Bisphenol-A, or BPA, found in many types of plastics, bottles and thermal papers like receipts, has been spurned by many consumers due to evidence that it is an endocrine disruptor. Research has shown that in several types of animals, it interferes with the activity of hormones like estrogen and causes problems in reproduction, development, brain function and cardiovascular health.

Following consumers’ concerns, American manufacturers phased out the use of BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups by 2012. But it remains in many types of plastic and a wide variety of products. Looking for an alternative, some manufacturers use a chemically similar compound called bisphenol-S, or BPS, which several studies suggest may have similar negative effects on the body.

Adding to this accumulating body of work, a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that BPA and BPS both impair the growth of neurons in zebrafish. After being exposed to bisphenol, the fish began to behave as hyperactively as larvae, says study author Deborah Kurrasch, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

The findings raise concerns that both of these chemicals may impair brain development and cause long-term behavioral problems in humans, Kurrasch adds.

Perhaps most important, these effects were seen when developing fish embryos were exposed to extremely small concentrations of BPA and BPS—the same level at which the chemicals are found in two rivers in Alberta, for example.

“There definitely has been controversy about whether low-dose exposures to these chemicals are a cause for concern, and...this paper shows that very low doses at the kinds of levels that wildlife are exposed to, and even below the levels humans are often exposed to, are relevant and causing biological effects,” says Andrea Gore. She is a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Texas at Austin who wasn’t involved in the study.

In the study, researchers exposed zebrafish embryos to tiny concentrations of BPA—“1,000-fold lower than the accepted human daily exposure,” the paper states—and BPS. They found that these embryos developed 180 percent and 240 percent more new neurons, respectively, in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain thought to behave abnormally in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It also helps regulate many of the body’s most important hormones.

But this increase is not a good thing, Gore says; the number of cells birthed during this phase of neurogenesis is exquisitely controlled and carefully timed, to ensure proper function later in life. In the study, the abnormal growth led to an altered hypothalamus structure and, subsequently, the strangely hyperactive zebrafish behavior.

There are of course many differences between zebrafish and humans, but these creatures are a widely accepted non-human model that is increasingly being used to help develop all kinds of human drugs, Gore says. And neurogenesis in the hypothalamus happens very similarly in all vertebrates, or animals with backbones, she says.

“The birth of neurons in the developing embryo happens in a very similar way, whether you’re talking about a fish or humans,” Gore says. “Of course, we have a much more complicated brain…but it’s not a big stretch to assume that those environmental chemicals that perturb this process in zebrafish are doing the same kind of thing in mammals, including humans.”

There are also two epidemiological studies that show that children of women who had higher levels of BPA in their urine while pregnant had a slightly increased risk of developing ADHD, Kurrasch says.  

And studies in mice also suggest that BPA impairs the growth of neurons, and have linked embryonic exposure to the chemical with behavioral abnormalities like hyperactivity, she says.

“If you see effects with BPA over and over again on lots of different species, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that it has similar effects on the developing human brain,” says Heather Patisaul, an endocrinologist at North Carolina State University who wasn’t involved in the study.

There is one more major implication of the study, Gore says. It has long been known that BPA mimics estrogen, a hormone particularly important for female development. But this study shows BPA and BPS are also behaving—at least at this point in brain development—like androgens, a class of hormones that includes testosterone and which are found in higher quantities in males.

This is “a potentially new mechanism in which BPA is affecting the body, which is quite compelling” and concerning, Patisaul says.

The American Chemistry Council, a trade group that represents plastic manufacturers, didn’t appear to be impressed by the study. “The relevance of this limited study on zebrafish, as asserted by the authors, is not at all clear, and it would not be scientifically appropriate to draw any conclusions about human health based on this limited experiment,” they wrote in a statement.

The group references the fact that the Food and Drug Administration has stated that BPA is generally safe to use in food and beverage containers, and the agency just reiterated its approval of the use of the substance in can linings.

But it seems prudent to mention that there are links between government activities regarding BPA and the plastics industry. For example, a 2008 investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stated that “a government report claiming that bisphenol A is safe was written largely by the plastics industry and others with a financial stake in the controversial chemical.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States announced sweeping new rules on Thursday that will significantly ease sanctions on Cuba, opening up the communist-ruled island to expanded U.S. travel, trade and financial activities.

Defying hardline critics in Congress, President Barack Obama made good on his commitment last month to loosen restrictions on dealings with Cuba as part of a historic effort to end decades of hostility.

The 54-year-old U.S. embargo on Cuba will remain in place - only Congress can lift it.

But the package of regulations issued by the Treasury and Commerce Departments, which will take effect on Friday, will allow U.S. exports of telecommunications, agricultural and construction equipment, permit expanded travel by Americans to the island and open banking relations.

It was the first tangible U.S. step to implement economic changes Obama pledged on Dec. 17 when he and Cuban President Raul Castro announced plans to restore diplomatic relations between the old Cold War foes.

"Today’s announcement takes us one step closer to replacing out-of-date policies that were not working and puts in place a policy that helps promote political and economic freedom for the Cuban people," said U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew.

While Castro has welcomed last month's deal, he has made clear that Havana does not intend to abandon single-party rule or the state-controlled economy. Congressional critics of Obama's shift say that Washington should not be rewarding Cuba.

The new regulations will allow Americans to travel to Cuba for any of a dozen specific reasons, including family visits, education and religion, without first obtaining a special license from the U.S. government as was previously the case.

But general tourism will still be banned.

John McAuliff, executive Director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, which has organized trips to Cuba, said that apart from Cuban-Americans visiting relatives, most other Americans would still be corralled into escorted group tours.

Still, U.S. travelers will be allowed to bring home small numbers of the Cuban cigars that are highly rated by aficionados.

It will also be easier for U.S. companies to export mobile phone devices and software as well as to provide Internet services in Cuba. U.S. airlines will be permitted to expand flights to the Caribbean island. Delta Air Lines and JetBlue Airways said they would look into adding services.

In an expansion of remittances allowed, Americans will now be able to send up to $8,000 to Cuba a year, up from $2,000 previously, and bring $10,000 with them when they travel to the country. They will also be able to use credit and debit cards.

In addition, a changed definition of “cash in advance” payments required by Cuban buyers could help businesses, most notably U.S. agriculture, gain greater access to Cuban markets. The largest U.S. meat processor, Tyson Foods Inc , which already does some business with Cuba, hailed the changes.

The announcement came after the Obama administration said Cuba had fulfilled its promise to free 53 political prisoners and a week before high-level U.S.-Cuba talks in Havana aimed at normalizing ties, including discussions on when to reopen embassies.

'SIGNIFICANT STEP'

Obama's spokesman, Josh Earnest, called it a "significant step" in delivering on Obama's new Cuba strategy. The president declared last month that decades of trying to force change by isolating the island had not worked.

But Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American who has been strongly critical of the policy shift, called the announcement "a windfall for the Castro regime that will be used to fund its repression against Cubans, as well as its activities against U.S. national interests."

While Obama is using executive powers to poke holes in trade barriers, Republicans who control Congress have made clear they will not let him entirely dismantle the embargo. Washington imposed economic sanctions as Fidel Castro steered the island along a socialist path that made it a close ally of the Soviet Union, and severed diplomatic ties with Cuba in 1961.

U.S. officials made clear the new measures do not mean Cuba is now open for business, stressing that while investments in Cuba’s limited array of small businesses are permitted, general investment will still be prohibited.

And while telecommunications firms can export devices, U.S. companies still have to reach an agreement with the Cuban government, which controls all imports and maintains a firm grip on Internet access.

Reaction from the U.S. business community, which had pressed the administration to open up Cuban markets, was positive but tempered with caution.

“The regulations were welcome and they went even farther than was articulated in the president's announcement," said Jake Colvin, vice president at the National Foreign Trade Council. "But now it will depend on the reality on the ground in Cuba."

There was no immediate official reaction from Havana, but some ordinary Cubans welcomed the changes.

“If more Americans can come here, that means more customers, and this will be good for the economy,” said Orlando Veliz, a cook for a private restaurant in Havana.

The U.S. military is planning to deploy more than 400 troops to help train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, along with hundreds of U.S. support personnel, a Pentagon spokesman told Reuters on Thursday.

The U.S. military has not yet identified where it will draw its forces from for the training mission, expected to begin in the spring at sites outside Syria, Colonel Steve Warren said. Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have offered to host the training.

Warren did not offer additional details on the troop figures, first reported by Defense One website.

The training program is a part of President Barack Obama's multi-year plan to field local forces in Syria to halt and eventually roll back Islamic State fighters, while pounding them with U.S.-led airstrikes.

The Pentagon has estimated that it can train more than 5,000 recruits in the first year and that up to 15,000 will be needed to retake areas of eastern Syria controlled by Islamic State.

Critics in Congress have said the Pentagon program won't aid Syrian opposition forces fast enough, however, and question whether it is too small to influence the course of Syria's multi-pronged civil war between PresidentBashar al-Assad and his opponents.

Across the border in Iraq, Obama has authorized more than 3,000 U.S. troops to advise and train Iraqi and Kurdish forces.

The disclosure of the planned troop deployments for the Syria training mission came just days after senior U.S. officials met Syrian opposition and civil society leaders in Istanbul to discuss the program.

U.S. Major General Michael Nagata, Combined Joint Interagency Task Force - Syria Director, and U.S. Special Envoy for Syria Daniel Rubinstein led the meeting on the U.S. side.

"These introductory meetings were an important step as we prepare to launch the train-and-equip program later this spring with our international partners," said Pentagon spokeswoman Commander Elissa Smith.

German police said on Friday they had arrested two people following a raid on 12 homes and a mosque group linked to radical Islamic Salafists, shortly after Belgian police killed two men during similar raids against an Islamist group.

The arrests followed investigations which have been going on for several months into five Turkish citizens aged 31 to 44, who are suspected of "preparing a serious act of violence against the state in Syria" and money laundering, police said.

A police spokesman said the suspects were probably part of an extremist cell that had recruited fighters for Syria. Martin Steltner at the public prosecutors' office said the raids were unrelated to the Islamist militant attacks in Paris last week.

"It must be said very clearly that there is no connection to the attacks in Paris and there are no indications that attacks were planned in Germany," said Steltner.

Police said one of the men arrested was the leader of a group of Turkish and Russian citizens of Chechen and Dagestani origin who had radicalized the group through lessons on Islam while the other was responsible for the group's finances.

Some 250 police officers took part in the raid in Berlin.

Police said there were no indications that the group had been planning attacks in Germany.

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".

Belgian investigators said a plot to murder police officers across the country had been foiled "within hours or days" of being launched by raids in which two Islamist gunmen were killed.

Fifteen suspects were in custody on Friday, they said, after a dozen raids around Brussels and in Verviers, the eastern town where two men believed to have fought in Syria were shot dead on Thursday after opening fire on police with assault weapons.

Two of those under arrest were seized in France, but state prosecutors said they still had no evidence of a link between the Belgians and Islamists who killed 17 people in Paris last week at a Jewish store and satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

With security tightened across Europe, and other arrests in France and also in Germany on Friday, a man with a military weapon took hostages at post office near Paris. The incident, which ended with his surrender, unfolded after Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in the city to offer U.S. solidarity in combating militants.

In Belgium, Prime Minister Charles Michel urged people not to panic, saying authorities believed their actions had thwarted any imminent attack. Home to half a million Muslims, or five percent of the population, Belgium believes some 300 citizens have fought in Syria - the highest rate per head in Europe.

Security was tight at public buildings in the capital and at police stations. The army provided 150 troops to bolster police, who were instructed not to patrol alone. At the Verviers apartment where the two still unidentified gunmen died, security forces found police uniforms as well as four AK-47 rifles.

Officials declined comment on reports of threats to behead a policeman but said the targets were all over the country.

"This group was on the point of carrying out terrorist attacks aiming to kill police officers in the streets and in police stations," state prosecutor Eric Van Der Sypt told a news conference. They were set to act "in the next hours or days".

RADICALIZATION

Of the 15 people detained, one had been with the dead gunmen in Verviers, a struggling textile town near the German border, and two were held in France at Belgium's request. The other 12 were seized around Brussels, most in the Molenbeek quarter, home to many poor descendants of North African immigrants.

A government plan to combat radicalization and violence by those returning from Syria includes a move to strip those coming back of travel documents, as well as measures to improve intelligence and persuade people to forsake militant groups.

In Verviers, Muslims attending Friday weekly prayers distanced themselves from militants but had few ideas of how to combat the radicalization of disenchanted young men.

"Who can defend against this? Who can defend against youngsters who in some weeks, some months become radicalized?" asked local mosque imam Franck Hensch. "The Internet is the main source of radicalization ... How can we act? Sadly, I don't have a solution and I don't think the authorities have one either."

Belgian officials say their investigation into the group began several weeks ago, before the Charlie Hebdo bloodshed, and they believe the cell was acting without international links.

Separately, Belgian investigators have been interrogating a man suspected of supplying weapons to Amedy Coulibaly, the Frenchman who killed hostages last week at the Jewish grocery.

A former Belgian counter-terrorism chief told RTBF radio that the Paris attacks may have accelerated the timing of the arrests: "Paris may have speeded things up," said Andre Jacob.

"Some information that may have been barely 'ripe' has been acted on quicker than planned ... because the threat was real."

Belgium has seen Islamist violence before. A Frenchman of Algerian origin faces trial there, accused of shooting dead four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels last May.

A court in Antwerp is due to rule on 46 people accused of recruiting fighters for Syria. It was to have given its verdict this week but delayed it for a month after the Paris violence.

Saudi Arabia's ruling family is coming under pressure from Western countries over its weekly flogging of writer Raif Badawi for "insulting Islam", but it appears more worried about the risk of offending domestic conservatives if it lets him off.

The political stakes over the punishment of Badawi, who will face 50 more lashes on Friday, have been heightened by the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo newspaper and its publication on Wednesday of new cartoons lampooning Islam's Prophet Mohammad.

The kingdom is attempting to marshal conservative Muslims behind a campaign against Islamist militants in al Qaeda and Islamic State (IS), but has stirred anger among many of them for what they see as its weak response to the cartoons.

Riyadh issued an unqualified statement of condemnation of the attack, echoed by conservatives in the country, but it did not strongly criticize the images and its ambassador took part in a solidarity march in which protesters carried the cartoons.

"They're under pressure inside to punish people like him, especially among Salafis. It is a question of the legitimacy of the state. You have to remember those people are very influential at a street level," said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi security expert with close ties to the Saudi Interior Ministry.

Saudi officials were not available for comment.

Since the attacks in France, the United States and European Union have criticized the punishment of Badawi, who had accused clergy of extremism on his "Saudi Liberals" website and prompted fury on social media. Overturning his conviction would look to some Saudi Islamists like a betrayal of core Muslim values.

Against the background of regional turmoil, the authorities have issued tougher penalties against all forms of dissent in the past year, from women driving to social media comments supporting Islamist militants, and have increased the use of the death penalty - via public beheadings.

Moreover, it is the top clergy that controls the judiciary, making it particularly uncomfortable for the ruling dynasty to overturn its decisions given that it is unelected and depends on clerical approval for part of its legitimacy.

CONSERVATIVE ANGER

In an example of the ire felt by conservatives, Islamist activist Mohsen al-Awaji told Reuters he would not even speak about Badawi's case because of his anger over the publication of new cartoons depicting Mohammad in Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

"We don't have time these days to think of this guy Badawi because of the hatred taken by the West towards all Muslims when they publish these sorts of pictures against Mohammad. This is on the mind of everyone," he said.

Badawi, who was flogged 50 times in public a week ago by an Interior Ministry official is to face the same punishment every Friday until he has received 1,000 lashes. He will then spend 10 years in prison.

There has been almost no discussion of Badawi's flogging in Saudi press, underscoring official sensitivities over the subject, but on social media there has been some debate over the fairness of his punishment.

One person, Tweeting under the name Fattima, wrote: "Saudi Arabia condemns Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in France and at the same time it lashes Raif Badawi for freedom of speech, what an ignorant government".

But the opinion of Ibrahim al-Zubaidi, another Twitter user, that "anyone who will offend Islam deserves the same fate" appeared more typical of Saudi opinion on the social media platform.

Awaji said conservatives were at risk of becoming sympathetic to militants after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

"People are angry with the government. They think it is showing more respect to the West than it is to the Prophet. They even shared in this demonstration in Paris while there were pictures in the demonstration insulting the Prophet," he said.

WESTERN PRESSURE

The Al Saud dynasty have worked hard over the past decade to build up religious support for their campaign against al Qaeda and, more recently, IS, which attack the family for its ties to the West and gradual moves to liberalize Saudi society.

They have imprisoned clerics who openly backed the militant groups, have sacked others for comments the authorities viewed as extremist and have for years pressed senior clergy to denounce al Qaeda, IS and similar groups as "deviant".

Saudi implementation of Sharia punishments like beheading as well as flogging for crimes such as adultery, apostasy, blasphemy and witchcraft, along with its denial of equal rights for women, is the source of intense criticism in the West.

But when U.S. President Barack Obama visited Riyadh in March, Washington said he did not discuss human rights with King Abdullah in a meeting that focused on regional conflicts - an illustration of the limits of Western pressure.

However, the Al Saud have also sometimes curtailed their use of Sharia penalties in cases that particularly outraged international opinion, such as the punishment of rape victims for breaking gender segregation rules.

While King Abdullah appears unlikely to risk angering domestic opinion by issuing a pardon to Badawi, Alani said, he might respond to growing international pressure by informally suspending the floggings before they are completed.

"The first part is done and they have made their point," he said.

Ifthekar Jaman was a self-selected enthusiast with no training who travelled to Syria at his own instigation and at his own expense. There are some similarities between his early life and that of Cherif Kouachi, 32, the French jihadi who, with his 34-year-old brother Said, shot dead 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. But in other ways Kouachi conforms more closely to the pattern of a militant recruited and trained by others.

Like Jaman, the Kouachis’ parents were immigrants. Like him, too, the brothers were members of a da’wah proselytising group and grew up in a regional city, Rennes in Brittany, western France. But unlike Jaman, who came from a stable family, the Kouachi brothers were orphans, raised by foster parents. Cherif was also not a pious boy. He was an aspiring rapper and, according to his lawyer in 2008, more a “pot-smoker from the projects than an Islamist”. “He smokes, drinks, doesn’t sport a beard and has a girlfriend before marriage,” said Vincent Ollivier. Cherif himself told the court: “Before, I was a delinquent.”

That early history and Cherif’s subsequent embrace of doctrinaire violence fits a well-established progression in which a recruiter targets troubled youngsters and present righteous Islamist militancy as their salvation. Cherif’s transition took a decade. The 2008 trial followed his arrest for attempting to travel to Iraq in 2005, a journey he undertook with the help of a group of Paris jihadis that had already sent several Frenchmen to Iraq with whom he had trained in Buttes Chaumont since 2003. By then, Cherif was also receiving religious instruction from Farid Benyettou, a young self-styled preacher whose local mosque had ejected him for his radicalism. “I think in Mr Benyettou he found someone who could tell him what to do, like an older brother,” said Ollivier, the lawyer.

At the trial, Cherif was found guilty and sentenced to three years for conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, of which he served half. In 2010 he was arrested again, accused of plotting to free Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, an ethnic Algerian who injured 30 people when he set off a bomb in the Paris metro in 1995. Said was also detained but after three months the brothers were released without prosecution for lack of evidence. One man jailed in that case was Amedy Coulibaly, who was released from prison in November last year. The day after the Charlie Hebdo attack, he killed a policewoman in Paris, then the next day four more people from a group of hostages he was holding at a supermarket, demanding the police end their pursuit of the Kouachis.

When Cherif was first arrested in 2005, he had no military training. The proficiency of the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices – in which the brothers executed 10 people in five minutes after reading out their names, then gunned down two policemen in the street outside, then eluded a massive manhunt for two and a half days – suggest that had changed and some reports have claimed that one or both of the brothers travelled to Yemen in 2011 to train with al-Qaida in the Arabic Peninsula.

But in at least one sense, the Kouachis, Amedy Coulibaly and Ifthekar Jaman were the same. They all anticipated a glorious death. “Farid told me it is written in the scriptures that it’s good to die as a martyr,” Cherif said in court in 2008. “Thanks to Farid’s advice, my doubts evaporated. He provided justification for my coming death.”

Alex Perry's in-depth ebook on homegrown jihadis, Once Upon a Jihad, is available now from Newsweek Insights.

Below the green slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece, the small town of Distomo was unusually full of people. The visitors were marking the 70th anniversary of the Distomo massacre, one of the worst Nazi atrocities in the country during the Second World War, in which more than 200 civilians were executed.

On a hill where a memorial to the victims stands, Greek and German high-school students presented the “Children of War”, a theatrical ode to peace. Photographs of Nazi troops on the Athens Acropolis were projected onto the backdrop. The audience watched in solemn silence.

In the town’s cafés, the atmosphere was normally more boisterous. Soon, Maria Sideri-Tsami’s name is mentioned. Three members of Sideri-Tsami’s family were killed in the Distomo massacre. Yet the 23-year-old was a candidate in regional elections last May  for Golden Dawn, the party widely described as neo-Nazi that has risen to prominence in Greece in recent years.

Sideri-Tsami has blamed communist resistance fighters for the massacre, saying they provoked the Nazis by staging an ambush. “They knew the Germans would come back to the village to kill the people if they were attacked,” she said soon after the memorial ceremony.

Sideri-Tsami’s embrace of the far-right may seem extraordinary. But even people with ancestors killed by the Nazis or a family tradition of leftism forged in the Second World War have joined Golden Dawn, which has tapped into anger at Greece’s deep economic crisis and disillusionment with traditional politics. In the run-up to the elections, Golden Dawn proudly displayed the video of Sideri-Tsami’s interview on its website.

But her declaration was met with less enthusiasm locally. “It’s shameful,” says 84-year-old Maria Sechremeli, a distant relative of Sideri-Tsami. Sechremeli survived the massacre by hiding under the body of an executed neighbour. The scar of a stray bullet from the massacre still marks her leg. Sitting in her living room, Sechremeli says she never used to talk about the massacre with her grandchildren, not wanting to upset them or perpetuate the hatred from that era. But she changed her mind after becoming alarmed at the rise of Golden Dawn. “Do they want the best for Greece? By killing people? Doing all these ugly things? she says. “You can tell what kind of people they are.”

Skulls and bones in an ossuary in the Greek village of Distomo serve as a reminder of the Nazi massacre of 218 civilians. Yiorgos Karahalis/Reuters

After decades on the political fringe, Golden Dawn came to much broader attention in 2010 with a nationalist, anti-immigration and frequently violent agenda. Media and academics have labelled the party neo-Nazi or fascist, but its members deny any links to national socialism.The party’s rise coincided with an unprecedented increase in racist attacks against immigrants. This violence went largely unpunished for years until a man with close links to Golden Dawn murdered anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in an Athens suburb in September 2013. The killer was arrested and the government launched a crackdown on the party.

Today, six high-ranking party members, including leader Nikos Michaloliakos, are in jail awaiting trial for setting up and operating a criminal organisation. The trial, which the party sees as political persecution, is expected to begin imminently. Despite the proceedings, Greece’s political scene has been in such flux that Sechremeli says she is afraid Golden Dawn could seize power and trigger a new civil war – in a country whose political traditions were established in the Second World War and which have been upheld for generations since.

Greece was riven by civil war after Germany’s defeat in the Second World War. More than 100,000 people were killed in a brutal battle for power between leftists and rightists – an early Cold War conflict that ended only in 1940 with the defeat of the left. Many of Golden Dawn’s leadership come from families that were prominent in Greece’s post-war right. But not all. Giorgos Germenis has very fond memories of his maternal grandfather, Panayotis Griziotis. He remembers him as a “modern grandpa” who was always close to the younger generations.

During the war, Griziotis was a communist guerrilla leader in western Greece. When his daughter was 10 years old, he would send her to fetch the then illegal newspaper of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). She too became a communist. She gave birth to Germenis, whom she used to carry in her arms while putting up posters with party comrades for the annual May Day rally in Athens. Her son is now one of Golden Dawn’s most prominent members of parliament and the first party executive to publicly acknowledge, in 2012, that his grandfather was a communist guerrilla.

His revelation came as a huge shock to leftists, who could not comprehend how someone with such family traditions could end up on the far-right of the political spectrum. Germenis is currently in prison awaiting trial with the rest of the party leadership. For this article, he gave written answers to questions passed on by his wife when she visited him in the maximum-security Korydallos jail in Athens.

According to Germenis, people who were once communists or socialists are among the most zealous Golden Dawn supporters. “They feel that the parties they were following all these years betrayed them!” he writes. Germenis joined the ranks of Golden Dawn in the early 1990s, when the ghost of nationalism was haunting the Balkan peninsula. His parents found out about his ideological departure much later. He says no one in his family tried to change his mind, nor did he try to change theirs. Germenis writes that his mother now believes that Golden Dawn is a truly revolutionary party. “In our rallies she didn’t see the usual party henchmen and the politically appointed executives but people from next door, workers, breadwinners, and that impressed her,” he writes.

Such ordinary people and their struggles made a deep impact on Tasos Papaioannou. He says he has been shocked by a rise in the number of suicides linked to the economic crisis in his home region of Corinth. Papaioannou, in his early forties, does not like to be called a taxi driver, unless he is driving Greek clients. For most of his day, he is a chauffeur taking wealthy foreign tourists to ancient Corinth, about 80km west of Athens. His parents emigrated to Australia when he was two years old. Twenty years later he returned for a holiday and stayed.

Papaioannou now votes for Golden Dawn, a strongly anti-immigrant party, despite the fact that he experienced discrimination as a Greek in Australia. His grandfather, Giorgos, was also a communist guerrilla in the Corinth region during the civil war. “I never met him. I wish I had, even though my views are entirely different,” he says.

Supporters of Golden Dawn.Milos Bicanski/AFP/Getty

When the Greek economic crisis started, Papaioannou says he began to identify enemies: immigrants; corrupt politicians who embezzled the people’s wealth; the International Monetary Fund; those who held the leftist beliefs of his grandfather. He claims that some extreme rightists in nearby villages have boxes of Kalashnikov rifles stored in their houses. Just in case.

Further south, Nikos Kourakos is a senior official at the Golden Dawn office in Kalamata. His grandfather fought the Germans as part of the communist resistance and was executed by a member of the notorious “security battalions” formed by Greece’s collaborationist government. He does not feel his decision to join Golden Dawn more than 10 years ago offends the memory of his grandfather.

For some families, however, a child’s decision to break with long-held values and support the far-right is a source of great anguish. Giorgos Triantafyllou, a pensioner whose name has been changed here at his request, lives in a small community of which the Nazis executed almost half the population, including one of his relatives, during the Second World War. His family has a long history of resistance fighters during the German occupation – and later, of victims of political persecution during the rule of the military junta in the 1960s and 1970s.

Triantafyllou turned to religion and became a Jehovah’s Witness. He and his childhood sweetheart raised two children according to their values. But after turning 18, their older child denounced the family’s religious beliefs and eventually joined Golden Dawn, standing as a candidate for the party in this year’s regional elections. Triantafyllou discovered the shocking news while surfing the internet. He was utterly devastated and he has not spoken to his firstborn since. His distress is heightened by the fact the Nazis persecuted and imprisoned Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Likewise, pollsters, political analysts and sociologists ponder why Golden Dawn has proved to be so popular in areas formerly dominated by the Communist party. In Perama and Nikea, two districts of Athens long considered “red strongholds”, there has been a sharp rise in support for Golden Dawn in recent years. Vassiliki Georgiadou, an associate professor of political science at Athens’ Panteion University, who has been carrying out extensive research in these districts, says the impoverishment of the working class and local long-term unemployment – which hovers around 70% – have created fertile territory for Golden Dawn.

The party has blamed the local trade union’s political activity for the decreasing competitiveness of local shipyards and subsequent loss of jobs. Golden Dawn set up its own trade union and promised work. Some workers signed up.

Politicised youths have used graffiti to turn the neighbourhoods’ walls into a battleground of ideologies. “Our grandfathers were refugees, our fathers were immigrants and we are racists!” one leftist slogan proclaims. “Free all jailed Golden Dawn members!” says another, not far from Korydallos prison, where the party’s leadership is incarcerated.

In another part of Athens, there’s a graffio offering an ironic commentary on the twists of history. An old man smoking a cigarette observes, “I fought the fascists so that my grandchildren could bring them back.”

The gunman who had taken three people hostage in Paris this afternoon has surrendered to police following negotiations.

The incident came just a week after Amedy Coulibaly killed four people in a hostage situation in a kosher grocery. French police said that today’s situation was not connected to terrorism, and French radio station RTL reported that the security forces know the assailant as he is a petty thief.

Liberation newspaper had said the the man involved was “disappointed in love” and had “lost his head”. AFP reported that he was "speaking incoherently".

RTL has also reported that the man was armed with a gun, a Kalashnikov rifle and grenades and that he took the hostages in a post office at about 12pm. The building is situated on the Général De Gaulle in Colombes, which is in the northwest suburb of Paris.

One Twitter user posted a picture of a police car blocking off the road:

Tout est bouclé à Colombes... Et moi aussi! #colombes#prisedotagepic.twitter.com/Ielg0EdyXX

— Julien Peschard (@JulienPeschard) January 16, 2015

And another tweeted a picture of the police helicopter overhead;

L'hélicoptère de la sécurité civile tourne en rond au dessus du site, ça sent pas bon. pic.twitter.com/Pthn3N4quB

— Florian Berenson (@Florian_Beren) January 16, 2015

Tout est bouclé à Colombes... Et moi aussi! #colombes#prisedotagepic.twitter.com/Ielg0EdyXX

— Julien Peschard (@JulienPeschard) January 16, 2015

And another tweeted a picture of the police helicopter overhead;

L'hélicoptère de la sécurité civile tourne en rond au dessus du site, ça sent pas bon. pic.twitter.com/Pthn3N4quB

— Florian Berenson (@Florian_Beren) January 16, 2015

PayPal billionaire and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has announced plans to build a test track for his conceptual high-speed transport system. He tweeted today that he plans to build a five-mile test track, “most likely in Texas”, leading to much online discussion about the mysterious and futuristic Hyperloop project.

The Hyperloop is the name of Musk’s idea for a new public transport system that will take commuters hundreds of miles in minutes. Musk has described the system as: “A cross between a Concorde, a rail gun, and an air hockey table." Talking to the Silicon Valley magazine, PandoDaily in 2012, Musk initially outlined his plans for the “fifth mode of transport.”

Musk released a 57-page report in August 2013, detailing how the system might work, and Gizmag simplified his explanation, describing the Hyperloop as: “An elevated, reduced-pressure tube that contains pressurized capsules driven within the tube by a number of linear electric motors.” These pressurised pods would ride in a low-pressure tube, taking passengers long distances at very high speeds, up to 800 mph even. The pods would travel over ground on elevated pylons, with air bearings propelling the pod using, “the same basic principle as an air hockey table” as Musk puts it. He has even said that it could be self-powering if solar panels were used.

The entrepreneur and inventor acquired much of his fortune from the online payment system Paypal, which he co-founded in 1998. Musk is known for his imaginative and enterprising ideas which include pioneering the first electric sports car and founding SpaceX, a space transport company whose ultimate goal is helping to colonize mars. Hyperloop is one in a long line of visionary endeavors.

Musk originally intended the Hyperloop track to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco, competing with the state-owned California high-speed rail, which he has described as “both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world.” The Hyperloop, on the other hand, aims to travel the 400 mile journey in “about 30 minutes”, according to business site Inc.

Although the Californian route was the initial plan, Musk is also considering routes in other parts of the U.S. as well as in Europe and Asia. However, these are not immediately pressing decisions - though great strides have been made in the development of Hyperloop’s low pressure tubes and pylons, Wired reports that we are “at least 10 years away from a commercially viable Hyperloop.”

Musk also mentioned that the test track will be used for, “companies and student teams to test out their pods”, suggesting that he may open the development of the Hyperloop to people that want to work on it. Musk has already handed over much of the Hyperloop’s development to JumpStartFund, a platform for crowd collaboration, allowing interested volunteers to work on the project.

Musk added in a subsequent tweet:

Britain’s long lost spacecraft Beagle 2 has miraculously been found, having been stranded on Mars for over a decade, the United Kingdom Space Agency announced today. The lander was meant to study life on the Red Planet but vanished in 2003, and has not be seen or heard of again until this week.

Scientists operating the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spotted remains of what they recognized as Beagle 2 on 12th January, just 6km from where it was originally supposed to touch down on Christmas Day 2003.

After successfully being launched into space on 19th December 2003, Beagle 2 went off the radar six days later. Named after Charles’ Darwin’s expedition ship HMS Beagle, Beagle 2 was Britain’s first mission to Mars, and the spacecraft was designed to study rocks and soil for carbon signatures over the course of 180 days.

Scientists speculate that Beagle 2 broke upon landing, and that a motor which was supposed to open solar panels didn’t work, preventing the spacecraft from being able to make a connection with Earth.

“We were always pretty sure that we didn’t miss the planet, but there was no knowledge of where it was because there was no signal at all” Professor Mark McCaughrean, senior science advisor at the European Space Agency (ESA) said at the press conference held by the UK Space Agency today to officially announce the discovery of Beagle 2.

Professor Mark Sims from the University of Leicester, who was the mission’s manager said that the “bad luck scenario” means that no data could be collected from the mission. “Beagle 2 had to fully deploy all of its solar panels for the data to be collected, but imaging is showing that only two or three panels deployed.” He added that: “There’s a share of frustration that we got so close to getting science on the surface of Mars.”

However, Professor Sims still sees the project as a success, saying: “Beagle 2 shows that the UK can do innovative science and engineering, and will do so in the future.”

Friday’s announcement comes just one year after the death of the mission’s leading Cambridge scientist, Professor Colin Pillinger, who was the founding member of the Planetary and Space Science Institute at the Open University. Professor Pillinger had hoped that Beagle 2 would shed light on life on Mars in the same way that Darwin did about life on Earth. He died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 70.

In 2005, convinced that a speck on a photo of the surface of Mars was Beagle 2, Professor Pillinger called a press conference. However, high-resolution imagery from Nasa later showed that it was not. He continued to defend the mission against critics who blamed poor management for its failure.

Attending the conference today, Professor Pillinger's daughter Shusanah said that, despite the incredible discovery: "There is a tinge of sadness that [my father] can't be here. You can see that in the room where all his colleagues, all the people he worked with, everybody is gutted he cannot be here.” She added that her father would have been happy to "defy the critics who want to say that Beagle 2 is a failure", according to The Telegraph.

With the recovery of Beagle 2’s remains, scientists are now in the process of collecting imaging data from the MRO. “We have quite good imaging data today,” Professor Sims said:  “Now we have to try to put together a story of what went wrong.”

Updated | LONDON (Reuters) - The case of a Saudi blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes, which has been widely criticized by Western governments, has been referred to the Supreme Court by the King's office, the BBC reported on Friday.

Badawi was flogged 50 times last week but a second round of lashings due on Friday was postponed for what a source told Reuters were medical reasons.

Political stakes over Badawi's case, which included a charge of insulting Islam, have been heightened by the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo newspaper and its subsequent publication of more cartoons featuring Islam's Prophet Mohammad.

In a brief newsbreak without quotes, the BBC said Badawi's wife had told it the decision had given the blogger hope that the authorities want to end his punishment.

Rights watchdog Amnesty International said in a statement that a medical examination found that Badawi's earlier "wounds had not yet healed properly and that he would not be able to withstand another round of lashes at this time."

The doctor who carried out the medical check-up recommended that the flogging be postponed until next week, Amnesty said, adding "it is unclear whether the authorities will fully comply with this demand."

Badawi, who set up the "Free Saudi Liberals" website, was arrested in June 2012 for offences which also included cyber crime and disobeying his father - a crime in Saudi Arabia.

The prosecution had demanded he be tried for apostasy, which carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, but a judge dismissed that charge.

He was sentenced last year to 10 years in jail, a fine of 1 million riyals ($267,000) and 1,000 lashes after prosecutors challenged an earlier sentence of seven years and 600 lashes as too lenient.

The United States has called on Riyadh last week to cancel the sentence of 1,000 lashes.

The Swiss franc has risen dramatically against the euro following the unexpected removal of the long-standing exchange-rate control by the Swiss National Bank (SNB). The cap - which was introduced in 2011 - was designed to prevent the Swiss currency from falling below 1.20 francs per euro in order to protect Swiss exporters.

The announcement on Thursday immediately sent the currency market into a flurry of panic, causing the Swiss franc to soar by around 37% in value against the euro at its peak. Whilst it has since leveled out, it still remains at around 30% of pre-removal value.

Whilst the move has made the average Swiss a bit richer overnight, the effects on the economy as a whole have not been positive. Swiss stock markets have been hit hard, plummeting by over 10%. A stronger currency also hits exporters, and Swiss companies selling goods abroad such as Nestle, Swatch and Roche may be forced to hike prices abroad. Meanwhile, imports will become cheaper, leading to fears of deflation hitting the Swiss economy.

The move by the SNB was largely unexpected, especially since its president Thomas Jordan declared only last month that he would “defend [the ceiling] with the utmost determination”.

So why has the cap been removed?

According to Jennifer McKeown, chief economist at Capital Economics, the “upwards pressure” on the Swiss franc was “so great” that the SNB feared that if they did not remove the cap themselves, the cap “may be removed accidently anyway”.

“They have abandoned the ceiling ahead of market pressure to allow the bank to essentially have more control over what happens,” she said.

“I’m not sure however, that the SNB envisaged such a strong response,” she continued.

Jeremy Cook, chief economist and head of currency strategy at World First, says that there are two main reasons why the cap was removed: the looming prospect of a major intervention by the European Central Bank (ECB), and the deteriorating economic situation in Russia.  

“In the past six months the mood around the euro has changed quite dramatically,” he said. “Next Thursday the ECB are almost unanimously expected to introduce quantitative easing in an attempt to lower the value of the euro”, he continued, with QE referring to an asset purchase programme in which the central bank goes out into the market to buy bonds and debts in a bid to stimulate demand and encourage inflation within their country. This would also make their exports more attractive as the value of the euro falls.

He continued: “In order to maintain the 1.2 [franc exchange rate] against the euro, the SNB has to buy euros and sell Swiss francs to try and weaken the franc. They have a tsunami of euros coming their way, and so they have taken the decision to step out of the way because if they don’t, they will get run over.”

The second reason, he says, is the falling rouble, Western sanctions and declining oil prices in Russia.

“Russians have been parking money in Switzerland for a long time. But given the current economic situation, these flows have increased because of its stability and investors look on Switzerland as a ‘safe-haven’. To put funds into Swiss banks they have created Swiss assets, which has then created a bubble in the economy,” he said.

“In order to try and combat this, the SNB also decided to cut interest rates into negative territory [-0.75%] to discourage this, meaning that over time you actually have to pay to keep your money in Swiss banks.”

“These factors have just made it uneconomical to maintain the cap at the moment,” Cook continued.

In a statement yesterday, the SNB said the Swiss currency had now left an era of "exceptional overvaluation" during which the minimum exchange rate had been introduced.

It said: "The euro has depreciated considerably against the U.S. dollar and this, in turn, has caused the Swiss franc to weaken against the U.S. dollar. In these circumstances, the SNB concluded that enforcing and maintaining the minimum exchange rate for the Swiss franc against the euro is no longer justified.”

Whilst SNB chairman Thomas Jordan assured people that the decision to abandon the cap was not a “panic reaction”, but rather a “well thought-out decision,” according to Cook, the move is “vastly out of character” for any central bank.

“All central banks over the past few years have had a general policy of engagement to make sure that they all talk to the markets at all times and ensure that no steps are misguided and that there are no surprises,” he said.

“This could not be more far removed from what happened yesterday. It was a mugging - it came out of nowhere. No wonder people are angry,” he continued.

“In the short-term, I think it is quite a logical decision as they were going to get run over. In this sense it was a basic survival technique to step out of the way.”

“However, if we don’t re-introduce inflation, there are going to be disastrous consequences,” he continued.

“I always seemed more vulnerable at home,” wrote Chris Kyle in his 2012 book, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, which has sold an estimated 1.6 million copies and has been made into a Clint Eastwood film that opened December 25. “Overseas, on deployment, in the war, I seemed invincible,” Kyle wrote. But then some minor injury, like a broken toe, would befall him back home. “You take your superhero cape off every time you come home from deployment,” Taya Kyle told her husband.

She was right. Kyle was not felled in Nasiriyah, Fallujah or Sadr City. It wasn’t a roadside bomb that got him, nor an insurgent sniper. Chris Kyle was killed on February 2, 2013, by Eddie Ray Routh, a deeply disturbed Marine who was one of the veterans Kyle had dedicated himself to helping. He had taken Routh shooting at Rough Creek Lodge, outside of Dallas, because Kyle thought that men who shot guns in Iraq and Afghanistan might want to keep shooting guns in Texas. He was right, too right. Routh shot Kyle and another man, Chad Littlefield, thus leaving Taya Kyle alone with two young children and proving Chris Kyle’s premonition about his stateside vulnerability tragically correct.

Much of Eastwood’s film takes place on the battlefield: We see the world reduced to the crosshairs of a scope, all moral quandaries compressed into the question of whether to squeeze the trigger. Lying prone on a rooftop, as he almost always is, Kyle pleads in a whisper for a boy not yet old enough to shave to drop the grenade launcher of a dead insurgent. If he keeps the weapon, he is an enemy and must be killed. “I don’t see too much gray,” Kyle wrote in his book, which opens with him killing a woman determined to lob a Chinese grenade at a unit of approaching Marines. After she’s dead, Kyle concludes that the American lives he saved “were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul.”

American Sniper—the book, but not the movie—often delves into this uncomfortable moral territory, making the fight in Iraq seem less like a military campaign than a religious crusade. “Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq,” writes the man insurgents branded Shaitan ar-Ramadi (the Devil of Ramadi). His pronouncement certainly sounds messianic. Yet many in the Bush administration felt exactly the same way.

Bradley Cooper stars as Chris Kyle in "American Sniper."Keith Bernstein/Warner Bros.

Timothy Murphy climbed a tree and positioned his rifle. Three hundred yards away was Brigadier General Simon Fraser, and Murphy had been ordered to kill him. Murphy did not hit Fraser with his first shot, nor with his second. But the marksman from Pennsylvania fatally wounded Fraser with a third shot, and he died the next morning.

This scene took place on October 7, 1777, during the Second Battle of Saratoga, of the Revolutionary War. The fight was won by the Americans and became a foundational stone in the legend of “Sure Shot Tim,” whom Andy Dougan calls “a precursor of the modern sniper” in Through the Crosshairs: A History of Snipers. Murphy was “a man who uses his deadly skill as a marksman to target opposing commanders and shatter the morale of the enemy.”

The 1st United States Sharp Shooters were formed during the Civil War, by Colonel Hiram Berdan. “We have no drill or picket duty,” he advertised. “Our warfare is like the guerilla or indian.... You are privileged to lay upon the ground while shooting, picking your position. No commander while firing.” By the end of September 1861, he had 1,392 men under his command, as well as permission to form a second regiment.

The mythic image of the sniper proffered by Berdan has endured. He is a soloist, a minimalist, a brooding freelance killer who lurks in the shadowy edges of the chaotic fray. During the Vietnam War, where the irregular terrain made traditional warfare obsolete, snipers were seen as having a tactical advantage over regular infantry. “You don’t select the first gooner that comes into your field of fire,” counseled Captain Jim Land, who trained snipers in Hawaii. “I know that as grunts it was easy for you to feel justified in killing the enemy when he attacked you—he was trying to kill you.… As a sniper you do not have that luxury. You will be killing the enemy when he is unaware of your presence.... You will be, in a sense, committing murder on him—premeditated.”

The military historian Adrian Gilbert once called the sniper “the ultimate hunter in a game where the quarry shoots back,” a description that would have surely appealed to Kyle. The product of north-central Texas, Kyle wrote that he “always loved guns, always loved hunting.” He got into fights at school, though he claims he “didn’t start most of them.” After high school, he dipped in and out of college, then worked as a ranch hand. In 1999, he did what he had long wanted to do and enlisted in the Navy, eventually becoming a member of a SEAL team. He makes no pretense of being the best marksman in his class. Yet he was good enough to become, in time, a sniper.

Jeremy A. Mitchell, who served as an Army sniper in Afghanistan’s treacherous Kunar province, told me that being a sniper was a “coveted position.” But it was also a difficult one, he recalls. “You lay in the same place for days,” watching for enemy movements. Mitchell would go for weeks without showering or changing. “Out in the elements the whole time,” he recalls. “You just get fatigued.”

The genius of the Chris Kyle story is that it imbued warfare with a kind of glamorous sheen, turning the privations Mitchell describes into the stuff of macho American legend. His book is clearly written for a generation reared on PlayStation, Red Bull and Vin Diesel flicks. “Fuck, I thought to myself, this is great,” he wrote. “I fucking love this. It’s nerve-wracking and exciting and I fucking love it.” He was good at it, too, with 160 kills to his name. Yet it is hard to imagine a similar sentiment from a dogface who’d liberated Buchenwald, or from a grunt who’d spent a miserable year wading through the bloody rice paddies of Da Nang.

Brian Van Reet, a veteran who served in Iraq, has accused Kyle and others of promulgating the “kill memoir” genre, in which the horrors of war are treated with a sunny, uncomplicated, Rumsfeldian braggadocio. Authors like Kyle, he wrote in The New York Times,“[offer] the spectacle of high body counts and terrorists twitching on the floor as proof that we are winning. Or if not that exactly, then proof we have inflicted serious damage.” Van Reet, who is now a writer, read American Sniper but has not yet seen the movie. He told me that he thought Kyle was “an embellisher” and that the movie based on his memoir is for “people who like Toby Keith,” the gratingly patriotic country singer.

I do not like Toby Keith songs, or for that matter, any country music except that one song by Garth Brooks about having friends in low places. Nevertheless, there is much to admire about the movie Eastwood has made.

The film version of Chris Kyle, for starters, is far more likable than the one in the book, even if the latter is more faithful to life. Bradley Cooper, who plays Kyle, could make just about anyone seem like the kind of guy you’d want for a brother-in-law. He captures Kyle’s bravado, at once alluring and threatening, but endows the character with depth. It’s almost something like naïveté, a likable aw-shucks-I’m-just-a-Texas-boy-doing-my-job quality. Sienna Miller is also excellent, as the devoted but brassy Taya Kyle, though she is underused.

The battle scenes are poems of dust and blood. Eastwood has made a great combat movie; a great war movie, however, would have needed more of Kyle at home, trying to find a purpose in the civilian world, struggling with alcohol, feeling holy matrimony slip from his grasp. While on leave, he is startled at the sound of a lawnmower. In that moment, Cooper capably broadcasts the inner anguish of his character, the bad juju he brought back from the ghoulish theater of war; Eastwood could have done more with that flash of pain. And with Routh, too, whom we see only in the final sequence of the film. Kyle’s death is treated almost like an afterthought, though the credit sequence, which shows actual footage from his funeral procession through Texas, is so moving because it is so real.

Perhaps what makes some uncomfortable about Kyle is that he reminds us of who fights our wars. “You live in a dreamworld,” he once told an interviewer. The implication was that he, Kyle, didn’t. Eastwood forces us to leave that snug dreamworld for about two hours, but while still stuffing our faces with popcorn and soda. Then we can go back to our lives, without ever having to think again about Muqtada al-Sadr.

“It’s not even on the news,” Kyle complains to Taya during a spell back home. “No one cares.” This must have been a dismaying thought for someone who felt the cosmic import of what he was doing. Even those soldiers who didn’t share Kyle’s religious vision of the conflict felt keenly the apathy back home. There was “no attempt by the government to call for some national sacrifice,” Van Reet told me. “Besides asking people to go out and shop more, there was no effort.”

Invariably, both the right and left will use American Sniper, though the movie is far less susceptible to political manipulations than the book on which it is based. But when has that stopped anyone? Already, a writer for the liberal Guardian has written a piece labeling Kyle a “hate-filled killer,” while a critic for the right-leaning New York Post praised the Navy SEALs depicted therein as “a class of men in whom is contained a distilled essence of the American spirit.”

Some will surely go see the movie because they are fans of Chris Kyle and what he represents, the cowboy machismo of the Texas plains. And others will avoid it for much the same reason. But both blind devotion and wholesale rejection miss the point. The wars are yours, whether you love them or not. 

Fresh winds are blowing through both boardrooms and MBA programs these days, stirring up debate about the fundamentals of doing business. Some of the key questions on the minds of executives weren't even on the syllabus when I attended business school in the early '80s.

I think these questions will continue to grow in relevance in the year ahead. And how the business sector answers will determine whether the health of the planet—and the health of society—will make it onto a company's list of strategic priorities.

First off, executives are questioning the purpose of the corporation itself. From Tim Cook at Apple to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, business leaders are challenging the old-line mantra about "shareholder value maximization" as the organizing principle for the enterprise. These leaders and many others from outside the tech sector understand that long-term success depends on a host of critical inputs: creative talent, skilled labor, a secure supply chain, license to operate on the ground and—of course—reputation with consumers or customers.

A second question naturally flows from the question of purpose. If, indeed, this quarter's profits are no longer the best—or only—metric of success, how should we measure progress in business? How do long-term investors (versus traders) and discerning consumers define the performance of corporations today?

In the past year, we have witnessed big growth in concepts like "integrated reporting," taking into account other constituents besides investors. There is more talk of environmental profit and loss, and frameworks like the circular economy, which connect the success of the business with the systems on which life depends.

In 2015, I think we will see some real progress on the question of metrics and measurement. The best models won't be generic; they will allow the company to express—and its real investors to understand—the vital signs of the corporation's health. And robust measures of future success will naturally connect back to the natural resources and human conditions that are critical to the company.

The right metrics will help executives and boards assess risks to the enterprise as well as business opportunities. New ideas about what "quality management" means will take shape.

As I look forward, I see a third critical question beginning to take root. It is the linchpin between the questions about purpose and measuring success: How should we incentivize the key executives and officers who set the agenda in boardrooms and the C-suite? What should dictate executive compensation? In essence, what should we pay executives to do?

With large-company CEOs earning something close to 300 times the wage of the median American worker, it is no surprise that the public connects business execs with growing inequality and that most of the buzz about pay in the past year has been about runaway executive compensation. But for all the ills associated with outsize pay, it's how we pay executives that matters most.

A few decades ago, executives were paid mostly in cash. Today, the typical executive receives two-thirds of his or her pay in stock-based compensation. While there have been attempts to build long-term focus into pay packages by embedding future targets and conditions, they are largely unsuccessful.

With the vast majority of pay based on the stock price, all the noise in the boardroom and executive suite is about the stock and total shareholder return, not the long-term investments that are key to achieving goals aligned with environmental and social sustainability—and to identifying future risk.

As we move into 2015, activist investors looking to mine companies for quick gains are drawing attention. They want to reduce corporate investment in research and development, and in environmental innovation. They continue to put the squeeze on employee wages and benefits.

Sadly, when company management is paid in stock, executives may have more in common with the activist than with more reliable contributors to the long-term health of the enterprise: employees, host communities, and truly long-term shareholders.

There's good news, however. Experts are taking a fresh look at the unintended consequences of "pay for performance" and experimenting with better strategies and protocols for building long-term value.

Today, society needs business at the table as a partner and innovator. But to make improvements with respect to global challenges requires executives who think about the long-term consequences of their decisions outside the company's four walls.

These three questions—purpose, how we measure success and how we compensate the managers of the enterprise—shape the discourse and the potential for real engagement with the business sector.

I can't predict how quickly a shift might come, but first let's ask the right questions in the boardroom (and MBA classrooms) about corporate compensation. The first step requires connecting the dots between how we reward top talent and our aspirations for a healthy planet.

Judith Samuelson is the executive director of the Business and Society Program at the Aspen Institute. This article first appeared in The Guardian.

A spate of arrests were carried out across Europe last night and this morning, including detainments in Paris, Berlin, Belgium and Austria.

Yesterday evening Belgian police killed two men during an anti-terrorism raid. The men, who had recently returned from Syria were shot after they opened fire on police. It’s believed they were just hours away from carrying out a terrorist attack - AK-47 rifles and police uniforms were reportedly found in their house. Following these events there were dozens more raids carried out in Verviers, where the men were shot, and around Brussels as well as two people who were arrested in France. One man was also detained at the scene in Verviers. A total of 15 people are now in custody.

The police force in Belgium said they had been investigating the group in the weeks before the attacks in Paris and said they believed they did not have international links and it is not thought that they have connections with either the Kouachi brothers or Amedy Coulibaly, the man who attacked the kosher supermarket.

However, as part of a separate investigation, Belgian police have arrested a man on suspicion of arms trafficking and are looking into whether he had links with Coulibaly.

In Paris, which is still on high alert following the events of last week, 12 people were arrested this morning. Those detained suspected of aiding the Islamists who killed 17 people last week. The French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that most of those arrested were “known to the police for common crimes”.

Two men were arrested early this morning in Berlin, suspected to have recruited and radicalised fighters for ISIS. The anti-terror raids were carried out by almost 250 police officers and commandos. It is not believed the men, who are of Turkish descent, were planning on carrying out any attacks on German soil and a police spokesman explained that the raids had been in the planning for months. “The accused have been on the violent Salafist spectrum for years and follow an ideology close to that recognised by terrorist organisations like ISIS and Chechen groups fighting in Syria,” he said.

Finally, a 14-year-old Austrian boy was also detained on Friday for terror offences. The boy, who has been arrested once before in October, is believed to have been planning on travelling to Syria to build bombs there. He was released in autumn last year, but his mother contacted the police earlier this week to report him missing and authorities reissued a warrant for his arrest.

Security forces have emphasised that the raids and arrests are not directly connected.

The Vilnius District Court in the Lithuanian capital has heard the cases of at least two alleged Belarusian spies on Friday, both also under investigation for ties to Russian intelligence, Baltic news agency Delfi reported.

The first alleged spy, 28-year-old Lithuanian military medic Andrejus Ošurkovas, who was arrested in January last year, is suspected of collecting classified information about Lithuanian “armed forces, serving officers, military plans, buildings - a little bit of everything,” the court heard.

Following his first appearance in court on Thursday, Ošurkovas was put in police custody for another three months on Friday as investigation into his case continues.

According to the Vilnius public prosecutor Raimondas Petrauskas, Ošurkovas is also charged with spying on the NATO mission in Lithuania, as well as trying to turn other military personnel into double agents.

“As a result of his work he has put several individuals’ lives and well-being in danger,” Petrauskas said of the accused.

The medic is suspected to have been employed by the Belarusian air force as early as five years ago.

Belarus is one of Russia’s strongest political allies in Europe, being one of the first two countries to join Russia’s Eurasian union, alongside Kazakhstan in 2010 and has been a member of Russia’s military union, the Collective Security Treaty Alliance, since 2002.

Ošurkovas was born in Lithuania’s second largest city of Kaunas, however he is believed to have family in Belarus. The prosecution noted it has not yet found evidence Ošurkovas has links to Russian intelligence.

Following Ošurkovas’s hearing, court proceedings on a second spy case began in Vilnius district court, as 57-year-old Romualdas Lipskis, employee of Lithuania’s air-surveillance and traffic monopoly Oro Navigacijos, was also charged with espionage for Belarus.

According to Vilnius’s public prosecution, Lipskis could have spied on Lithuania’s defence forces by acquiring access to classified information through his work in Oro Navigacijos where he was an electrical engineer.

Lipskis has allegedly been sending Lithuanian state secrets to Belarusian intelligence officer Sergey Kurlenko for more than three years, according to evidence compiled by Lithuania’s state security service.

Lipskis was reported to have travelled to Belarus and Russia frequently and the prosecutor did not rule out he may his work may have also aided Russian intelligence.

Unlike Ošurkovas, Lipskis did not shy away from speaking to the press, accusing the Lithuanian authorities of framing him. Lipskis pleaded his innocence but did not say why he believed he was being falsely accused.

The public prosecution has requested to try Lipskis in a private trial, as some of the evidence in his case including photographs and audio recordings allegedly reveal classified state information. No decision has been made on this yet.

Lipskis and Ošurkovas could each face up to 15 years in jail if found guilty of spying on Lithuania. The public prosecution did not comment on whether there was evidence the two worked together.

The Baltic state has been on high alert for spy activity from its east, as its membership of NATO makes it a strategic hotbed of security secrets from across the alliance. Lithuania has currently taken over command of the Baltic air police programme, which consists of a series of patrol flights, surveying airspace over Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.

A Newsweek investigation recently found that levels of Russian espionage in Lithuania and its two Baltic neighbours are currently at their highest since the Cold War.

Last month a suspected Russian spy was detained by Lithuanian security services near Šiauliai, not far from a major NATO airbase.

The Lithuanian government has grown increasingly wary of pro-Russian interference in its territory, in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, with the Defence Ministry publishing a citizen manual on how to react to a possible Russian invasion in Lithuania earlier this month.

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was questioned on Friday by Russian investigators and his offices were raided by police in what colleagues called an attack on his anti-corruption campaigning.

Shortly before noon (0500 ET), Navalny, who led a protest movement from 2011 to 2012 against Vladimir Putin's rule, said on Twitter 12 policemen had escorted him to the investigators' offices.

Navalny, 38 is technically under house arrest but has taken an increasingly confrontational course with the Kremlin. He has defied the arrest order to join a street protest, cut off his monitoring tag and given an interview to a radio station.

Navalny remains one of the biggest thorns in Putin's side but appears to have little chance of mounting a serious challenge to the Kremlin leader, whose popularity is high.

The Investigative Committee, which answers directly to Putin, has opened up several criminal cases against Navalny. The latest charges of embezzlement him led to a suspended sentence on Dec. 30.

"Today we broke a record. Twelve people were waiting for me at my apartment building's exit," he wrote on Twitter.

"The order was to escort. They're taking (me) to the Investigative Committee."

After questioning at the committee, he and colleagues at his anti-corruption fund said masked men with guns had raided the organization's offices, opening its safe and going through records and computers.

"Four people are filming on cameras. No one has identified themselves," said Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer.

"They want to take away all the fund's equipment, including the volunteers' telephones, computers, flash cards, etc ... it's clear it's an attack on the fund," she said on Twitter.

Navalny was placed under house arrest almost a year ago during an investigation into charges that he stole 30 million rubles from two firms including an affiliate of French cosmetics company Yves Rocher.

He was given a suspended sentence in the case and has said the house arrest order no longer has any legal basis. His brother was jailed for three and a half years in the same case.

In the seven months since a Russian-backed militia in southeastern Ukraine captured Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian paratrooper and pilot has become one of her country’s biggest icons in its war against the Russian invasion. Her captors spirited her illegally into Russia, held her in isolation, then accused her of helping to kill Russian journalists.

At home, Savchenko, already celebrated as Ukraine’s first female military pilot, was nominated and elected to parliament, an office she accepted from her Moscow prison cell.

Now Savchenko, 34, has raised the ante against her captors with a hunger strike that has lasted more than a month. Drinking only tea and water, she has lost more than 26 pounds.

“I’m hunger-striking to try to force some common sense from the Russian government and some conscience from the Investigative Committee [the prosecuting agency],” Savchenko told the Russian human rights activist and journalist Zoya Svyetova this month. Her captors have put her into an isolation cell and in recent days began administering her glucose intravenously.

Effectively, Savchenko has been running a one-woman information war against the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin over what she and numerous legal sources call her illegal detention and fabricated criminal charges against her. “They cannot break my spirit,” she wrote in a January 12 open letter she handed to her lawyers, whom the Russian authorities allowed to see her. “A person who was born free, and not a slave in captivity, cannot live in prison—especially if he or she is innocent.” (See the full text of her letter, below.)

Savchenko’s campaign has won support from the Obama administration, other foreign governments, human rights organizations, European pro-democracy groups, and thousands of Internet petitioners worldwide. Her defiance of her captors was reinforced this week by Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, which appealed to European leaders to step up political pressures on Russia to release her.

Savchenko was something of a celebrity in Ukraine before the war began, because of her crusade to win the right to become the country’s first female military pilot. She first enlisted in the army and qualified as a paratrooper, then served with the country’s contingent in the Iraq war. Then she used her combat credentials to force the national Air Force University to train her as a pilot and navigator.

When Russia used its troops and mercenaries last year to foment a separatist war in the southeastern region of Donbas, Savchenko took a leave of absence from her air force duties to use her combat experience in one of the country’s new, volunteer, National Guard battalions. Russian-backed separatists captured her near Luhansk in June and filmed her in their custody in Ukraine.

Weeks later, Savchenko disappeared—shackled and abducted across the border into the custody of the Russian state. When Russia announced her arrest in its territory, it declared that she had fled to Russia to seek asylum—a notion that has been ridiculed even in the country’s own social media.

Russian prosecutors say they can prove that Savchenko called in a mortar attack on a road intersection that killed two journalists for a Russian state-run TV station. It has cited as evidence anonymous statements by what it says were fighters of a Russian-supported militia in the area, and an interrogation of a wounded Ukrainian soldier who says he was under duress and disoriented with pain.

Savchenko’s defense attorneys cite data from her cellphone showing that she made no calls, was not in the area of the attack and had been captured by the Russian-backed militia one to two hours before the explosion that killed the reporters.

In violation of Russia’s own laws, authorities held Savchenko incommunicado after her abduction across the border, and interrogated her without permitting her the presence of a lawyer. For weeks, it refused nine requests from the Ukrainian government before allowing its consular officer to see her. It has barred her from receiving books, letters and visitors. (Svyetova, the human rights activist, was able to reach her because she is a member of an official prison oversight commission.)

Prison authorities have harassed her defense attorney, Mark Feygin. A court forced Savchenko to undergo “psychiatric evaluation” at Moscow’s Serbsky Center, a mental hospital that has been used to “treat” political dissidents.

Throughout her ordeal, Savchenko has won admirers with a remarkable calm—whether shackled and under interrogation by her initial captors, or in court in Moscow. One of Ukraine’s main political parties, the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) Party of former Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, named Savchenko at the top of its parliamentary ticket. Her face appeared on billboards around Ukraine that urged her compatriots “Don’t give up! Ukraine can prevail!”

Ukraine’s parliament gave a standing ovation to news that Savchenko had signed her oath of office, carried to her prison cell by her lawyer. (In doing so, she resigned her military commission.) The Rada chose her as one of its delegates to the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly—and last week urged Europe’s governments to step up pressure on the Kremlin to release her.

Amid it all, Savchenko told Svyetova, one of her main worries is the Russian authorities’ refusal to allow her phone calls or visits from her younger sister, Vira, who has been perhaps the most ardent campaigner for Nadiya’s release. Nadiya lamented that she had not been allowed to call Vira (their names translate, respectively, as “Hope” and “Faith”) to wish her a happy birthday on January 12. The next day, Vira sat in the parliament gallery to watch Ukraine’s legislature pass the resolution she had sought asking Europe’s help in freeing her sister.

Irena Chalupa covers Ukraine and Eastern Europe for the Atlantic Council. This article first appeared on the Atlantic Council website.

Here is a translated text of Savchenko’s January 12 open letter to her supporters, which she transmitted through her lawyers:

To all those concerned about my fate

A heartfelt thank you for your support. Believe me, I feel it despite the fact that the Russian Investigative Committee has deprived me of the right to correspondence. I have not received a single letter for two months and so I can’t answer you. I’m saying thank you now, therefore, to all those who have written to me or simply remembered me with a kind word.  That has filled me with strength.

Now about the hunger strike. I know that very many people at all levels in Ukraine and throughout the world are doing a lot to secure my release and I am very grateful to them.

I never anticipated such support because both in Ukraine and in the whole world right now there are plenty of problems besides mine…. I am very aware of your concern and feel ashamed that from prison I myself can do almost nothing.  I have therefore decided to fight in the only way available to me—through hunger strike.

But I don’t want you to worry too much about me. Thank God, as well as thanks to my genetic code and my parents, I have the health of an astronaut and will endure. And the part you are playing in my fate will help me in that. Every person who even once a day just thinks good things about me will give me faith and strength, while each who thinks badly will add to my determination and anger!

Yulya Tymoshenko wrote me a letter in which she asks me to suspend my hunger strike and preserve my strength since “the enemy needs us to be weak”.  These are very wise words. Thank you, Yulya Volodymyrovna.

But I want to reassure you that I have never been weak and never will be! They cannot break my spirit, and I’m not going to get into battle with the prison guards!  The main thing is to hold out in spirit, and my physical strength will recover. .. And if God has need for something else, then so be it … the loss of one fighter is a very great loss, but it is in no way a lost war!  Ukraine will win!”

Well, a person who was born free and not a slave in captivity, cannot live in prison. Especially if he or she is innocent.

Through my protest—my hunger—I wish to achieve common sense from the Russian authorities and an awakening of conscience from the Russian Investigative Committee. There is irrefutable evidence of my lack of involvement and innocence of the crimes they accuse me of.  What else do they need?

I have taken the decision to go on hunger strike myself and nobody pushed me into it. I have given my word that “Until the day I return to Ukraine, or until the last day of my life in Russia!” and I will not back down, otherwise what value would my words have?!

I will get through!  Thank you for believing in me!

Nadiya Savchenko

12 January 2015

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Friday warned of a "clash of civilizations" following the wake of the Islamist militant attacks in Paris and he also appeared to criticize France for allowing the wife of one of the gunmen to travel via Turkey to Syria.

Erdogan, a devout Sunni Muslim, has already accused the West of hypocrisy after the attacks last week in which the gunmen killed 17, including 12 at the offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. The three gunmen were also killed.

Speaking at a businessmen's meeting in the capital Ankara, Erdogan said Charlie Hebdo was known for its provocative publications.

"We are following with great concern the attacks against Islam hidden behind the attack on the satirical magazine in France," said Erdogan, who has become an increasingly vocal critic of what he sees as mounting Islamaphobia in the West.

"Despite all our efforts to prevent it, the clash of civilizations thesis is being brought to life."

Charlie Hebdo has published numerous cartoons mocking religious figures including Jesus, Pope Frances and the Prophet Mohammad.

Its first edition since the attacks depicted the Prophet, provoking renewed outrage amongst some Muslims.

Erdogan said the decision to print millions of copies of the magazine had nothing to do with freedom of expression and was instead "terrorizing the freedom of others".

A Turkish newspaper which reproduced part of the magazine is currently being investigated by prosecutors.

Without giving names, Erdogan also appeared to take aim at the French authorities for allowing Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of one of the gunmen, to travel to Turkey in the days before the attacks. She is now thought to be in Syria.

"They are talking about people who go through Turkey, but they should first learn how to check passports when these people are leaving their own country," Erdogan said.

Turkey has tightened its border security after facing criticism for allowing hundreds of European would-be militants transit into neighboring Syria to join up with radical groups, including Islamic State.

A French official said this week that intelligence co-operation between Paris and Ankara was strong and emphasized that Turkey was not at fault for not picking up Boumeddiene.

"This is not and should not become an issue, because there's lots still to do, there's other people that we need to track. We're not blaming Turkey at all," the official told Reuters.