Not so long ago, in a land not far away, the British man who would become an icon to a generation of European Islamists fighting and dying in Syria and Iraq sat down before a webcam in his parent’s modest home on England’s south coast and filmed a 90-minute tutorial on how to tie a turban. The image was badly lit but sharp enough to reveal the figure of a young man with extravagant black hair. To the back and sides it fell in long, thick loops, tumbling onto the upturned collar of a docker’s jacket where it executed a final exuberant ski-jump. The front was more delicate: single, thin strands spilling like poured water down over his forehead, past his black eyes, his noble nose and full mouth, extending to his black beard.

Ifthekar Jaman looked like a musketeer. Like Che Guevara. And that was no accident. Staring directly ahead, Ifthekar examined his image, then ran his fingers through one side of his hair before turning to the other and smoothing it. “Assalamu alaikum,” he said. “Okay … er … I thought I’d do a little tutorial on, er, turbans ‘cos a couple of brothers – I wonder if he’s watchin’ – er, @ReflectionofIslam is a brother that ask can I do a tutorial so I thought, yeah, man, might as well …” Ifthekar checked how he looked again, smoothed his hair several more times and regarded his smartphone expectantly. With no audience, there was no point to the tutorial, and maybe not to anything, so Ifthekar waited in silence, examining himself on screen. “Hair’s really crazy, man,” he tutted, as though someone was watching – which, after several minutes, they were. “Cool, man, ‘preciate it,” said Ifthekar, smiling at his phone. Then, picking up a white taqiyah cap, he cleared his throat and began. “Alright,” he said. “OK. So. First of all, you need a hat . . .”

Ifthekar Jaman was 22. His parents, Enu Miah and Hena Choudhury, were first-generation immigrants from Bangladesh. Arriving in 1981, the couple settled in Hudson Road in Portsmouth, a few streets from where Charles Dickens was born and a 20-minute stroll back from the old navy docks where Nelson set sail for Trafalgar. Like hundreds of Bangladeshi émigrés, Enu and Hena opened a takeaway selling kebabs, biryani, tandoori and spicy chips with free delivery on orders of more than £6. The name they gave their business, St Mary’s Kebab & Masalla, captured the integration – the multiculturalism – that was the shared hope of the British state and the hundreds of thousands of new citizens it assimilated from its former colonies in the decades after empire.

Portsmouth gave Enu and Hena the essential elements of a new, prosperous life: a decent living, a home, free hospitals, and free schools for their four children. But Portsmouth was a hard place to love. Hudson Road was one of hundreds of drab, treeless terraces ordering human life into neat, grey rows that ringed the city and one of tens of thousands like it in regional towns across Britain. Tamannah was their eldest and their only girl, after whom came the boys – Tuhim, Ifthekar and baby Mustakim – and, of all of them, it was Ifthekar who was the dreamer.

Like all English kids, as a boy he liked to lose himself in the stories of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. That was fine, as far as it went. But these were English stories about English boys fighting English monsters and Hena, especially, didn’t understand them and as such neither she nor Enu really trusted them. So when Ifthekar was 11 they sent him for a year’s Islamic instruction at a private school in London.

A still showing Ifthekar Jaman, after he has given an online tutorial on how to tie a turban. YouTube

It seemed to work. Ifthekar stuck with his Bengali traditions. He helped out in the restaurant kitchen, preparing kofta and naan and puri, and rarely missed prayers at Jami mosque. By the time he left school and got a job answering phones in a call centre for Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV, he was a polite and sober young man, popular with colleagues and calm with customers, even when one asked if his name was pronounced “I’m a fucker”. On Saturdays, he volunteered at a da’wah stall in Commercial Road, where he and other respectable boys from the neighbourhood handed out Qur’ans to passers-by.

But Ifthekar hadn’t stopped dreaming. On the contrary, for him Islam had become the foundation for a powerful new adventure fantasy. Online, he began to sketch out a new narrative for himself as a Muslim warrior-hero facing off against the biggest monster of them all: Satan. Ostensibly this was about religious piety, though often it seemed to be about nothing more serious than Ifthekar’s love of cats, of which he posted endless pictures. But some would also have spotted signs of radicalism. “I really like it I’ll be honest,” said Iftekhar, just like that, in the middle of his turban tutorial. There were also hints that Ifthekar was gay. His blogs and tweets were rarely addressed to girls, and Ifthekar unfollowed any who posted uncovered pictures of themselves. But when the boys said he looked great, Ifthekar would reply with rhapsodies about his deep feelings for the brothers. “I swear – you know what? – I love you brothers,” he would say. “I just want you to know. I love you brothers so much. It’s something I’ve never seen before. I wish us lot, us brothers, we could, like, we could get some land and stuff and do Khilafah, all of us. Honestly. Alhamdulillah.”

But mostly Ifthekar was just trying on a new identity for size. That was the simple and beautiful truth about surrendering to Islam, said Ifthekar. With all Islam’s prescriptions on how to be and what to eat and how to appear, how you looked was who you were. And it was like this, steeped in his love for the brothers, and their love for him, and the way they looked, which was the way he looked, which was the same as Osama bin Laden’s look, with bits from The Mummy andThe Prince of Persia thrown in, that Ifthekar came to see himself as a soldier of faith and death. He was a mujahid, a jihadi – even, if Allah called him to it, a shahid, a martyr.

If he was an example to others, he insisted it was not because he was anything special but because he was guided through the darkness by the bright light of jannah, a perfect, everlasting paradise far away from Hudson Road and Portsmouth, far above Middle Earth and all the Muggles. “I’d love to meet all you brothers in jannah, man, just chilling, smoking some shisha,” he said. “Hey, imagine the cats you can have in jannah! Like massive tigers – or lions! – just walking with you . . .”

Ifthekar Jaman recorded his tutorial on the night of 16 December 2012. A day less than a year later, on 15 December 2013, in the snowy ruins of an eastern Syrian town called Ghazwa al-Khair, Ifthekar was sent by one Islamist militia to fight another and died right there, in the first minutes of his first battle, his legs blown off by a tank, his guts splashed all around, his lustrous long black hair curled back over his head.

THE ROAD TO JIHAD

In early 2011, a democratic wave that became known as the Arab Spring swept the Middle East. Though distinctly anti-democratic, political Islam soon learned to ride the wave of protest, challenging for power across the Arab world, even holding it for a year in Egypt. When the turmoil spread to Syria, the protests quickly became a rebellion and the rebels – outgunned by a 40-year-old authoritarian regime led by an Alawite president, Bashar al-Assad – were soon describing themselves as jihadis.

Ifthekar often talked about migrating to the Middle East. Privately, he already considered himself a jihadi. In May 2013, telling his parents he was going to learn Arabic and maybe help Syrian refugees, he booked a one-way ticket to Turkey and caught a bus to Reyhanli on Turkey’s southern border with Syria. Ifthekar had no idea how to cross the frontier. But, as he told Shiraz Maher, a researcher at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, on the bus to Reyhanli Ifthekar spotted a man with a beard, offered him use of his bottle of alcohol-free perfume and introduced himself. The man surmised Ifthekar was an aspiring jihadi. A few hours later the pair crossed the border and were driving in the man’s car to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

While battling its way into Iraqi cities, Isis and its supporters also set out on an offensive social media campaign to recruit young men with “inspirational” posters.Instagram

Writing in the New Statesman, Maher said Ifthekar’s aim was to join a Syrian rebel group called Jabhat al-Nusra. Among Syria’s insurgents, Jabhat al-Nusra distinguished itself as one of the most effective and, with many former al-Qaida in Iraq members in its ranks, the official al-Qaida affiliate. But Jabhat al-Nusra still used the old ways – vetting, personal introductions, background checks – and Ifthekar was a self-selected jihadi. Presenting himself at a Jabhat al-Nusra compound in Aleppo, Ifthekar was rejected. Devastated, he wandered into a coffee shop, where he met an Algerian fighter who was in another group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis). Ifthekar hadn’t heard of Isis. “But I checked them out,” he told Maher, “and they were great.” Isis vetted Ifthekar for a fortnight, then gave him basic weapons training and, as a first job, guard duty.

Isis’s relaxed attitude to recruitment meant it was attracting thousands of foreign jihadis. Most were from the Middle East or North Africa but Ifthekar also met Britons, French, Germans, Scandinavians, Belgians and others from the Americas and Asia. Its commanders were often veterans of Saddam Hussein’s army, with battlefield experience against Iran and the US. Its structure included departments overseeing finance, logistics, electricity generation, education and health. It had a media team, which produced videos of fighting and massacres it said had been carried out by Assad’s forces. They also oversaw a steady stream of online broadcasts from foreign fighters encouraging others to join them and denouncing the West on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and ask.fm.

With his online following and his good looks, Ifthekar quickly became the team’s star. For his part, Ifthekar revelled in the attention. He assumed a jihadi name, Abu Abdurrahman al-Britani, and began taking pictures of himself wherever he went, staring seriously at the camera, long hair flying in the wind. Several pictures went viral. One was of Ifthekhar looking stern as he rode across the desert in the back of a pick-up in black turban, a gun on his back and the black flags of Islam flying behind. Ifthekar’s tweets, meanwhile, were widely celebrated. “There are people who think that the jihad in Syria is 24/7 fighting but it’s much more relaxed than that,” he wrote on 21 September 2013. “They’re calling it a five-star jihad.” Another famous line was about the hypocrisy of Westerners who denied the heroism of jihad. “A man leaves his home to fight for the oppressed people sounds heroic until you add in ‘Muslim Man’,” he wrote on 30 November. “Then he’s a terrorist/extremist.” Ifthekar soon had more than 3,000 followers on Twitter.

THE BANGLADESH BAD BOYS BRIGADE

A screen shot showing Ifthekar Jaman surrounded by other ISIS fighters. YouTube

Ifthekar’s fans wanted to be like him. Once looking like him had been enough. Now, in the summer of 2013, many wanted to join him in Syria. Ifthekar took a personal interest in two groups of British men. There was a trio from Manchester with whom Ifthekar became close online: Mohammad Azzam Javeed, Anil Khalil Raoufi, who would later re-style himself as Abu Layth al-Korasani (meaning ‘the Afghan’, reflecting his ethnic origin) and another man who would take the jihadi name Abu Qa’qaa. There were also five friends from Portsmouth, many of them from his da’wah group: Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, who worked at Primark; Mamunur Roshid; Asad Uzzaman; Mehdi Hassan, a privately educated body-building fan who was just 19; and Mashudur Choudhury, 30, who was married with two children. It was Choudhury who discussed the logistics of traveling to Syria with Ifthekar and gave the group its nickname: the Bangladeshi Bad Boys Brigade.

Getting to Syria wasn’t complicated. To seem like they were going for a holiday, both groups bought return tickets from Britain to Turkey. The Manchester group flew out on 5 October, the Portsmouth group followed three days later and Ifthekar guided them together in Reyhanli. Abu Qa’qaa later described his relief at meeting up with the Portsmouth group on Tumblr. These were “brothers who understood the deen, brothers who understood the reason we had been placed on this earth and who knew what was incumbent upon them from the commands of Allah”.

The next day the eight men packed and took taxis to the border. Abu Qa’qaa was spooked by the sight of a “random white man” smoking and a holding notebook outside their hotel. On seeing their British passports, the Syrian border guards demanded $6,000 to let them pass. “We returned back to the hotel extremely disheartened,” wrote Abu Qa’qaa. “Tears were ready to flow from our eyes. I was lying with my head on the lap of my brother Abu Layth. Your average person would never understand this. This is why the brotherhood in Islam is so beautiful, something unique.” Suddenly, Mashudur Choudhury received a call from Ifthekar saying a van was coming shortly and the group must make ready. The van took them to a Turkish village and dropped them. A second pick-up then took them a further five minutes, at which point they ran into a Turkish army patrol. The Turks ordered the men out, searched their luggage, stole a pair of gloves, then discovered their British passports. At this, said Abu Qa’qaa, “they smiled, were inspired by our presence and let us go on our way on foot”.

ISIS' propaganda on Instagram illustrates how the group hope to attract new fighters.Instagram/Shutterstock

The group walked across the border and immediately ran into a rebel fighter from another group who took them into the nearest town in his van. “As soon as we jumped out, a pick-up swung round the corner and out jumped Abu Abdurrahman al-Britani [Ifthekar]. He seemed as eager to meet us as we were to meet him. Instantaneously love was stored between our hearts and we hugged each other tightly with the biggest of smiles on our faces ... so much the muscles in our face began to hurt!” After another two hours’ drive, the men arrived at Ifthekar’s Isis base. They were given a place to rest then taken to see the bodies of six jihadis killed that day. “To my amazement it was if they weren’t dead,” wrote Abu Qa’qaa. “Wallahi, it was as if they were sleeping but more paler. This reminded me of the ayat in the Qur’an: ‘Do not think of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive!’”

The British jihadis began their training in Syria with religious study and gun safety. But within days, they suffered their first disappointment when Mashudur Choudhury announced he was quitting. Though his age gave Choudhury some authority, among the brothers he was both the biggest fantasist and, ultimately, the least convinced. As Kingston Crown Court would later hear, after the collapse of a business in 2012, Choudhury pretended to have stomach cancer and persuaded his sister-in-law to give him £25,000 to spend on treatment in Singapore. Choudhury did fly to Singapore but spent the money on hotels and prostitutes and a series of other holidays. Going to Syria as a jihadi was his masterplan to escape the past and impress the world. The training, he wrote on Twitter, “sounded proper hardcore, like running for 10km without stopping”. But confronted by the reality of war, Choudhury lost his nerve. He travelled back to Turkey and caught his return flight to Gatwick, where he was arrested by counter-terrorism officers who had been following his travels online. In May he was convicted of terrorism offences and in December sentenced to four years.

At least one of the British jihadis was now exposed as a spectacular fantasist. The others appeared undeterred, however, embracing their new identities with new jihadi names and posting messages online saying war was awesome, and just like the movies. Abu Layth al-Korasani claimed a firefight he saw “was like a scene from star wars with all the ‘zing’ noises and red lights”.

Of all the foreign jihadis, Ifthekar remained the star. In November 2013, his fame hit new heights when he appeared on Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship evening show, via camera phone. This time Ifthekar seemed to be attempting a special forces look: black beanie, beard, kohl eyes, long hair, black scarf around his neck. He confirmed he was with Isis and said he had travelled to “the land of Sham” to establish “the law of God, the law of Allah”. He added that Isis’s insurgency was “fully, fully” justified, despite its habit of executing and beheading unarmed prisoners. “That’s why I am so pleased to be here,” he said. “The way they rule is with justice.”

BRINGING TERROR BACK HOME

Ifthekar ended his interview by saying Britain shouldn’t worry about fighters like him returning home. Back home, the press, government and security agencies were discussing plans to refuse them re-entry. The assumption was that in Syria they would have acquired dangerous new skills and a terrifying battle ruthlessness.

In truth, Ifthekar posed little threat to Britain, or anywhere else. Though Ifthekar had been in Syria six months, he had yet to fire a shot in anger. He had no combat experience, no medical knowledge, no understanding of tactics or soldiering and only the most rudimentary knowledge of how to use a gun. His lack of scholarship meant he could assume no religious role and his assiduous use of social media made him a liability to operational security. For the British fighters, jihad meant guarding, cooking and a steady stream of selfies. It was, in the end, an introspective adventure. Even if they weren’t doing much, they were in Syria and they looked good. They looked the part.

If these were terrorists, then, they were among the least capable, least experienced and altogether least scary the world had ever seen. But even inept soldiers have one military use. And soon after the Newsnight broadcast – maybe the British fighters’ fame was making other Isis soldiers jealous, maybe their commanders wanted to test their zealousness, maybe Isis’s battle plan simply required a tactical distraction – the British fighters started being deployed as cannon fodder. First to be killed, on 15 December 2013, was Ifthekar. On 3 February 2014, Abu Layth al-Korasani died. In July, Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, the Primark worker from Portsmouth, was killed and Mehdi Hassan was shot in the stomach. Over the summer, Isis captured enough territory that it re-designated itself “Islamic State”. But its successes ended with a costly battle against Kurdish forces aided by US warplanes for a city called Kobane on the Turkish border. There, on 21 October Mamunur Roshid and Asad Uzzaman were injured when a building collapsed on them during a US airstrike; Roshid later died of his wounds. Three days later Hassan was also killed in Kobane.

In 10 months, five of the nine British fighters were dead. A sixth, Uzzaman, was badly injured. A seventh, Choudhury was in jail. Of the last two, Manchester jihadis Mohammad Javeed and Abu Qa’qaa, who was shot in the right foot and leg in the same attack in which Ifthekar died, little had been heard for months. The beheadings of two American journalists and two British aid workers between August and October by a masked jihadi with a British accent focused attention on the barbarism of Isis’s foreign fighters. A more accurate picture would have centred on the fighters’ own attrition. In August the US government-funded Western Jihadism Project said around a third of the 2,000 Westerners who travelled to Syria and Iraq since 2011 had died. It predicted that to rise to a half.

Ferocious fighting for control of Kobane has raged for three months. The tow has become a symbol of resistance against ISIS.Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty

OF HEROES AND MONSTERS

The British jihadis cast themselves as heroes facing a monster. Most of Britain – and the world – cast them as the monsters. Neither story was true.

The jihadis’ motivation was transparent. They wanted to be adored. But what reason would the British state have for describing these little boys lost as the devil? For it was largely a fiction, even the part about the threat they posed on coming home. Of the 500 Britons who have travelled to Syria and Iraq, around 260 have returned but only 40 are being prosecuted for terrorism offences. To repeat: even the British counter-terrorism services consider a full 220 of them less dangerous than Mashudur Choudhury.

A senior counter-terrorism officer told me that far more dangerous than returnees were prospective jihadis stopped from going abroad. He pointed out that the two Canadian converts arrested for attacks in October – one ran over two soldiers in Quebec, killing one; the other shot a guard at the war memorial in Ottawa before he was gunned down inside the Canadian parliament – had both been prevented from traveling to Syria. So why such concern over the British jihadis? Cage, a Muslim prisoners group, believes the British security services have an incentive not to dampen public fears but raise them to scare them into approving ever more draconian security legislation and drum up extra resources; British politicians want to appear tough at a time when hostility to immigration is electorally popular; and British newspapers faithfully repeat these stories because they are, after all, good stories, well sourced, and those sell papers.

The one winner to emerge from this confusion of story-telling is the man all sides agree is a true monster: President Bashar al-Assad. In his quest to stay in power, Assad has torn his own country apart, flattening cities, making more than three million of his people refugees and using chemicals on those who have remained. Assad’s justification has always been that he is fighting al-Qaida. It was once a fiction. But the foreign jihadis not only gave him the enemy he wanted but prompted the most gymnastic redrawing of international alliances.

Today Assad’s backers – Iran, Hezbollah and Russia – are in effective alliance with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, all of Europe and Israel. Fantasy has become fact. And, for Europe’s thousands of aspiring jihadis, this looking glass world holds an open invitation for thousands to follow Ifthekar and make their dream reality.

“This is going to sound weird,” said a young Muslim man with a Scottish accent in an audio tribute posted online after Ifthekar’s death. “But I was actually really impressed, masha’allah, by how handsome this guy was. I was jealous. I was like, ‘Man, this guy’s got a turban on, he’s got really great eyes, beard, everything about this guy, he looks like the prophet’.” The Scot said he wanted to copy Ifthekar. “He made it look cool,” he said.

The nominations for the 2015 Academy Awards were revealed at 8:30 on Thursday morning. Directors Alfonso Cuarón and J.J. Abrams announced the nominations for some of the technical prizes, while actor Chris Pine and Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs took the stage soon after to reveal the nominations for the major prizes.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and The Grand Budapest Hotel lead with nine nominations each, including major categories Best Picture and Best Director. The rest of the eight Best Picture nominations include American Sniper, Boyhood, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything and Whiplash.

Missed the big reveal? Here's the full list. The Academy Awards will take place February 22.

BEST PICTURE

• Boyhood 
• The Imitation Game 
• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
• The Theory of Everything
• The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Whiplash
• Selma
• American Sniper

BEST ACTOR

• Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything
• Benedict Cumberbatch for The Imitation Game
• Steve Carell for Foxcatcher
• Bradley Cooper for American Sniper

BEST ACTRESS

• Julianne Moore for Still Alice
• Reese Witherspoon for Wild
• Rosamund Pike for Gone Girl
• Felicity Jones for The Theory of Everything
• Marion Cotillard for Two Days, One Night

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

• Patricia Arquette for Boyhood
• Emma Stone for Birdman  or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) 
• Keira Knightley for The Imitation Game
• Meryl Streep for Into the Woods
• Laura Dern for Wild

​BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

• J.K. Simmons for Whiplash
• Edward Norton for Birdman  or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) 
• Ethan Hawke for Boyhood
• Mark Ruffalo for Foxcatcher
• Robert Duvall for The Judge

BEST DIRECTOR

• Richard Linklater for Boyhood
• Alejandro González Iñárritu for Birdman  or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) 
• Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Morten Tyldum for The Imitation Game
• Bennett Miller for Foxcatcher

​BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

• Graham Moore, The Imitation Game
• Anthony McCarten, The Theory of Everything
• Damien Chazelle, Whiplash
• Jason Hall, American Sniper
• Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice

​BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

• Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo, Birdman  or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) 
• Richard Linklater, Boyhood
• Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness, The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Dan Glroy, Nighcrawler
• Dan Futterman and E. Max Frye, Foxcatcher

BEST FOREIGN FILM

• Ida
  Leviathan
• Tangerines
• Timbuktu
• Wild Tales

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

• Citizenfour
• Last Days in Vietnam
• Virguna
• Finding Vivian Maier
• The Salt of the Earth

​BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

• Big Hero 6
• How to Train Your Dragon 2
• The Boxtrolls
• Song of the Sea
• The Tale of Princess Kaguya

FILM EDITING

• American Sniper
• Boyhood
• The Grand Budapest Hotel
• The Imitation Game
• Whiplash

​BEST ORIGINAL SONG

• "Lost Stars" (Begin Again)
• "Glory" (Selma)
• "Everything Is Awesome" (The Lego Movie)
• "Grateful" (Beyond the Lights)
• "I'm Not Gonna Miss You" (Glen Campbell ... I'll Be Me)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

• Emmanuel Lubezki for Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
• Dick Pope for Mr. Turner
• Robert D. Yeoman for The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Ryszard Lenczewski and Łukasz Żal for Ida
• Roger Deakins for Unbroken​

COSTUME DESIGN

• Colleen Atwood, Into the Woods
• Anna B. Sheppard, Maleficent
• Milena Canonero, The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Jacqueline Durran, Mr. Turner
• Mark Bridges, Inherent Vice

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYSLING

• Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou and David White for Guardians of the Galaxy
• Bill Corso and Dennis Liddiard for Foxcatcher
• Frances Hannon and Mark Coulier for The Grand Budapest Hotel

PRODUCTION DESIGN 

• Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock for The Grand Budapest Hotel
• Suzie Davies and Charlotte Watts for Mr. Turner
• Dennis Gassner and Anna Pinnock for Into the Woods
• Nathan Crowley, Garry Fettis, and Paul Healy for Interstellar
• Maria Djurkovic for The Imitation Game

​SOUND EDITING

• American Sniper
• Interstellar 
• Unbroken 
• The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
• Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

​SOUND MIXING

• American Sniper
• Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
• Unbroken 
• Interstellar
• Whiplash

VISUAL EFFECTS

• Interstellar
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• X Men: Days of Future Past
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier

​SHORT FILM, LIVE ACTION

• Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis, Aya (Chasis Films)
• Michael Lennox, director, and Ronan Blaney, Boogaloo and Graham (Out of Orbit)
• Hu Wei and Julien Féret, Butter Lamp (La Lampe au Beurre de Yak) (AMA Productions) 
• Talkhon Hamzavi and Stefan Eichenberger, Parvaneh (Zurich University of Arts)
• Mat Kirkby, director and James Lucas, The Phone Call (RSA Films)

SHORT FILM, ANIMATED

• Daisy Jacobs and Christopher Hees, The Bigger Picture (National Film and Television School) 
• Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi, The Dam Keeper (Tonko House)
• Patrick Osborne and Kristina Reed, Feast (Walt Disney Animation Studios) 
• Torill Kove, Me and My Moulton (Mikrofilm in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada)
• Joris Oprins, A Single Life (Job, Joris & Marieke)

DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT

• Perry Films, Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1
• Wajda Studio, Joanna
• Warsaw Film School, Our Curse
• Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, The Reaper (La Parka)
• Weary Traveler, White Earth

The al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, usually referred to as AQAP - or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - was founded in 2009 after the Yemeni and Saudi branches of the terrorist organisation combined. According to recent figures from the U.S. State Department the organisation has almost a thousand members and analysts rate it as the most dangerous franchise of al-Qaeda.

Since forming, the group have carried out a series of attacks in the Middle East including a suicide bombing at a military parade rehearsal which killed as many as 100 Yemeni soldiers in 2012. Last week, on the very same day that the world’s media was reporting that gunmen had shot dead 12 people in Paris, AQAP killed 37 people in Yemen when they detonated a bomb near a police academy on January 7th. As James Fergusson, a Newsweek correspondent who recently returned from the country points out: “They may not be terribly good at targeting the West but they’re very effective at targeting their own.”

The extent of AQAP’s involvement in the attacks in Paris is still under investigation, but counter-terrorism officials have confirmed that in 2011 the group transferred $20,000 to the Kouachi brothers responsible for the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Even if they did not officially direct the attack, AQAP’s funding means that Paris represents the first successful attack on Western soil which the group have been involved in, and al-Qaeda’s most deadly since the 2005 bombings of the London transport network.

AQAP have been consistently vocal about their aim to target the U.S. and Europe, but so far have been unsuccessful in their attempts. In 2014 a video surfaced which appeared to show

al-Wuhayshi addressing more than a hundred fighters, in which he says: "We must eliminate the cross... The bearer of the cross is America!" They were behind the failed Christmas Day bombing in 2009 of a plane heading to Detroit, and they have also twice tried to down U.S.-bound cargo planes. Yemeni officials later said that both plans were foiled due to a tip off from Jabir al-Fayif, a Saudi jihadist who had become a double agent.

AQAP’s current leader is Nasser al-Wuhayshi, who previously served as Osama bin Laden’s secretary in Afghanistan and who was one of 23 prisoners who escaped a high-security jail in Yemen’s capital Sana’a in 2006. The U.S. have pledged a $10 million reward for information that leads to his capture.

Another prominent figure in AQAP, who was killed in a drone strike in 2011, was American-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who is considered to be a key influence behind many of the attacks AQAP have carried out. The FBI later said that he had meetings with two of the 9/11 hijackers and it’s believed that al-Awlaki met with one of the Kouachi brothers when he visited Yemen in 2011.

In 2009 Wikileaks released classified State Department cables in which Hillary Clinton indicated that it was rich donors from Saudi Arabia who were a major source of funding for al-Qaeda. James Fergusson also believes that much of AQAP’s money comes from “misguided” millionaires from the Gulf. “Yemen has a special status in the Arab world, it’s considered a holy land,” he explains. Many of these oil sheiks trace their lineage back to Yemen and so are keen to pay back these remittances to AQAP.”

One question that has been raised by the Paris attacks is a possible link between AQAP and ISIS. Whilst the al-Qaeda group have claimed responsibility for the Hebdo attack, they have said they were not involved with Amedy Coulibaly, the man who shot a policewoman and four people in the kosher grocery. In a video released after Coulibaly’s death he says he is a member of ISIS, although his links to the organization have not yet been established. AQAP released a video in November 2014 in which Harith bin Ghazi al Nadhari, a senior official of the group said they reject ISIS’s caliphate, suggesting that the groups are not working together as of yet.

Whether AQAP will expand and grow, boosted by the events in Paris, is also a concern. James Fergusson says that, even without being connected with the Paris shooters, the current upheaval in Yemen is creating a rich breeding ground for AQAP’s expansion. “Yemen is the new front in the fight between Sunni and Shia Muslims and al-Qaeda is exploiting this. There are towns full of religious students in the south and the east which are basically factories for jihadists. Yemen is looking like a good opportunity for AQAP now. The government is under attack, there are secularists in the south, Houthis in the north and al-Qaeda rapidly rising in the east.”

The attacks in Paris have led to concerns that more like them will follow - targeted, smaller-scale assaults carried out in European and U.S. cities. Raffaello Pantucci, the director of international security studies at RUSI - an organisation that researches international security and defence - says that security services would certainly be “reevaluating the level of concern regarding the community of people who were going out to Yemen” to visit al-Awlaki between 2009-2011. Pantucci points out that while a lot of attention - both from the media and the security services - has been focused on ISIS activity over the last year or so, we have “a tendency to get caught up in the immediate and should be careful not to be distracted”.

The 2015 Academy Award nominations are in, and they are overwhelmingly white and male. In fact, every single contender for Lead and Supporting acting categories is white. As The Hollywood Reporter points out, this is only the second time that's happened this century.

Meanwhile, the nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Cinematography have gone exclusively to white men.

That makes for the whitest Academy Awards since 1998—an especially striking fact given last year's wins for 12 Years a Slave, which had a primarily black cast and took home three awards, including Best Picture. By contrast, the Academy's treatment today of 's Selma has been widely taken as a snub: Although Ava DuVernay’s heavily acclaimed civil rights drama garnered two nominations, including Best Picture, neither DuVernay nor the film's actors were nominated. (No African-American woman has ever been nominated for Best Director.)

Twitter users promptly noted the lack of diversity:

Looking at these noms, it's kind of hard to believe that Oscar voters are 94% white, 77% male, and have a median age of 62...not. #Oscars

— Rosianna Halse Rojas (@papertimelady) January 15, 2015

#OscarNoms No female directors, screenwriters, or cinematographers. No actors of color. #diversity

— David Daniel (@CNNLADavid) January 15, 2015

Surely this will be much discussed today: Every single #OscarNoms acting contender is white. Only the second time in 20 years.

— Janice Min (@janicebmin) January 15, 2015

Quickly, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite (inspired by Twitter joke #CokeSoWhite) took off in reaction:

#OscarsSoWhite they selling #AllNomineesMatter tees in the atrium

— rell (@Awkward_Duck) January 15, 2015

#OscarsSoWhite they assume you're the kids' nanny

— Amanda Nelson (@ImAmandaNelson) January 15, 2015

#OscarsSoWhite they don’t see the power of black leaders only thugs, victims, slaves or whores. Thanks Academy!

— DanielleMoodie-Mills (@DeeTwoCents) January 15, 2015

#OscarsSoWhite we'll see a lot of "Je Suis Charlie" buttons on the red carpet, but no #BlackLivesMatter

— April (@ReignOfApril) January 15, 2015

#OscarsSoWhite they don't see race. Or movies with black folks in it, apparently.

— rell (@Awkward_Duck) January 15, 2015

#OscarsSoWhite they nominee pictures look like a jury from the south in 1962.

— Lena Waithe (@hillmangrad) January 15, 2015

Here's the full list of nominations—chosen by an Academy of voters that is primarily white and male, yet exerts outsized influence on the movie industry each year.

A decline in prices meant Spain’s inflation rate fell to -1% at the end of 2014, it emerged today, putting the country in the grip of deflation - but it seems that this is not entirely bad news as growth continues to beat the Eurozone average.

The fall sees the country’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) at its lowest rate for December since records began in 1962, according to data released by the National Statistics Institute (INE) today.

The net decline in prices, which is also the lowest on record for any month since July 2009 when the annual CPI was -1.4%, is largely due to the falling price of oil products and food.

Negative inflation, or deflation, worries economists who fear a deflationary spiral will set in as has been seen in Japan, where consumers delay spending on the assumption that prices will fall further, which then leads to further economic decline. Inflation also usually reduces the value of debt over time as wages go up but the price of the debt remains fixed. Deflation – when prices fall - means that debt essentially gets bigger, whilst the price of everything else falls.

However, the Bank of Spain and influential Spanish thinktank Funcas have predicted that despite these deflationary pressures, the Spanish economy is likely to have grown by 1.4% in 2014, and is projected to grow a further 2% in 2015. Whilst the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Eurozone as a whole grew by 0.2% in the third quarter of 2014, Spanish GDP grew by 0.5%.

In November 2014, Spanish retail sales actually rose 1.9% from the previous year, the fourth consecutive monthly increase.

According to Newsweek correspondent Andrew Davies, who recently wrote an in-depth feature on imminent deflation in the Eurozone, the decline is mostly due to the falling price of oil.

“What is happening is due to the oil price. There has been such a big drop in oil prices – 50% in six months – and this is a big component of the CPI. Therefore when it changes this much, it will inevitably have a major effect on overall inflation,” he says.

So why is deflation not leading to a slump in consumer spending?

“If prices are low and people have more money due to low oil prices then they will spend more money,” says Davies.  

According to BNP Paribas, every time the price of a barrel of oil drops by $10, Spain’s GDP growth increases by 0.6%, making the country one of the biggest beneficiaries of declining oil prices.

Spanish multi-national engineering company Gestamp, which is a major leader in the European automotive industry and employs over 25,000 staff in 20 different countries, is one of the companies that has benefited from the lower prices.

According to chief financial officer Francisco López-Peña low oil prices have meant consumers have more a disposable income as they have to worry less about re-fuelling their cars.

“We are seeing now that people are buying fuel by the gallon, rather than buying a particular amount of money worth of gallons,” López-Peña told  the Wall Street Journal.

But Inigo Fernandez de Mesa, the country’s trade secretary says that oil prices are just one factor that is positively impacting the Spanish economy.

Speaking to CNBC in Madrid on Thursday, Fernandez de Mesa said: "The sharp reduction in oil cost reduces the cost of production and possibly increases the income of families and it also improves the external account of Spanish economy.”

"The second positive factor is the exchange rate depreciation. This could be a very important factor to improve the performance of Spanish exports further."

According to Fernandez de Mesa, these factors - alongside a “rapid reduction” in funding costs and keeping workers' wages at a slow pace of growth - could all work together to make our forecasts for this year “conservative”.

However, not all are so optimistic. Jonathan Loynes, chief European economist at Capital Economics, says it is unlikely that the economic growth Spain is experiencing at the moment is sustainable.

“While Spain's economic recovery remains solid, its high unemployment and large degree of spare capacity make it vulnerable to a prolonged bout of deflation," he wrote in the consultancy's next quarterly report.

"Spain has been one of the Eurozone's stronger performers over recent quarters. And timely survey evidence such as the composite PMI [Purchasing Managers' Index] show few signs of any significant loss of momentum. But this may not be sustainable."

Spain’s deflation figures are released just one week after figures revealed that the Eurozone as a whole slipped into deflation in December, raising the prospect of an intervention by the ECB to try and stimulate the economy. The central bank is due to meet on January 22 to consider whether to extend its existing stimulus measures and start buying sovereign bonds in a new strategy of quantitative easing (QE).

The Dalai Lama identified himself as a Marxist on Tuesday while addressing capitalism, discrimination and violence at a lecture on world peace in Kolkata, India. This is not the first time that the 14th Dalai Lama has spoken about his political leaning - in 2011 he said: “I consider myself a Marxist...but not a Leninist”  when speaking at a conference in Minneapolis.

"We must have a human approach. As far as socioeconomic theory, I am Marxist," he said to the audience on Tuesday, at the lecture entitled ‘A Human Approach to World Peace’ which was organized by Presidency University.

The Tibetan spiritual leader partly blamed capitalism for inequality and said he regarded Marxism as the answer: "In capitalist countries, there is an increasing gap between the rich and the poor. In Marxism, there is emphasis on equal distribution,” he said, adding that “many Marxist leaders are now capitalists in their thinking”.

He said that he regarded economic and social inequality in India as the reason for ongoing discrimination against women and low social castes, calling on the world’s youth to take the 21st century from a century of violence to a “century of peace”.

“I will not see this in my lifetime but we must start working on it. Those below thirty are the generation of the 21st century. You have to stop violence with your will, vision and wisdom," adding that nuclear weapons should be banned.

The Dalai Lama’s sentiments are not shared by the Pope Francis, however, who has repeatedly dismissed suggestions that he is a communist. Earlier this week, the Pope again defended his economic and social ideologies by saying they are rooted in the Christian faith, not Marxism.

"As we can see, this concern for the poor is in the gospel, it is within the tradition of the church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into some ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history," he said in an interview taken from This Economy Kills, a book of his teachings set for release in Italian this week.

One critic, American radio host Rush Lambaugh, has referred to the Pope’s views on poverty and growing inequality as “pure Marxism”.

There are currently rumours circulating that the Dalai Lama will be making an appearance at the UK's Glastonbury Festival in June 2015. Despite an announcement being made on his official site in early January 2015 announcing his attendance, the post was quickly deleted and the organisers have refused to comment. 

The Green party has announced that they have passed Ukip in terms of membership. The party announced earlier today that their total membership stands at 43,829 - 35,481 from England and Wales, 8026 Scottish and 322 in the Northern Ireland Greens.

The party claims that a surge of new members over the last couple of days has allowed them to surpass Ukip’s membership of 41,943, making them the UK’s fifth largest party.

Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green party, said that 3,000 members had joined in the last 36 hours. “We are now entering new political territory, for the Green party and more broadly for Britain,” she added.

The increase in membership will give further ammunition to the party in its demand to be included in the upcoming television debates, which they have been controversially left out of. Green party leader Natalie Bennett wrote to Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage on the morning of the 14th of January, calling for them to back her bid to appear in the planned debate between the four main parties.

In a public consultation released in January on who might be considered as major party in May’s election, Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, said that while Ukip might qualify for consideration as a major party, the Greens did not, because they have not, “secured sufficient support in previous elections and current opinion polls”. One of Ofcom’s roles as broadcasting regulator is to ensure that broadcasters give “due weight” to coverage of major parties during the election.

In an interview today on London Live, Natalie Bennett said that the Green party is exploring legal options should the party be denied participation in the leaders debate. “We have to look at the fine legal detail,” she said, “but certainly we are talking to some lawyers and they are giving us very strong support that we really appreciate. Legal action is an option whether it would be directly against ITV or against the consortium, would be a matter of detail”

The latest polling from YouGov shows the Green party on 7%, a point ahead of the Liberal Democrats on 6%, while 15% of respondents said they would vote for Ukip.

YouGov also found that 67% of Britons think Natalie Bennett should be invited to take part in the leaders debates, while 72% think it is unfair that the Greens are not included while the Lib Dems given their similar level of support in the polls.

A spokesperson from Ofcom said that party membership was not part of the regulator’s assessment. The Scottish National Party (SNP) is also keen to be included in the debates and recently overtook the Lib Dems as the UK’s third biggest party by membership.

There are signs Labour are worried that the Greens will form a legitimate challenge on the left in the same way Ukip has been to the Conservatives on the right, with the Telegraph reporting that shadow justice minister Sadiq Khan is heading a unit to “halt the green rot”.

The Green party will be fielding candidates in at 75% of seats in England and Wales in May’s general election.

Ukip did not immediately respond to a request to comment.

Updated | Pope Francis said on Thursday there are limits to freedom of expression, especially when it comes to making light of a person’s religious beliefs.

While saying that freedom of expression and religion were fundamental human rights, he said there were limits to these rights, according to a summary of his comments provided by the Vatican press office. “You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others,” he said.

Francis’ remarks came during a press conference on board a flight from Sri Lanka to the Philippines, part of the pontiff’s weeklong trip to Asia.

His comments were in response to a question by a French journalist about the recent attack on the satire magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in which 10 journalists and two police officers were killed by Islamist extremists who claimed affiliation with radical group Al-Qaeda.

Pope Francis said it was normal to expect the faithful to be upset when their religion is mocked. He used as an example Alberto Gasparri, an aide who organizes the papal trips and who was present on the plane at his side, according to the press summary.

According to the summary, “The Pope said if 'his good friend Dr Gasparri' says a curse word against his mother, he can 'expect a punch,' and at that point he gestured with a pretend punch towards him, saying: 'It’s normal.'”

Francis also called killing in the name of God “an aberration.”

Vatican spokesman Fr. Thomas Rosica later clarified that the Pope's remarks were spoken "coloquially" and were "in no way intended to be interpreted as a justification for the violence and terror that took place in Paris last week."

During the press conference, Pope Francis spoke on a range of topics, including climate change and social justice. He is expected to deliver Mass to as many as 5 million Filipinos on Sunday. The Philippines, an 80 percent Catholic country, was ravaged last year by Typhoon Heiyan.

The horrific terrorist attack in Paris comes in the context of an escalating ideological war within the global jihadist movement pitting the Islamic State (or ISIS) against Al-Qaeda. The last month has seen a sharp uptick in the ideological conflict.

The two groups have been at odds for months, but their war of words intensified in December. In a coordinated offensive, three Al-Qaeda franchises—Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Nusra Front—published on their media sites attacks on the legitimacy of the ISIS caliphate.

AQIM published the longest (96 pages), most detailed and specific assault. AQAP published a criticism of the caliphate that suggested all pledges of loyalty to it must be null and void because it is illegitimate. Interestingly, Al Qaeda's core leadership in Pakistan did not comment, perhaps refusing to deign to even discuss Caliph Ibrahim (a.k.a. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi).

ISIS responded late in December in the latest issue of its online English-language magazine Dabiq. It had an article titled "Al-Qaeda of Waziristan: A Testimony From Within” that was sharply critical of Al-Qaeda and Mullah Omar's Taliban.

Al-Qaeda was accused of moving too slowly to create a caliphate, and Mullah Omar for considering negotiations with the Crusader enemy. Dabiq even indirectly criticized Osama bin Laden for not being eager for a caliphate, crossing a red line in jihadists' literature.

The articles online produced a flurry of social media messaging. ISIS lost ground by taking a swipe at bin Laden but gained ground by suggesting AQAP's caution had empowered the Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen to take Sanaa. Some ISIS supporters suggested the criticism of bin Laden was a result of poor translation and editing.

The war inside the global jihad over the legitimacy of the caliphate, and who is the proper heir to bin Laden (Ayman al-Zawahiri or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), is bound to lead to competition to outdo each other on the battlefield as well. In that context, a major terror attack in Europe would be a significant achievement.

Bruce Riedel is director of The Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution. This article first appeared on the Brookings Institution website.

The Russian Kremlin-critic and opposition figure Alexei Navalny was detained by police yesterday after saying on a live radio show that Russian president Vladimir Putin “created problems for years to come” by annexing Crimea from Ukraine. Navalny was then met by security forces outside the building of the independent radio station Echo of Moscow in the Russian capital yesterday evening.

Both the host of the radio programme, Irina Vorbyeva and Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh posted photos of Navalny being apprehended by two men in uniform. According to both women the two policemen did not give a reason as to why they were detaining Navalny.

Less than an hour after he was was detained, Navalny announced on Twitter that the police had simply driven him home, writing on his blog that “even the policemen did not understand” why they were arresting him. He also tweeted: “I left the Echo to go home. They detained me, conferred with their superiors… and drove me home. What does that mean?”

When asked why they were detaining Navalny outside the radio station’s headquarters, the police officers gave radio host Vorbyeva a cryptic reply, saying they did so “in order to clarify the circumstances”.

На вопрос, за что арестовывают @navalny, полиция ответила "до выяснения обстоятельств". pic.twitter.com/Sc4T20Az2J

— Воробьева (@Vorobievaya) January 14, 2015

His press secretary later joked that they must have “arrested him in order to identify him”.

 

Забрали для установления личности. Кривоарбатский, 14.

Фото опубликовано t_felg (@t_felg)

Янв 14, 2015 at 10:15 PST

Navalny is currently under house arrest after he was handed a controversial suspended sentence of three and a half years for embezzlement in a snap trial in Moscow last month.

His brother Oleg was also drawn into the case and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison - a move which Navalny compared to keeping his brother hostage.

However, Navalny has refused to stay under house arrest as he insists there is no legal reason to keep him there now that he has recieved his sentence. He has said that he believes the trial and his and his brother’s sentences are part of the Kremlin’s attempts to intimidate him as he is a figure of opposition. Last week he reported having another unsettling incident when three men followed him to a shop near his home when he went to buy milk.

In the radio interview yesterday, after which he was detained, Navalny reiterated his belief that the only reason he is under such intense surveillance is because the Kremlin wish to

discourage him from continuing his political activity. “Putin has decided… to keep me in perpetual isolation,” Navalny said.

When asked to explain why Putin still had such a high approval rating, with Russian polling organisation the Levada Center estimating it to be around 84%, Navalny replied: “These 84%, this is fiction which exists solely because they will not let anyone else stand.”

“The only reason that Putin has his approval rating, that United Russia has the votes they have, it is because they do not not let us stand for election. I do not mean just myself,” Navalny said, launching a scathing attack on Vladimir Putin and his political party.

“When I ran for mayor of Moscow, did I not win 30% of the vote? I did. I am confident that if our Progress Party were still running, instead of being attacked as we have been for many years, I am not saying we would beat United Russia straight away, but I do not doubt it for a second that United Russia would lose its majority,” Navalny said.  

As part of his sentence, Navalny will not be able to run for public office until 2020, despite the fact that the next presidential election in Russia will be held in 2018, after current President Vladimir Putin’s third term runs out.

The European Parliament held a plenary meeting on human rights in Strasbourg on Thursday, where MEPs agreed that Alexei and Oleg Navalny’s convictions were “based on unsubstantiated charges", accusing the Moscow prosecution of being "politically motivated". The parliament urged the case to be revisited and that it should be free of political interference.

At a quick glance, the limestone hills of southern Lebanon don’t seem like a good place to invest in real estate. Located near the country’s volatile border with Israel, this narrow slice of land has suffered through a 15-year civil war and several devastating battles with the Jewish state. But over the past few years, about a dozen new villas have sprouted along the narrow roads near the small town of Jouaiya, about 60 miles from Beirut. These opulent homes seem out of place amid the olive groves and fields of grazing sheep, dilapidated farms and dirt roads. A few have orange-tiled roofs, neoclassical columns and large courtyard walls, while others resemble gaudy Chinese pagodas.

Locals say the mansions, some still under construction, belong to middle- and high-level members of Hezbollah, the Shiite militant and political group. The United States and Israel consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization, and the European Union has given the same designation to the group’s armed wing. But over the past 30 years, Lebanon’s Party of God has come to dominate both politics and security in this nation of under 5 million, thanks in part to Iranian largesse, a wealthy foreign diaspora and some shrewd political gamesmanship. It’s also helped many Shiites, a historically impoverished sect in Lebanon, get rich.

But the good times may now be over for Hezbollah and its supporters. Iranian oil profits, which have lubricated the proxy group with hundreds of millions of dollars a year, appear to be drying up. Western sanctions, imposed on Tehran due to its nuclear program, coupled with falling oil prices, have emptied the coffers of the Islamic Republic. Crude now trades at less than $50 per barrel, down from more than $100 in June, due to lower global demand, oversupply in the Middle East and the rise of the American fracking industry. Meanwhile, Iran has reportedly seen its oil exports fall by 60 percent since 2011, and the country’s budget deficit has climbed to an astounding $9 billion.

The result, according to Hezbollah officials and observers close to the party, is that Iran is slashing the amount of money it’s giving to its Lebanese ally. “There are many members…who are now paid their wages much later," says Khalil, a 40-something Hezbollah commander, who asked to use a pseudonym because he’s not authorized to speak to the media. “Some are getting less money than before."

This isn’t the first time the party has run into cash flow problems. In the summer of 2008, oil peaked at $147 per barrel, before bottoming out that winter at $32, creating a difficult year for Iran's most powerful proxy. As a result, analysts estimate Tehran cut its funding to Hezbollah roughly in half. But the cuts now, Khalil says, are far more severe. A hardened veteran of the Syrian war, he remains defiant and optimistic, even as he braces for the worst. "We are used to having a black cloud over us,” he says. “And this one will pass, too. Now we will begin to see who stands with us, not only for the money and other support.”

Yet Hezbollah’s budget woes come at perhaps the worst possible time for the organization. The group recently uncovered a Mossad spy high in its ranks, and its militant wing has reportedly lost nearly 1,000 fighters in the Syrian civil war. As Hezbollah takes on a growing role in the battle against ISIS and Syrian rebel groups, that conflict further threatens to strain its resources. Which is why Matthew Levitt, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, D.C., says this oil shock is the most significant that the group has ever felt.  

With oil forecasters predicting a long run of prices for crude, Hezbollah’s cuts are likely to become extreme. The military budget shouldn’t be affected, at least not yet. But the slowdown could anger the group’s foot soldiers in Syria. Already, some complain that higher-ups and their relatives are inured to the daily hardships of war. Umm Ayman, a middle-aged widow and resident of the Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, from which Hezbollah draws much of its support, has a 17-year-old son fighting in Syria. In recent weeks, she says, Hezbollah has cut support to the relatives of soldiers.

"Now our family only gets half of the medical care and medicine that we need,” she says. "This used to come every month without any problems, but today we are suffering."

She’s not the only one. As critics continue to blast the party for the war in Syria, the slowdown has also led to a gradual reduction in social services, along with payments to Lebanese political allies. One Druze politician allied with Hezbollah used to receive $60,000 per month from the group, according to Khalil and a Lebanese political source close to the party. Today he gets just $20,000 each month. Both claim that another Lebanese politician used to get a monthly stipend of $40,000 but now must settle for $15,000.

"I think Hezbollah is very concerned,” says Levitt. “When you position yourself as the party which fills these needs, expectations grow." Much like those mansions perched in the hills along the border. 

VERVIERS, Belgium (Reuters) - Belgian police killed two men who opened fire on them during one of about a dozen raids on Thursday against an Islamist group that federal prosecutors said was about to launch "terrorist attacks on a grand scale".

Coming a week after Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris, the incident fueled fears across Europe of young Muslims returning radicalised from Syria. But the Belgian probe had been under way before the Jan. 7 attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and officials saw no obvious link between the two.

A third man was detained in the eastern city of Verviers, where police commandos ran into a hail of gunfire after trying to gain entry to an apartment above a town center bakery. All three were citizens of Belgium, which has one of the biggest concentrations of European Islamists fighting in Syria.

Other raids on the homes of men returned from the civil war there were conducted across the country, prosecutors said, adding that they were suspected of planning attacks on Belgian police stations. Security had been tightened at such sites.

"The searches were carried out as part of an investigation into an operational cell some of whose members had returned from Syria," said prosecutors' spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt. "For the time being, there is no connection with the attacks in Paris."

Describing events in the quiet provincial town just after dark, he said: "The suspects immediately and for several minutes opened fire with military weaponry and handguns on the special units of the federal police before they were neutralized."

Earlier in the day, in an apparently unrelated development, police detained a man in southern Belgium whom they suspected of supplying weaponry to Amedy Coulibaly, killer of four people at a Paris Jewish grocery after the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Belgian police inspect the entrance of an apartment in central Verviers, a town between Liege and the German border, in the east of Belgium January 15, 2015. At least two people were killed when Belgian counter-terrorist police raided an apartment used by suspected Islamist radicals on Thursday, local media said, describing a coordinated, national operation related to last week's attacks in Paris. Francois Lenoir/Reuters

ISLAMIST STRENGTH

With half a million Muslims, mostly of French-speaking North African descent, among its 11 million people, Belgium has seen similar discontent to that in France among young, unemployed children of immigrants in blighted, post-industrial towns like Verviers, once a major center for wool and other textile mills.

A young Frenchman of Algerian origin is facing trial in Belgium, accused of shooting dead four people at the Jewish Museum in the capital Brussels last May.

Per head of population, more Belgians have taken part in the fighting in Syria than any other European state. The Belgian government believes about 100 of its nationals have come back with combat experience. A further 40 may have been killed and about 170 are still in the ranks of fighters in Syria and Iraq.

Public television RTBF showed video from Verviers of a building at night lit up by flames, with the sound of shots being fired. Late into the evening, police commandos were controlling some streets and checking other sites. Crime scene investigators were at work.

Emrick Bertholet was outside a pharmacy shortly before 6 p.m. (12.00 noon EST) when police vehicles roared up and armed commandos leapt out: "They shouted 'Let's go', they ran off and everything happened really quickly," he told Reuters.

Belgian special forces are pictured near a building, where four gunmen have taken a man hostage, in Ghent December 15, 2014. Francois Lenoir/REUTERS

"I heard the sound of grenades, bursts of gunfire ... I'm a bit shocked, a bit afraid, surprised it could happen here."

Belgium has taken a lead in EU efforts to counter the threat perceived from the return of "foreign fighters" from Syria. It is also part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State. Six Belgian F-16s have taken part in bombing Syria and Iraq.

A court in Antwerp is due to deliver its verdict on 46 people accused of recruiting young men to join jihadists or of becoming jihadists in Syria, Belgium's largest Islamist militant trial to date. The court was to have given its verdict this week, but it was delayed for a month after the Paris violence.

In Germany, police arrested a suspected supporter of Islamic State who had recently been in Syria, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Four new Russian long-range radar stations have started active combat duty, the head of Russian Space Command has announced.

The four ‘Voronezh’ early-warning radar installations have come online in the last year and are placed in Irkutsk and Yeniseysk in the east, Barnaul in the South and in the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, stationed between Poland and Lithuania, Major General Oleg Maidanovich said yesterday. The new installations join two other combat-active Voronezh sites; one outside of St. Petersburg and another in Krasnodar, between the Black and Caspian seas.  

Chris Biggers, writing for the investigative journalism website Bellingcat reports that the radars, “are currently in a mixed state of full active and experimental combat duty.”

The Voronezh radars have a range of up to 4,200 kilometres, allowing detailed observation of military operations such as missile launches.

A map of the radars and their fields of viewPavel Podvig

The new radar stations have been completed as Russia restores and modernises its aerospace and defence capabilities after they largely fell apart with the end of the Soviet Union. The radar stations will complement Russia’s EKS, programme which also seeks to modernise Russia’s aerospace capabilities with a series of early warning satellites. Described by an official within Russian Space Command as “hopelessly outdated”, Oko, the satellite system first launched in 1972, will be replaced by EKS.

The announcement comes at a time of heightened tension with the West over Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict. Patrols by the Russian air force have increased considerably over the last year, with flights of bombers spotted as far as the Atlantic. There have also been a number of incursions by Russian fighter jets into European airspace. There has been at least one near-miss with a commercial airliner due to the jets flying without their transponders switched on, rendering them invisible to commercial radar.

The radar stations are considered energy efficient, where earlier radar systems required water plants to cool the transmitters; The Voronezh’s transmitters are cooled by the wind. According to Russia’s Kommersant Daily, the radars only consume 0.7 megawatts of power as opposed to the 50 megawatts that older models could use.

However, Pavel Podvig,  director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project plays down the political implications. “Construction of the Voronezh radars appears to be part of a long-term plan to rebuild the early-warning radar network. The general idea is to make sure that all radars are on the Russian territory and to replace some really old ones, like Dnepr or Daryal. But I'm fairly confident that it's not linked to any political considerations of the moment.”  

Saudi Arabia is building a 600-mile long wall along its northern border with Iraq in order to keep ISIS at bay, the Telegraph newspaper reported today.

Once completed, the wall will consist of a ditch and a triple-layered steel fence, with 40 watchtowers spread out along it. Each watchtower will be equipped with high-tech surveillance radars that are capable of detecting low-flying helicopters and approaching vehicles, as well as being able to spot a human from the range of about 20km.

There will also be 38 separate communication towers in place and 32 military response stations, as well as 240 armed rapid response vehicles which will patrol the wall.

Work on the wall was started in September 2014 but plans for the project were initially drafted in September 2006 at the height of the Iraqi civil war. ISIS’s advance across central and south-western Iraq has prompted fear in Riyadh of a violent overspill and the project was given the go ahead.

The wall will stretch from the northwest town of Turaif near Jordan, to the northeastern town of Hafar al-Batin near Kuwait, spanning virtually the entire length of Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia.

It will not be the first time Saudi Arabia has enforced one of its borders. In 2013 it constructed a 1,100 mile barrier across its southern border with Yemen after a spate of intense sectarian fighting in the country led to a deterioration of security along the border.  

A spokesperson for the Iraqi government declined to comment when Newsweek enquired if they were aware of these plans and if they had endorsed them.

Iraq’s defence forces have provided unreliable resistance to ISIS, with approximately 30,000 Iraqi servicemen abandoning stations in the country’s north over the summer leaving the city of Mosul to be overrun by ISIS in June.

According to a recent Newsweek investigation pro-Iranian Shia militias and Kurdish peshmerga fighters have proven a stiffer resistance to the jihadist group than the country’s armed forces.

Lina Khatib, director of the Lebanese-based think tank the Carnegie Middle East Centre, says that plans for projects like the wall reflect Saudi Arabia’s fear of ISIS advancing towards its borders.

Discussing an attack which occurred earlier this month in which three Saudi border guards were killed by masked militants who had advanced from Iraq, Khatib says: “As the attack on northern Saudi Arabia earlier this month showed, Saudi Arabia is under direct threat from ISIS, and will therefore be prepared to take extreme measures to defend itself against an ISIS advance.”

He adds: “Concerns about ISIS are pushing Saudi Arabia to try and revise its strategy on Syria and move it from focusing on supporting jihadist groups to empowering the moderate Syrian opposition, and to present the Kingdom as a champion of counter-radicalization in the Middle East.”

While ISIS’s roots are currently in Syria and Iraq, Saudi Arabia is considered a likely target for the group due in part to the fact that the country contains the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Saudi Arabia is currently backing US-led strikes on ISIS over Syria and Iraq.

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - Currency speculators, especially large global macro hedge funds with big short positions in the Swiss franc, are staring massive losses in the face after the Swiss National Bank shocked markets on Thursday by removing a three-year-old cap on the currency.

The move sent the safe-haven franc soaring against the euro and the U.S. dollar at a time when more than $3.5 billion was positioned in favor of franc weakness, the largest such position in more than a year and a half.

Only days ago, the SNB termed the 1.20 francs per euro cap the cornerstone of its monetary policy. 

The damage from the Swiss franc's sharp moves comes as a blow for macro hedge fund managers nursing wounds from nearly four years of mediocre performance.

"You have these massive policies which forced all investors to invest with the policy and then they remove the policy and everyone is left high and dry," said Chris Morrison, strategist for the $550 million Omni Macro Fund.

Data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission released on Friday showed net short positions of 24,171 contracts on the Swiss franc, the largest since June 2013. Adding in 662 short option contracts gives a combined position of 24,833 contracts or $3.5 billion at the current rate of around 0.90 franc to the dollar.

Global macro hedge funds that use fundamental analysis to bet on the financial markets and representing $288 billion in assets on the Lyxor platform had net short position of 2.6 percent, indicating a loss for them given the currency move.

The euro dropped as much as 30 percent below the 1.20 cap to 0.8500 franc per euro at one point on Thursday before rebounding to roughly 1.04. The dollar plunged to 0.736 franc, its lowest since 2011, before paring losses. It was last trading at 0.894 franc, down 12 percent.

Hedge fund portfolio positioning at the start of the year indicates that commodity trading advisors, hedge funds that use computer-driven models to evaluate risk, pricing and timing in financial markets, stand to gain.

"This is one of those moments where some people would have been lucky. Many more people, I suspect, would have been unlucky because they would have positioned with the policy of the central bank," said Morrison, whose fund profited from the move.

One of the winners was Sunny Dhonsi, a former JP Morgan trader who left last year to set up Govardhan, primarily an opportunistic equity hedge fund. He had bought puts on EURCHF with a 1.20 strike price.

These puts, a bet on the euro falling against the franc, were cheap because of how aggressively the Swiss had defended their currency. He said with the European Central Bank poised to boost its own monetary policy, the SNB was looking at having to purchase even more euros in order to defend the franc.

"We didn’t put on the trade thinking they would lift the cap so soon, just that the options were too cheap and totally mispriced," he said.

However, other computer-driven funds that base their models on historic volatility may have been exposed because the cap has dampened volatility in the franc for the last few years.

CTAs returned nearly 10 percent last year, according to data from industry tracker Eurekahedge, nearly three times the average gains in global macro hedge funds.

"CTAs will win from today's move, global macro may lose and that will be a repeat of the developments that we have had in recent quarters," said Philippe Ferreira, head of research at Lyxor Asset Management.

Kevin Hoffmeister, a broker for RCO Financial who mainly deals in currency markets, said he was shocked when he strode onto the trading floor in Chicago. Because the news came out during London trading hours, the "initial shock and awe was over," but he still said "everybody was stunned."

Hoffmeister was unsure whether the SNB will take more action.

"No one thought they would do this," he said of scrapping the cap. "Will they telegraph it any better next time? Maybe. It caught a lot of people off guard."

In the week since the attack on satirical magazineCharlie Hebdo rocked Paris, French websites have reported a sharp rise in cyberattacks, about 19,000 thus far, according to a French cyberdefense official.

Most of the hacks, which have reportedly affected sites ranging from tourism pages to military defense websites, have resulted in a denial of service (DoS), which renders a network unusable to users by clogging it with traffic. Arbor Networks, a private firm that tracks cybersecurity threats, said that in just the past day, France has suffered over 1,070 DoS problems with its websites, The Associated Press reports. Nothing more severe, such as a data hack, has happened so far.

France’s cyberdefense chief, Admiral Arnaud Coustilliere, said Thursday at a press conference that this was “the first time that a country has been faced with such a large wave,” referring to the staggering surge in cybercrime, according to the AP.

Coustilliere said at the press conference that about 19,000 cyberattacks had been identified, adding that most of the “unprecedented” attacks weren’t carried out by particular individuals but rather by groups that were “more or less structured,” including several hacker groups, known to officials, who claim to be affiliated with the terrorist group ISIS.

Agence France-Presse reports that “cyber-jihadist” groups based in Mauritania and North Africa have led attacks on over 1,000 websites since the Paris attacks last week. These hacker groups warned that the level of cybervandalism would become more sophisticated and would target higher-level organizations.

Earlier this week, groups of hackers professing their allegiance to ISIS hacked Twitter and YouTube accounts run by the U.S. military’s Central Command. CENTCOM’s Twitter account was restored later that evening, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The bloody shooting at Charlie Hebdo on January 7 left 12 dead, including two policemen. In the past, the magazine has published controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate claimed responsibility for the attack via a video Wednesday, with an apparent leader of the group condemning the magazine and saying the attack had been done “in vengeance for the Prophet,” according to Sky News. While both French and U.S. intelligence authorities believe the affiliate was behind the attack, including its funding, they think it wasn’t directly carried out by the group itself, ABC News reports.

Two days later, on January 9, individuals believed to have been tied to ISIS held people hostage at a kosher supermarket in Paris; four hostages died. One terrorist, Amedy Coulibaly, was killed, while his accomplice and girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, is still at large.

The attacks have ignited conversations about anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim attitudes in the nation. On Thursday, President François Hollande, speaking at the Arab World Institute in Paris, said that anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim actions would be “severely punished.” The AP reports that French authorities have recently arrested 54 people who have either made anti-Semitic statements or spoken in favor of terrorism. In France, the punishment for promoting terrorism online is seven years in prison.

France has beefed up security since the attacks. France 24 reports that about 120,000 additional armed forces have been deployed in the past week. Heightened surveillance is in effect at government sites, the AP reports.

Like many local government buildings, the sheriff's county office in Pinellas, Florida, is adorned by a sizable green rug bearing our nation’s official motto: “In God We Trust.” Or, so they thought. An error by the manufacturer, American Floor Mats, spelled the phrase: “In Dog We Trust.”

The rug, which BBC reports cost $500, lay in the lobby leading to the sheriff’s office for a two months until a deputy working security noticed the mistake. It was removed on Wednesday, according to an office representative.

On the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page, dozens of people have written and requested purchasing the rug, and one cheeky user even suggested the office entrust the rug to the K-9 Unit. Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times that the office is considering auctioning the misspelled rug online, with the proceeds going to an animal rescue organization.

The company will replace the rug free of charge, according to ABC News. “In God We Trust” is the official state motto of Florida, as well as that of the United States.

Today marks the beginning of the world’s encounter with Pluto, as a NASA spacecraft that has journeyed for nine years begins its first phrase of approach to the dwarf planet.

The spacecraft is still 135 million miles away from Pluto, but Thursday marks a significant day for NASA scientists as the beginning of a series of phases in which the spacecraft can start studying and capturing increasingly detailed images of the Pluto system.

In just under six months, the world will catches its first close-up glimpse of Pluto when NASA’s New Horizons zooms within 6,200 miles of the dwarf planet on July 14.

New Horizons has traveled three billion miles since its launch on January 19, 2006, according to NASA. That’s farther than any other other space exploration mission has ever gone to reach its primary target.

As with space missions before it, the New Horizons spacecraft is packed with interesting memorabilia, including two U.S. flags and some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the American astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930.

The spacecraft has spent about two-thirds of the time since its launch (intermittently) “in hibernation” in order to reduce the wear and tear on equipment and minimize the risk of system failures. But on December 6 last year, the spacecraft came out of hibernation and switched into active mode for its final approach.

“This is a watershed event that signals the end of New Horizons crossing of a vast ocean of space to the very frontier of our solar system, and the beginning of the mission’s primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons in 2015,” said Alan Stern, the principal investigator for New Horizons, when the spacecraft awoke last month.

In a “PI’s Perspective” blog post from New Year’s Eve—or Pluto Eve as Stem called it—Stern explained that for the first few weeks after the spacecraft awoke, the team was checking and calibrating the instruments on board, planning and testing flight plans and otherwise preparing the spacecraft for Approach Phase 1 of the Pluto encounter, which began Thursday.

Starting on January 25, the spacecraft will be capturing images of the Pluto system as part of the “optical navigation campaign to make sure the spacecraft is on course,” says project scientist and co-investigator Hal Weaver. New Horizons will observe and take photos during one full rotation of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, around their common center of mass. NASA is expected to publish a movie that culls from those images sometime in February.

Pluto is a dwarf planet, which means that it’s round and orbits the sun like the eight major planets, but is much smaller in comparison and has not cleared its orbital path of other objects  such as the icy objects of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune’s orbit.

Though the early images will show Pluto and no more than two pixels across, by mid-May they will surpass what the Hubble telescope could capture. During Approach Phase 2, which begins on April 5, the team will be collecting data specifically meant for science rather than focusing primarily on navigation. On June 23, the start of the third and final approach phase, they will “really ramp up on the cadence of what we’re doing and the quality of what we’re doing,” says Weaver.

The three main goals of the “closest approach” in July, says Weaver, are to map the surface of Pluto with great detail, measure its composition, and probe its atmosphere.

Besides the seven instruments performing various scientific tasks on New Horizons, there’s a short list of other items along for the ride, or ”nine mementos on their way to the ninth planet,” a NASA spokesman says.

A portion of the ashes of Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto while working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona and died in 1997, are in a container attached to the bottom of the spacecraft. The inscription on the container reads:

Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system’s ‘third zone’ Adelle and Muron’s boy, Patricia’s husband, Annette and Alden’s father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997).

Tombaugh is not the first whose ashes have traveled on a NASA craft. In 1999, a vial of geologist and outer-space collisions expert Eugene Shoemaker’s ashes hit the moon while on NASA’s Lunar Prospector.

Other items onboard New Horizons include state quarters from Maryland and Florida, where New Horizons was built and launched, respectively; a CD-ROM containing the names of more than 400,000 people who wanted to be part of the exploration and another containing photographs of the project personnel; two U.S. flags; a piece of SpaceShip One; and a 29-cent U.S. postage stamp from 1991 that says “Pluto: Not Yet Explored.”

A small container of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes is affixed to the inside, upper deck of the New Horizons spacecraft.JHU-APL/NASA

As this U.S. postage stamp from 1991 flies past Pluto aboard NASA's New Horizons, its message will become obsolete. JHU-APL/NASA

“I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm,” Joni Ernst once said in 2014 campaign ad.

Back then, Ernst, a former colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard, was running for the U.S. Senate in Iowa. After she won and came to Washington, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina presented her with a pig castration device mounted on a wooden plaque.

Now that the GOP has tapped Ernst to deliver the opposition response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, it will be looking for her to deliver the same sort of verve and tenacity that she displayed on the campaign trail.

They seem to have the right woman for the job. Everything the Republicans do from now until 2016 will be designed to undermine Democratic hopes of keeping the White House. From that perspective, Ernst is a smart choice. For one thing, as a first-term senator, she’s a fresh face. Having previously served as an Iowa state senator from 2011 to 2014, she isn’t seen as part of the Washington establishment.

And with the presidential 2016 race shaping up to be a Clinton versus Bush contest, both sides need to combat the perception of staidness—a battle between two entrenched political dynasties won’t generate much excitement among young and Latino voters, who overwhelmingly chose Obama in 2012 but didn’t turn out for the midterms.

Choosing Ernst to deliver the response to the State of the Union is also smart because she’s a woman. It’s the second time in a row the Republicans have tapped a female politician to deliver the response. And with good reason. The party needs to attract women voters. Its record on abortion rights and access to contraception has left some women feeling lukewarm toward the GOP. And for the party to have a future on the national stage, it needs more interested (and interesting) women. In 2012, 55 percent of women voters cast their ballots for Obama, while only 43 percent voted for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Finally, Ernst is from the critical state of Iowa. Since 1972, presidential campaigns have begun with the Iowa caucuses, which are seen by many as a bellwether for potential candidates. The conventional wisdom is that if you bomb in Iowa, you’re finished. A hardline conservative from a key battleground state could be a valuable addition to a presidential ticket, so putting Ernst in front of national audiences now might pay dividends if voters respond to her speech.

Previously, Republicans chose Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington to give the State of the Union response, and before that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Rubio is now a presidential contender himself—a recent poll of Iowa voters by Gravis Marketing shows him with 4 percent of the vote. Romney leads with 21 percent, followed by 18 percent who are uncertain and 14 percent who plan to vote for former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

It’s unlikely Ernst will mention castrating hogs in her response to Obama’s State of the Union. But cutting pork? That’s another story.

It’s the hoops matchup that everyone has been longing for! The Cleveland Cavaliers, losers of nine of their last 10 games, visit the Los Angeles Lakers, owners of the NBA’s 27th-best record. Tonight at 10:30 p.m. on TNT: We know drama.

Actually, Cavs-Lakers is ratings gold in the mind of any television executive seeking to sell a 30-second spot. Certainly, ESPN would gladly take the 19-20 Cadaverliers, who last defeated an opponent with a winning record on the Winter Solstice (December 21), versus the LOLakers (12-27) for a seven-game series in June over any other option on the board.

Records be damned.

The Golden State Warriors have the league’s best record, the Atlanta Hawks are the NBA’s hottest team, and right now DeMarcus Cousins of the Sacramento Kings is its most dominant player (no, really), but no two NBA franchises generate more buzz, more headlines and more “hot takes” than the Cavs and Lakers. They’re more integral to ESPN’s daily programming than the two Tonys: Kornheiser and Reali. Why? Because Cleveland and Los Angeles are following the same can’t-miss, RealityTV recipe as the Kardashian clan: gargantuan egos, dysfunctional synergy and surgery.

Kobe Bryant. LeBron James.

“People ask me if this is a Clippers town yet,” says Arash Markazi, who covers Los Angeles for ESPN.com, “and it isn’t even close. It’s the Lakers by far and this is the hottest ticket of the season. We’re a star-driven town. We’d rather see a bald Tom Cruise on one leg than the best indie movie you’ve got.”

As for the Cavs, ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” devoted Wednesday’s show to the topic, “What’s the Cavaliers’ Problem and How Do The Fix It?” (Answer: It’s January 15; Give 'em time.). Still, it’s compelling theater. "These teams are led by arguably the two most popular stars in the NBA in LeBron and Kobe, who are both global sports icons,” says ESPN’s senior director or programming, Doug White, “The idea of those two going head to head is an intriguing event for many sports fans."

The Lakers, who lost first-round pick Julius Randle to a season-ending injury in their opener and then nine of their first 10, are the NBA’s most entertaining team—off the court. Kobe Bryant, who recently passed Michael Jordan on the league’s all-time scoring list (the first time the Black Mamba has passed all season...ba-dum!), has settled comfortably into his role of domineering big brother who will use his knees to pin you down by the shoulders and then menacingly suspend a ribbon of spittle over your face. Kobe’s “Don’t Give a Shit” epoch may be the most alluring chapter of his career.

Recently, Bryant was apprised of a Twitter war between two strangers arguing about the 36-year-old’s value at this point in his career, a feud that escalated to the point where one of them (@MyTweetsRealAF) drove 50 minutes to Temecula, California, where he believed the other tweep (@SnottieDrippen) to be.

On Christmas Day.

Kobe, when shown the tweets by ESPN.com’s Markazi, laughed and delivered this blunt commentary: “Mamba army don’t fuck around. They take after their captain.”

Officially, Bryant leads the league in shots attempted (per game) this season. Unofficially, he leads in shots directed at teammates and opposing players. Verbal shots. At a mid-December practice the 19-year veteran chastised his fellow Lakers for being “soft like Charmin” and barked at general manager Mitch Kupchak, “These mother-(blanks) aren’t doing (blank) for me!”

Two weeks later Mamba was dressed in a smart suit, taking one of coach Byron Scott’s enforced nights of rest, as the Lakers visited the Mavericks in Dallas. A heckler attempting to irk Bryant was silently rebuffed as Kobe performed the opposite maneuver of balling his hand into a fist, instead unwrapping his fist finger by finger to illustrate the number of NBA championships he has won. Then Kobe garnished it with his signature “No joke” glare.

Of course, Kobe long ago realized that this Laker lineup is not the one that help him earn a sixth world championship ring (tying his idol, Jordan) and he seems to actually be at peace with that. He’s having fun wearing the black hat everywhere he travels.

But this odyssey would be joyless if Bryant received no push-back, which he does from Laker guards Jeremy Lin and Nick Young, who themselves are as different as two people could be. The latter, Young, dubs himself “Swaggy P.,” dates hip-hop star Iggy Azalea and has been known to bark at Kobe in practice, “Nobody in the world can guard me. Nobody!”

Nick Young, aka "Swaggy P," is the Lakers’ id, its wanton, unreserved font of unfiltered thoughts and desires.Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters

Young is the Lakers’ id, its wanton, unreserved font of unfiltered thoughts and desires. “About Swaggy P? It’s Biblical,” he says. “You got to find it. It’s going to be in the New Testament. I’m like a Prophet of Swag.”

Lin is the introspective Harvard alum who seemed intimidated early in the season by having to be paired with Bryant in the backcourt (after future Hall of Famer Steve Nash announced he’d sit out the season due to back issues). Lin is the Laker’s ego, its rational, realistic side.

Jeremy Lin is the Laker’s ego, its rational, realistic side.Richard Mackson-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters

Kobe, of course, is and long has been L.A.’s superego.

Only after Bryant stoked enough ire and resentment in Lin did the Laker ship begin to chart a course toward, well, competence. After the Charmin assault Los Angeles went out and beat the defending champion Spurs in San Antonio. In the post-game locker room Lin quipped, “Not bad for a bunch of guys softer than toilet tissue.”

A week or so later, Scott sat Bryant for the first time all season on December 23 for a game against the Warriors, who have been the NBA’s dominant side since opening night. How did Lin, Young and the other Lakers show big brother how sorely he was missed? They spanked Golden State, 115-105.

And so, because it is that rare season in Los Angeles where expectations are low, this team is actually displaying signs of comity. And comedy. At a recent Lakers All-Access event Young said, “Kobe at practice, it’s crazy. He has no filter. He talks all day.”

“That’s ironic,” Lin quipped.

“What’s that?” said Young.

Speaking of irony, Kobe was a no-show at that “all-access event,” though, to be fair, he was not the only Laker allowed to RSVP his regrets.

The Lakers have learned to lose and laugh together. The Cavs are still learning one another’s names. Four-time league LeBron and perennial All-Star Kevin Love joined the cast this season as did coach David Blatt, but as the show has bombed in previews, new cast members have been added: center Timofey Mozgov and guards J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert have all been traded for in the past week.

Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James (23) holds back Cavaliers head coach David Blatt.Casey Sapio-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters

In terms of talent, the Cavaliers will be fine. At least the players will be. Blatt, a veteran Euroleague coach with Maccabi Tel Aviv, is discovering that, to paraphrase a famous Gregg Popovich quote, he’ll be lucky if LeBron and Love allows him to coach them. In Wednesday night’s loss at Phoenix, James provided the early favorite for Sports Vine of the Year when he pushed Blatt aside as the coach attempted to argue with an official. The King may have been attempting to spare his rookie coach a technical foul, but in terms of symbolism the moment will not soon be forgotten.

The Cavs are tighter than the lid of a martini shaker right now (whither a Prophet of Swag?). Blatt benched Love for the entire fourth quarter of that loss in Phoenix, citing subpar defense as a reason.

Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love (0) high fives guard J.R. Smith (5) and guard Kyrie Irving.Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters

No Love. And no love lost between Blatt and the All-Star for whom the Cavs traded away not one but two present or former No. 1 overall draft picks. That’s not a good look. Johnny Manziel is more secure on the south shore of Lake Erie right now than Blatt, and one wonders if there is any way possible to wrest Phil Jackson from his sinecure gig with the 5-35 New York Knicks for one last go 'round?

Perhaps the good folks at TNT will discuss that question later this evening at Staples. Who wins tonight, after all, does not really matter. It’s all about the plot line.