British Prime Minister David Cameron came under concerted pressure on Wednesday from political rivals to take part in a series of pre-election TV debates he has said he will boycott unless the smaller left-leaning Green Party is also included.

Cameron's refusal has seen opponents accuse him of using a questionable pretext to avoid a debate they say he is scared of. His foes also accuse him of showing disdain for what they say is a healthy democratic exercise ahead of the May 7 national election, which is expected to be unusually tight.

In separate but identical letters, the leaders of the main opposition Labour Party, the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Liberal Democrat Party, Cameron's junior coalition partner, wrote to him urging him to reconsider.

"It would be unacceptable if the political self-interest of one party leader were to deny the public the opportunity to see their leaders debate in public," the letters read.

"Therefore, if you are unwilling to reconsider, the three party leaders who have committed to participate will ask the broadcasters to press ahead with the debates and provide an empty podium should you have a last-minute change of heart."

The spat follows a provisional ruling from Britain's broadcast regulator Ofcom which said the Green Party did not qualify for major party status.debate

The first edition of Charlie Hebdo published after the deadly attacks by Islamist gunmen sold out within minutes at newspaper kiosks around France on Wednesday, with people queuing up to buy copies to support the satirical weekly.

"I've never bought it before, it's not quite my political stripes, but it's important for me to buy it today and support freedom of expression," said David Sullo, standing at the end of a queue of two dozen people at a kiosk in central Paris.

A print run of up to three million copies has been set for what has been called "the survivors' edition", dwarfing the usual 60,000 run. But still, many outlets were selling out fast.

"It's important for me to buy it and show solidarity by doing so, and not only by marching," said 42-year old Laurent in the same queue, adding he had no guarantee he would get a copy because he had not reserved one the day before.

A few blocks away, by Jules Joffrin metro station in northern Paris, one newspaper seller said people were already waiting outside her shop when she opened at 6:00 am. "I had 10 copies - they were sold immediately," she said.

The newsagent at Gare du Nord rail station said it opened at 5:15 am local instead of the usual 6:00, and its 200 copies sold out in less than 15 minutes.

Seventeen people died in Paris in three days of violence that began with the attack by two Islamist gunmen on the offices of Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7 - in which 12 people were killed - and ended with a siege at a kosher supermarket two days later.

At least 3.7 million marched through Paris on Sunday to honor the memory of the journalists, police officers and supermarket customers who had died.

The front page of Charlie Hebdo's Jan. 14 edition shows a cartoon of a tearful Mohammad with a sign "Je suis Charlie" (I am Charlie) below the headline: "Tout est pardonné" (All is forgiven).

"I wrote 'all is forgiven' and I cried," Renald "Luz" Luzier, who created the image, told a news conference on Tuesday at the weekly's temporary office at left-wing daily Liberation.

"This is our front page ... it's not the one the terrorists wanted us to draw," he said. "I'm not worried at all ... I trust people's intelligence, the intelligence of humor."

Grand Mufti Warning

Inside the edition, the weekly's usual irreverent humor was on display. One cartoon shows jihadists saying: "We shouldn't touch Charlie people ... otherwise they will look like martyrs and, once in heaven, these bastards will steal our virgins."

"What makes us laugh most is that the bells of Notre-Dame rang in our honor," the newspaper, which emerged from the 1968 freedom movement and has long mocked all religions and pillars of the establishment, wrote in an editorial.

All proceeds from the sale of this week's edition will go directly to Charlie Hebdo, in a windfall for a publication that had been struggling financially, after distributors decided to waive their cut. The cover price was three euros ($4). A call for donations has also been aired on national media.

In Charenton on the eastern edge of Paris, queues formed in the early morning darkness at the normally quiet newspaper stand near the metro, until people got closer to a notice by the door saying "Charlie Hebdo: none left".

The newspaper seller said he hoped to get more copies on Thursday but was refusing to take reservations.

Digital versions will be posted in English, Spanish and Arabic, while print editions in Italian and Turkish will also appear.

At a news briefing on Tuesday, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said: "We absolutely support the right of Charlie Hebdo to publish things like this. Again, that's what happens in a democracy. Period."

However Egypt's Grand Mufti warned the newspaper against publishing a new Mohammad caricature, saying it was a racist act that would incite hatred and upset Muslims around the world.

Female asylum seekers, often survivors of sexual violence, are denied dignity and privacy by being routinely watched and searched by male staff in Britain's Yarl's Wood detention centre, a report by rights group Women for Refugee Women said.

The UK Home Office has stated - in response to a previous report from the group - that male staff would not supervise women in intimate situations, but women's privacy is still being abused, said the report, published on Wednesday.

"We are committed to treating all detainees with dignity and respect, and take any allegations to the contrary very seriously," a Home Office spokesperson said, commenting on the new report.  

"The latest independent inspection by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons found that Yarl's Wood was a respectful and safe place."

The charity interviewed 38 women who came to Britain to seek asylum and were detained in Yarl's Wood detention centre between June 2012 and October 2014.

One third of the women told Women for Refugee Women that they were searched by male staff, and more than half of them said they were watched by men while being searched by women.

"Men enter your room without knocking and see you in bed every day. I have been seen partly naked more than once," the report quoted one woman as saying.

A majority of the women said they were seen by male staff in intimate situations including when naked, in bed, on the toilet and in the bathroom, a situation they described as uncomfortable, frightening and distressing.

"When you are on a suicide watch (and) you ask for a woman when you want to take a shower, they said we don't have enough staff," the report quoted one woman as saying.

"I was on suicide watch and so was my room mate. A man and a woman were watching us. We asked if the man could leave while we went to the toilet and he refused. They didn't respect us."

Yarl's Wood is one of 12 centres Britain uses to detain asylum seekers while they wait to be sent home or have their cases examined.

More than 70 percent of the women interviewed by the charity said they had experienced sexual violence in their home countries before arriving in Britain.

"This report shows that survivors of sexual violence who come to the UK seeking protection are routinely being locked up and are denied privacy and dignity in detention despite claims to the contrary by the Home Office," the group's director, Natasha Walter, said in a statement.

Six of the women interviewed said the staff at Yarl's Wood had made sexual suggestions to them and three said they were touched sexually.

"The behaviour of staff, particularly male staff, in Yarl's Wood detention centre, is adding to the trauma of survivors of sexual violence," said Walter.

Citing figures from the Home Office, Women for Refugee Women said that in 2013, 6,396 women came to the UK seeking asylum in their own right - not as wives or dependants - and 2,038 were detained, more than half of them for more than a month.

In 2013 one third of the women who had been detained after seeking asylum were deported, while two thirds were eventually released while their asylum claims were being processed.

Women for Refugee Women says that detaining those who seek protection is unnecessary and all asylum claims can be considered without detaining the asylum seekers.

Women interviewed by the charity were detained in Yarl's Wood for an average of 93 days, while one woman was held for one year and three months.

The report said that while Britain was taking steps to combat practices that harm women, such as forced marriage or trafficking, protection of women should extend to creating a dignified asylum process for those fleeing persecution.

A French comedian was detained for questioning on Wednesday for writing on his Facebook account he felt "Charlie Coulibaly," a word play combining the widespread "I am Charlie" vigil slogan and the name of one of the three gunmen.

More than 3.7 million people marched through the streets of France on Sunday, many of them holding "I am Charlie" signs to honor the memory of the Charlie Hebdo journalists, policemen and kosher shop clients killed by Islamist gunmen last week.

Prosecutors launched Monday an inquiry on potential charges of glorifying terrorism against Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, who has already faced accusations of anti-Semitism and has mocked the killing of U.S. reporter James Foley by Islamic State militants.

Dieudonne won international attention last year after former France striker Nicolas Anelka celebrated an English Premier League goal with a salute popularized by him and which critics say has an anti-Semitic connotation.

Amedy Coulibaly, whose name inspired the joke, killed a policewoman and four clients of a kosher shop last week in Paris, two days after two gunmen shot 12 people at and near the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said this week European officials should work more closely with internet companies to eliminate hate speech and content glorifying terrorism.

Dieudonne, Paris-born son of a Cameroonian father and French mother, says he is not anti-Semitic. He has been repeatedly fined for hate speech in France where local authorities in several towns have banned his shows as a threat to public order.

His lawyer Jacques Verdier told BFM-TV that arresting him for the "Charlie Coulibaly" comment was "completely out of proportion." If condemned for glorifying terrorism, Dieudonne could face up to seven years in jail and 5,000 euro ($5,868) in fine.

The killings at Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday have hit Syrian Tarek Alghorani hard. His girlfriend tells me he’s been distant since the news first came in; the events in Paris have stirred too many memories. Tarek knows better than most the exorbitant price that laughing in the face of terror can demand.

In 2006, before Syria became synonymous with the slaughter and sectarian violence of jihad, Tarek was sentenced to seven years in the country’s notorious Sednaya Prison for daring to satirise the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in his blog, Syrian Domari. After being freed in 2011, he continued his opposition to the regime that had imprisoned and tortured him, embarking with others on a graffiti campaign that would result in the deaths of his friends and, ultimately, his flight from Syria. Still, almost lost within the smoke of a busy downtown bar in Tunis, Tarek laughs. He laughs a lot. He tells me how he laughed as the judge handed down his sentence, “I looked at him and I said, seven years? You won’t even be here in seven years.”

For a regime that has outlawed criticism, humour presents a threat bordering upon the lethal. Many of those in Sednaya with Tarek had been responsible for acts of terror that had resulted in the deaths of hundreds. Tarek’s sentence for mocking the regime was as long as any. “Funny; funny is not easy, but it’s perfect for giving an idea to another. Funny draws people in. Funny gets you more followers and (for the government) that makes you more dangerous. With funny you can do anything. You can give your opinion in a smart way.” Tarek pauses to ask himself a question, “Funny? Funny does everything.”

Not everything is funny. There is little humour to be found in the “festival” of Falaqa that greeted Tarek’s arrival at Sednaya. The animation drains from his face, “They fold your body into a car tire, so you cannot move. Then they put a thick iron bar here,” he says, indicating to the back of his knee. “After that, they beat you on the legs with sticks, until you are black from the beatings. When the security services torture you during interrogation, you know that if you give them something, they will stop, even if just for a little bit. When the prison guards beat you, you have nothing. You can say nothing. It’s just beating.”

Similarly, there is little that could be considered funny in the murder of his friend, Nizar Rastanaoui. “They put us in with the jihadists, with al-Qaida and the beginnings of what is now Daesh, (the Arabic term for ISIS) . . . In 2008, the prisoners revolted, taking control of the prison. One group of jihadists, we never found out who, came for Nizar. They took him to another floor and beat him with water pipes. When we found him, his head was like this,” he says, indicating with his hands something the size of large water melon. “We couldn’t recognise him. We only knew him by the T-shirt he was wearing.”

Tarek grew up in 1980s Damascus, the son of a small businessman. “They tell me I was always joking. I was always up to something, making up songs, jokes, this kind of thing.” As a child he became a voracious reader, consuming everything that hadn’t been censored and applying it to life within Syria. Referencing Descartes’ Method of Doubt, he explains how his distrust of the regime grew, eventually drawing him inexorably to a life online. Initially he joined the internet discussion forum Akhuaia (fraternity) before, along with others, founding the satirical and political blog, Syrian Domari in 2003, eight years before social media was to drive a revolution throughout the Arab world.

Tarek Alghorani in Tunis.Simon Speakman Cordall

Tarek was released from jail in 2011, emerging into a Syria experiencing the first throes of the secular, democratic revolution that was to tragically descend into the vicious and the sectarian. Once more, despite the beatings and the torture he had experienced, Tarek felt compelled to take up arms against the regime that had taken seven years of his life. This time he did it with an ­aerosol can.

“Graffiti is key, because with graffiti, you have broken the wall, broken the wall inside people’s minds, because people are scared of the wall. They tell you, ‘Shh . . . the walls have ears. Don’t say anything’.” For Tarek and his friends, graffiti equated to defiance and hope. “For more than 40 years, all we have are pictures of Bashar al-Assad and his father. Every day, that is all people see. With graffiti, we can break that. We can break that wall. When there is a demonstration and people are shot, afterwards, the television will come and say that nothing happened there and they will film it empty. With graffiti, we can say that we were there, these are our martyrs, and that we are still there.”

Inspired by similar campaigns in Iran and Egypt, Tarek switched from creating graffiti, to creating the stencils by which Syrian youths could replicate the images en masse. More stencils appeared, some mocking Assad’s resemblance to Hitler, others making great play of the leaked information that the President’s wife, Asma al-Assad, (in Arabic, Assad means lion) referred affectionately to him as her “duck”. It was a gift Tarek savoured.

Nine of Tarek’s friends were killed during that campaign. Their families remain in Syria, so their identities must remain secret. However, the death of one, Nour Hatem Zahra, was publicised, his funeral drawing disaffected Syrian youths in their thousands. It is still visible on YouTube.

Tarek left Syria in 2012 after learning that, once more, he was wanted by the regime, this time – not to be arrested – but to be killed. Initially, he left for Jordan, before later relocating the relative safety of Tunisia. He now works for the Tunisian Centre for Press Freedom and has little choice but to observe the carnage that has come to characterise his home from a distance. Though reduced, his involvement in the secular, youth-led Syrian resistance remains. His latest effort, a stencil of ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was taken directly from the pages of Charlie Hebdo. “I wanted to show solidarity with Charlie Hebdo. I don’t know if they’ll use it in Raqqa, (the de facto capital of the Islamic State) but they might.”

“Satire and magazines like Charlie Hebdo can’t stop. We must still fight for freedom of expression. We can never stop. We must do it for all people, so that they can say what they want to say. If you write something I don’t like, I can write something saying you’re wrong. If you draw a picture attacking me, I will draw a picture back. In this way, word by word, caption by caption, we can move forward. Not with violence. Violence will not stop anything. Violence is for dictators, for terrorists. It’s for everyone who wants to make us frightened. No, we will not give them that. We must continue.”

Just before Christmas, former FBI special agent Mark Rossini greeted me with his usual good cheer when we met for drinks in a midtown Manhattan restaurant. He told me his life had finally taken a turn for the better. He’s spending most of his time in Switzerland, where he works for a private global corporate-security firm. “Life’s good,” he said.

Good, but with a few major changes. Rossini was drinking club soda instead of the expensive cabernets he quaffed when I first knew him as a high-flying FBI official in Washington a decade ago, when he was a special assistant to the bureau’s chief spokesman, John Miller (now with the New York City Police Department). “I’ve cut back,” he said. “Feeling good.”

But when I ask him how he’s really doing, the light in his eyes dims. “Well, you know, I still miss the job,” he said, shaking his head. A boneheaded move—showing confidential FBI documents to his actress-flame Linda Fiorentino, who said she was researching a script about L.A. wiretapper extraordinaire Anthony Pellicano—cost him his career in 2008 and nearly landed him in jail.

“What’s past is past,” he said. But not all of it. He quickly told me of an encounter the day before on a street in Yonkers, where he keeps an apartment. He’d run into a close family friend who’d lost relatives at the World Trade Center on 9/11. “Mark,” she told him, “you’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

Former F.B.I. Agent Mark Rossini leaves U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. after being sentenced to a year's probation and a $5,000 fine for his role in illegally accessing F.B.I. documents, May 14, 2009.Ron Sachs/CNP/Newscom

“She says that every time I see her,” he said, his mouth turning down. But now, at 53, six years out of the bureau, he’s making a determined effort to do just that—to close some of the gaping holes in the official 9/11 narrative, which blames the attacks on a vague “intelligence failure.”

Rossini is well placed to do just that. He’s been at the center of one of the enduring mysteries of 9/11: Why the CIA refused to share information with the FBI (or any other agency) about the arrival of at least two well-known Al-Qaeda operatives in the United States in 2000, even though the spy agency had been tracking them closely for years.

That the CIA did block him and Doug Miller, a fellow FBI agent assigned to the “Alec Station,” the cover name for CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, from notifying bureau headquarters about the terrorists has been told before, most notably in a 2009 Nova documentary on PBS, “The Spy Factory.” Rossini and Miller related how they learned earlier from the CIA that one of the terrorists (and future hijacker), Khalid al-Mihdhar, had multi-entry visas on a Saudi passport to enter the United States. When Miller drafted a report for FBI headquarters, a CIA manager in the top-secret unit told him to hold off. Incredulous, Miller and Rossini had to back down. The station’s rules prohibited them from talking to anyone outside their top-secret group.

Khalid Almihdhar was one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.FBI

All these years later, Rossini still regrets complying with that command. If he had disobeyed the gag order, the nearly 3,000 Americans slaughtered on 9/11 would probably still be alive. “This is the pain that never escapes me, that haunts me each and every day of my life,” he wrote in the draft of a book he shared with me. “I feel like I failed, even though I know it was the system and the intelligence community on the whole that failed.”

‘I Finally Broke Down’

The various commissions and internal agency reviews that examined the “intelligence failure” of 9/11 blamed institutional habits and personal rivalries among CIA, FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) officials for preventing them from sharing information. Out of those reviews came the creation of a new directorate of national intelligence, which stripped the CIA of its coordinating authority. But blaming “the system” sidesteps the issue of why one CIA officer in particular, Michael Anne Casey, ordered Rossini’s cohort, Miller, not to alert the FBI about al-Mihdhar. Or why the CIA’s Alec Station bosses failed to alert the FBI—or any other law enforcement agency—about the arrival of Nawaf al-Hazmi, another key Al-Qaeda operative (and future hijacker) the agency had been tracking to and from a terrorist summit in Malaysia.

Nawaf Al-Hamzi was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.FBI

Because Casey remains undercover at the CIA, Rossini does not name her in his unfinished manuscript. But he wrote, “When I confronted this person...she told me that ‘this was not a matter for the FBI. The next al-Qaeda attack is going to happen in Southeast Asia and their visas for America are just a diversion. You are not to tell the FBI about it. When and if we want the FBI to know about it, we will.’”

Rossini recalled going to Miller’s cubicle right after his conversation with Casey. “He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.… We were both stunned and could not understand why the FBI was not going to be told about this.”

It remains a mystery. None of the post-9/11 investigating bodies were able to get to the bottom of it, in part because Rossini and Miller, who continued to work at Alec Station after the attacks, didn’t tell anyone what happened there. When congressional investigators came sniffing around, they kept their mouths shut.

“We were told not to say anything to them,” Rossini said. Who told you that? I asked. “The CIA. I can’t name names. It was just understood in the office that they were not to be trusted, that [the congressional investigators] were trying to pin this on someone, that they were trying to put someone in jail. They said [the investigators] weren’t authorized to know what was going on operationally.… When we were interviewed, the CIA had a person in the room, monitoring us.”

As a result, Rossini wasn’t interviewed by the subsequent 9/11 Commission, either. “Based on that interview, I guess the 9/11 Commission [which followed up the congressional probe] thought I didn’t have anything worthy to say.” He kept his secret, he said, from the Justice Department’s inspector general as well. “I was still in shock,” he added, and still fearful of violating Alec Station’s demand for omerta. Finally, when his own agency—the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)—came to him in late 2004, after the congressional probe and 9/11 Commission had issued their reports, he opened up.

Pedestrians react to the World Trade Center collapse on Sept. 11, 2001. Richard Cohen/Reuters

“Tape recorders were running. I was sitting right next to Candace Will, associate director of the FBI” in charge of the OPR, Rossini recalled by telephone early this month. “It’s when I finally broke down and told them what had happened, what I had done, and why. Those tape recordings are the key, that’s what has to be released.”

The CIA has long insisted it shared intelligence about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi with the FBI, but records gathered by the 9/11 Commission contradict this assertion. Indeed, the panel could find no records supporting the claim of another Alec Station supervisor, Alfreda Bikowsky, that she had hand-carried a report to the FBI.

“The FBI is telling the truth,” Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, told Newsweek. As for why the CIA not only failed to share pre-9/11 information on Al-Qaeda operatives but forbade the FBI agents in Alec Station from sharing it, Zelikow said, “We don’t know.”

And He Comes Back...

In such darkness, all sorts of conspiracy theories have flourished, from the absurd “truther” scenarios about preset charges in the World Trade Center to Israeli or even Bush administration connivance in the attacks. But more substantive theories remain, some deeply disturbing.

The issue was revived on January 7, when two members of Congress, backed by the co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, former Florida Democratic senator Bob Graham, unveiled a resolution calling on the Obama administration to declassify 28 pages of the joint congressional probe dealing with Saudi contacts with and financial support for the hijackers when they were in this country. Saudi officials, Graham says, “knew that people who had a mission for Osama bin Laden were in, or would soon be placed in, the United States. Whether they knew what their assignments were takes the inference too far.”

Zelikow, who later went on to work for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sees the Saudi Embassy’s alleged connections to the hijackers as “a red herring.” But he said there are “loose ends” worth exploring, particularly the hijackers’ movements in the U.S. that brought them close to Yemeni extremist preachers. “The more interesting story is where they decided to settle and why,” he added.

Richard Clarke, former National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and National Security, is sworn in before the bipartisan September 11 commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon The U.S., on Capitol Hill, March 24, 2004, in Washington.Mark Wilson/Getty

Now a professor of history at the University of Virginia, Zelikow is likewise skeptical of what former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke said in a startling, videotaped interview with two freelance journalists in October 2009—remarks that have garnered far less attention than the hijackers’ Saudi connections.

Clarke recalled that in 1999, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had been taken over by Cofer Black and Rich Blee, two “hard-charging” covert operations veterans who “understood Al-Qaeda was a big threat.… What I was told at the time,” Clarke told journalists Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, “was that they were going to try, for the first time, to get sources on the inside”—to turn one of the terrorists into a double agent.

Clarke found it odd that when CIA Director George Tenet came to an emergency White House meeting with Black and Blee on July 10, 2001, “they never mentioned that already two Al-Qaeda terrorists...had entered the United States.”

“So you ask yourself, Why not?” he added. The “only conceivable reason that I’ve been able to come up with” is that they were running an illegal domestic operation to recruit al-Mihdhar or al-Hazmi. And they didn’t want the FBI to barge in on it.

That would also explain why Alec Station’s Michael Anne Casey forbade Miller and Rossini to tell FBI headquarters about al-Mihdhar’s multi-visa passport to enter the U.S. Rossini believes “they did” try to recruit al-Mihdhar, who had made prior visits to the U.S. As the former FBI agent pointed out, the NSA had been eavesdropping on a house al-Mihdhar frequented in Yemen. It’s how the CIA learned of the Kuala Lumpur terrorist summit. “He’s a known terrorist that they follow around the globe,” Rossini said. “He’s a subject of several cables, he comes to America…and they allow him to leave America and go back to Yemen for the birth of his baby. And he comes back.”

The CIA didn’t tell the FBI about his presence until midsummer of 2001, after they had lost track of him. “It just stands to reason that they had some kind of relationship with him—or they tried,” Rossini said. “So they were following these merry men around for a year or two without telling us, and now all of the sudden, in July 2001, they say, ‘Please help us find these guys!’ Why then? I can’t prove it, the only reason is, he went south—he told them to go fuck themselves—or stopped responding to their phone calls. They ran a clandestine op in the U.S., and they didn’t want the bureau involved in it.”

A minister stands amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center, seemingly dazed from the events of the day on Sept. 11, 2001.Larry Towell/Magnum

‘Lying Pieces of Shit’

A former CIA operations officer who was assigned to Alec Station at the time thinks that both Rossini and Clarke are onto something—but that their theory is a bit off-kilter. “I find that kind of hard to believe, that [al-Mihdhar or al-Hazmi] would be a valid source,” said the former CIA operative, who spent 25 years handling spies in some of the world’s most dangerous places, including the Middle East. “But then again, the folks that were making a lot of calls at the time there were junior analysts, who had zero general experience and absolutely zero on-the-ground operational experience or any kind of operational training.”

From the beginning, Alec Station, the operative pointed out, was run by intelligence analysts, many of them like the fictional heroine of Zero Dark Thirty, a composite of real-life CIA analysts. Over time, they began fancying themselves as field-savvy, venturing into the operations—sometimes with disastrous consequences.

“They had all these analysts coming up with their grand schemes and following targets,” said the former officer, who asked for anonymity in exchange for talking freely about clandestine matters. “But then they wanted to call the shots on the operational size of things, and that’s where their strengths were not.” It was an Alec Station analyst, Jennifer Matthews, the operative pointed out, who recruited the double agent who killed her and six other CIA personnel on a remote base in Afghanistan on December 2009.  

“Their definition of a source was very different from what an intelligence officer or case officer or the [directorate of operations] would consider a validated bona fide source,” said the operative. And the Alec Station analysts didn’t much like the wizened older case officers looking over their shoulders. “Sometimes I’d propose something and they would warn me off, saying it might compromise somebody they were talking to.”

But who would they be talking to? Not real terrorists. “I don’t think they ever personally talked to anybody,” the operative said. “They just worked in their office in tennis shoes....They probably got a source through liaison. So their source [on the hijackers] might have been someone in the Saudi service who said they are talking to somebody, or someone in the Jordanian service who said he was talking to someone. As far I was concerned, they were a bunch of lying pieces of shit. So they could’ve done that.”

“That” meaning essentially conjuring up a relationship with al-Mihdhar, perhaps through a very sensitive source in Saudi intelligence, and selling it as something with great potential to their CIA bosses, who were desperate to get something going inside Al-Qaeda. This is essentially what happened with Matthews and her spy Humam al-Balawi, a doctor who claimed to be treating Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri at his lair in Pakistan. Balawi was served up to Matthews by Jordanian intelligence, the CIA’s closest Middle East partner outside of Israel.

Top CIA officials were so excited about al-Balawi’s supposed access to Al-Qaeda’s inner circle that they were running down to the White House to give progress reports on him. That is, until he was driven into a CIA base without being searched—on Matthew’s explicit, tragic orders—and blew himself up, killing eight people altogether.

Waiting for Heads to Roll

All these years later, no one has come up with a plausible explanation for why Alec Station would deny Rossini and Miller the chance to tell the FBI about dangerous Al-Qaeda figures coming into the U.S. “It’s looney,” said the former Alec Station CIA ops officer.

“When the first 9/11 report came out, I was waiting for heads to roll,” the ops officer said. “But of course they took out all the important stuff. And all the people who were responsible for not sharing information—their names were taken out. They were commended and moved up.”

To this day, Rossini can barely contain his fury. Over drinks in New York, he tried to count his blessings. It was Christmas, nearby Rockefeller Center was lit up and beautiful. He was firmly locked into his default mode: big smile, glass raised.

“What the hell,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. “I’m gonna tell my story.”

Jeff Stein is Newsweek’s national security correspondent in Washington. He can be reached somewhat confidentially via spytalk@hushmail.com.

Israeli political parties are in the midst of a primary season, to determine their lists for the upcoming parliament. Yesterday, the Labor party led by Isaac Herzog held its primary. Today the Bayit HaYehudi will hold its elections.

The Labor party primary went off without a hitch. In contrast to the Likud primary last week, (whose results are still being disputed in court), when the results of the votes by Labor party members were announced this morning there seemed to be no ill will. The major surprise of the election was the fact that the former head of the Labor party, Shelly Yacimovich easily won the first spot on the list, and Stav Shaffir (the youngest member of the Knesset) won the second spot.

Coming in third was Shaffir's co-leader of the protest movement, Izik Shmueli. The top five places on the combined Labor/HaT’nua list that includes Herzog and Tzipi Livini, will now have five women, compared to none at the top of the Likud list. Labor candidates are now by far the youngest candidates in the election, with a woman under 30 now in a top position – something that might engage a new young generation of voters, who have been apathetic as of late, and as a result have chosen to be “no-shows” on election day. 

As the author of Newsweek’s Tel Aviv Diary I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce readers to some of Israel’s key politicians.

Last week I had the opportunity to sit down with Labor Member of the Knesset Stav Shaffir. At 29 years old, she is the youngest member of the Knesset.

Shaffir has made a name for herself as one of the leader of the Israeli protest movement in the summer of 2011. While many new members of the Israeli Knesset, especially member of the opposition, fade into near oblivion after being elected. Shaffir avoided that fate by being a very very vocal member of the Knesset Finance committee, vigorously objecting to what she implied were a repeating series of improper actions.

Her relentless objection to actions of the Committee Chair, favoring the right-wing Bayit Hayehudi party, resulted in her being forcibly removed from the committee room a number of times, and earned her the reputation of being the enfant terrible of the Israeli parliament.

I was not sure what to expect before meeting Shaffir. However, after spending 45 minutes interviewing her I came away duly impressed by this onetime Air Force flight cadet, whose command of the English language is exemplary, and whose understanding of Israel’s political reality is striking. Her impressive victory yesterday in the Labor primary certainly confirmed that initial judgement.

Here are edited excerpts from that interview.

What made you go into politics?

I never planned to be a politician. When we led the protest movement, three years ago, I was employed as a journalist, studying for my masters and working as an activist. I wanted to make change, to fight for specific causes.

Politics seemed to me to be a corrupt place. I think this is the perception that most young people in Israel are holding. They don’t believe that politics can be influential in a positive way on their lives. When we led the protest movement, we thought, naively, that if we mobilize  enough people to the streets to demonstrate for social justice, the government will understand that this is what the public wants and will do something to change.

It took me many months, (nearly a year) after the last big rally (the half a million rally) to understand that unless we enter politics and make a change, it will not happen. We do not have the privilege of thinking that politics is too dirty or too corrupt.

How do you think your army service and your time out of the country impacted your thinking regarding Israel and politics?

My army service was split into three parts. Before I was drafted I took on another year to volunteer in an “at risk” school in Tiberias. I lived with other teachers. We taught and became guides for children from poor socio-economic backgrounds.

Then I went into the military’s pilots’ course. My year was one of the first courses open to women. I think it was only the fifth year that women were even allowed to try to become pilots. This was an amazing experience. I was one of a group of very special people who were very ideological and very dedicated. That was especially true among the women. It was an adventurous and interesting  experience.

After five months I was transferred to the army’s newspaper. This was another interesting experience. I covered the disengagement process and I covered the second Lebanon war. I focused mainly on what Israel was doing in the West Bank, so I got to learn a lot of things I did not know before.

Until my military service I do not think I ever crossed the Green Line with my family. In the army I got to see both sides. I met and stayed with a number of settlers. Before the disengagement I lived in Gush Katif for a while, to get the feel and understand the needs of the settlers who were evacuated. I covered a lot of the stories of the Palestinians who lived in the West Bank and I got a number of different narratives.

Following my military service I wanted to continue on the path of conflict resolution, so I got a scholarship to study in London for three years in the Olive Tree Program, together with a group of fellow Israelis and Palestinians. This was another very interesting experience, because were a group of people that were not from one single ideological position—we were left-wing people and very right-wing people (there were two settlers within the group).

We studied and learned from people from Northern Ireland. We got not only inspiration, but real knowledge on how to resolve conflict.

What bothered me most was that many of my friends did not want to return home afterwards. Many of my Israeli friends both here, and those who lived abroad did not believe there was a chance to make real change. They slowly got stuck in the position that they should only take care of their own lives and try to make the best situation for their personal families.

This is very not Israeli. There is something about being an Israeli. There is a story in what Israel is and what Zionism is—that we don’t give up.

What was your biggest surprise being in the Knesset?

On the negative side, I came into politics with a lot of disbelief in the system. I believed there was a lot corruption and I believed there was a lot of money that did not go to the right places—like to our education system or towards solving our housing problem. After a few months in the finance committee I realized I had been too optimistic about the system. It was even worse than I imagined.

After sitting in the finance committee every day I discovered a secret system of budget transfers from within the Israeli budget on a weekly basis, and these changes were made continuously throughout the year as much as 54 billion shekels [$13.6 billion] out of a 320 billion [$80.6 billion]-shekel budget.

A lot of that money goes to places that most of the Israeli public does not know about and that even most Israeli Knesset members don’t even know. I also discovered that many Israeli Knesset members collaborated with this system and that the amount of money transferred to unknown locations became bigger each and every year.

In the beginning, as I started to investigate this matter, many of the more experienced Knesset members told me, “You should not touch that issue, it’s not good for you”. Others said, “We have been doing this for years, even decades, and it is not going to change.” But I was very persistent. I started to interrogate the representatives of the Finance Ministry who came before the Finance Committee and I began to expose many secrets from that secret budget.  

The Israeli public is paying for extreme right-wing NGOs, run by people from the Bayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home) party [who] get money for the State. I can’t say this is done illegally. It is in the grey zone. How it happens and where the money goes, most Knesset members do not know. It goes to organizations and private companies that get lots of money from our public Treasury, with no explanation for their projects (some of which do not even exist.) Throughout the year the government transferred 1.2 billion shekels [$300 million] to the settlements—as a bonus—beyond what they were given at the beginning of the year.

How and why why do they hide that transfer of money? I don’t think it’s even a question of right-wing or left-wing ideology. It’s a question of transparency. If the government is doing something they are proud of, they would expose what they are doing to the public. Why would they be doing it in secret?

So I guess they’re either not very proud of what they are doing, or they don’t want people in the Negev and the Galilee to think “we don’t get enough money” (which is true, they get less), or that they are transferring money to places that are not entirely legal (i.e. to the NGO close to the Jewish Home Party.)

Now that I see the corruption scandal with Yisrael Beiteinu (Avigdor Lieberman’s party) my bet is that it is not going to stay only within that one party. I saw up close how the system works in the Finance committee. After a year of fighting this, now everyone is beginning to see how the system works.

I believe it is possible to change things. After a year of fighting this battle. I have forced the Treasury to publish the entire secret budget online—so it’s no longer a secret.

Are you surprised by the extent of the corruption scandal?

No, I think it is still going to get bigger and wider.

If you were prime minister tomorrow what would you do about the Palestinian situation?

After the election, when [Isaac] Herzog, leader of my party becomes the PM, our government will enter into negotiations; negotiations to actually reach an agreement, and not just to be in negotiations. This is the most urgent problem we have.

[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is under the perception that we can manage the conflict, because Netanyahu is not willing to get out of any territory. Even though he has said it for the international media, he didn’t mean it. He thinks we could manage it and we can remain in a relatively good place, fighting the Palestinians in the international community.

But he is wrong. During the last five years we have had four rounds of fighting with Gaza. No one has felt safe in Jerusalem for some time and he has no plans to deal with the situation only crazy ideas from people like Naftali Bennett.

What if the Palestinians are not willing to make the concessions Israel needs?

I think that the Arab initiative is something we need to adopt (with minor changes) and bring the international community into that understanding. It is not only a conflict between us and the Palestinians.

Jordan and Egypt should be involved in a solution, because we are all fighting against terror today. It’s not only Israel who is fighting terror, it’s also the United States, it is also Europe. We must collaborate. If we get all the moderate forces to collaborate and make the Israel-Palestinian solution part of a greater solution in the war against terror, we can reach a solution. The more partners we have in a solution, the better that solution will be.

You are the first of your generation to enter politics seriously. Where to do you see yourself and your generation ten years from now?

I see myself continuing to dedicate all my time to making Israeli society better. I know that in ten years’ time, if we work well, we will be in a much better position as a society. I put a lot of effort into bringing young people into politics and into developing an understanding that politics is something we have to take responsibility for.

In ten years’ time we will have a much more transparent and decent political system and our democracy will become much stronger. The fact that Israel is suffering from socio-economic gaps that we never had before is a result of our political corruption.

There is enough money in the system to solve the problem of poverty, and the problem of housing, and to make our public hospitals much better. It is just a matter of making the decision.

Today the ideology of the government is just to survive as a government. It’s funny. Netanyahu is the son of a historian, but 15 years in the future, when historians look back at his period as prime minister, what will they say? He did not leave a trace. There is nothing he did which he could be proud of in any field—not in the security field, not in the socio-economic field. He failed. He is not courageous enough to do anything.

We, in our generation, which is the third generation for Israel, need to take the inspiration of our grandparents’ generation that built this country with so much courage and so much hope. We need to take everything that we learned and the solutions that exist in the 21st century to make Israel the best place to be.

Media historian Marc Schulman is the editor of historycentral.com. An archive of his reports from Tel-Aviv can be found here. He is also a columnist for the Times of Israel.

By now you may have heard: Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones is leavingThe New Yorker for Genius, the lyric annotation site that was formerly known as Rap Genius. Or, in other words, Frere-Jones is leaving perhaps the most prestigious gig in music criticism for—in New York Times parlance—“a start-up.” Wait: where? Who? Why?

Cue media-world anguish, puzzling over how a legacy-media journalist might leave such a cozy perch for a shakier (and controversial!) annotation-site-in-progress, which doesn’t even promise any bylines. But to Frere-Jones, that’s exactly the logic: If there’s no better job in music criticism, why not step outside the conventional boundaries of music criticism?

The writer elaborated on his reasoning in a conversation with Newsweek. Also on hand were Genius co-founders Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory (a third founder, Mahbod Moghadam, resigned amid scandal in May), who touted their hire. Zechory called Frere-Jones “a truly brilliant writer” and said he would be “working with artists and with the Genius community to create this permanent museum of songs.” Lehman added, “For us the idea of taking someone who has so much power on the platform of The New Yorker and giving him a platform that’s 100 times more powerful and more timeless was just an intoxicating notion to us.”

Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman, co-founders of Genius.Photo by Margarita Corporan

The interview with Frere-Jones has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You’ve had one of, if not the most, enviable jobs in music criticism. Why is now the time to jump ship and take a radically different job?

That kind of job in criticism, there’s not, like, one next to it or one above it. It was a dream, and you don’t want to wear that out. You want to move when the time is right to something that’s equally exciting but totally different. That was sort of my plan and dream when I began the job: “I know this will be the apex of this kind of work.” Over the years I had been talking to various people and nothing seemed all that exciting, and then this seemed like such an amazing tool that I really wanted to take the chance and try it.

What exactly will you be doing on a day-to-day basis that you can’t do at The New Yorker?

My main role is to just really build up the community, establish a baseline of quality, take the old lessons about precisions and correctness, and bring that into sync with how people move information around. Take some of the old, great rules and try to bring them into sync with how people interact on the Internet and add comments.... It’s both permanent and impermanent. It’s permanent because it’s that page. But it’s impermanent in that people will always be adding to it and correcting and contributing and making it better, which is a thing that’s very hard to do with any traditional piece of journalism, because it doesn’t really work that way. That’s a thing you can’t do at, I don’t think, any magazine, really.

Will you be writing criticism anymore?

Oh yeah. Probably I’ll be writing stuff that people haven’t heard from me before, but I don’t know exactly where or when. I do want to focus on this for a second. But I’m not going to stop writing ever. Never, ever.

What will you most miss about working at The New Yorker?

Oh, God. I’ll miss pretty much every single person. That’s a really emotional question. There’s one thing that The New Yorker teaches better than any other place in the world, which is how to be clear, how to be concrete, how to make sure as best you can that your facts are right, and how to really respect both the subject and the idea. There’s no cleverness for its own sake. You are trying to do justice to both the subject and whatever it is you think you are trying to talk about. You want to sharpen that and sharpen that and work until you get the best thing you can. In some ways, I won’t miss it, because I’m going to hope to bring that over to the site.

What did you think of some of the reactions in the media world to your job news?

There were several, so you’d have to be more specific.

What did you think of the Times headline, for instance?

To be perfectly honest, I forget what the headline is [laughs]. What was the headline?

“Pop Music Critic Leaves The New Yorker to Annotate Lyrics for a Start-Up.”

Yeah, that’s not exactly accurate. The point is not to have me annotating all these lyrics myself, by a long, long shot. They’ve been around a minute. They’re not really a startup. They’ve gone through several rounds of changing their ideas and changing their focus. But we all know that heds and deks aren’t even written by the writers. Especially in the Twitter age, they’re very unhelpful, because they go beyond reductive and they sort of distort what’s actually going on. Although I like the piece—I thought the piece was fair and accurate—I didn’t like the headline.

A lot of other writers and bloggers were lumping you in with a range of legacy-media journalists who have jumped ship for digital companies and startups, insinuating that it’s motivated largely by money.

Yeah, that’s just nonsense. I’m not even that smart. I just like the people that I met. Chris Glazek, who used to be at The New Yorker, who I really respect and like—he just called me and told me what they were doing and I got more and more interested as I met them. I don’t think anybody who’s really looking to build a career and keep the trust of the people who’ve been reading his or her work, you can’t do something for reasons of money. Cash grabs don’t work. You end up falling down on your face.

It’s really, really simple. I like the people that I met. And I think at heart the project is in many ways quite simple. It’s giving lyrics a safe place to live, raising the standards for all the annotations, bringing in different layers of meaning. Frankly, if you look at a page, I’m very myself suspicious of that whole new tech rocket science, like, “We’re building something that the whole world has never seen.” That’s partially true because I think Genius has technically made some innovations that are great, but at the end of the day, we’re just trying to put in one very user-friendly place a whole bunch of different voices that really, really bring out what’s going on in a song or a book or a fact.

Can you speak to some of the rumors that have flown around about bro culture at Rap Genius and some of the scandals that have taken place?

That’s the easiest one of all. Those pieces actually read a little bit like science fiction to me. I haven’t met a single bro. The people I started talking to at the company were largely women. I don’t know about any of that stuff that happened three or four years ago. I didn’t meet those people. It’s another time and another world for me. That’s not who I met, and that’s not what I met.

Who do you think should replace you at The New Yorker, if you had to name names?

Oh, come on [laughs]. That would be the stupidest question in the world to answer. I love a lot of writers. I’m not really being coy here. I don’t know. They have to fit into what The New Yorker does. And they have to want to do it. It’s a beautiful but a very intense job. You have to be able to make some sincerely different judgment calls. You don’t write all the time, the way a blogger would. You’re crafting these columns that come out definitely less frequently. The website changed that, so your voice is out there more than it used to be, but you’re creating these things that are very much legacy pieces. You write something that people will refer to. So figuring out how to do that and also be up to date, it’s a bit tricky.

I’m fascinated to see who they get. I think a lot of people could do it. I just don’t know who it’s going to be. It’s exciting to not know. I’m dying to see who it is. David [Remnick] is pretty good at spotting the right person.

I was always impressed with how fluently you wrote about a very wide range of different artists and genres. Is there any particular piece or a few pieces you’re especially proud of?

I’m going to punt slightly now, because that’s exactly what my last piece in this chunk of work [will be]. The endcap will be a post this week just about that.

One of the very first conversations, if not the first, I had with the editors at The New Yorker was, I don’t want this column to have a theme or a tendency. I mean, you can’t help it because you’re a human being and there are things that you like more than others, but I wanted to cover as much as we could, to give people an idea of everything to happen in the year in 15 or 18 slices, which is how many columns came out.... I don’t know that I was able to pull this off, but I wanted people, ideally at the end of the day, to not know “what does this guy really like more than anything else?”

Is there anything else you want to mention about the new gig?

The coolest part of this will be more visible in three months, six months, a year, when more and more voices are on the site. I likened it a little bit to, you know, that moment with Twitter. Twitter was a thing where everyone was dubious of it, they didn’t want to get on it, they thought it was trivial. And then somebody they respected got up and said something. And then all of a sudden: boom! Everybody got on, and they all wanted to be clever and smart or linked to things they care about or get mad or whatever.

I’d like to see that happen with this site, where people who think in some way that they are excluded or it was doing something they don’t like, they get up in there and they throw their weight behind some annotations and it really begins to expand. Then it’s just a tool like any other. 

(Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, reported a 6.6 percent drop in quarterly profit as legal costs exceeded $1 billion in the wake of government probes, leading Chief Executive Jamie Dimon to claim banks were "under assault."

JPMorgan agreed in November to pay $1 billion in penalties over its conduct in foreign exchange markets. Investigations into that and other areas of the bank's business, including alleged manipulation of Libor interest rates, are continuing.

"Banks are under assault," Dimon said on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, responding to a question about the bank's legal costs.

"We have five or six regulators coming at us on every issue."

"Obviously companies make mistakes. We try to resolve it, we try to fix it, we admit it," he said.

However, while legal expenses rose to $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter, from $847 million in the same quarter last year, total legal costs of $2.9 billion for the year were far less than the $11.1 billion recorded in 2013.

Apart from legal costs, JPMorgan's earnings were hit by a 14 percent fall in revenue from fixed-income trading, after adjusting for the sale of the bank's physical commodities business and accounting changes.

The results from JPMorgan - the first big U.S. bank to report for the quarter - are a pointer to the performance of its competitors, which are also struggling to adjust to stricter trading rules in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Like other banks, JPMorgan has also been investing heavily to improve risk controls and system security.

The bank revealed in October that names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of the holders of about 83 million accounts were exposed when its systems were hacked.

Net income fell to $4.93 billion, or $1.19 per share, from $5.28 billion, or $1.30 per share a year earlier. Revenue on a managed basis fell 2.3 percent to $23.55 billion.

Analysts on average had expected earnings of $1.31 per share on revenue of $23.64 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The bank's shares fell 3.5 percent in early trading.

Revenue from home loans fell by $405 million to $1.9 billion while investment banking fees rose 8 percent to $1.8 billion, driven by record debt underwriting fees of $1.1 billion.

JPMorgan paid its investment bank employees 27 percent of revenue in 2014, down from 33 percent in 2013, in a record year for both IPOs and mergers and acquisitions.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. retail sales recorded their largest decline in 11 months in December as demand fell almost across the board, tempering expectations for a sharp acceleration in consumer spending in the fourth quarter.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday retail sales fell 0.9 percent last month after a 0.4 percent increase in November.

It was the biggest decline since last January and exceeded economists' expectations for only a 0.1 percent drop and implied a slower pace of consumer spending at the end of 2014.

Still, economists saw the decline as temporary, citing a strengthening labor market and lower gasoline prices.

"This isn't the start of a collapse in activity as that doesn't fit with the strength of employment growth and consumer confidence. Retail sales will strengthen again before too long," said Paul Diggle, an economist at Capital Economics in London.

Economists at BNP Paribas in New York blamed the decline on difficulties adjusting the numbers for seasonal fluctuations in December because of volatility in holiday spending.

Other economists said consumers were saving the extra income from lower gasoline prices.

Excluding automobiles, gasoline, building materials and food services, sales fell 0.4 percent last month after a 0.6 percent rise in November.

Economists had expected the so-called core retail sales, which correspond most closely with the consumer spending component of gross domestic product, to rise 0.4 percent last month. Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity.

GROWTH ESTIMATES CUT

December's surprise decline prompted economists to lower their estimates for consumer spending in the final three months of 2014 as well as growth forecasts for the quarter, which had been sharply raised following last week's reports showing a smaller November trade deficit and larger wholesale inventories.

A second report from the Commerce Department showed retail inventories excluding automobiles barely rose in November.

December's weak retail sales saw traders cut bets on an anticipated June interest rate increase from the Federal Reserve.

The data combined with concerns over the global economy to push U.S. stocks down. Prices for U.S. government debt rose, while the dollar fell against a basket of currencies.

Retail sales were weighed down by declines in receipts at electronic and appliance, clothing, building materials and garden equipment stores, as well as auto dealerships.

Online sales also fell as did receipts at sporting goods stores. Lower gasoline prices weighed on service station sales, with receipts falling 6.5 percent - the biggest decline since December 2008.

Receipts at furniture stores and restaurants and bars rose.

In a separate report, the Labor Department said import prices fell 2.5 percent last month as the cost of energy plummeted. It was the largest decline since December 2008 and followed a 1.8 percent drop in November.

The weak import prices pointed to subdued inflation pressures over the coming months.

BOSTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Wednesday rejected the latest plea by lawyers for accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to pause jury selection for his trial due to the recent attacks in Paris.

Tsarnaev's lawyers on Tuesday had argued that the Paris attacks, which started with a mass shooting at a satirical newspaper and left 17 people dead after three days of violence, would stir memories of the deadly 2013 blasts at the marathon, making it harder to select an impartial jury.

Jury selection for the trial began last week when some 1,350 candidates filled out questionnaires at U.S. District Court in Boston and will continue on Thursday when the first group of 20 jurors is brought in for follow-up questioning, a process known by the Latin phrase "voir dire."

"My detailed review of the juror questionnaires in preparation for voir dire has so far confirmed, rather than undermined, my judgment that a fair and impartial jury can and will be chosen to determine the issues in this case," U.S. District Judge George O'Toole said in a electronic court filing on Wednesday.

The field of potential jurors called for the case, from which a 12-member jury and six alternates will be selected, is the largest ever summoned to Boston federal court. The numbers reflect how intensely personal the bombing attack and surrounding events were residents of the Boston area.

Thousands of people were crowded near the race's finish line on April 15, 2013, when the bombs went off, killing three people and injuring more than 260. Four days later, hundreds of thousands of residents of the greater Boston area were ordered to remain in their homes while police conducted a massive manhunt to find Tsarnaev the day after he and his older brother, Tamerlan, are charged with shooting dead a university police officer.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died following a gun battle with police late on April 18, 2013. His younger brother, now 21, faces the threat of execution if convicted.

The Tsarnaevs were Muslim immigrants, and Dzhokhar Tsaranev left a note during the manhunt suggesting that their attack was intended as an act of retribution for U.S. military engagement in Muslim-dominated Iraq and Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda in Yemen on Wednesday claimed responsibility for last week's attack on the French newspaper, saying it was intended in retribution for cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed that the group deemed insulting.

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A Texas prison bus carrying 15 people was hit by train on Wednesday, prison officials said, with local media saying at least four people were killed in the accident.

The bus with 12 inmates and three corrections officers was traveling from Abilene to El Paso when it veered off the roadway and ended up on railroad tracks, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said based on preliminary reports.

The accident took place near the western Texas city of Odessa.

The local CBS affiliate said officials at the scene reported at least four people were killed. The state's Department of Criminal Justice did not provide details on injuries or deaths.

The bus appears to have gone off a bridge and landed on railroad tracks, where it was struck by a train, the Odessa American newspaper said, citing a Texas Department of Public Safety official.

A section of the International Space Station has been evacuated after an alert over a suspected ammonia leak in the American area of the station.

The six crew members were evacuated from the US section and moved into the Russian section at around 9am GMT this morning, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency has reported. In their initial statement, they attributed the alarm to an, “emission of substances from the coolant system into the atmosphere of ISS”. Maxim Matushin, head of the Russian Mission Control Centre remarked: “The security of a crew was guaranteed thanks to correct actions of the cosmonauts, astronauts and the crew of the Mission control centres in Moscow and Houston. Further plan of actions in the US modules must be prepared in Houston. For now NASA colleagues are analyzing (the) situation.”

According to NASA, the alarm appears to have been triggered by a faulty sensor. Reuters has reported that Jim Kelly from Mission Control in Houston radioed the crew, which consists of two Americans, one Italian, and three Russians, saying: “It’s becoming a stronger case that this is a false indication, which is great news.” The Guardian quoted a NASA spokesman who said: “There is no hard data to suggest there was a real ammonia leak.”

A statement from NASA, released on their website earlier today said:  “Flight controllers in Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston saw an increase in pressure in the station’s water loop for thermal control system B then later saw a cabin pressure increase that could be indicative of an ammonia leak in the worst case scenario.” The statement added: “Acting conservatively to protect for the worst case scenario, the crew was directed to isolate themselves in the Russian segment while the teams are evaluating the situation.”

The International Space Station is used by the space agencies of 15 different countries but is divided into Russian and American sections. It was first launched in 1998 and was considered a symbol of the normalizing of east-west relations after the Cold War, a period when Russia and America competed for technological superiority in spaceflight capability.  

Following a visit to Jordan in November, Representative Rob Wittman, R-Virginia, argued the campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS) “needs an Arab face.” Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal agreed, declaring success “requires the presence of combat troops on the ground.”

It is a notion shared by Jordan’s King Abdullah as well. During an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose, Abdullah said, “We, as Arab and Muslim countries…need to take ownership of this.”

Rhetoric comes easily, but implementation does not. When pressed by Rose about deploying Jordanian troops the king demurred, noting “at the end of the day, whether it’s in Iraq or in Syria, it has to be done by the local populations themselves.”

Here lie the limits of the anti-ISIS coalition: U.S. partners in the region are unable or unwilling to do more.

Key reasons for this reticence include limited capability, Iraq’s uninterest in foreign troops, regional tensions and fear of domestic blowback. U.S. allies in the region invest heavily in air power, but their conventional land forces remain limited (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Bahrain), or outdated (Jordan).

The coalition’s contribution to date is limited: of 1,219 airstrikes conducted in Iraq and Syria since August, coalition partners contributed 208.

Second, Iraq’s leaders have dismissed the idea of foreign troops. Saudi Arabia has stationed 30,000 troops along the Saudi-Iraq border since July and reports from September hinted at possible Jordanian deployment, but Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has emphasized, “Not only is it not necessary,” he said, “We don’t want them. We won’t allow them. Full stop.”

Third, existing regional tensions make a cohesive coalition unlikely. While Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) both joined NATO operations in Libya in 2011, they are now on opposite sides of a regional proxy war, with Qatar backing the parliament in Tripoli, while the UAE, other Gulf states and Egypt back the parliament based in the eastern Libyan city of Tobruk. Qatar supports Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, while Saudi Arabia backs Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s regime.

Amid these competing regional rivalries, even the backdrop of a growing ISIS threat may not be sufficient to create unity among Arab League or Gulf Cooperation Council members.

Finally, the potential for domestic blowback concerns regional leaders. Most ISIS fighters appear to be Iraqi or Syrian, yet the topthree states of origin for foreign fighters joining ISIS are Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, followed closely by Jordan. ISIS’s continued advance threatens neighboring states, and returning fighters could destabilize regional governments, but with many citizens distrustful of U.S. policy in the region further participation in the coalition could spark domestic protest as well.

Could the coalition ever overcome these challenges? It is difficult to imagine how. Short of an about-face by Iraq’s leadership, or a sudden thawing of tension in the Gulf, the dysfunction will likely continue. Overt U.S. pressure on regional partners might backfire, yet in absence of broader participation from the coalition, the United States should plan to assume much of the operational burden going forward.

Tara Beeny is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. This article first appeared on the American Enterprise Institute website.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is back in a familiar form. The controversial bill, which would allow private entities to share users’ information with government intelligence agencies, passed the House of Representatives in an identical form last year, but did not make it out of the Senate. The bill met with stiff opposition. Critics claimed it did not do enough to protect Americans from the prying eyes of surveillance agencies and corporations.

The bill applies to “certified entities,” which it defines as any “protected entity, self-protected entity, or cybersecurity provider that—(A) possesses or is eligible to obtain a security clearance, as determined by the Director of National Intelligence; and (B) is able to demonstrate to the Director of National Intelligence that such provider or such entity can appropriately protect classified cyber threat intelligence.”

It would allow such entities—corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies, among others—to share “cyber threat intelligence” with other certified entities, “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” In other words, CISPA is written to trump any past or future legislation which might take issue with such sharing. Opponents, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have argued that the bill would sacrifice internet users’ privacy by allowing companies to share users’ data with agencies like the NSA without any oversight.

Proponents argue that allowing private companies to share potentially threatening information with government agencies might prevent cyberattacks.

On January 8, Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, a Maryland Democrat, reintroduced the bill in the House as H.R. 234. The 2015 version of the bill is identical to the one passed by the House in 2014, a Ruppersberger spokeswoman said.

Several iterations of the bill have been introduced in the House and Senate since 2012, but none have been approved, and Obama threatened to veto the bill in 2013, citing privacy concerns.

GovTrack, a government transparency service, gives H.R. 234 less than a 1 percent chance of passage.

The first bridge connecting Russia with the annexed Crimean peninsula will be built by Russian construction magnate and personal friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Arkady Rotenberg, local business daily newspaper Vedomosti reported on Wednesday.

Initial plans for the bridge were made five years ago but the original plan for it to be a joint project between Ukraine and Russia has fallen apart due to the country’s recent conflict.

Instead the Stroygazmontazh Corporation, of which Rotenberg owns 51%, has been awarded the contract for the controversial project. Two other companies were on the shortlist of potential contractors: road construction company Mostotrest, which is also partly owned by Rotenberg, and a contractor company owned by another personal friend of Putin’s - Gennady Tymchenko.

Both Rotenberg and Tymchenko have had personal trade sanctions imposed on them by the EU, as they are perceived to be two of Putin’s strongest supporters. Both men have continued to back the Kremlin’s involvement with the separatist rebels in eastern parts of neighbouring Ukraine.

Rotenberg, who partakes in judo training with Putin, lost access to tens of millions of euros worth of property and assets in Italy after additional EU sanctions against Russia hit in September 2014.

Russia’s ministry of transport is yet to confirm the reports that Rotenberg’s firm will be employed to construct the bridge and when asked by Newsweek the ministry were not available for comment.

However, the Vedomosti newspaper report cites a company insider and two sources from the ministry of finance, all speaking on the condition of anonymity, who confirm the contract. The newspaper is partnered with the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and frequently breaks stories of private deals and infighting in Russian institutions based on insider information.

The bridge between mainland Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed last spring, has been a long time in the making, with plans to create road links between mainland Russia and Crimea dating back to the end of the WWII.

This latest attempt to realise the project initially began as a joint venture between Ukraine and Russia in 2010, while president Viktor Yanukovych was still governing Ukraine. However, his deposition and Russia’s annexation of Crimea has severely damaged the relationship between Kiev and Moscow, forcing Ukraine to pull out of the project in October.

Interestingly, Russia had already drafted its own unilateral plan for the bridge a month before Ukraine backed out, making the project all the more controversial as Western governments and Kiev still refuse to recognise Crimea as a part of Russia.

In October last year, Putin set the deadline for the bridge’s construction as 2018, two years earlier than the date agreed while Ukraine was still part of the deal.

According to the current plan, the 19km-long bridge will cross the Kerch strait through the Tuzla spit which separates Crimea from mainland Russia’s Krasnodar region. It will accommodate four car lanes and a railway link across the water, though the exact design for the construction has not been made public.

Currently there is no road linking mainland Russia and Crimea that does not pass through Ukraine, with a ferry from Krasnodar to Crimea being the most popular mode of transportation from one to the other.

Estimates surrounding the cost of the project have varied, with the Moscow Times reporting the increasing price of the project has kept it from getting off the ground so far, and arguing that tolls for passengers were likely to be put in place once the bridge was built in order for the builders to break even.

In December, Russia’s transport minister Maxim Sokolov estimated the bridge would cost nearly €3 billion, making it the most expensive one in the country’s history. However, in July Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov’s estimated that the bridge would cost less than half that amount.

The project has stalled amidst Russia’s recent economic dip, however Vedomosti reports that with Rotenberg on board building may soon commence.

Rotenberg’s Stroygazmontazh company was one of the major contractors in Russia’s South Stream pipeline and, alongside Gennady Tymchenko, Rotenberg has been entrusted to oversee many other crucial infrastructure projects within Russia by Putin, such as the construction of facilities for the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Both businessmen’s finances were hit after the Russian government raised interest rates by 7% overnight in an unsuccessful bid to halt the fall of the rouble last month.

It is tempting to rush to judgment on the Russian economic crisis.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov is among those declaring the currency crisis over and promising rate cuts to follow currency stability. Conversely, many market analysts have warned of an imminent, full-blown economic crisis including a credit crunch, exchange-rate-driven inflation, sky-high interest rates and rising unemployment.

Both assessments are off the mark. The reality is that these are early days in the crisis; sanctions and oil together are imposing massive economic dislocations and those costs will rise over time as sanctions bind more tightly, limiting the resilience of the Russian economy. Russia still has substantial financial buffers and economic policies that it can use to delay an economic crisis, but market pressures are likely to return sometime in 2015.

A Classic Currency Crisis?

Recent developments in Russia present many elements of a classic emerging-market crisis. A market selloff and loss in confidence fuels capital flight. Sharp interest-rate hikes (650 basis points) fail to stem currency depreciation (see Figure 1).

Investment plunges and consumers race to get out of the currency (for example, through the purchase of durable goods). Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that growth fell in the fourth quarter by 0.5 percent over a year earlier, leading to renewed currency declines. Market forecasts of a 5 percent decline for 2015 now look optimistic.

Increasingly higher oil prices were needed to balance the budget.

But it would be misleading to view these developments solely through a currency lens. The Russian economy was already struggling prior to the current crisis, as weak economic policies, a poor global environment and adverse demographics undermined the promise of a strong recovery following the financial crisis.

Oil has always been central to Russian economic performance, but weak fiscal policies have meant that increasingly higher oil prices were needed to keep the budget balanced.

In 2014, the fiscal break-even price was around $110 per barrel, compared to estimates of $30 to $40 per barrel just a decade ago. With current oil prices around $50 per barrel, the fiscal and external shortfall is substantial and is likely to widen as the government steps in with rescue packages for companies in trouble. Even though a depreciated currency can help the budget by raising the ruble value of exports, fiscal policy looks unsustainable.

The most likely trigger for a future crisis resides in the financial sector. December’s $2 billion bailout of Trust Bank, coupled with news of large and potentially open-ended support for VTB Bank and Gazprombank, highlight the rapidly escalating costs of the crisis for the financial sector as state banks and energy companies face high dollar-denominated debt payments and falling revenues.

Rising bad loans, falling equity values and soaring foreign-currency debt are devastating balance sheets. As foreign banks pull back their support, the combination of sanctions, oil prices and rising non-performing loans is creating a toxic mix for Russian banks.

So far, a crisis has been deferred by the belief that the central bank can and will fully stand behind the banking system. If any doubt creeps in about the strength of that commitment, a run will quickly materialize. Therein lies the central challenge for the central bank. News of large or unexpected bailouts trigger renewed market pressures and risks a political backlash, but the trigger for a crisis may be more closely linked to any sense that the central bank will step back from its support for the system.

Figure 1: Central Bank of Russia's (CBR) Key Rate and the Value of the Ruble

Source: Central Bank of Russia.

Trade and investment have dropped sharply.

In this environment, further central bank rate hikes are likely to be counterproductive. Capital controls look increasingly likely, even though controls in Russia usually have been ineffective. Options range from those relatively benign to markets (for example, requiring state companies to sell foreign currency holdings) to repressive constraints on private deposits.

In the end, evasion is simply too easy. The government has resources: International reserves fell $121 billion last year to a still-healthy $389 billion, but the government’s willingness to spend further is uncertain. Still, Russian policymakers need to do something.

Sanctions as a Force Multiplier

Sanctions are a force multiplier. Western sanctions have taken away the usual buffers—such as foreign borrowing and expanding trade—that Russia relies on to insulate its economy from an oil shock. Over the past several months, Western banks have cut their relationships and pulled back on lending, creating severe domestic market pressures. The financial system has fragmented.

Meanwhile, trade and investment have dropped sharply. These forces limit the capacity of the Russian economy to adjust to any shock. Russia could have weathered an oil shock or sanctions alone, but not both together.

When crisis happens, exchange rates will move far and fast.

This was the argument made by President Barack Obama, who stated recently that “over time [sanctions] would make the economy of Russia sufficiently vulnerable that if and when there were disruptions with respect to the price of oil—which, inevitably, there are going to be sometime, if not this year then next year or the year after—that they’d have enormous difficulty managing it.”

Another implication of sanctions is the reduced risk of contagion to the West. Unlike the 1998 Russian crisis, the fact that sanctions have caused Western financial institutions to pull back from Russia makes the West less leveraged, less interconnected and therefore less vulnerable to contagion than was the case in 1998.

It is not surprising, therefore, to see a modest reaction in U.S. markets so far, with the exception of energy companies that are affected by the global energy shock.

A Russian Crisis: Are We There Yet?

Measured by the severity of recent market moves, Russia is in crisis. But from a broader perspective, a comprehensive economic and financial crisis would cause a far greater degree of financial distress for the Russian people.

Companies would find working capital unavailable; interest rates of 17 percent (or higher) and exchange rate depreciation would cause a spike in import prices; and capital expenditure would crater. All this would generate sharp increases in unemployment and a far greater fall in gross domestic product (GDP) than we have seen so far.

We are not there yet. Ultimately, though, the test of whether a crisis materializes is as much political as economic: An upturn in inflation and a deep recession would be the real test of whether sanctions would create conditions for peace, not just a move in Russian stocks and bonds.

That is because it is only now that the broader Russian public is feeling the costs of President Vladimir Putin’s policies. No doubt the searing experience with hyperinflation in 1998 still resonates with the Russian public. History also reminds us of the fragility of confidence. When crisis happens, exchange rates will move far and fast.

But these are early days, and economists should mind the old dictum when it comes to financial crises: Predict an outcome or a date, but not both.

Robert Kahn, is Steven A. Tananbaum Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations website.

Noma's five-week pop-up restaurant in Tokyo has a waiting list of 60,000, holds 56 people and has two daily seatings where diners can feast on a 14-course meal that includes langoustine speckled with black ants, shaved monkfish liver and cuttlefish "soba" with a bowl of pine broth and rose petals.

Noma’s 37-year-old chef and founder, René Redzepi, took on the challenge of Tokyo because it was foreign to him and has such a rich food culture. “Even though we’re considered a success, you sometimes can be so comfortable in your success that you stop seeing opportunities and stop seeing possibilities. The pop-up is a shake-up," Redzepi said.

Imagine a pop-up restaurant that holds 56 people, has two daily seatings and a reservation waiting list of 60,000. Now imagine being the last person on that list. That may be the very definition of optimism.

Noma, the Copenhagen eatery that industry magazine Restaurantnamed Best in the World four of the past five years, assembled such a list for its five-week pop-up in Tokyo. I wasn’t one of the 60,000. I was one of the lucky few who nailed a reservation.

Which is how, on January 9, I got to be the very first customer seated for the very first meal on the very first day.

So kick me.

Newsweek's Gogo Lidz chews on a cinnamon stick during an 14-course meal at Noma's pop-up restaurant in Tokyo.Maggie Lidz for Newsweek

Noma’s 37-year-old chef and founder, René Redzepi, is the high wizard of “New Nordic” cuisine. Using traditional Scandinavian techniques like smoking, pickling, curing and fermenting, he and his small, dedicated team transform native ingredients into something entirely new and, more important, delicious. “The idea is to force creativity by setting limitations,” Redzepi says.

This is edible theater: The plating is scenery, and the menu forms a sometimes whimsical narrative. What he describes as “snacks”—deep-fried reindeer moss, fermented grasshoppers, roasted lettuce juice—has been so groundbreaking and inspirational that the inevitable backlash has begun. This month Redzepi’s “Great Scandinavian Craze” topped New York magazine’s Trends We’re Tired Of list. (“I’m tired of hearing my name myself,” the genuinely humble Redzepi told me.) Another critic called him the “personification of nature worship,” which he described as “an ardent belief system among top-tier chefs that seems to skirt the distinction between gastronomy and religion.”

The philosophy of this Danish demigod informs not only his cooking but the management of his restaurant. Rather than building on his success by spinning off an airport franchise, Redzepi mothballed Noma for three months and flew his entire staff of 60—from sous chefs to dishwashers—to Japan. Years in the making, the pop-up was a daring gambit. “We really had the potential to look like idiots,” concedes Redzepi.

He took on the challenge of Tokyo because it was foreign to him and has such a rich food culture. “Even though we’re considered a success, you sometimes can be so comfortable in your success that you stop seeing opportunities and stop seeing possibilities. The pop-up is a shake-up.”

Tokyo’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel gave Redzepi and his team its Michelin-starred restaurant Signature on the 37th floor. They were allowed to skim off the lush purple velvet upholstery and crystal chandeliers and furnish the space in spare Danish style. The prime asset of the room is the view of Mount Fuji, 60 miles away.

Photos: The Edible Theater of Noma

A 14-course meal at Noma's pop-up restaurant in Tokyo includes langoustine speckled with black ants, shaved monkfish liver and cuttlefish "soba" with a bowl of pine broth and rose petals. slideshow

‘A Needle to Its Brain’

The Danish-Japanese fusion is evidenced not just in the food and decor but in the personnel as well. As I enter the dining room, I’m greeted warmly and bowed to by dozens of Noma and hotel staff, all in Noma’s signature pale-gray uniforms.

After being seated and given a moment to gaze out at the spectacular vista, I’m presented with a wine glass of fragrant juice: apple infused with pine and a Japanese citrus called sour kabuso. Noma offers wine, but juice pairings are an innovation Redzepi came up with eight years ago. Today, they’re so pervasive that even Evolution, the juice of Starbucks, suggests "pairings" on its website.

With great ceremony, the first of my 14 dishes arrives. And it’s a shocker: a langoustine on a bed of ice, the tail shell peeled back to expose the raw flesh, which is speckled with large black ants. I gamely take a bite. To my horror, the tentacles wave frantically. Steadying myself, I ask one of my servers, Redzepi himself, if the shellfish is still alive. “It feels alive, but it’s dead,” he assures me.

“How?” I ask, hesitantly.

“A needle to its brain. For three to four minutes after the langoustine is killed, it moves as if it were electric.”

This little guy seems to be running on AC current. Which is not exactly comforting. It’s kind of off-putting to see my meal trying to high-five me from the plate. I close my eyes and bite into the ant-y tail. It’s...delicious! Almost like lobster ice cream. With salted ant jimmies.

I ask James Spreadbury, Noma’s manager, if the ants are farmed or wild. “Wild,” he says. “From the Nagano Forest. We find them under tree stumps.”

As I await the next course, I glance around the room and observe a similarly stunned reaction from diners at other tables. I’m relieved by what comes next: citrus segments with tiny, pickled Okinawa chilies in a puddle of roasted kelp oil. They don’t budge an inch.

Gogo Lidz takes a bite of a langoustine, which is garnished with a sprinkling of wood ants.Maggie Lidz for Newsweek

This is followed by shaved monkfish liver that’s frozen and served on lightly grilled toast. It comes on a pale-gray napkin that matches the Noma uniforms. I am urged to eat the liver quickly before it melts. I do, and take a sip of palate-cleansing juice. The apple-pine perfectly complements Course No. 4, cuttlefish sliced into ribbons that mimic soba noodles. My server hands me a bowl of pine broth and rose petals, and advises me to dip each “noodle” in the sauce before I devour it.

The fifth course appears to be a slice of banana pie, but was, as you probably guessed, freshwater clams and wild kiwi paste on a sea kelp pastry shell. The staff is particularly proud of the clams. There are 45 per tart, and 13 people spent eight hours shucking them. The amazingly complex flavors linger, continually changing like one of Willy Wonka’s everlasting gobstoppers.

Mads Kieppe, the sommelier, explains the difficulty of pairing wine with the clams. “I wouldn’t drink anything for five minutes after eating it,” he cautions. Kieppe pours me another juice: cooked turnip spiked with yuzu and black currant shoots. This is floral and not sweet. Kieppe and the chefs spend much more time on the juice pairings than the wine combinations. Each juice is developed for a specific segment of the meal and is almost like a parallel broth course.

Redzepi is proudest of his creamy steamed tofu, which comes studded with wild walnuts. “Tofu is an ancient tradition that is very difficult to make,” he says. It’s not difficult to eat, however.

A cube of dried scallops with beechnuts and kelp looks not unlike a Rice Krispies square. It disappears on my tongue instantly. I chase it down with cucumber seaweed juice.

My vote for the prettiest dish goes to the sliced pumpkin dressed in cherrywood oil and salted cherry blossoms. This comes with a matching pumpkin and green gooseberry juice worthy of the flagons Harry Potter drinks at Hogwarts.

The most aesthetically pleasing of the courses: pumpkin, cherry stems and dried salted cherry blossoms.Maggie Lidz for Newsweek

A black ceramic plate is placed dramatically in the center of the table. On it are three black “garlic flowers,” a homage to the Japanese art of origami. I’m helpfully instructed to pick up the flower (basically a folded fruit leather) and eat it tip to stem. The fermented garlic paste is mild and slightly sweet. It has the chewy texture and flavor of black licorice. The diner at the next table, ramen king Ivan Orkin, calls the flowers “grown-up candy.”

White root vegetables are served in a white bowl accented with a red preserved egg in the center, echoing the Japanese flag. Kieppe pours me a mushroom mocktail that he says is “in between a broth and a tea.” I wonder if the White Rabbit said the same thing to Alice.

To this point, everything has been either cold or room temperature. Here comes the very first hot dish: a roasted whole wild duck (head and feet included) with a sauce of matsubusu berries, the color and pungency of blueberries. The breast meat is sliced on the body and is pulled off easily with chopsticks.

The servers whisk away the carcass and say that it will return shortly, “transformed.” In the meantime, I get a steaming cup of broth with a tasty turnip.

The duck returns, looking drawn and quartered. It’s been re-roasted and hacked apart. The head, halved lengthwise, stares up at me, tongue poking from its bill. Guess I’ve entered the guys’ part of the meal. I long for the pink rose petals.

Dessert begins with a sweet koji water and juniper berry concoction. Then an extraordinary bowl of what my server calls “rice” that somehow involves the lees of sake. A sorrel sauce on the bottom makes this dish a conscious tribute to the Danish-Japanese alliance.

What seems like a fitting finale is not a finale at all but a prelude to a series of treats. A molten sweet potato is covered in caramelized raw sugar, wild kiwi sauce on the side. I fight the urge to lick my plate. A fairy-tale landscape of moss is topped with chocolate-dipped fermented mushrooms and delicate twigs of wild cinnamon. The Noma team foraged for the mushrooms and cinnamon in the woodlands of Aomori, in northern Japan.  

The guests leave the dining room happily swooning. The staff is exultant. I ask Redzepi, the visiting Prince of Denmark, which Hans Christian Andersen tale this adventure reminds him of. He mulls his answer for a beat and quips, “Well, of course I thought of The Emperor’s New Clothes, but I don’t know, it’s too early to say. Ask me in five weeks.”

We were sitting in a bar in Aspen, Colorado, almost 20 years ago, I remind Ralph Steadman, when he first told me that he’d become a cartoonist because he wanted to change the world. It wasn’t the first time he’d made this declaration and it wouldn’t be the last. But it’s a mission statement that seems horribly apposite this afternoon, as we sit in the living room of his house near Maidstone, Kent, watching live news coverage from the print warehouse where Said and Cherif Kouachi, the killers of the Charlie Hebdo artists, are making their last stand.

“It is interesting that you should mention that remark today,” says Steadman, “because, looking at what has been happening in Paris, I now feel that I have succeeded. I did manage to change the world, and it is a worse place than it was when I started. Far worse – an achievement I had always assumed would be impossible.”

With the exception of a brief radio interview on the day of the shootings, Steadman had declined to join the throng of commentators jostling to share their opinions on the tragedy. Just as I arrived, he had spurned an invitation from a radio station in Lincoln, Nebraska. “As soon as this thing happened,” he says, “the phone started ringing. I don’t know why.”

“Probably,” I tell him, “because people perceive you as precisely the sort of . . .”

“. . . bastard who might draw something that would severely displease somebody because they could not see the joke?” the 78-year-old interrupts.

It’s more likely that, given his reputation for images of grotesque irreverence, typified by his illustrations for his friend Hunter S Thompson’s demented novella Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, people see him as eminently qualified to assess the splenetic defiance in the work of revered cartoonists like Cabu and Wolinski, who died in the assault. I was with Steadman when he last saw Thompson, a few months before the writer’s suicide, which occurred 10 years ago next month and, as I tell the artist, I can remember the intense emotional impact that particular death inflicted on him.

“What was your first reaction when you heard about the attack in Paris?”

“I thought, ‘Oh, bloody hell, this cannot possibly be true.’ Disbelief. After that, I think I was in shock.” Steadman explains that he heard the news from his wife, Anna, when he came in from his daily swim in the outdoor pool behind his house. “And then, as I say, the phone calls started. And I just said to myself, ‘I am not going to respond to this now. I’ve got to let some time pass. I can’t start handing down judgment on this yet.’ We put the television on, as I guess most people did. We saw the hideous sight of that wounded policeman on the floor.”

“Ahmed Merabet: a Muslim.”

“Yes. There are so many terrible and perverted dimensions to this affair. Can you imagine if the killers were to walk in here right now? We say, ‘Right. Explain why you did this thing.’ And they say, ‘We felt that we were being ridiculed in France.’ When you think about it in rational terms, the whole thing is surreal.”

"You would like to imagine that they [the cartoonists] looked in to their faces and laughed," he says. "You would like to think that they died laughing."

Steadman's original piece for Newsweek in reaction to the Charlie Hebdo Murders.Ralph Steadman

Steadman, as I remind him, is hardly unfamiliar with the power of gross and offensive imagery created with subversive intent. But the caricatures of Allah and Muhammad, I suggest, take any moral debate into rather more complex territory than do, say, his merciless depictions of Richard Nixon, George W Bush, or Tony Blair.

“Obviously there’s a long tradition of work in which satire and vulgarity collide,” I suggest. “But is it always legitimate to cause offence?” The Charlie Hebdo artist I’ve had most contact with over the years, I explain, is the 86-year-old anarchist Maurice Sinet, known as Siné, who was fired from the magazine after contributing, in 2008, a column and drawings which had him accused of inciting hatred against Jews; the kind of editorial sanction the paper has not always extended to artists satirising Islam. You hardly need a degree in religious studies to know that depicting the prophet Muhammad as a dog (as the Swedish artist Lars Vilks did, in 2007) will cause most Muslims to take offence and, most would agree, with good reason. Does Steadman ever find himself looking at such images and thinking: what’s the point?

“There can come a stage where what you are producing is just irresponsible graffiti. For which – yes – there is no point. But working as . . . I don’t often find myself using the phrase ‘a responsible satirist’ . . . you would seek to produce something that is very funny in some way.”

“Which Charlie Hebdo could be.”

“Yes,” Steadman replies. “It is quite reasonable for a reader to be offended. It’s slightly less reasonable to enter an office armed with two Kalashnikovs and a grenade. Most people would regard that as something of an overreaction.”

Steadman has an apartment in Paris, not too far from that address. He knew Georges Wolinski, Cabu, and several others of the victims. “It does bring a peculiar focus to these events,” I suggest, “when you realise that there is a real, if very remote, possibility that you could have been a guest in the building that day.”

“And when you imagine that,” Steadman says, in a remark that curiously anticipates an interview which will later be broadcast with Michele Catalano, the owner of the print warehouse who offered the Kouachi brothers coffee, “you find yourself wondering how you would have reacted in those circumstances. What could you possibly say? ‘How can I help you? Can I get you a drink? Milk and sugar? Or would you prefer that I served as a target?’”

One of the stranger aspects of the tragedy is the way in which solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, a publication not known for its conservatism or subtlety, has been effusively expressed by the kind of people with whom its staff would have struggled to empathise, among them David Cameron, headline writers for The Sun, and Marine Le Pen, who was once represented by the paper as a pile of faeces.

Ralph Steadman, by contrast, says he struggles to find the kind of language appropriate to describe the events in Paris. “In the case of the killers,” he tells me, “it’s far easier to find adjectives that are inappropriate. Like ‘anodyne’. And ‘atheistic’. ‘Apathetic’. And ‘Anglican’. I’m still on the As. We could go through the whole dictionary’.”

A caricature of Tony Blair, largely seen a subservient to American interests. 2001Ralph Steadman

I should probably say that I have never met a more compassionate person than Steadman before mentioning that this last remark, dark as it is, strikes us both as extremely funny. We’ve been talking for an hour or so and this is not the first time we’ve found ourselves laughing. I don’t know, I tell the artist, what that says about us as people.

“Tragedy provokes different offshoots of thought,” he replies. “Even at a wake, you can’t keep sitting there saying, ‘Oh, it’s terrible you know. I feel terrible. Do you feel terrible? You must do, I know, but I can tell that you don’t feel anything like as terrible as I do’. As humans we just can’t do that.”

Some years ago, when we were travelling in Utah, Steadman told me that he feels interviews sometimes risk sounding like posthumous tributes. What adjectives, I asked him, would he like to see in his own obituary?

“Distasteful,” he said. “Unhygienic. Truculent. Moody. Provocative towards bastards.”

“How about long-lived?”

“Oh, yes. I’d like my obituary to say: ‘He was very long-lived. Endlessly. We thought he’d never go away’. A pause. “And we were right: he didn’t.”

Since then, his painting has continued to resonate with a new, younger audience. He recently completed the artwork for a limited edition Blu-ray release of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, which goes on sale next month. His distinctive labels for Jim Caruso’s Flying Dog Brewery have helped turned beers such as “Raging Bitch” into globally recognised brands. And Steadman’s longstanding friendship with Johnny Depp was the focal point of Charlie and Lucy Paul’s acclaimed 2012 film about Steadman, For No Good Reason. “In many ways,” Depp told me, “I look upon Ralph as a kind of miracle. It is just a gas to go down and see him in Kent; an incredible privilege. He really is just so gentle and so nice. And yet at the same time he is, as you know, a psychopath.”

Ralph Idris Steadman was born in Wallasey and grew up in Abergele, North Wales, from the age of five. He dropped out of an engineering apprenticeship at aircraft manufacturer De Havilland after less than a year, “because I couldn’t stand factory life” and went to work at Woolworths supermarket in Colwyn Bay. He began drawing seriously while completing his military service.

“I enrolled in a correspondence course,” he says, “taught by Percy V Bradshaw, called ‘You Too Can Learn To Draw And Earn £££s’.”

His principal mentor was a highly-gifted art teacher at East Ham Technical College, Leslie Richardson, who died last month. People often struggle to reconcile the benevolence of Steadman’s character with the extreme viciousness of the work. If there’s one crucial impulse that drives him, I suggest, it’s his ferocious detestation of the bully.

“My parents were kind people,” says Steadman, “with a strong sense of the need to defend the defenceless. I was brought up to be honest by my mother and father. They were very concerned about that. They believed that honesty should be the foundation of anyone’s life. That ideal was ingrained in me.”

“I can’t imagine you having ever been involved in a fight.”

“No. I can’t do it, which naturally risks putting you at the mercy of bullies. At school I can remember flapping my arms around, in some attempt at defence.”

“Of course part of that awkwardness relates to physique. Had you been built like – I don’t know, Johnny Weissmuller [the best known Tarzan] – you would have had a very different experience of the world.”

“Undoubtedly. The thing is that, temperamentally, I’m less like Tarzan, more like Jane.”

His international reputation was established in 1971 by his illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which Thompson took the Wodehousian bachelor’s blithe and incautious attitude to alcohol and extended it to LSD and munitions. Thompson brought the hubris of a delinquent rock guitarist to the normally sedate world of American letters.

The two men’s relationship was a curious one to say the least. The softly-spoken Englishman contributed generosity, patience and good-humour. Thompson responded with theatrical abuse that sometimes crossed over into real meanness. I saw him reduce Steadman to tears on two occasions, and that was just while Thompson was still alive. And yet if, like Steadman, you appear to produce your best work when anguished, Thompson’s was a useful number to have in your contacts list.

A caricature of Texan and then-President George Bush. 2004.Ralph Steadman

Steadman’s artistic range is such that it would be unfair to describe him simply as an illustrator or cartoonist. He is, as his friend Bruce Robinson, director of Withnail and I and The Rum Diary told me, “A supremely talented artist. I feel it is a privilege to know him, because at his best he has the power of fucking Goya. I mean that. There is no one else in his league that I know of.”

Steadman’s own satirical targets have tended to be men abusing positions of power, and consequently very different people from the Charlie Hebdo assassins, who came from the class commonly described as the urban dispossessed, and who would undoubtedly have experience of scorn and racism.

“I am quite sure that people must have treated them like shit,” Steadman says. “But I also think they were bullies, in not so different a way than certain politicians. Think of the mechanics of the killing. They call out the names, perhaps with those terrible pauses you get in reality shows. ‘And the contestant leaving us today is . . .’ I hope those deaths were quick, but in the minds of the killers it was probably the slower the better. I imagine they would have preferred to use a single shotgun, which required careful reloading each time, or a chainsaw. I think they were seeking to produce a very particular kind of shock.”

In many ways, Steadman argues, “I think that terrorists and some political leaders share a similar mindset, in that they consider themselves to be believers. They are devoted to a cause and they’ll go to any lengths to uphold their chosen position. They are not completely stable, as the word is usually understood.”

“So you can see a kind of similarity between terrorist operations and the rationale that led to the excursions to Vietnam or Afghanistan?”

“I can, and a big part of it is that sense of pride. Once they start the war, or the mission, they feel they can’t stop. That would mean losing face. In the Rue Nicolas Appert they tried to give the whole thing a veneer of organisation by calling out the names, the death list, which must have been rehearsed. These are people who obviously have no sense of humour.”

“It would be interesting to know what they would have laughed at.”

“The helpless, the broken and the lame,” Steadman replies. “Bullies. That is what they were.”

“There’s an odd confluence in all this: what these murderers represented was everything you have opposed all your life, and their victims were working, broadly speaking, in the same trade that you practice.”

“And killers express their desires with blood. Very often my ink has the appearance of splattered blood. It’s a recurrent theme; I don’t know why.”

Steadman’s thoughts turn to the probable backlash against the wider Islamic community in France, once the prevailing spirit of national unity begins to dissolve, and the extreme right identifies the resulting tension as a commodity.

“Not that these two brothers were religious,” Steadman says. “Who could argue that they were devout? My own view of all religion is that, if it brings people comfort, why deprive them of it? But I do think that, with certain people, belief can pervert morality.”

“You were close to Kurt Vonnegut – didn’t he once say that the only proof he required for the existence of God was music?”

"Old Crooked Cross Nixon"Ralph Steadman

“He also said that life is no way to treat an animal. And I think I know what Kurt Vonnegut would have said about all this, and not in an uncaring way: ‘So it goes’. Meaning that, very sadly, these things happen. My father was in the first war and it was a hideous bloody affair. But of course those in that war, broadly speaking, never wanted to shoot. They were ordered. By some poncey bloody general, or Duke.”

Would it be absurd to ask whether any good might come out of the events of 7 January?

“The only thing that you could possibly say that has not been entirely negative in this affair is that it hasn’t half provoked a lot of discussion. Moral turpitude is high on the agenda. People are questioning their own stance on a whole range of things in a way that they might not have done previously.”

“I didn’t come here meaning to quote my own work,” I tell Steadman, “but there is a psychopathic character in one of my books who is described as dangerous ‘because he believed that the pen was mightier than the sword, but didn’t always have a pen to hand’. People all over the world, on the streets and on social media, are finding all kinds of visual ways to rework that old proverb. These shootings could place cartoonists at the heart of contemporary conflict rather in the way that poetry became the most important form of artistic expression in the First World War.”

“Or in the Spanish Civil War. I think that’s very possible. It’s also possible that, in some people’s minds, becoming a cartoonist might seem like a heroic thing to do. Either heroic or suicidal.”

“You’ll know that Peter Cook once joked about the way that all of those satirical night clubs in 1930s Berlin ‘did so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler’. Can all of these new cartoons have any effect?”

“I think – I know – that satire does frighten fascists. Fascists don’t like satire. They don’t like it at all. And they especially don’t enjoy visual satire. Because of its unique power to communicate. As Wittgenstein [Ludwig] asserted, the only thing of value is the thing you cannot say. Sometimes you can’t communicate the idea or the emotion, but a drawing can. You draw something, and people say: ‘Oh, I see what you’re getting at now’.” And that thought, Steadman says, “brings us back to what happened in that room at Charlie Hebdo. Some things,” he adds, “there are no words for”.