women saw few short-term benefits even though they were at the forefront in most of the 2011 uprisings. Few Islamist political parties had enlightened or forward-leaning policies to promote gender equality. In Egypt, the Brotherhood had an active Sisterhood of female members, but it opposed the idea of a female president.

The Salafi parties were more restrictive. In Egypt, they refused to allow female candidates—mandated by election laws—to use their pictures in the campaign or on ballots. They also favored separation of the sexes. “We want segregation in school and in public and in the workplace so people can concentrate,” said Sheikh Mohammed Kurdy, who was elected to the short-lived parliament from Egypt’s Nour Party in 2011. He had two wives and 10 children.

Women fared most poorly in areas where extremists had any role. Under the rule of militants such as the Islamic State, women were forced to wear hejab, discouraged from working, and often segregated from men. ISIS fighters were widely reported to have taken women and girls captive, engaged in rape and forced marriage on females in their territory.

The Economy: On the economy, most political Islamists favored a balance between free markets and so-called social justice, which meant more equitable distribution of resources long hoarded by autocratic regimes. Policies stemmed from their service-oriented histories and mass grassroots support, as well as from their own experiences in small businesses or the professions.

In contrast, Islamic extremists relied on extortion, kidnapping and ransoms, smuggling, captured oil facilities or businesses, and donations from wealthy Salafis in the Gulf.

Foreign Policy: Relations between Islamist parties and the outside world were uneasy, even when they tolerated or engaged with each other. For the West particularly, Islamists were often viewed as a political force vying against the democrats, liberals, and secular politicians they supported. To Islamists, the West was seen as the force that propped up decades or centuries of autocratic rule. The harder the Islamist party’s rhetoric, the harder the relations with the international community.

Like Al-Qaeda in earlier decades, extremist militias uniformly rejected relations with the West and deliberately targeted foreigners as a top goal. The Islamic State beheaded American journalists, British aid workers and others in Syria, releasing grisly videos as proof. It took dozens of Turkish diplomats hostage in Iraq. Its spokesmen and leaders made inflammatory threats against the outside world, especially the West, in its quest to create a global caliphate.

The Future

By early 2015, the next decade in the Middle East looked almost certain to be far more traumatic than the past decade for both insiders and outsiders. And the variety of Islamists will often be a big part of it.

For Islamist political parties, the main focus may be finding a formula to survive and grow, whether through accommodation, compromise or reinvention. The reality test will often involve finding effective solutions to debilitating economic problems as much as pushing for political change in their countries.

Their ability to coexist with secular parties is likely to be constantly questioned and tested. So will their ability to actually govern.

Among extremist militias, the fate of the Islamic State will be the pivot in determining whether the flames of militancy grow or diminish. Its ambitions are to expand well beyond Iraq and Syria. It has the wealth—as well as American equipment captured after the Iraqi Army collapsed—to sustain itself.

In 2015, it still had sufficient manpower in volunteers, both local and foreign. Its successes in 2014 were infectious, soliciting fealty from distant militant groups a country or continent away. But it has yet to prove that it can effectively govern, making it vulnerable long-term to local resistance.

Robin Wright is a joint fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the U.S. Institute of Peace. This article first appeared on the Woodrow Wilson Center website. A former correspondent for The Washington Post, Wright's most recent book is Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World (2011). Her blog is http://robinwrightblog.blogspot.com and her book website is http://www.robinwright.net.

The film Selma offers a powerful, visionary cinematic treatment of one of the most important events of the civil rights era. Director Ava Duvernay’s film depicts a three-month period in the winter and early spring of 1965 that forever changed American democracy.

Selma is anchored by David Oyelowo’s powerful and lived in performance as Martin Luther King Jr. The actor doesn’t mimic King, but settles into a three-dimensional, understated depiction that achieves the rare feat of turning an icon into a human being. To its credit the film does not shy away from King’s extramarital affairs, laying them out in a brutally poignant scene between Oyelowo and actress Carmen Ejogo who perfectly captures Coretta Scott King’s fierce intelligence, strength and marital pain.

But in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter protests what truly sets the film apart is its panoramic and complex view of the civil rights movement. Duvernay wisely resists presenting the movement as either the top-down manifestation of King’s charisma or the grassroots organizing of unsung activists and ordinary citizens. 

Instead she offers the movement as it unfolded, a patchwork quilt that featured black women organizers who received scant national media attention, young Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC, pronounced “snick”) activists seething with resentment over King’s star power, white volunteers moved by racial injustice to join a movement that did not have national appeal. The notable presence of black female characters who, in addition to Coretta, include Oprah Winfrey’s soulful Annie Lee Cooper, Lorraine Toussaint’s wise Amelia Boynton, and Tessa Thompson’s brilliant Diane Nash offers a corrective to popular depictions of the era as a male-led movement.

Selma is populated with cliché-busting characters whose obvious intelligence stands out in sharp contrast to Hollywood fantasies (most recently The Help) that center white protagonists at the heart of a movement that, despite help from white allies, was led, organized, and shaped by blacks. Intelligent filmmaking should not be taken for granted and Duvernay’s film never panders or condescends to her audience. 

Important historical figures such as Diane Nash, Jim Bevel, Annie Lee Cooper, Hosea Williams and Andy Young are all featured in small but pivotal roles; and Malcolm X makes a cameo (and historically accurate) appearance. As such, Selma emerges as the most complex and intellectually satisfying civil rights movie ever made.

Some people have objected to the way the film "Selma" depicts President Lyndon Baines Johnson.Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum/Handout/Reuters

This is not to suggest that the movie gets everything right. Ex-Johnson aides and even civil rights activists have criticized Selma’s portrayal of President Lyndon Johnson as overly harsh and historically inaccurate. Some have even suggested, hyperbolically, that the Selma demonstrations were LBJ’s idea. In truth King and Johnson, before irrevocably splitting over Vietnam in 1967, worked in tandem and not as primary antagonists in pursuit of voting rights. To the historian Selma’s” Johnson appears to be more a composite of John F. Kennedy and LBJ, than the historical Johnson in early 1965. After all, it was Kennedy, not Johnson whose reluctance and perceived foot-dragging on civil rights set the stage for his finest moment as president: the monumental June 11, 1963 televised address that characterized civil rights as a “moral issue.”

Johnson’s role as president and King’s position as a civil rights activist mean that they were serving different constituencies even as, after MLK’s Nobel Prize in 1964, they were both international statesmen. King pushed the president into proposing voting rights legislation faster that he would have liked. 

The film’s unsympathetic portrait of Johnson does nothing to detract its larger and more cogent truths about the civil rights movement and in this it reminds one of the Oscar-winning Lincoln, which failed to include the towering abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Selma effortlessly displays the fact the movement’s organizers and activists, including but not only King, were intellectuals and strategists, thinkers, writers, and thought leaders, as well as inspirational orators.

Oprah Winfrey stars as Annie Lee Cooper in “Selma.”Atsushi Nishijima/Paramount Pictures

Depictions of state-sanctioned violence are especially resonant in the Age of Ferguson. The recreation of the infamous March 7, 1965 Bloody Sunday confrontation on Selma’s Edmund Pettis Bridge is heartbreakingly violent, conjuring images of contemporary national tensions between law enforcement and nonviolent protesters.

Watching these horrific scenes unfold in the theater left the audience speechless and provided a context for understanding King’s decision, two days later, to lead only a truncated march in what younger activists derisively labeled “Turnaround Tuesday.” Despite major internal disagreements the voting rights campaign pressed forward. LBJ gave a rousing and public endorsement of voting rights to a joint session of congress and the Selma to Montgomery demonstrations took place from March 21 to 25.

The film’s stirring conclusion depicts a high point in the history of American democracy that, far from being the individual accomplishment of “great men,” is treated as the collective achievement of a multiracial constellation of people who mustered the will and the courage to defy a system of racial and economic injustice whose legacy still lingers today.

Selma is a film with not so much a message for our time but stands out, 50 years after the events it dramatizes, as a reflection of it. 

Peniel E. Joseph is a professor of history and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at TuftsUniversity. He can be followed on twitter @penieljoseph.

In late December, a baby orca whale was born off of the coast of Washington state—an important development for the endangered species, due to their low survival rate.

AsThe Washington Post reported, the Center for Whale Research, which studies orcas in the Pacific Northwest, discovered the female calf while tracking an adult killer whale in the area. Newsweek has decided to call her “Wiggles,” but for now, researchers are only identifying her as J-50. They tend to wait a year and make sure a baby whales survive before giving it a name.  

The discovery came just weeks after a pregnant 19-year-old whale, died with a fetus in her stomach in Strait of Georgia near Vancouver, British Columbia. “We lost a lot of reproductive potential," Brad Hanson, a wildlife biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told Live Science.

According to NOAA figures, 35 to 45 percent of newborn orcas don’t live past the first year. But Hanson is hopeful that J-50’s birth is a positive sign for orcas. Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research told The Washington Posthe plans on keeping tabs on baby J-50 and monitoring what he hopes is her progress. “We're going to take every opportunity,” he said, “to get out and see if it's still doing well.”

If these photos of her frolicking with other orcas are of any indication, she’s doing just fine.

Newsweek has decided to call the female calf “Wiggles,” but for now, researchers are only identifying her as J-50.Center for Whale Research/Ken Balcomb & Dave Ellifrit

Researchers tend to wait a year and make sure a baby whale survive before giving it a name. Center for Whale Research/Ken Balcomb & Dave Ellifrit

The Center for Whale Research discovered the female calf while tracking an adult killer whale in the area.Center for Whale Research/Ken Balcomb & Dave Ellifrit

According to NOAA figures, 35 to 45 percent of newborn orcas don’t live past the first year. Center for Whale Research/Ken Balcomb & Dave Ellifrit

Researchers are hopeful that the birth of J-50 (or Wiggles) is a positive sign for orcas.Center for Whale Research/Ken Balcomb & Dave Ellifrit

In 1964, the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr. Strangelove sported an alternate title, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. An existential atomic anxiety permeated society: We lived with the dread that just a button push could unleash new technology that would, ironically, end modern life.

It’s time to feel that kind of dread about cyberattacks. North Korea’s apparent hack of Sony was just a ham sandwich compared with what’s coming. Now we’ve got a Ukrainian group shutting down German government websites. Nobody knows how to stop these attacks, which will only get more sophisticated and more treacherous. This is the atomic bomb of our networked age—a looming disaster, and a genie that can never be stuffed back down. Cyberwar does not seem as tangibly destructive and terrifying as nukes, but give it time. It will.

That’s not an alarmist point of view. Among people who know cybersecurity, it’s conventional thinking. “This has the whiff of August 1945,” former CIA director Michael Hayden told an audience more than a year ago about hacking. “It’s a new class of weapon—a weapon never before used.”

Our lives are now completely reliant on fantastically complex systems controlled by computers. Those computers, by necessity, connect to networks, and those networks connect to billions of things all over the globe: supercomputers, laptops, cellphones, sensors, machines, planes, trains, automobiles, MRIs, DVRs—oh, and weapons. Complex systems are the foundation of this era of humanity. The planet can’t support—would never have tried to support—7 billion people without them. Every day, we need these systems more.

If bad actors damage or take control of our systems, they could cause remarkable devastation. Pick your favorite Hollywood blockbuster scenario. Bad guys could muck up financial systems and start a global panic. They could wreck the power grid or fling open dams. Farm machinery is now highly networked: Fry all the combines at harvest time and what happens to the food supply? Others have imagined hijacking planes without boarding them; instead, just hack into connected cockpit systems from the ground. Or there’s the ultimate fear that hackers could take control of some country’s nuclear arsenal.

We are at the beginning of an exciting new Internet of Things, which promises to connect much of the physical world to networks. In so many ways, this technology will improve life and give us more knowledge. It could also make us vulnerable in ways we never dreamed. “I was trying to think of some strange scenario that could drive the point home, like my new Bluetooth meat thermometer,” Mike Campbell, CEO of financial software company International Decision Systems, told me. “Does somebody hack that and all the rest of them too, and have the things give us all the wrong readouts until there are a million grease fires all going at the same time on Thanksgiving?”

He’s not even half-joking. “You really have to have an hour-by-hour sense of paranoia now,” Campbell added.

Scarier still is that there’s no way to foresee who or what might launch attacks. With nukes, there’s a chance of knowing who has what weapons and who might try to get them. Cyberattacks could be launched by a loner genius in a Montana shack, organized criminals in Russia, the Chinese military or an MIT-trained Taliban soldier in Pakistan. If nerds in North Korea, which is such a technological backwater that a Space Invaders video game would seem miraculous to most of the population, can mount a cyberattack, anybody can.

Actually, the worst news about the attack on Sony is that it was utterly mundane. Companies get attacked constantly. Most of the time, intruders do little damage. Break-ins are typically motivated by money: Criminals want to steal information they can sell. That’s what happened to Target, Home Depot, the P.F. Chang’s restaurant chain and many other companies. Sony’s attackers, though, intended to do harm by destroying data and releasing executives’ emails. It won’t be the last time that happens. In fact, attackers will get more dastardly.

From 2009 to 2013, the number of reported invasions of U.S. military or federal government computers jumped from 26,942 to 46,605, according to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. That’s not attempts. That’s successes. How long before one of those shuts down a vital system?

Of course, giving up isn’t an option. The world has to work to contain this threat, just as it did with nuclear weapons after World War II. Fred Wilson, the well-known venture capitalist, predicts that in 2015 every business and government institution, spooked by Sony, will pour money into cybersecurity. Investment in startups that have new ideas in this space will rocket. Maybe someone will hit on a breakthrough.

Somewhere down the road—a decade or longer, probably—the first commercial quantum computers might get built. They will be exponentially faster than any computer today and, supposedly, could deploy unbreakable protection schemes. But for now, in 2015, that sounds like Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan to defeat incoming nuclear missiles: comforting but far-fetched.

Even with the best technology, the problem is often humans. We download a malicious file thinking it is a picture of a puppy, and it infects a whole system. Or someone operates from the inside, like Edward Snowden. As billions more people get online, we’ll never secure all the humans. A Georgia Institute of Technology report on cybersecurity concluded: “Humans are no longer the last line of defense against cyberattacks, but often represent an end run around security measures.”

The best hope, really, is the same kind of international effort and political tension that has prevented a nuclear attack since 1945. The world agreed that nukes were very bad, set up systems to monitor them and backed that up with an unspoken sense that any aggressor who used one would find its entire existence removed from Earth.

We’re going to need the same kind of international condemnation of and action against cyberattacks. It won’t happen anytime soon. The Sony attack wasn’t serious enough to drive that level of change. Hopefully, it will come before a major cyberdisaster gets unleashed by hackers.

Maybe Sony can help raise awareness by remaking Dr. Strangelove for the 21st century. Subtitle: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hack. We all need a big, broad dose of existential anxiety right now. 

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a brief Friday evening challenging the U.S. government’s assertion last month that releasing thousands of classified images depicting the U.S. military’s abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan would threaten national security.

While the disturbing images from Abu Ghraib -- including of U.S. personnel giving the thumbs-up sign amid piles of naked bodies and detainees being led on leashes -- have been seared into the American consciousness, some of the photographs being sought by the ACLU are said to be possibly even more disturbing. One of the classified photos reportedly shows a female soldier pretending to sodomize a naked prisoner with a broom, while others allegedly depict U.S. troops pointing guns at detainees’ heads.

The brief is part of a legal battle that started with the ACLU filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the pictures’ release in 2003 and suing the government in 2004 after it refused to comply.

The brief begins: “Even in an age which information, whether photographs or cartoon images, the written word or even satirical cinema, may give rise to horrific terroristic reaction,” the FOIA provides “legal standards that if correctly applied, stand as a bulwark against excessive government secrecy, thereby assuring the informed citizenry that is so critical to the survival of our democracy.”

In 2009, the legal standoff led to a debate in Congress that culminated in the passage of the Protected National Security Documents Act (PNSDA) the same year. The statute allows the secretary of defense to keep a photograph concealed for up to three years if its release would be seen as endangering American lives.

Former secretaries of defense Robert Gates and Leon Panetta opted to use this power in 2009 and 2012, respectively, saying the release of the more than 2,100 images sought by the ACLU would pose a security risk.

In August 2014, however, U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled against the lump concealment, saying that if the government wanted to keep the images classified for the remainder of the three-year allotment, it would have to review “each and every photograph, individually and in relation to the others,” and demonstrate why each release would endanger Americans.

December 19 was the last opportunity for the government to give a picture-by-picture explanation to the court for withholding the images. Instead, the Department of Defense argued that the original evaluation process, which led to Panetta’s blanket assertion in 2012 that the images were unfit for declassification, was sufficient.

The government explained that Megan M. Weis, associate deputy general counsel, had reviewed all of the photographs and placed them into three categories based on content.

Weis “considered the extent of the injury suffered, if any, by the detainee depicted in the photograph; whether the photograph depicted United States service members; and the location of the detainee photograph,” the government memorandum from December reads.

It explains that Weis then selected between five and 10 photographs from each of the three categories and presented the representative sample to three senior military officials: General John R. Allen, commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, General James N. Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All three recommended that Panetta certify all of the photographs classified.

The government maintained that all of the images had been reviewed by Weis and that the “three recommendations expressly relied upon by Secretary Panetta...provide more than an ample basis for his conclusion.”

The ACLU argues that the government failed to explain why each image threatened national security and therefore should remain classified, as mandated by the court.

During the congressional debate over the pictures, and afterward, the images have been labeled everything from “relatively innocuous” to “even more gruesome than the last.” The ACLU contends that had a proper review been conducted, the innocuous documents could be disclosed without endangering Americans.

“Congress did not create an exemption to FOIA for inconvenient truths,” the ACLU writes, “only for photographs that would actually endanger Americans.”

The ACLU also takes issue with the government’s claim that release of the images, even the most gruesome, would incite violence against Americans. It argues that not every disclosure of U.S. misconduct triggers a backlash, as evidenced by the fact that many warned that release of the heavily redacted, 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's 6,400-page report on CIA “torture” would pose a risk to Americans around the world, but no uprisings occurred.

The group adds that it is unreasonable to withhold the images based on the possibility of retaliation because “one need look no further than the recent tragedy in Paris to see that some people react violently and irrationally to even cartoons.”

A hearing is set for January 20 in a Manhattan federal court, when Hellerstein will review the submissions and make a decision about the release of the images. Even if Hellerstein rules in favor of the ACLU, however, the government could appeal and the prolonged legal battle over the images would continue.

Of the many live performances Richard Pryor recorded, his Live on the Sunset Strip may be the one with the most directionals. Like one of those milestone signs with arrows pointing every which way, this tour de force nods to his distant past (the sin city of Peoria, where his grandmother ran a brothel that employed both his mother and father) as well as more recent events. His audiences (the film was drawn from shows in San Carlos, California, in 1981 and Hollywood in 1982) were waiting to hear about that evening of June 9, 1980 when the troubled comedian set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine, and they were not disappointed. As Scott Saul reports in his masterful new biography, Becoming Richard Pryor, his “first comedy routine” came after he slipped in some dog poop as a kid—“And I’ve been slipping in it ever since.”

There, too, is the classic sex farce, when the husband caught with another woman says to his wife, “You gonna believe me or your lying eyes?” There is also the somber social critic, reflecting on race after returning from Africa. “Do you see any niggers?” he asked himself when he was abroad. “I’ve been here three weeks, and I ain’t even said it.” And in between are animal impressions (two cheetahs, a caged bear), mobsters spouting gibberish Italian (reminiscent of his early hero, Sid Caesar) and finally the burning-man routine (a doctor at the burn unit says upon viewing the torched Pryor, “Why don’t we get some cole slaw and serve this up?”)

“He was like his own variety show, with all the different tonalities possible, a kind of carnival of character,” says Saul from his home in Berkeley.

Pryor had his own variety show on NBC in 1977, but it only lasted four episodes, being no match for Laverne and Shirley and Happy Days, which aired on ABC in the same hour. Saul, who spent eight years researching Pryor’s life, sees Comedy Central’s Key & Peele as “a successful version of what The Richard Pryor Show could have been. “John Moffitt, director of The Richard Pryor Show, said every other variety show he worked on, people had their safe corners they went back to show after show, the characters that repeat and so on,” says Saul. “Richard Pryor never wanted to do that… He was willing to take comedy into a place where he didn’t have to be funny; it was more  of an exploration of character and environment, and the thorniness of life.”

The thorniness of Pryor’s life was rooted in race. His grandmother, Marie Bryant, was born in 1899. “The person who most shaped him was imprinted by the mores of an earlier era,” says Saul. “It’s the Jim Crow Midwest of the turn of the century; a world where people had been lynched and you could only expect the roughest of justice.” A lot of the justice young Pryor received was pretty rough as well: the canings he got from his grandmother, the neglect he suffered from his mother, and the Dickensian admonitions delivered by his dad, Buck Pryor, a tough character who worked as a bouncer at his mother’s whorehouse. “I chose you, so be cool,” he would often tell his son. “You could be in an orphanage.”

But his grandmother also embodied survival skills, and by the time of his Sunset Strip performances, Pryor was starting to talk about his childhood as an almost privileged one. “His grandmother was a successful businesswoman,” Saul notes of the matriarch who ran both a beauty parlor and a whorehouse. “She found a way of making do, making a way out of no way.” And the hypocrisy of the mostly white clientele that frequented the mostly black brothel was not lost on young Pryor, even as he was sent to white schools where he became the class clown and mimic, his first forays into crossover comedy.

“I think a lot of the drama of the book is how Peoria made him and unmade him at once,” says Saul. “He finds the stage in part to escape the world of his family and to find that imaginative freedom. In the end he finds his identity as a performer by reconciling himself to that childhood, bringing it into his comedy.…  [But] his unhappiness could be traced back to his childhood; it was such a conflicted and difficult childhood I think it made him a conflicted and difficult person.”

“Difficult” is a kind way to describe the faithless husband who physically and verbally abused his many wives, and the coke fiend who wrecked and rebuilt his career many times. The stop and start nature of his subject’s career is the pattern of Saul’s biography, which made many best books of 2014 lists. “There were always breakthroughs”—his scene stealing film debut in 1972’s Lady Sings the Blues; the unlikely success of 1974’s X-rated comedy album That Nigger’s Crazy—“but the breakthroughs were always followed by some kind of stoppage.… ”

Saul’s interest in Pryor was piqued while attending UC Berkeley, where he is now an associate professor of English. It was in Berkeley, in the early ’70s, before his Hollywood success, that Pryor claimed to have found his voice, throwing stuff against the wall at clubs like Mandrake’s, drinking deeply from the various gourds that were being passed around at the time. “I think his comedy was really borne out of counterculture and black power movements,” says Saul. “He feeds off those energies.... So there is an edge of militancy in what he does, coming out of the civil rights movement, but there is also this freewheeling absurdity, surrealism and love of the irrational, the desire to push experience to new frontiers, that comes out of the counterculture.”

It was no coincidence that the first time he hosted Saturday Night Live, in December 1975, he did a version of “Acid,” a routine in which he painfully parodied himself freaking out under the influence of LSD (“I don’t remember how to breathe!”) while a white hippie kibbitzes, seemingly unconcerned (“Told you it was far out!”)

One of the biggest surprises for Saul was learning how much Pryor changed every film he was involved with. The 1976 hit Silver Streak, his first buddy picture with Gene Wilder, was rewritten around Pryor’s improvisations, but Becoming Richard Pryor also details how his role inLady Sings the Blues, the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic starring Diana Ross, was expanded from one line to a supporting role—all from the way he read that one line—and his commentary in Mel Stuart’s 1973 concert film Wattstax was widely held to be the most dynamic thing about it. “The standard line was that Richard Pryor never found the right Hollywood vehicle,” says Saul, but it was more complicated than that.

Earlier Pryor biographies (and there have been at least six by Saul’s count) pointed to Blazing Saddlesas a signature disappointment for the comedian, who called it a “thorn in his heart.” He had wanted to play the lead role of Bart, which ultimately went to Cleavon Little. This was not, however, Pryor’s Bruce Lee moment (when the role Lee created in Kung Fu went to a white actor, David Carradine); Pryor got second billing under writer-director Mel Brooks among the writers, and Saul argues that the choice of Little, a classically trained actor then in a popular TV show (Temperatures Rising) was part of what made the film successful—and consequently paved the way for many other irreverent comedies, and much of the interracial humor of Pryor’s later films with Wilder. “Cleavon Little was a figure like Bill Cosby was, very likable,” says Saul. “Pryor was lovable…but he wasn’t necessarily likable.... You couldn’t have an easy surface relationship with the guy; you had to go deeper.”

One of the other received truths of earlier Pryor biographies involves the night he walked off stage of the Aladdin casino in Las Vegas in 1967, a crucible of his comedy that divided every thing before and after, like Dylan’s motorcycle accident. According to the 2013 documentary Omit the Logic and Pryor’s recollections, he blew up what was becoming a successful career playing the token negro on TV shows and doing safe comedy acts in Vegas. Imagining how uncool he must look, doing his Cosby-esque material in front of Dean Martin (who was in the audience), Pryor asked the audience, “What the fuck am I doing up here?” before exiting the theater. The only problem with that version is that Pryor went on from there to do the Pat Boone Show and play Vegas, where he was supposedly been blackballed for the Aladdin incident. And the Aladdin, Saul points out, was one of the hipper joints in town, booking blue acts like Redd Foxx and Rusty Warren long before Pryor made the scene.

“Every biographer has to deal with how reliable is the person they’re writing about,” says Saul. “I found with Pryor there was a germ of truth in everything he said.” And while he didn’t really destroy his career at that moment, he did change its course. “It was a crucial moment in his life because after 1967, he does walk away from those kinds of gigs, in general, where you’re supposed to wear a tuxedo.”

It was a different kind of integration struggle—Pryor was trying to reconcile the PG comic with the griot, a man bringing true stories of winos and junkies and street preachers from another side of life. That was the key to the Aladdin incident: “He’s turning to character-centered comedy, with characters that have a more salty edge to them, and that forces him to open up his act to obscenities,” says Saul. “He can’t play the characters he wants to become unless he starts pushing that taboo.”

There were more two Pryors at war within him; as Saul suggests, the man contained multitudes: the sweet clown battling with the angry misogynist, the generous benefactor fighting the thin-skinned entertainer, ever looking to be ripped off. Even on the night of his self-immolation he was looking beyond himself. As the police followed him, running down the street on fire that night in June, neighbors could hear him pleading: “Lord, give me another chance. There’s a lot of good left in me. Haven’t I brought any happiness to anyone in this world?”

North Korea said on Saturday it was willing to suspend nuclear tests if the United States agreed to call off annual military drills held jointly with South Korea, but Washington rejected the proposal as a veiled threat.

The offer, which the North's official KCNA news agency said was conveyed to Washington on Friday through "a relevant channel", follows an often repeated demand by Pyongyang for an end to the large-scale defensive drills by the allies.

"The message proposed (that) the U.S. contribute to easing tension on the Korean peninsula by temporarily suspending joint military exercises in South Korea and its vicinity this year," KCNA said in a report.

"(The message) said that in this case the DPRK is ready to take such a responsive step as temporarily suspending the nuclear test over which the U.S. is concerned," KCNA said, using the short form for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the nuclear tests and military exercises were separate issues.

"The DPRK statement that inappropriately links routine US-ROK exercises to the possibility of a nuclear test by North Korea is an implicit threat," Psaki told reporters traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry inEurope.

The United States and South Korea have carried out the joint military exercises for roughly 40 years, she added.

Psaki said the United States remained open to dialogue with North Korea and urged Pyongyang to "immediately cease all threats, reduce tensions, and take the necessary steps toward denuclearization needed to resume credible negotiations."

North Korea has conducted three nuclear tests, the last in February 2013, and is under U.N. sanctions for defying international warnings not to set off atomic devices in pursuit of a nuclear arsenal, whichPyongyang calls its "sacred sword".

It often promises to call off nuclear and missile tests in return for comparable steps by Washington to ease tensions. It reached such a deal in February 2012 with the United States for an arms tests moratorium only to scrap it two months later.

The United States and South Korea have stressed that the annual drills, which in some years involved U.S. aircraft carriers, are purely defensive in nature, aimed at testing the allies' readiness to confront any North Korean aggression.

Tension peaked on the Korean peninsula in March 2013 when the North ratcheted up rhetoric during the annual drills, with Pyongyang threatening war and putting its forces in a state of combat readiness.

SpaceX, a private company that specializes in manufacturing rockets and spacecraft, recently launched a mission to deliver a 5,000-pound cargo capsule containing equipment, supplies and belated holiday gifts to astronauts at the International Space Station. While the cargo capsule successfully reached orbit on Saturday, the Falcon 9 rocket that launched it into space crash-landed, Reuters reports.

The rocket and cargo capsule were initially supposed to launch on Tuesday, but the mission was called off just a minute before its scheduled departure due to “rocket trouble.” On Saturday, it started out well enough: The Falcon 9 rocket, Dragon cargo capsule in tow, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 4:47 a.m. local time, BBC reports. The cargo capsule separated from the rocket and was able to reach orbit nine minutes after liftoff.

The rocket then attempted to make a controlled vertical landing on an “autonomous drone ship” that was floating about 300 kilometers from the launch site, where it crashed. The ship sustained minor damage but remains intact. No one was harmed in the crash.

Until Saturday, the Falcon had been tested only during mock landings. According to BBC, SpaceX has been experimenting state-of-the-art boosters that help relight rockets’ engines and allow them to coast through the atmosphere. But these boosters failed to sufficiently reduce the rocket’s velocity and it “landed hard,” according to a tweet from SpaceX’s CEO, Elon Musk. Later on Saturday, he added that the steerable fins attached to the boosters, which help the rocket descend, had run out of hydraulic fluid. 

Musk, who also helms Tesla Motors, has spoken in the past about his desire to make space travel affordable and his hopes for building human colonies on the Red Planet. SpaceX’s ambitious missions and focus on recycled rocket parts would allow researchers to cut costs by reusing rockets, which typically disassemble after one use, and could revolutionize the idea of space travel.

After the failed landing, Musk tweeted about the first phase of the mission: “Close, but no cigar this time.” Musk acknowledged that there was only about a 50 percent chance the rocket would land successfully, but said he remains optimistic about the future of SpaceX’s endeavors and added that the landing test “bodes well for the future.”

Musk also divulged on Twitter that he plans to re-test the landing next month with fins boasting 50 percent more hydraulic fluid. SpaceX currently has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA, which covers the cost of about 12 resupply missions. This marks SpaceX’s fifth mission to the International Space Station. The Dragon capsule is expected to reach ISS on Monday, and the six astronauts stationed there will reportedly unload its contents over the next month. 

A woman hunted by French police as a suspect in the attacks on a satirical paper and Jewish supermarket in Paris left France several day before the killings and is believed to be in Syria, Turkish and French sources said on Saturday.

After killing the gunmen behind the worst assault in France for decades, French police launched in an intensive search for Hayat Boumeddiene, the 26-year-old partner of one of the attackers, describing her as "armed and dangerous".

But a source familiar with the situation said that Boumeddiene left France last week and traveled to Syria viaTurkey. A senior Turkish official corroborated that account, saying she passed through Istanbul on January 2.

Security forces remained on high alert before a march on Sunday which will bring together European leaders in a show of solidarity for the 17 victims killed in three days of violence that began with an attack on the Charlie Hebdo weekly on Wednesday and ended with Friday's dual sieges at a print works outside Paris and a kosher supermarket in the city.

French security forces shot dead the two brothers behind the Hebdo killings after they took refuge in the print works. They also killed an associate - Boumeddiene's partner - who planted explosives at the Paris deli in a siege that claimed the lives of four hostages.

On Saturday, police maintained a heavy presence around the French capital, with patrols at sensitive sites including media offices, and local vigils were held across France. The Interior Ministry said about 700,000 people attended including 120,000 in Toulouse, 75,000 in Nantes, and 50,000 in Marseille.

"It's no longer like before," said Maria Pinto, on a street in central Paris. "You work a whole life through and because of these madmen, you leave your house to go shopping, go to work, and you don't know if you'll come home."

The attack on Charlie Hebdo, a journal that satirized Islam as well as other religions and politicians, raised sensitive questions about freedom of speech, religion and security in a country struggling to integrate five million Muslims.

NO WARNING

A source familiar with the situation said that Boumeddiene left France last week and traveled to Syria viaTurkey.

"On January 2, a woman corresponding to her profile and presenting a piece of identity took a flight from Madridto Istanbul," a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

The source said she was accompanied by a man and had a return ticket for January 9, but never took the flight.

A senior Turkish security official said Paris and Ankara were now cooperating in trying to trace her, but said she arrived in Istanbul without any warning from France.

"After they informed us about her ... we identified her mobile phone signal on Jan 8,” the source said. "We think she is in Syria at the moment but we do not have any evidence about that ... She is most probably not inTurkey," the source said, adding the last signal from her phone was detected on Thursday.

An official police photograph of Boumeddiene shows a young woman with long dark hair hitched back over her ears. French media, however, released photos purporting to be of a fully-veiled Boumeddiene, posing with a cross-bow, in what they said was a 2010 training session in the mountainous Cantal region.

French media described her as one of seven children whose mother died when she was young and whose delivery-man father struggled to keep working while looking after the family. As an adult, she lost her job as a cashier when she converted to Islam and started wearing the niqab.

Le Monde said Boumeddiene wed Amedy Coulibaly in a religious ceremony not recognized by French civil authorities in 2009. The two were questioned by police in 2010 and Coulibaly jailed for his involvement in a botched plot to spring from jail the author of a deadly 1995 attack on the Paris transport system.

BOOBY TRAPS

Participation of European leaders including Germany's Angela Merkel, Britain's David Cameron and Italy'sMatteo Renzi in a silent march through Paris with President Francois Hollande will pose further demands for security forces on Sunday.

Arab League representatives and some Muslim African leaders as well as Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will attend.

Political and security chiefs were reviewing how two French-born brothers of Algerian extraction, Cherif andSaid Kouachi, could have carried out the Charlie Hebdo attacks despite having been on surveillance and "no-fly" lists for many years.

Paris chief prosecutor Francois Molins said late Friday the three men killed on Friday in the two security operations had had a large arsenal of weapons and had set up booby traps. They had a loaded M82 rocket launcher, two Kalashnikov machine guns and two automatic pistols on them.

With one of the gunmen saying shortly before his death that he was funded by al Qaeda, Hollande warned that the danger to France - home to the European Union's biggest populations of both Muslims and Jews - was not over yet.

"These madmen, fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion," Hollande said in a televised address.

"France has not seen the end of the threats it faces," said Hollande, facing record unpopularity over his handling of the economy but whose government has received praise from at least one senior opposition leader for its handling of the crisis.

An audio recording posted on YouTube attributed to a leader of the Yemeni branch of al Qaeda (AQAP) said the attack was prompted by insults to prophets but stopped short of claiming responsibility for the assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas condemned the strike as an unjustifiable terrorist attack.

Before his death at the printing works, Cherif Kouachi told a television station he had received financing from an al Qaeda preacher, Anwar al Awlaki, in Yemen.

Al Awlaki, an influential international recruiter for al Qaeda, was killed in September 2011 in a drone strike. A senior Yemeni intelligence source told Reuters that Kouachi's brother Said had also met al Awlaki during a stay in Yemen in 2011.

Paris prosecutor Molins said there had been sustained contact between Boumeddiene and the wife of Cherif Kouachi, with records of no fewer than 500 phone calls between the two last year. The wife of Kouachi is being questioned by French police.

Coulibaly had also called BFM-TV, to claim allegiance to Islamic State, saying he wanted to defend Palestinians and target Jews. He said he had jointly planned the attacks with the Kouachi brothers, and police confirmed they were all members of the same Islamist cell in northern Paris.

Indonesian search teams believe they have found the fuselage of an AirAsia airliner that crashed in the Java Sea two weeks ago, and divers hope calmer waters on Monday will allow them to retrieve the black box flight recorders.

Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather on Dec. 28, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore. None of the 162 people on the aircraft survived.

Searchers have also been hearing pings, believed to be from the aircraft's two black boxes near where the tail of the Airbus A320-200 aircraft tail was raised on Saturday.

Supriyadi, operations coordinator for the National Search and Rescue Agency, said on Sunday a sonar scan had revealed an object measuring 10 meters by four meters by 2.5 meters on the sea floor.

"They suspect it is the body of the plane. There is a big possibility that the black box is near the body of the plane," Supriyadi told Reuters in the town of Pangkalan Bun, the base for the search effort on Borneo.

"If it is the body of the plane then we will first evacuate the victims. Secondly we will search for the black box."

Forty-eight bodies have been found in the Java Sea off Borneo and searchers are still hunting for the plane's fuselage, which could contain more bodies.

Strong winds, currents and high waves have been hampering efforts to reach other large pieces of suspected wreckage detected by sonar on the sea floor.

Three vessels involved in the search have detected pings about 4 km (two miles) from where the plane's tail was raised on Saturday, in water about 30 meters (yards) deep.

"Three ships have (recorded) the pings so we can confirm the coordinates of the location of the black box,"Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee investigator Santoso Sayogo told Reuters.

If weather conditions are conducive, "hopefully they will recover the black box tomorrow morning," Santoso said. "The coordinates show the bottom of the sea (in that location) is sand so the divers should easily be able to see it."

If and when the recorders are found and taken to the capital, Jakarta, for analysis, it could take up to two weeks to download data, investigators said, although the information could be accessed in as little as two days if the devices are not badly damaged.

TAIL FLOATED

On Saturday, teams of divers in rubber dinghies battled the swell to attach inflatable balloons to the tail section, which was later hauled onto a rescue vessel and towed to Kumai Bay, not far from Pangkalan Bun, which has served as the base port for search and rescue vessels.

The aircraft carries cockpit voice and flight data recorders - or black boxes - near its tail but once the wreckage was visible, it quickly became apparent that the flight recorders were still underwater.

While the cause of the crash is not known, the national weather bureau has said seasonal storms were likely to be a factor.

President Joko Widodo, who took office in late October, said the AirAsia crash exposed widespread problems in the management of air transportation in Indonesia.

Separately on Sunday, a DHC-6 Twin Otter operated by Indonesia's Trigana Air crashed on landing at Enarotali Airport in Paniai, Papua, on Sunday.

Strong winds caused the aircraft to roll over, domestic news website Detik.com reported, with no injuries to the three crew members on board. The plane was not carrying any passengers.

A building of German newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost was the target of an arson attack and two suspects were arrested, police said on Sunday.

Like many other German newspapers, Hamburger Morgenpost has printed cartoons of French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo after the deadly attack on Wednesday in Paris.

A police spokeswoman said that an incendiary device was thrown at the newspaper building in the night and documents were burned inside. Two suspects were arrested near the crime scene because they behaved in an unusual manner, she added.

The newspaper said on its web page that there were no people inside the building when the attack happened. Whether the arson attack was connected to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons was still under investigation, the paper added.

Police said state security had taken over the investigations.

With Europe on alert for copycat terror attacks following events in Paris, particular attention is being paid to Islamists with links to Anwar al-Awlaki.  

One of the gunmen who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine on Thursday, killing 12, Said Kouachi, is thought to have met al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011, when the preacher was al-Qaeda’s most effective propagandist.

Al-Awlaki was killed by a U.S. drone strike in September of that year – but there are fears other contacts of his will be emboldened to act by the Paris attacks.

“If you are linked to him, you will already be of high concern,” says Raffaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “If you knew of him, you are on high concern lists, but I’m sure they [European security services] will also look back at old cases. This was a guy who was directing people to launch attacks.”

“I think they will also be looking again at the excitable type of people, who might see this as a chance to do something.”

Researchers say that al-Awlaki’s name comes up again and again with the latest generation of European jihadists. His videos are popular with young extremists, and feature accessible messages about Western foreign policy rather than abstract doctrine.

Explaining al-Awlaki’s appeal, well-known British Islamist Anjem Choudary told Newsweek last night: “He was a very charismatic speaker, plus he spoke well in English and Arabic, he had a good grasp of Islam and I guess most importantly he didn’t compromise on the big issues, like Jihad, Sharia and Khilafah [the idea of a common leadership for all the Muslims in the world]."

Choudary, the deeply controversial Islamist who founded the now-banned al-Muhajiroun network, prayed for al-Awlaki outside the U.S. Embassy after his death.

Before his death at the printing works, Said’s brother Cherif told the French television station BFM-TV: "I was sent, me, Cherif Kouachi, by al-Qaeda of Yemen. I went over there and it was Anwar al-Awlaki who financed me,".

The jihadist turned informer Morten Storm has been quoted saying that cells loyal to al-Awlaki could strike again in the West. "Al-Awlaki had an extra hatred toward everything not Islamic,” Storm said in an interview this weekend, “He believed it was his calling to bring the banners of Islam back to victory.”

This morning, the Sunday Times reported that UK security services are reviewing 120 British figures with extremist views who were not considered dangerous before but may now pose a threat, in addition to the more than 30 returned fighters who are already under surveillance.

A senior Yemeni intelligence source told Reuters that Kouachi's brother Said had also met al-Awlaki during a stay in Yemen in 2011.

Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico and speaking with an American accent, al-Awlaki became the most effective al-Qaeda recruiter of Western extremists – attracting huge audiences on his Facebook page, propaganda magazine Inspire and videos on YouTube.  

Hundreds of his videos were deleted by the site after it was shown that the British student Roshanara Chaudhry watched many of them before stabbing Labour MP Stephen Timms in 2010.

The U.S. army major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 at Fort Hood after regular contact with the preacher, and Omar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the student who attempted to blow up a plane over Detroit in 2009, had attended al-Awlaki’s preachings in Yemen.

“There is a certain mystique about him,” says Pantucci. “If you want an example of how powerful his influence can be, look at Roshanara Chaudhry.”

A poll published on Sunday showed that leftist upstart Podemos was again in the lead to winSpain's next general election, which could result in the formation of party pacts, or even the country's first coalition government.

The Metroscopia poll of 1000 people, published in the left-leaning newspaper El Pais, showed one-year-old Podemos (We Can) would take 28.2 percent of the vote, up from 25 percent in December when it fell back to second place behind the Socialists. Podemos stood at 10.7 percent of the vote when it was first included last August.

Spain has a general election due by the end of the year and a regional and municipal election expected in May. Most of those who told Metroscopia they would vote for Podemos said they believed Spain needed to get rid of its two-party system.

Podemos has leveraged discontent over corruption in the political class and high unemployment by portraying the two big parties -- the Socialists and the centre-right People's Party (PP) -- as having vested interests in maintaining the status quo while ordinary people suffer the consequences of a gruelling economic crisis.

The poll showed the Socialists had slipped to 23.5 percent of the vote, from 27.7 percent in December, while the ruling centre-right People's Party (PP) continued to decline with a 19.2 percent share versus 20 percent in December.

That is less than half the PP's 44.6 percent backing at the last general election in November 2011, followed by the Socialists with 28.7 percent.

The fragmentation has led to talk of pacts or a coalition, although there has been no coalition government sinceSpain's return to democracy in the 1970s. Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez recently ruled out a "grand coalition" with the PP.

Podemos is an anti-establishment party which is widely considered to be leftist, although the party itself says such traditional ways of describing politics are no longer valid.

Its leaders have allied themselves with Syriza in Greece and in a provisional manifesto the party said it wanted to cut the working week and raise the minimum wage. But it has backed off from more radical plans such as nationalizing Spain's utilities.

However, pollsters have warned of the difficulty of estimating seats in congress given Podemos did not exist at the last general election, and another party, Cuidadanos (Citizens), projected to take 8 percent of the vote, only operated in the Catalonia region at the last election but is now a voter option nationwide.

Many analysts also believe there is a latent PP vote which does not surface in polls. Right-leaning newspaper La Razon last weekend, gave the PP as winner.

Support for the anti-Islamic Freedom Party of Dutch populist Geert Wilders has jumped to its highest level in more than a year after the Islamist militant attacks in Paris.

Wilders, known for his inflammatory rhetoric, said after the Paris bloodshed that the West was "at war" with Islam, drawing a rebuke from Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Sunday.

If elections were held now, his party would be the single largest in the Netherlands, with 31 seats in the 150-member parliament, more than twice as many as it won in the last elections, according to a Sunday poll.

The governing Liberal and Labour parties, damaged by persistent sluggish growth, would have just 28 seats between them, compared to the 79 they held after the 2012 elections.

The Freedom Party was polling 30 seats just prior to the Jan. 7-9 Paris attacks, in which 17 people including journalists and policemen were killed by three Islamist gunmen who were later shot dead by French special forces.

Wilders this week called in an interview for measures against Islam: "If we don't do anything, it will happen here," he was quoted by the newspaper Het Parool as saying.

But speaking to Dutch public television shortly before leaving to attend a peace rally in Paris, the Dutch prime minister distanced himself from Wilders's comments.

"I would never use the word 'war,'" he said. "We are in a struggle with extremists who are using a belief as an excuse for attacks."

More than 80 percent of respondents to the De Hond poll said people who left the Netherlands to wage jihad (holy war) in Syria should lose their Dutch citizenship and those returning from fighting in Syria or Iraq should face lengthy jail terms.

The attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo had particular resonance in the Netherlands. In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, known for making anti-Islam remarks that were designed to offend, was stabbed to death by an Islamic radical as he cycled down an Amsterdam street.

Wilders, who has described Islam as a "lie" and the prophet Muhammad as a "criminal", has lived in hiding and under 24-hour armed guard since van Gogh's murder.

He is currently facing prosecution over remarks he made at an election rally last year, when he appeared to call for "fewer Moroccans" in the city of The Hague, and later referred in a television interview to "Moroccan scum".

Dozens of world leaders including Muslim and Jewish statesmen linked arms leading hundreds of thousands of French citizens in an unprecedented march under high security to pay tribute to victims of Islamist militant attacks.

President Francois Hollande and leaders from Germany, Italy, Israel, Turkey, Britain and the Palestinian territories among others, moved off from the central Place de la Republique ahead of a sea of French and other flags. Giant letters attached to a statue in the square spelt out the word Pourquoi?" (Why?) and small groups sang the "La Marseillaise" national anthem.

Some 2,200 police and soldiers patrolled Paris streets to protect marchers from would-be attackers, with police snipers on rooftops and plain-clothes detectives mingling with the crowd. City sewers were searched ahead of the vigil and underground train stations around the march route are due to be closed down.

The silent march - which may prove the largest seen in modern times through Paris - reflected shock over the worst militant Islamist assault on a European city in nine years. For France, it raised questions of free speech, religion and security, and beyond French frontiers it exposed the vulnerability of states to urban attacks.

"Paris is today the capital of the world. Our entire country will rise up and show its best side," said Hollande in a statement.

Seventeen people, including journalists and police, were killed in three days of violence that began with a shooting attack on the weekly Charlie Hebdo known for its satirical attacks on Islam and other religions as well as politicians. It ended on Friday with a hostage-taking at a Jewish deli in which four hostages were killed.

Overnight, an illuminated sign on the Arc de Triomphe read: "Paris est Charlie" ("Paris is Charlie").

A video emerged featuring a man resembling the gunman killed in the kosher deli. He pledged allegiance to the Islamic State insurgent group and urged French Muslims to follow his example. A French anti-terrorist police source confirmed it was the killer, Amedy Coulibaly, speaking before the action.

DISSENTING VOICES

"We're not going to let a little gang of hoodlums run our lives," said Fanny Appelbaum, 75, who said she lost two sisters and a brother in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz‎. "Today, we are all one."

Zakaria Moumni, a 34-year-old Franco-Moroccan draped in the French flag, agreed: "I am here to show the terrorists they have not won - it is bringing people together of all religions."

Among many children brought along to the march, Loris Peres, 12, said: "For me this is paying respect to your loved ones, it's like family ... We did a lesson about this at school."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italy Prime Minister Matteo Renzi were among 44 foreign leaders marching with Hollande. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon,Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu - who earlier encouraged French Jews to emigrate to Israel - and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were also present.

Immediately to Hollande's left, walked Merkel and to his right Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.France has provided troops to help fight Islamist rebels there.

While there has been widespread solidarity with the victims, there have been dissenting voices. French social media have carried comments from those uneasy with the "Je suis Charlie" slogan interpreted as freedom of expression at all cost. Others suggest there was hypocrisy in world leaders whose countries have repressive media laws attending the march.

The official estimate on attendance is due to be announced later. A 1995 protest against planned welfare cuts brought some 500,000-800,000 people onto the streets of the capital, while a 2002 rally against the far-right National Front's then leader Jean-Marie Le Pen after he got into the run-off of that year's presidential election drew 400,000-600,000.

Twelve people were killed in Wednesday's initial attack on Charlie Hebdo, a journal know for satirizing religions and politicians. The attackers, two French-born brothers of Algerian origin, singled out the weekly for its publication of cartoons depicting and ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad.

All three gunmen were killed in what local commentators have called "France's 9/11", a reference to the September 2001 attacks on U.S. targets by al Qaeda.

The head of France's 550,000-strong Jewish community, Roger Cukierman, the largest in Europe, said Hollande had promised that Jewish schools and synagogues would have extra protection, by the army if necessary, after the killings.

France's Agence Juive, which tracks Jewish emigration, estimates more than 5,000 Jews left France forIsrael in 2014, up from 3,300 in 2013, itself a 73 percent increase on 2012.

While there has been widespread solidarity with the victims, there have been dissenting voices. French social media have carried comments from those uneasy with the "Je suis Charlie" slogan interpreted as freedom of expression at all cost. Others suggest there was hypocrisy in world leaders whose countries have repressive media laws attending the march.

Far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, whom analysts see receiving a boost in the polls due to the attacks, said her anti-immigrant party had been excluded from the Paris demonstration and would instead take part in regional marches.

In Germany, a rally against racism and xenophobia on Saturday drew tens of thousands of people in the eastern German city of Dresden, which has become the center of anti-immigration protests organized by a new grassroots movement called PEGIDA.

Separately, a building of the newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost, which like many other publications has reprinted Charlie Hebdo cartoons, was the target of an arson attack and two suspects were arrested, police said on Sunday.

Turkish and French sources said a woman hunted by French police as a suspect in the attacks had left France several days before the killings and is believed to be in Syria.

French police had launched in an intensive search for Hayat Boumeddiene, the 26-year-old partner of one of the attackers, describing her as "armed and dangerous".

But a source familiar with the situation said Boumeddiene left France last week and traveled to Syria via Turkey. A senior Turkish official corroborated that account, saying she passed through Istanbul on Jan. 2.

The Hamas group that controls the Gaza Strip on Saturday issued a condemnation of the deadly attacks by Islamist gunmen in France this week, saying there was no "justification for killing innocents".

The Palestinian Islamist faction, which is designated as a terror organization by most Western countries, also challenged Israel's "helpless attempts" to draw comparisons between its activities and the violence in France.

In the worst assault on France's homeland security for decades, 17 victims lost their lives in three days of violence that began with an attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper on Wednesday and ended with Friday's dual sieges at a print works outside Paris and a kosher supermarket in the city.

"(Hamas) stresses that its position on the latest events in Paris is in line with the statement issued by theInternational Union of Muslim Scholars which condemned the attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and that any differences in opinion are no justification for killing innocents," Hamas said in a rare statement in French.

Islamist Gaza militants led by Hamas, whose charter includes a pledge to destroy Israel, fought a 50-day war against Israeli forces which ended in August.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, more than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were also killed.

Hamas added in its statement that Israelis should be tried for war crimes and condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "helpless attempts" to draw parallels between "the resistance of our people from one side and the terrorism across the world in the other side."

The Palestinians will formally become a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on April 1, when the court could exercise jurisdiction over war crimes committed by anyone on Palestinian territory, without a referral from the U.N. Security Council.

Israel is not a member of the Hague-based ICC but its citizens could be tried for actions taken on Palestinian land. Palestinians could also be liable for prosecution for actions against Israelis.

On Friday, the leader of Lebanon's Shi'ite group Hezbollah said the attacks in France had done more harm to Islam than any cartoon or book, a reference to the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

One of three gunmen behind the worst militant attacks in France for decades appeared in a video released online on Sunday, declaring his allegiance to the Islamic State armed group and urging French Muslims to follow his example.

In the seven-minute video apparently intended for release after the actions, Amedy Coulibaly, who staged the attack on a Jewish deli, said the planned assaults on a satirical journal and a Jewish target were justified by French military interventions overseas.

A French anti-terrorist police source said there was no doubt it was Coulibaly in the French-language recording.

Seventeen victims were killed in three days of violence that began with an attack on the Charlie Hebdoweekly on Wednesday and ended with Friday's dual sieges at a print works outside Paris and a kosher supermarket in the city.

French security forces killed Coulibaly, 32, on Friday after he planted explosives at the Paris deli in a siege that claimed the lives of four hostages. They also shot dead two brothers behind the Hebdo killings, Said and Cherif Kouachi, after they took refuge in the print works.

The Kouachi brothers said they were aligned to al Qaeda, which competes for influence with Islamic State among militant Islamists.

Coulibaly had also called BFM-TV on Friday to claim allegiance to Islamic State, saying he wanted to defend Palestinians and target Jews.

He said in that call that he had jointly planned the attacks with the Kouachi brothers. Police confirmed they were all members of the same Islamist cell in northern Paris.

The video showed scenes of man resembling Coulibaly doing physical training and images of an arsenal of weapons and ammunition on the wooden floor of an apartment. He was shown variously in white robes, sitting with a gun at his side, and in combat outfit.

“I pledged allegiance to the Caliph as soon as the caliphate was declared,” he says, referring to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whose group is an anti-government paramilitary force in both Iraq andSyria that has a growing network of followers elsewhere in the Middle East and Asia.

Coulibaly said he would be working together with the Kouachi brothers: “We’ve done things a bit together, a bit apart, to try and (achieve) more impact."

“I’m a relationship collector,” Jay Glazer tells me, which is slightly awkward only because we are alone in his dressing room and the Fox NFL Sunday insider is wearing only orange briefs. It is a December Sunday morning on the Fox Studios lot in Century City, California. For Glazer and his five Fox NFL cohorts—host Curt Menefee and analysts Terry Bradshaw, Jimmy Johnson, Howie Long and Michael Strahan—the day began before dawn, and since 8 a.m. they have either been rehearsing or on-air, and now, with the 10 a.m. (1 p.m. EST) games past halftime, everyone can exhale. And, if like Glazer, their next on-camera moment is two hours away, they can undress.

On the huge television overhead, the Cincinnati Bengals are shutting out (and shutting up) Johnny Manziel and the Cleveland Browns. Menefee, Glazer and Johnson share this dressing room, which has socks and a T-shirt strewn on the floor. Directly across the hall, Bradshaw, Long and Strahan occupy another dressing room that would pass Felix Unger’s white glove inspection.

Menefee enters to use the adjoining men’s room. Glazer, who has known Menefee since the mid-1990s and was best man at his wedding, says, “I’m about to tell him about the time we saw a UFO.”

“Olive Branch, Mississippi,” Menefee says with a smile. “It’s true.”

If it feels like you’ve stumbled into a college dorm on a Sunday afternoon, you have. But it would be an insult to the cast of Fox NFL Sunday to refer to their relationships as collegial. This is closer to a family. Besides being best man at Menefee’s wedding, Glazer is the godfather of one of Strahan’s kids. One of Long’s three sons, Kyle, a second-year Pro Bowl right guard with the Chicago Bears, worked as a nanny for Glazer. Johnson and Bradshaw commute to Los Angeles together, from Florida and Oklahoma, respectively, in Johnson’s private plane.

In other words, they are all relationship collectors.

For the 21st time in its 21 seasons, Fox NFL Sunday is the top-rated NFL studio show, which means that it is the top-rated sports studio show, period. And yet Fox’s cash pigskin is hiding in plain sight. It is never “trending.” Media pundits never mention it when lauding the zeitgeist sports studio shows, favoring TNT’s Inside the NBA or ESPN’s College GameDay, which are terrific. And at the annual Sports Emmys, Fox NFL Sunday is Susan Lucci, having last won for “outstanding studio show—weekly” in 2000.

“It’s your favorite pair of jeans,” says Fox Sports President Eric Shanks. “You always put ’em on, but you don’t talk about ’em too much.”

Jimmy Johnson says he awoke at 4 o’clock this morning and headed over to the studio. “I’m an early riser, and I don’t like waiting on people.” When Fox NFL Sunday premiered in 1994, Johnson, Bradshaw and Long were part of the original cast. “There was a lot of pressure on all of us,” recalls Bradshaw. “A lot of people were mad that Homer and Jethro [he and Long] were getting this gig.”

Johnson originally got the gig after having won the previous two Super Bowls as coach of the Dallas Cowboys, but he short-armed all his on-camera observations. An avid fisherman, Johnson still had one line in NFL coaching waters. “I was guarded,” the majestically coiffed coach concedes. “I’ve always considered myself somewhat of a gypsy. Five years at Oklahoma State. Five years at Miami. Five years in Dallas. I was already lining up my next job.”

The Miami Dolphins took the bait, and in 1996 Johnson returned to the NFL. But, after four middling seasons in the AFC East, he returned to Fox, far more candid and congruent with his off-camera self, a life that is Jimmy Buffett during the week and Jimmy, well, Johnson on weekends. He spends his fall Saturdays with beers, nachos and Bradshaw, watching college football on three televisions in his L.A. hotel suite.

During today’s 9 a.m. pre-game show, Glazer reports that the NFL will experiment with narrowing the field-goal width of the field goals for kicks at the 2015 Pro Bowl. “That width has not changed since 1920,” says Glazer.

On-camera, Strahan says, “Jimmy hasn’t changed since 1920, either.”

“Since Jimmy returned, he’s opened himself up,” Bradshaw says later. “And now we fuck with him.”

Inside the control room, coordinating producer Bill Richards says, “We have a 100 or so people who work on this show, but those five guys on the desk are the story. Their camaraderie. Except for a few curse words, they’re exactly the same with one another off-camera.”

Strahan, 43, is now in his seventh season on the show. He retired from the New York Giants in 2008, shortly after their monumental upset of the undefeated New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. Strahan landed the gig with Fox, but that summer the Giants lost their other Pro Bowl defensive end to a season-ending knee injury in an exhibition game. Big Blue put a $7 million, one-year offer in the future Hall of Famer’s hands in an attempt to forestall his foray into television.

“We had a production dinner before our first game, and Michael stands up on a chair,” says Richards. “Tells everyone that he got offered a lot of money to return to the Giants but that he is sticking with us. And Terry cracks, ‘You’re a fuckin’ moron.’”

The outlier in this huddle is the conservative Long, who dubs himself “the fun police.” Long, the set’s other Hall of Fame defensive end, still looks as if he could bench-press Rhode Island and melt snow with his glare. “I prepare for this show much like I prepared when I was playing,” says the former Oakland Raider. “I over-prepare, and I’ll probably only use 4 percent of my material.”

This is a rare and serene Sunday for Long, as neither of his two sons on NFL rosters, Chris (St. Louis Rams) or Kyle, have a game today. “Oh, it’s brutal when they are playing,” says Long, who will admit to paying obsessive attention to their games. Each week during the NFL season, Long watches the previous three games of his sons’ upcoming opponents. He then sends extensive scouting reports, via text message, to his sons (his youngest son, Howard, Jr., works in personnel for the Raiders). Long may do more game prep for progeny each week than Bradshaw, Johnson and Strahan do for Fox.

On this team, Johnson is the guru. Long is the X’s-and-O’s guy. Strahan is the precocious talent and Bradshaw the quarterback.

No quarterback ever led a team to four Super Bowls with less fanfare than Terry Bradshaw. Only one other quarterback—Joe Montana—has a 4-0 Super Bowl record (and the less said about Montana’s brief broadcasting flirtation, the better). Bradshaw was twice named Super Bowl MVP, but he may be as well remembered for what Dallas Cowboy linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson said about him before Super Bowl XIII in 1979: “He couldn’t spellcat if you spotted him the c and the a.”

Bradshaw responded by throwing for four touchdowns and a then-record 318 yards in a 35-31 Steeler win. And by always wearing a smile. “The camera,” he says, by way of explaining the longest tenure of a bald, animated character at Fox this side of Homer Simpson, “sees something you can’t teach.” In person as on-camera, the gentleman rancher—yes, the Steeler is now a cowboy—is effervescent and engaging. Spend one minute on the Fox set and it’s clear Bradshaw is the dude upon whom Fox NFL Sunday would place the franchise tag.

The hot topic during the pregame show was the Chicago Bears’ struggles with quarterback Jay Cutler. Strahan, drawing upon a popular definition of insanity, said, “You know what they call it when you do the same thing over and over and expect—”

“Repetition?” Bradshaw interjected.

“I should have known better than to reference Einstein to Terry Bradshaw,” Strahan replied. (Never mind that Einstein didn’t coin that phrase.)

Not only can Bradshaw spell cat, but he is dumb like a fox. “Terry Bradshaw is the smartest guy I know at letting people think they’re smarter than he is,” says Strahan. “When you think he’s two steps behind you, he’s two steps ahead.”

It has been a difficult year for Bradshaw. His father passed away days before last February’s Super Bowl, which Fox aired, and he missed the entire weekend of broadcasts. Last September, his son-in-law, former Tennessee Titan kicker Rob Bironas, died in bizarre fashion when he drove his truck off an embankment following some erratic behavior. And yet Bradshaw remains this Sunday congregation’s evangelical minister. At one point, as the crew balks at a producer’s request to tape a congratulatory video to a fellow Fox talent, Bradshaw raises his arms aloft and begins singing a spiritual.

“Shall we gather at the river?” Bradshaw implores in soothing tones, and the others quit yapping. “Shall we gather at the river?”

A producer wanders over. Bradshaw is needed for another voiceover task. “Terry,” the producer says, “it’s time for you to save the network again.”

FOX NFL Sunday analysts Michael Strahan, Terry Bradshaw and co-host Curt Menefee talk during FOX NFL Sunday Live from Times Square in New York, Sept. 8, 2013.Bill Menzel/FOX Sports

Back inside Glazer’s dressing room, the information broker has, mercifully, donned a pair of jeans. “Every one of us here has outworked the world to get here,” he says. Glazer was expelled from West Chester University (dorm prank gone awry) and graduated from Pace University in Manhattan with an unimpressive 2.3 GPA. Today he lives in Beverly Hills, owns a gym where he trains students (some of them NFL players) in mixed martial arts, has an ownership stake in some restaurants and is even a pitchman for Subway. When he started covering the New York Giants in the early 1990s, he was earning less than $10,000 a year and quasi-homeless. “I remember [when] Jay had more hair and fewer muscles,” says Menefee, who was a local New York City sports anchor back then. “He was, at the time, dating women just so he’d have some place to live.”

A self-proclaimed “5-foot-7 Jew from New Jersey,” Glazer never lacked chutzpah. He befriended a rookie defensive end on the Giants, a player 10 inches taller than he. Unable to afford bus fare to and from Manhattan to the Giants’ Meadowlands practice complex in New Jersey, Glazer inveigled that friend to drive him to Harlem after every practice. For seven years. His proto-Uber driver was Strahan. “I owe him seven years’ worth of tolls at the Lincoln Tunnel,” says Glazer.

Most denizens of the tri-state area would balk at giving their own mothers a ride into Manhattan more than once per lifetime. But to do so every day? And for a future NFL Hall of Famer to do so for a beat reporter who was barely on salary? Glazer’s UFO story is more believable.

“I never really cared about our respective status,” says Strahan, who had Glazer be his presenter when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. “I hung out with Jay more than any other player.”

Whatever trait Glazer possessed to induce Strahan to be his chauffeur is the same quality he employs to be the league’s primary broker of information. He is the Varys, for you Game of Thrones fans, of the NFL. Each Saturday he phones at least one person from each of the 32 NFL teams. Over the decades he has established deep trust among players, general managers, owners and even embattled NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. They not only take his calls but they regularly phone him.

“Roger Goodell calls, sure,” says Glazer. “Listen, I’ve always been a very in-your-face kind of guy, and I think players respect that. They also know that they can trust me. I only use 2 to 3 percent of the information that I have.”

Back in the green room, the crowd has dwindled as the late afternoon games are ending. There’s enough time for a brief wrap and then the cast, Richards and a few others repairs to a steakhouse in West Hollywood. The restaurant does not carry Johnson’s favorite beer (it’s not the brand he does commercials for) so a manager runs out to a local market to procure it.

Each Friday Johnson, 71, gasses up his private plane in Islamorada, Florida, and heads west (well, his pilot does) to Los Angeles. And each Friday that plane touches down outside Thackerville, Oklahoma, to pick up one passenger: Bradshaw. “He’s probably my closest friend,” says Johnson, who won a national championship as the coach at the University of Miami in 1987 and a pair of Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys in 1992 and 1993.

“I appreciate the ride,” says the former Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback, his blue eyes dancing, “but Jimmy doesn’t allow me to talk.”

Johnson may be the only person in America who can shut Bradshaw up.

When Geneva Brooks was hired to work at a retail store selling outdoor and athletic gear in Portland, Oregon, she hoped the promise of full-time employment would stick. But after a few weeks at her new job, reality quickly set in: Sometimes she would be scheduled for as little as 20 hours per week.

Brooks’s story isn’t unique. “There are lots of people out there who have their hours cut with no warning,” she said. According to a recent report published by the Federal Reserve that evaluated 2013 data, 21 percent of Americans reported occasional months with unusually high or low incomes, and another 10 percent said their income was up and down every month.

As the economy continues to embrace on-demand work arrangements, also known as the freelance economy, an increasing percentage of the workforce will face some weeks (or even months) where they are forced to live on unlivable wages. To survive, many turn to options like overdrafts and payday loans to pay their bills. But as helpful as those services can be, they also have the potential to hurt by racking up interest charges and fees.

Enter Even, a financial service that hopes to revolutionize banking.

“We’re starting to realize that a big problem for the people working hourly and part-time jobs is not so much the amount of money that they make but the inconsistency of that income,” says Even co-founder Quinten Farmer. “What we’re trying to do is...move people away from products that require them to pay interest.”

By gaining access to your financial history, Even is able to calculate an average weekly income and pay you this amount every Friday. If your hours are cut one week, it will make up the difference, interest-free. Then, if you get scheduled for a few extra hours in a subsequent week, Even will use the surplus to pay off any amount it has loaned to you in the past or will put the money aside into savings for you.

Even also offers emergency assistance—giving you early access to your next paycheck for no additional fee. But the service does come with a cost: a flat rate of five dollars a week.

Even is still in the early stages of development, but is currently being tested by a small group of people whom the founders believe could benefit from the service. The company does not expect the product to become generally available for a number of months, but it is allowing interested parties to sign up on its website for a future invitation.

In the meantime, some potential customers spot causes for concern.

“I’d be concerned that if my paycheck continued getting smaller over too long of a period, I’d have a hard time paying off the extra,” says Brooks.

But Even insists it has your back—the company allows you to pause the service at any time and offers a payment plan to users who accrue debt. Again, interest-free.

Some have privacy concerns associated with giving the company their banking history, but Even says that it uses SSL encryption to keep both your money and information safe. The company adds, “We only use the information in your bank account to help us determine your weekly salary. We will never ever share or sell your information.”

Others worry it would prevent customers from learning how to manage their finances themselves.

Veteran freelance writer Devon Maloney says she now has a steady stream of income and no longer requires financial help. But that wasn’t always the case.

“If I had this service working with me, sure, I would sleep a little bit better knowing that they’re evening my money out for me,” she says. “However, I don’t think I would be prepared for the realities of this gig,” such as quickly finding a new publication to write for when an old arrangement abruptly ends.  

While Maloney thinks that the service would be attractive to a lot of people, she worries it would inhibit customers from learning how to manage their own money.

Even promises to front a great deal of money to customers in order to offer stability amid inconsistent paychecks, but how will Even itself stay afloat?

“We’re a venture-backed business, and we believe there is a way to build this business that is a huge benefit to consumers, because it is something that hasn’t existed for them before but can be profitable and be a sustainable, long-term business,” Farmer said.

Despite receiving $1.5 million in seed funding from multiple investors, including Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures), Michelle Wilson (former general counsel of Amazon) and Andrew Kortina (Venmo founder), Farmer’s business partner concedes it will be no easy feat.

“This will be, well, rather difficult. We’ll have to solve problems no one has ever solved before,” Jon Schlossberg, Even’s product designer and CEO, writes on Medium.com. “But with a mission like this, I ask you: Because we might fail, does that mean we should not try?”

The contemporary #selfie craze, like the Myspace mirror picture frenzy of the mid-2000s, is a curious thing. Why do so many of us flood the already saturated Internet with photographs of ourselves at the gym, or at brunch? Is it to be a part of the conversation? Shameless self-promotion? New research  from Ohio State University suggests that excessive selfie-taking may point to something more insidious: Men who overload the Internet with selfies are more likely to exhibit psychopathic or narcissistic qualities than those who don’t.

Published January 7 in the Personality and Individual Differences journal, the study found that men who reported taking extra time to edit selfies with Photoshop or other programs before posting them online also exhibited high levels of self-objectification, which means they liken themselves to sex objects instead of people, a mode of thinking that can lead to such problems as eating disorders and depression.

For the study, 800 men between the ages of 18 and 40 answered an online questionnaire that asked them to describe how much time they spent on five of the most popular networking sites, including Facebook, Twittier, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest. The survey asked participants to estimate how many photos of themselves they had taken and posted in the span of one week, and to divulge how frequently they used cropping or photographic filters to make themselves appear more attractive.

Researchers then used a measure called the Dark Triad to determine whether participants’ answers fell into the spectrum of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Narcissism stems from insecurity, but manifests itself as entitlement and egocentrism; psychopathy is defined by antisocial behavior, as well impulsive tendencies and a complete lack of empathy; and Machiavellianism is a term used to describe people who are manipulative and cynical. Machs, psychopaths and narcissists are all characterized by aggression, deception and calculated self-promotion, according to the study, portions of which were used in a larger survey conducted earlier last fall by Glamour, as part of the magazine’s body issue, but didn’t have sufficient enough data for women.

Online, men who exhibit Dark Triad traits have been linked to cyberbullying, trolling and coercing people to engage in sex, according to the study’s lead researcher, Jesse Fox. This isn’t to say that excessively selfie-posting fellows are the next Patrick Batemans, but the data showed that they had higher incidences of antisocial personality traits associated with psychopathy and narcissism.

In an interview with Newsweek, Fox said her motivation for conducting the study came from wondering how people used social networking sites. “The way that social networking sites are designed, it’s kind of easy to deceive and misrepresent yourself,” she said. “So I wanted to see if those Dark Triad traits could predict certain behaviors and how people are self-presenting on those sites.”

Those exhibiting higher incidences of narcissism and psychopathy reported posting more selfies and spending more time online than those who didn’t exhibit such traits, the study found. It said narcissism was a predictor of photo editing behaviors, but not Machiavellianism and psychopathy, because the latter two are more characterized by impulsivity than the calculated approach suggested by the act of altering images.

The study is the first to examine personal implications of the selfie surge across a wide demographic. Prior research about social interaction and selfies has focused solely on college-age men. A 2013 study found that men typically take twice as many selfies as women do because it is a socially acceptable -- and validated -- form of vanity for men.

Fox suggests that the #selfie phenomenon draws from our reality-television-flooded, paparazzi-driven culture. “People constantly feel like they have to offer this photographic proof of what’s going on” in their lives, she said. “Instead of having very highly formalized, controlled, posed environments of elite celebrities, now it’s more of a tendency of always being on camera.”

It’s interesting to note that a recent trend in fashion photography features prominent models proudly exhibiting their unedited and unretouched photographs. Most recently, fashion maven Kate Moss posed unretouched for Vogue Italia.

Researchers also believe that social media may be an outlet for “cheater strategies” that allow narcissistic or psychopathic individuals to achieve a measure of social validation despite having antisocial personalities. So perhaps it’s best to step lightly when dealing with fellows who spend 24/7 on Instagram and take part in another recent craze: wielding selfie sticks.