If John Boehner isn’t charming enough to turn you against Obama’s plan to make two-year community college free, the speaker of the House evidently hopes these Taylor Swift GIFs will get the job done.

No, but really. Boehner’s website just unveiled a BuzzFeed-lite arsenal of Taylor Swift GIFs meant to “explain” Obama’s plan. “It sounded exciting at first…” Boehner (or some hapless GOP intern somewhere) writes. “But then, we got to thinking…”

Boehner's site says these are meant to “explain” Obama’s community college plan. http://www.speaker.gov/

Cut to assorted GIFs of Swift attacking a tree in the “Blank Space” video, curtsying in the “Shake It Off” video and clapping at an award show—none of which have any bearing whatsoever on education policy or congressional feuding.

Boehner’s GIF explainer looks like the GOP’s latest bid to connect with Web-savvy millennials by dipping into the viral morass. Just last month, former congresswoman Michele Bachmann bid goodbye to congress with a BuzzFeed listicle. The net effect is sort of like watching a dog walk on its hind legs and then take an Instagram selfie while doing so.

Turning to popular music has traditionally brought mixed results. In 2012, Mitt Romney was forced to stop using Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger" and Silversun Pickups'"Panic Room” at campaign events after both bands objected. More recently, former Florida governor Jeb Bush attracted the ire of Beastie Boy Ad-Rock after quoting “"(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!).”

Last year was hot. Too hot. Anomalously hot.

Independent analyses released Friday from both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) came to the same conclusion: A hotter year on earth has never been recorded. Plus, December hit a record all on its own; a hotter December has never been recorded, either.

The global average temperature in 2014 was 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, beating out 2010 as the record holder. In fact, over the last decade and a half, global temperatures have set records rather regularly. Scientists have recorded global temperature since 1880. The 10 hottest years on record have all happened since 1997. The trend is clear: Despite yearly fluctuation, the planet has warmed unremittingly, and it has happened relatively recently.

The chart below, courtesy of NOAA, shows global average surface temperature change since 1880, using the 20th century average temperature as a baseline. The 10 warmest years on record are displayed in dark red.

A chart showing global average surface temperature changes since 1880climate.gov

The year was marked by plenty of atypical climate and weather events, too. Much of the Western U.S. was warmer than average, and Arizona, California and Nevada, stricken by drought, had their warmest year on record. Meanwhile, the eastern half of the country had a cooler-than-average year, with seven states experiencing a top-10 cold year. Alaska had its warmest year since records began in 1916. Hawaii’s Big Island was hit by its strongest tropical cyclone ever, the Arctic saw its fifth smallest annual ice extent, and torrential downpours caused severe flooding in India and Pakistan, which displaced over 100,000 people and killed 250.

Around the world there were many atypical climate and weather events.NOAA

NASA pointed directly at human activity as the force driving the climatic changes.

“This is the latest in a series of warm years, in a series of warm decades. While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, said in a statement.

A protest in Karachi, Pakistan turned violent today when those demonstrating against Charlie Hebdo’s depiction of the prophet Muhammad clashed with police outside the French consulate. The police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd, Reuters reported.

A spokesperson from a Karachi hospital told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that two protesters had been injured, as well as AFP photographer Asif Hassan: “The bullet struck his lung, and passed through his chest. He is out of immediate danger,” said Dr. Seemi Jamali, a spokesperson for the hospital. Senior police official Abdul Khaliq Sheikh later told AFP that it was the protesters who had shot at the security forces: "There were around 350 protesters who wanted to go to the French consulate and when the police tried to stop them they started firing at the police."

The protests are part of a larger ‘black day’, organised and promoted by a group of Pakistan’s Islamic leaders, in objection to the publication of images of the prophet in the French magazine. Described as a “countrywide protest movement against the publication,” by Pakistani news outlet Dawn , the protests were called for by Tehreek-Hurmat-e-Rasool, an umbrella group consisting of over 20 of Pakistan’s most influential Muslim groups. 

Tehreek-Hurmat-e-Rasool roughly translates as: ‘The movement for safeguarding the sanctity of the messenger’.

The leader of the group, Maulana Amir Hamza said that if so many European countries could unite in support of Charlie Hebdo, all 57 Muslim countries in the world should also unite to ‘safeguard the sanctity of the Prophet’. He called on the leaders of Muslim countries across the world to demand the introduction of an international law against depictions of the Prophet.

There are also reports that Pakistani religious leaders have said that journalists responsible for publishing the caricatures should stand trial in the International Court of Justice for “their crime against billions of Muslims of the world.”

Only yesterday, demonstrators in the city of Lahore, accompanied by lawmakers, carried banners with slogans calling for the deaths of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists as they protested outside parliament. The Pakistani religious affairs minister Sardar Mohammad Yousuf said that a symbolic resolution had been passed by the political parties, condemning the publication of the cartoons.

Previous depictions of the prophet in the West have lead to widespread anger in Muslim communities. In 2008, three men were arrested by Danish police for plotting to murder cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard who drew a picture of the prophet which was published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Kamran Matin, a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex and a specialist on Islamic politics said that he does not think these recent events “will affect Pakistan’s strategic relation with the US or its allies."

Two years ago, Cedric Harper and his friends stopped at a convenience store in southeast Washington, D.C., after their high school homecoming to buy candy and Gatorade. As they left the store, Harper says, an unmarked truck sped over to them and four police officers in bulletproof vests jumped out, guns drawn.

These weren’t ordinary police handguns, he recalls, but big, tactical weapons. Harper, now 18, says the police threw him against a brick wall and searched him. The officers gave no reason for the stop, and after they found nothing suspicious, they let the kids go. The police offered no apology and appeared to make no record of the encounter, he says.

It was one of at least 10 so-called “jump-outs” Harper has endured; they are now such everyday occurrences that he doesn’t think to report them or even tell his parents. “It’s kind of a regular thing,” he says. “What’s the point of telling anyone?”

President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st-Century Policing held its first “listening session” in D.C. this week, while heated debate is going on within the district over the controversial police tactic that activists say is traumatizing black communities. Locals say anyone is a target, especially young black men, while the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) says it hasn’t used this policing tactic for at least 15 years, and even then, it was employed only for high-risk arrests.

“Jump-outs” became notorious during MPD drug stings in the 1980s, when open-air drug markets plagued D.C. and, according to The Washington Post, kids in schoolyards would imitate drug busts, role-playing jump-out squads and hustlers, using crushed chalk in sandwich bags as the “drugs.” “Nobody wants to be the jump-outs,” a 9-year-old told the Post, adding, “The hustlers get to keep all the money.”

Though police have eradicated those drug markets, residents still yell “jump-out” when undercover officers on lookout are spotted in a neighborhood. “It’s almost like a scene from The Wire,” says criminal defense lawyer Patrice A. Sulton.

As the national conversation about racial bias in policing and the militarization of police departments intensifies, community activists in D.C. say they’ve had enough of the jump-outs and have enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others to tell police leadership that this must stop. But that’s difficult to do when MPD officials deny that it has jump-out squads. MPD Chief Cathy Lanier recently referred to such squads as a “fantasy.”

The tactic sounds like a souped-up version of the New York City Police Department’s much-maligned “stop-and-frisk” policy, which the police commissioner promised to reform last year. But while the MPD’s regulations do permit stop-and-frisks, jump-outs would violate those rules, based on descriptions from victims and activists. For example, a stop for reasonable suspicion is not supposed to exceed 10 minutes, an officer must be clear about the reason for the stop, and the officer must file paperwork afterward. Civil rights lawyers say that in many cases of jump-outs, none of that is happening.

Armed with arrest records and “hundreds of anecdotal stories,” ACLU lawyers have testified in court and before the D.C. City Council that jump-outs are illegal and target people of color. “Jump-outs are one of the strategies and tactics that make up this entire matrix of policies and practices that police use in black communities to aggressively pursue low-level offenses,” says Seema Sadanandan, policy and advocacy director in D.C. for the ACLU. Sadanandan, who regularly trains students in how to interact with the police, says she’s heard jump-out stories from children as young as 11.

In 2013, Sadanandan penned an opinion piece in the Post about jump-outs. A year later, after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, several D.C. communities mobilized to tackle the issue. Last October, a City Council committee held hearings to discuss what residents called racially biased policing, including the use of jump-outs, and in December a Change.org petition against the tactic had 2,000 signatures.

“We don’t use controversial tactics,” Chief Lanier said in a statement during one of those City Council hearings. “There are no jump-out units in MPD,” she added, explaining that activists were likely referring to vice units, responsible for covert drug busts. During such operations, she said, four to six undercover officers wearing police vests “pull into the block, jump out of the car and arrest those observed in the drug transaction.... That tactic is not used nearly as often as it was in the late ’90s and early 2000s.”

Lanier tells Newsweek that the MPD has discredited many of the alleged jump-outs and that accusers were often unable to provide basic details, or that the incidents involved other law enforcement agencies, or happened outside of the district. “An 11-year-old telling a story, and then the ACLU retelling that story, is not a fact,” she says.

Representatives from the U.S. Capitol Police, U.S. Park Police and Metro Transit Police Department, all agencies that make arrests in the district, say they do not conduct jump-outs.

Cathy Lanier, D.C.’s police chief, denies that her department has “jump-out” squads. Lanier is pictured in September 2013 during the Washington Navy Yard shooting.REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Kristopher Baumann, a former chairman of the local police union and a former MPD officer for 12 years, backs up Lanier. “There is something we call jump-outs in a limited manner, but those are specific tactics for specific situations…. What the ACLU and the City Council are talking about...that a patrol car simply drives into a neighborhood and officers jump out and start grabbing people, I haven’t seen that…. When you take apart the lawsuits,” he says, referring to cases involving jump-outs that the ACLU has defended, “it is fiction.”

High school junior Ishmael Reid, 17, says his jump-out experiences were far from fiction. After dinner one night about a year ago, he and a friend were walking around in southeast D.C., near the Eastern Market metro stop, when Reid says an unmarked truck pulled up and its passengers beamed bright flashlights at them.

“I didn’t know who it was,” Reid says. “I was scared. I thought it was somebody trying to grab me, throw me in the trunk or something.”

He says about five officers jumped out, all of them in civilian clothes and one in an unmarked tactical vest. Another had his handgun drawn. The reason for the stop, Reid recalls the officer saying, was that from the way Reid was walking, it looked as if he had a gun in his waistband. “He told me, ‘Don’t harass anyone on the street,’ and they started laughing.

“[Jump-outs are] a normal thing, especially from where I grew up,” he says. “You just get over it. You don’t bother trying to find out who the police officers were and stuff like that because it happens to almost everyone that you know.… I really can’t name one of my friends who hasn’t had a jump-out happen to them.”

Jump-outs are said to happen most in community district 7, in southeast D.C., which had the district’s highest homicide rate in 2008 and the second highest in 2012, the year for which data was last publicly available.

According to the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, 8 of 10 adults arrested in D.C. between 2009 and 2011 were African-American, even though the populations of adult African-Americans and whites were about the same. Around 59 percent of MPD officers are black, Lanier has said, a figure she uses to beat back accusations of racial policing, though Ronald Hampton, former executive director of the National Black Police Association and a retired MPD officer, says the statistic is moot.

“[Black officers] do what they get paid to do,” he says. “As a young black police officer, if you want to be one of the guys, you want to be successful, you have got to do what [white officers] do.”

“Either she has no control over her officers or she’s just completely oblivious to what they’re doing,” says Sulton, the criminal defense lawyer, about Lanier and jump-outs. “It’s not in anyone’s imagination.”

Pope Francis landed in Manila late Thursday to kick off the second leg of his two-week visit to Asia. The pope is to spend five days in the Philippines, where more than 80 percent of the population identifies as Catholic.

As Francis left Villamor Air Base, the streets were lined with ecstatic, cheering crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

On Friday morning, the pontiff celebrated Mass at the Cathedral of Manila, considered the most important Catholic church in the Philippines. The Cathedral, which had been closed for repairs since 2012, reopened in 2014. It seats 2,000 and the pope’s Mass was by invitation only. He defended the church's stance against contraception.

Afterward, instead of exiting from the front of the Cathedral as is customary, Francis took a side door and made an unscheduled detour to the office of a foundation for homeless children, children with mental illness and children from slum areas. Francis spent more than half an hour with the children, who entertained him with songs and dances, according to a Vatican spokesman.

On Saturday, Francis will depart Manila for Tacloban, where he will have lunch with survivors of Typhoon Yolanda. He will also meet with various other groups.

Resident Los Angeles weirdo and musical luminary Kim Fowley, who in the 1970s famously assembled and produced the teenage punk band the Runaways, has died at the age of 75. Fowley had been suffering from bladder cancer and was undergoing treatment in Los Angeles, according to Billboard, but no official cause of death has been announced.

The news was confirmed on Thursday night by author Harvey Kubernik and the CEO of Peer Music, Ralph Peer, who said on Twitter that Fowley “and his energy will be missed.”

Waif-like, gangly and “with a face like Frankenstein that never seems to age,” according to Runaways songwriter Kari Krome, Fowley had a talent for spinning yarns and mythologizing himself. To some, he claimed he had been born in the Philippines, and had known Nancy Sinatra in high school.

The real story was that Fowley was born in 1939 and grew up in southern California. His parents were actors—his father, Douglas Fowley, appeared in Singin’ in the Rain—and Fowley became entrenched in the gritty, dark side of Hollywood. At one point he was a male prostitute, he claimed in his 2012 autobiography, Lord of Garbage.

Fowley worked in the music industry for the better part of six decades, getting his start by taking whatever odd jobs he could with the hope of breaking into the business. He was Thelonius Monk’s food runner, a studio janitor, and was taken under the wing of notorious DJ Alan Freed; he was also an associate of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. He kick-started his career in the early 1960s by co-producing successful records by the Hollywood Argyles (“Alley Oop”) and Paul Revere & the Raiders.

Then, he went on to work with the likes of Warren Zevon, Alice Cooper, Blue Cheer and Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers, and assisted in co-writing tunes on Kiss’s smash record Destroyer. Most recently, he worked—from his hospital bed—on hirsute Los Angeles songwriter Ariel Pink’s 2014 album Pom Pom.

Krome, in the 2001 Los Angeles punk oral history book We Got the Neutron Bomb, remembered Fowley as “one of those odd birds, brilliant at the art of hustle.”

Fowley became a fixture in the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene in the 1970s, and is perhaps best remembered for discovering Joan Jett and putting together the all-girl punk rock group the Runaways. In 1975, he introduced a then-15-year-old Jett, a “perfect rhythm guitarist,” and drummer Sandy West. The pair went on to form the Runaways with guitarist Lita Ford, bassist Jackie Fox and lead vocalist Cherie Currie, for whom Fowley and Jett co-wrote “Cherry Bomb,” perhaps the Runaways’ most memorable tune, as her official audition for the band. Michael Shannon, of Boardwalk Empire acclaim fame, portrayed Fowley on-screen in the 2010 film about the band, entitled The Runaways.

Fowley and the Runaways parted ways in 1977, following disagreements about money. But Currie, who had been outspoken about Fowley’s verbal abuse of the band members, helped care for him this past year as he was battling cancer, and even moved him into her home, reports The Guardian. “After everything I went through as a kid with him,” she said, “I ended up becoming a mom and realized it was difficult for a man in his 30s to deal with five teenage girls. He’s a friend I admire who needed help, and I could be there for him.”

Fowley released a string of solo records in the 1980s, but slipped into the shadows soon afterward. He resurfaced in the 2000s, when he went on to make several films, including Golden Road to Nowhere/Black Room Doom, which received a special jury prize for innovation and audaciousness at the 2012 Melbourne Underground Film Festival. He also hosted a radio program on Sirius XM’s Underground Garage channel, the Kim Fowley Program, which plumbed the depths of rock and roll’s greatest, and sprinkled some weirdness in between.

“The loneliness of a visionary is that you might be the only one in the universe at that time who recognizes magic. I’m a magical person, and so I recognize other magical people. It takes one to know one,” Fowley told We Got the Neutron Bomb co-authors Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen.

Up to 1,300 European jihadists have already returned to the continent after fighting under the banner of ISIS according to ‘cautious’ estimates made by anti-extremism thinktank, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.The foundation, founded by former UK prime minister Tony Blair, also believe that these returning fighters intend to wage jihad in Europe.

“Returning foreign fighters are a potent force and a significant threat,” Ed Hussain, a senior advisor at the Foundation told Newsweek.

“As they meet other young Muslims in mosques or community centres they can portray themselves as returning heroes from the trenches of jihad in Iraq and Syria. These people have walked the walk, not just talked about it in abstract terms,” Hussain added.

According to figures compiled by King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), over 2,580 European fighters have left their home countries to fight with militants in Iraq and Syria. Interpol’s European chief, Rob Wainwright told British MPs this week that the number of Europeans fighting in the Middle East is now estimated to be between 3,000 and 5,000.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation think that between 1,000 and 1,300 fighters have already returned to Europe. Hussain believes many will return invigorated by their experience and ready to continue their jihad on the continent. “Unprecedented numbers are going to train and fight in the so-called caliphate, a tangible Islamist State which is also directly targeting our citizens online and through their glossy propaganda magazines, taking advantage of the sense of vulnerability and victimhood many young Muslim men and women in Europe feel,” Hussain said.

A wave of terrorism-related arrests has been made in the last few days in Germany, Belgium and France, and European security services are on high alert after three Islamist gunmen killed a total of seventeen people in Paris in attacks last week.

The first of the attacks saw two of the gunmen storm the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, after the publication printed images of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. 

All three of the gunmen were French-born, however evidence suggests two were radicalised by an al-Qaeda cell based in Yemen, while the gunman who held up the kosher grocery shop claimed to be a member of ISIS.

When asked by Newsweek how many British jihadists have already returned to the UK, Shiraz Maher, senior fellow of King’s College London’s ICSR estimated that around 260 had returned.

Last week, the head of MI5 Andrew Parker warned in a rare public speech that Islamist militants are “planning mass casualty attacks against the West,” urging security services around Europe to avoid becoming “complacent”.

French soldier patrols near the Eiffel Tower in Paris as part of the highest level of "Vigipirate" security plan after a shooting at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo January 7, 2015.Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

However, Haras Rafiq, managing director of the anti-radicalisation organisation, the Quilliam Foundation believes that UK has the mechanisms set up to rehabilitate many of these returning jihadists.

Commenting on the estimated 1,300 jihadists already back in Europe, Rafiq said: “First of all I think loads of people should be allowed back into the country and if they have broken any laws, they should be arrested and face trial. However every person should go through a deradicalization, rehabilitation programme to help them disavow the ideology and the theology that made them go and fight in the first place,” Rafiq added.

According to Rafiq, the UK’s deradicalization programme called Channel, which was set up in 2007 and which the Quilliam Foundation works in partnership with, has a “significant success rate” in reforming radicalised individuals.

“There is a risk assessment done when the treatment begins and there is a bespoke mentoring programme, where mentors who are already part of the British community, and are accredited by the home secretary engage with the person being treated. Sometimes mentors are former jihadis, sometimes not. They focus on five different aspects of deconstructing the narratives that cause radicalisation starting with the intellectual to the ideological, social, emotional and spiritual causes of why their charge became radicalised,” he said.

“I think the greatest success we have seen is in mentors who have joined after going through the programme themselves,” continued Rafiq, who added that individuals can also be referred to the programme prior to being radicalised. “France needs an anti-radicalisation programme like this,” he noted.

“I am optimistic because we have programmes like this in place, but the other reason I am very optimistic about our chances of combating radicalisation is because of the civic response we saw in France after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.”

Around two million people took to the streets of Paris last weekend in the largest march in French history, to express their solidarity with the victims of the attack at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

Leaders from across Europe and the Middle East joined the march in a bid to show civic unity in the face of terror.

Updated | Pennsylvania State University has reached a tentative settlement with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to restore 112 football wins that were vacated following a child abuse scandal involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, The Associated Press reported Friday.

The proposed settlement would resolve an ongoing fight between the NCAA and state officials over the legality of the NCAA’s sanctions against the university as a result of the scandal. 

In 2012, the NCAA vacated all the team’s wins from 1998, the year police first investigated a complaint about Sandusky, to 2011, the year Sandusky was charged. The organization also imposed punishments against Penn State’s athletics program due to the scandal, including a $60 million fine, a reduction of the school’s scholarship money and lengthy bans.

Postseason access and scholarships were restored by the NCAA in 2014. As part of the settlement, Penn State would commit the fine money to child abuse prevention and treatment organizations in Pennsylvania, the NCAA said.

“Continuing this litigation would further delay the distribution of funds to child sexual-abuse survivors for years, undermining the very intent of the fine,” said Harris Pastides, University of South Carolina president and a member of the NCAA Board of Governors, in a statement. 

Sandusky, who maintains his innocence, served as assistant football coach at Penn State for 32 years. Now 70, he was charged with 48 counts of abuse, convicted in 2012 of 45 counts and sentenced to between 30 and 60 years in prison. Debate has since ensued over whether the university’s athletic department covered up years of abuse to protect the legacy of its successful sports teams. 

If the settlement is finalized, Joe Paterno will regain his title as coach with the most wins at a college level, with 409 victories in total. Paterno was fired as a result of the scandal, after over three decades coaching the team. He died in January 2012.

The United States Supreme Court will consider whether the Constitution requires states to recognize same-sex marriage. The Court accepted four separate cases from Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky and consolidated them into a single case. It will hear arguments in April and issue its decision in June.

Review of the issue by the Court became a near-certainty after the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals based in Cincinnati, Ohio, upheld bans on same-sex marriage in four states. Courts in the Fourth, Seventh, Ninth and Tenth circuits have all ruled against bans on same-sex marriages. With the federal courts split, the Supreme Court must now step in to resolve the issue.

This story is developing.

Since the fall of longtime strongman Muammar Qaddafi, Libya has descended into chaos, with rival factions vying for power and influence across the country.

This week, members of the country’s warring factions met in Geneva for the first round of United Nations-brokered peace talks. The goal: to form a unity government and stop the fighting between Islamist and largely secular political groups. The talks concluded on Thursday night, and a new round will take place in Geneva next week.

Since December, the U.N. has been trying to establish a dialogue between the two sides. It’s part of a last-ditch effort to solve what seems to be an increasingly intractable conflict. But only one side has officially embraced the peace talks, and many critical parties refused to attend the first round.

In an interview with Newsweek, Wayne White, a scholar with the Middle East Institute and former deputy director of the State Department’s Middle East intelligence office, spoke about what the Libyan crisis means for the rest of the world and why the media doesn’t seem to be paying any attention.

Who are Libya’s two main warring factions?

One is the largely secular and internationally recognized government headed by Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thani, who was elected in June. In August, al-Thani and his cohorts, including Libya’s House of Representatives, fled the capital city of Tripoli for Tobruk, some 780 miles away, as a rival group of Islamist politicians drove them out. Led by Omar al-Hassi, this group now controls Tripoli and has chosen a new parliament. The source of their strength is an Islamist militia called Libya Dawn.

For months now, al-Hassi has been saying that Libya needs new elections and that al-Thani’s parliament has lost legitimacy. But experts say al-Hassi opposes peace talks because they could weaken his government.

“There’s still going to be the problem of luring the Islamist pretender government to these talks,” White says. “It suspects, quite credibly, that the ideal conclusion for the Western powers with these talks is their elimination or their de-legitimization.”

Who is Libya Dawn and how are they different from Libya’s other Islamist militias?

Libya Dawn is a group of hardened militia fighters that back the self-declared government of al-Hassi in Tripoli. It’s a nationalist organization that has no external connections to other Islamist fighters.  

Ansar al-Sharia, on the other hand, is Al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Libya. That group dominates the city of Benghazi, controlling vast swaths of the city, despite frequent attempts by the Libyan national army to dislodge them.

There are a variety of other Islamist groups as well, from ISIS-connected organizations such as Ansar al-Sharia Derna in the city of Derna to another Al-Qaeda offshoot, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which operates in the country’s southwest.

Libya Dawn, according to White, is far more moderate than these groups. “[It] denounces all of them,” he says.

Why has there been no further Western military intervention in Libya?

The ongoing civil war in Syria and the emergence of ISIS remain the region’s most intractable problems. They’ve captured most of the West’s focus, which is why Libya has been put on the back burner. Political turmoil in Egypt has also preoccupied the Western powers, especially after President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi overthrew his Islamist rival, Mohammed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president.

The lone exception in the West is France, which has prioritized the problems in Libya since late 2013 and has been acting mostly alone to contain the violence. But with the recent attacks in Paris, France will likely join the rest of the world in turning its attention now to Yemen, the stronghold of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which claimed responsibility for the Paris terrorism.

“The French will probably also ramp up their effort against the Islamic State, although what we’re hearing now, so far, is that France is still reluctant to extend its airstrikes against ISIS into Syria,” says White.

What will happen if the peace talks don’t pan out?

If the peace talks aren’t successful, the fighting will continue. But even the economics don’t work in favor of Libya in terms of getting attention from the international community. Libya’s oil production is down to 300,000 barrels a day, while before the 2011 civil war capacity was at least 1.65 million. Libyan oil has been absent from the market for at least a year, and with oil prices already low, no one is champing at the bit to reopen the country’s oil terminals.

In December, militants belonging to Libya Dawn pushed east and launched rockets at the oil port of Al-Sidra, setting an oil storage tank ablaze in a surprise attack against forces backing the legitimate government.

But a more disturbing scenario is a sort of Syria redux, in which extremist groups join the fray, widening and further radicalizing the conflict. Already that seems to be happening. Says White, “We’ve seen the radical portions of the city of Derna, which even during the days of Qaddafi was a hotbed for Islamist militant activity against his regime, declare allegiance to the Islamic State.”

Why is the war in Libya a problem for countries outside the region?  

The situation is Libya is causing another huge refugee crisis in the region. More than 2 million refugees are living in Tunisia, according to Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki, and Libya has more than 454,000 internally displaced people. While data from the U.N. refugee agency shows only 3,353 refugees registered in Tunisia as of mid-2014, the millions of reported refugees likely haven’t registered with the U.N. and are staying with family or other hosts.

But the problem extends beyond displaced people. In Mali, Islamist militias have infiltrated the country and nearly overthrown the government. In Niger, located southwest of Libya, similar groups have raided and threatened the government and flooded the area with guns, forcing France to step in to try to control the problem.

But perhaps the biggest fear is Egypt. Extremists and war profiteers in Libya have been successfully smuggling weapons across the border, especially into Sinai, where ISIS-linked rebels have attacked government forces and even launched cross-border attacks against Israel.

“The Egyptian-Libyan border is huge,” says White, “The Egyptians have shown over the last year that they do not have the resources to hold and control [it].”

Why has there been limited media coverage, and why is this dangerous?

As Western governments continue to focus on ISIS, so does the media. The terrorist group has successfully used social media to keep its brand in the news, beheading its captives and kidnapping women and girls and turning them into sex slaves.

The situation in Libya makes for a far less clickable headline, and apart from the 2012 Benghazi attack on the U.S. Embassy that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others, it’s received scant attention. Many outlets have also failed to grasp that security is deteriorating in Libya as the country’s two main factions continue to feud. Or that the implications are dangerous.

“To a lot of the media outside, what has been going on in Libya looks like a lot of the same,” White says. “I think they see a maddening maelstrom of instability out of which they can see few patterns, unless you start really looking at it.”

The Islamic State (ISIS) has released images purportedly showing a gay man being pushed from a roof in Mosul, Iraq. The terrorist organization uploaded the photographs to Justpaste.it, a file-sharing service. The images were also circulated amongst supporters and members of the jihadist movement on social media services, such as Twitter.

In the graphic photographs, a man is pushed off of the ledge of a tall building by two masked members of ISIS. Below, a crowd has gathered to watch. The photographs document the man plummeting and his body lying on the ground.

“The Islamic court in Wilayet al-Furat decided that a man who has practiced sodomy must be thrown off the highest point in the city and then stoned to death,” ISIS said in a statement provided to AFP along with the images. Other photographs purport to show a Sharia court charged him with the same act.

Homosexuality is regularly publicly punished in ISIS controlled territories. Two men were stoned to death in Raqqa, Syria, in November.

Last summer, militants from ISIS, the world’s most notorious jihadist group, forced thousands of Yazidis—a religious minority in the Middle East—to flee up Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. Had they stayed, they would have faced certain death or forced conversion to Islam.

Indeed, ISIS reportedly killed more than 500 Yazidis in August, and though a U.S. military operation helped free some of them from the mountain, not everyone escaped.

Since then, thousands of women and girls have been kidnapped by ISIS and forced into sexual slavery. The religious justification for these acts, the jihadist group says, is that Yazidis and their families are “idolators” based on their worship of a fallen angel—Melek Tawwus, or Peacock Angel—one of seven angels that makes up the core of their religious beliefs.   

Many women and girls are still missing, but a few have escaped and lived to tell harrowing stories of how they were raped and exploited.

The slideshow above shows portraits of Yazidis at the temple in Lalish, in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. 

This here’s Miss Cheyenne Phillips. This is Dalton Hayes. They rob cars, are madly in love and are currently living on the lam. Sounds like a plot loosely based on Bonnie and Clyde, but it’s true: A teenage couple from Grayson County, Kentucky have run away and are flying south, where they are wreaking havoc on cattle farms, swiping cars containing firearms, cashing stolen checks and worrying their parents.

There is currently a manhunt out for Cheyenne Phillips, 13, and Dalton Hayes, 18, who have been missing now for 12 days. “It is imperative that these two be located and apprehended as their behavior is becoming brazen and increasingly dangerous,” said the Grayson County Sheriff’s Office in a statement.

The pair have been going steady for three months, but fled when Hayes’s mom, Tammy Martin, found out that Phillips was not in fact 19 years old, but 13, and confronted her about it. “I texted Cheyenne and said the police are looking for you, she says why; I said, they say you’re underaged,” she told WHAS-TV Louisville. Phillips’s father had reported her missing to local police when she didn’t return home the night of January 3 and spent it at her boyfriend’s instead. Authorities alerted Martin, but her son and his girlfriend had vanished by the time she got home. Police believe that the two were staying with family and friends for about a week, until they began committing crimes.

On January 11, one week after they went missing, the couple jacked a truck from Kathy and Jim McGrew, a couple living in Grayson County. The McGrews told WHAS-TV Louisville that they heard a loud sound, “like a bomb went off,” and it was the pair stealing a truck from their garage. The pair thundered down the road in the stolen car with the police and Jim McGrew, who attempted to chase them in his personal airplane, in hot pursuit.

The teens damaged $7,500 worth of property after barreling through a cattle farm, then disappeared into the woods, where they made their escape. Later, local police found the truck and a pile of clothes the pair had left behind. Not an hour and a half later, they had stolen another car, a 2006 Toyota Tacoma, and skipped town.

On Monday, the Grayson County Sheriff’s Office released surveillance images placing the pair at a Walmart in Manning, South Carolina, where they were driving the Tacoma, which happened to have a gun inside, and cashed two stolen checks for $20 each, reports TheWashington Post. This car has since been recovered in Henry County, Georgia, but no mention of the gun.

Authorities confirmed on Thursday that the couple has stolen and is believed to be driving a silver 2001 Toyota Tundra, which was parked walking distance from the Tacoma they abandoned. Said car has a certified firefighter license plate and contains two handguns, a .38 special and a .45 caliber, reports the Lexington Herald-Ledger.

Hayes is currently wanted by the police on charges of felony car theft and custodial interference.

The criminal couple hasn’t made an attempt to contact their parents, save for a single text that Hayes sent his mom on January 6, two days after they disappeared. “Mommy, don’t worry. I’m fine, okay—plenty of money and food. Love you, good night, sweet dreams.”

Speaking to the Lexington Herald-Ledger, Grayson County Sheriff Norman Chaffins said authorities’ primary concern is getting the teens home safely. They don’t believe the couple has malicious intentions, but they worry about what could happen. "We think it's important for them to get back home, because they're starting to bite off a little more than they can chew,” he told the paper. “Our concern is that they could get themselves hemmed up in something that they.… We just don't want them to get hurt."

In last year’s absorbing spy thriller, A Most Wanted Man, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Günter Bachmann, a wheezing German counterterrorism agent determined to worm his way to the top of a Middle Eastern terror group.

“It takes a minnow, to catch a barracuda,” he says, “a barracuda to catch a shark.”

“We’re not policemen—” adds his sidekick, played by Rachel Adams. Hoffman finishes the thought: “We’re spies.”

Based on a John le Carré novel, the film’s betes noirs, of course, are security bureaucrats who are desperate, in more ways than one, to make headline-harvesting busts. When they push Hoffman to roll up a suspected terrorist money launderer instead of letting a mark lead him to the Beirut-based brains of the organization, he counsels patience.

“Our sources don’t come to us,” he says. “We find them. When they’re ours, we direct them at bigger targets.”

And that’s the counterterrorism dilemma in a nutshell: How much rope do you give lower-level terrorists, in the hopes of turning them, knowing they can always give you the slip and carry out a major attack?

In Europe today, the answer seems to be: not much. Anti-terror police in Paris, Berlin, Belgium and Austria carried out major sweeps Thursday night and Friday. After a dozen raids around Brussels and in the eastern Belgian town of Verviers—where a gun battle with police left two suspected Syria jihad veterans dead—the authorities reportedly rounded up 15 suspects on Friday.

A big plot was in the offing, Belgian authorities claimed. "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.” In France, the authorities arrested two men but said they “still had no evidence of a link between the Belgians and Islamists” who attacked a Jewish supermarket and the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, killing 17 people.

Robert Baer, a former CIA operative who pursued terrorists in France in the 1980s, says European attitudes toward Islamic extremists have clearly hardened in the wake of the Paris attacks.

“In those days there was a steady hand on the tiller,” he told Newsweek. “Europeans understood they [could] put up with a little political violence and still keep an open society. Today, I sense genuine panic—the barbarians are inside the gate.”

Moreover, Baer says, the Islamist violence unshackled traditional French racism toward Arab immigrants. “As the French would say, ‘It’s time to put the [derogatory term for Arabs] in the woodchippers.”

Frank Wuco, who had several assignments in Europe with the Defense HUMINT [human intelligence] Service in the 1980s and 1990s, emphatically agreed.

“For the near term, the Europeans, they will unapologetically do whatever they have to to get rid of the problem now that it’s become violent,” he said in a telephone interview.

The battle between jihadis and counterterror forces in Europe, he predicted, would be “brutal, even feudal,” he added, as European security police “are not nearly as concerned with people’s perceptions of them as we are.”

Across European airports and train stations, he said, security forces have no hesitation to “profile” travelers, a police tactic of singling people out by their appearance that is controversial in the U.S.

“You fly into Rome lately? You see heavily armed carabinieri, they’re checking people out,” he said. “You have a Middle Eastern passport, forget about it. You’ll be pulled aside or turned around. And you don’t hear complaints about it, because Europeans don’t give a shit. The police make a lot of arrests, and there’s not a lot of explaining or apologizing about it.”

Richard J. Chasdi, a political science professor at the Center for Complex and Strategic Decisions at Walsh College in Troy, Michigan, has the numbers to back up the idea that French police tactics have radically changed in 20 years. Chasdi is the author of Counterterror Offensives for the Ghost War World, which has a chapter on French terrorism and the various responses of the authorities to it.

In the mid-1990s, French security agencies showed “a strong preference for non-forceful action,” with police and military force used in only 10 percent of “preemption” events (when an plot is in the planning stage), even though "disruption events," (when an attack is believed imminent) used military and police efforts 76 percent of the time, his research of over 200 cases found.

The big sweeps and gun battles erupting now suggest those numbers may be dramatically eclipsed in short order, he added.

“I would agree that there is a strong likelihood the Paris attacks will increase this shift in disruption-style counterterrorism efforts from ‘softer-line’ to ‘hard-line’ tactics—if that has not already happened,” Chasdi said. “The irony of all this is that French counterterrorism policy was designed to be balanced—to keep France out of those political entanglements that generate terrorism in the first place.”

But France has been and continues to be entangled abroad. Paris has supported Christian Maronites in Lebanon, the military backed government in Algeria, and now, with its involvement counterinsurgency operations in Mali, along with France's commitment to the U.S. in Iraq, “all that has changed,” he said. Add to that, “its own legislative and police crackdowns in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, [and] that shift will probably intensify even more.”

Not everyone is convinced that the robust response of security forces in the past few days marks a permanent change.

“First, people in the EU are panicked right now, and understandably so, so a swift government response is appropriate and probably necessary to calm the public’s nerves,” said Philip Lohaus, a decorated former U.S. intelligence operative and analyst in the Middle East, in an email. “Second, it could be that the attacks have led European terror officials to take other threats more seriously.” 

Lohaus, now a research fellow in intelligence at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., compared the European response to the Paris attacks to how Washington woke up after September 11, 2001. Only days before the 9/11 attacks, many key officials in the George W. Bush administration showed little interest in counterterrorism, despite “the system blinking red,” as the 9/11 Commission report put it, about an imminent attack.

“Before the attacks, there was evidence that they would occur, but the threats simply didn’t seem credible enough to warrant pre-emptive action,” Lohaus said. “But after the attacks, the government would have been irresponsible to not treat similar information with the utmost seriousness.”

Many things changed after 9/11, but not everything—not the human dimension. There were several more terrorist near-disasters, despite the complete reorganization of the government around homeland security.

“The further we get away from the Paris attacks,” Lohaus said, “the more that old habits and inclinations will prevail.”

Jeff Stein is Newsweek’s national security correspondent in Washington. He can be reached more or less securely via spytalk@hushmail.com.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Several hundred U.S. military trainers will begin moving to the Middle East in the next four to six weeks amid efforts to start training this spring for moderate Syrian opposition forces who will battle Islamic State fighters, the Pentagon said on Friday.

The U.S. military has said it is planning to send more than 400 troops, including special operations forces, to train Syrian moderates outside the country. The U.S. trainers would be accompanied by hundreds of support troops.

Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, told a briefing that some of the U.S. trainers and support troops could be given orders "within the next week or so" and would flow to countries where training will take place "over the next four to six weeks."

Kirby said several hundred foreign military troops were expected to participate in the training mission as well, including from countries hosting the training.

He didn't identify the countries that would supply military trainers, but Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have publicly offered to host training sites.

U.S. officials have said they plan to train about 5,000 Syrian fighters a year for three years. Kirby said the training was expected to last several months and if it began by early spring, some opposition groups could be "getting back into Syria and into the fight ... before the end of the year."

ACCRA (Reuters) - West African leaders will seek authority next week from the African Union to create a multi-national force to fight Nigeria's Boko Haram Islamist insurgents, Ghanaian President John Mahama told Reuters on Friday.

Any such force would represent the most robust international response yet to the militants who have killed thousands over the last year in their campaign for an Islamic caliphate and have also launched cross border attacks into Niger and Cameroon.

Boko Haram is seen as the most serious security threat to Nigeria, Africa's most populous country and its biggest energy producer, but Mahama said the group and militants in Somalia, Kenya, Mali and elsewhere posed a wider risk.

"Terrorism is like a cancer and if we don't deal with it will keep going. It threatens everybody in the sub region. When it comes to terrorism nobody is too far or too near," he said.

It will take months before an African Union force could be set up and key issues such as who would command it, the location of its headquarters and its financing remain undecided, he said.

Once set up, however, the African Union could ultimately seek a United Nations Security Council mandate to take over the force as happened in Sudan's Darfur region, he said.

Mahama was speaking as current chair of West African regional bloc ECOWAS, which has been accused of not doing enough to combat Boko Haram.

"Nigeria is taking military action and Cameroon is fighting Boko Haram, but I think we are increasingly getting to the point where probably a regional or a multinational force is coming into consideration," he said earlier.

In a further blow, Boko Haram militants seized the military base and town of Baga, in Nigeria on the shores of Lake Chad, on Jan. 3. Baga was the headquarters of a planned force to fight the insurgents with troops from Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, although that initiative stalled.

The insurgency stirred international outrage when militants seized more than 200 school girls in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria, the epicenter of the violence, last April.

France must do more to help countries fight Boko Haram, President Francois Hollande told an annual conference of French and foreign ambassadors in Paris.

"Today, Cameroon, Niger, Chad and Benin are threatened and this situation means the international community must take appropriate action and can't let this be," he said.

France said last month it would help coordinate a regional task force against Boko Haram given signs of mistrust among West African neighbors.

Cameroon President Paul Biya this month appealed for military help against Boko Haram. On Friday, U.S. Ambassador Michael Stephen Hoza said Washington would help train Cameroon's soldiers and offered equipment for the fight.

Russian Ambassador Nikolay Ratsiborinski said Moscow would supply equipment, training and arms to Cameroon and provide humanitarian assistance.

When TheVillage Voice chose Anthony Freda to create artwork for a story about the 9/11 Truth movement, he first planned to gently mock the Truthers. It was 2006, and as the article stated, mainstream 9/11 accounts like the film World Trade Center had relegated the Truth movement to DIY documentaries and a few sweaty corners of the Internet. But as Freda researched the Truther claims, what they said made sense to him, especially about how Building 7 came down. “At the onset I was hostile to these ideas,” Freda says, “but by the end of my night of research I said that these are serious people with questions that haven’t been answered.”

Rather than attack the Truthers, Freda instead attacked the official narrative. The resulting piece, a collage called Questions, uses red string to connect images, like a detective on TV building a case on a bulletin board. Questions will soon join the permanent collection at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, becoming one in a handful of artifacts there that represents an alternate view of history.

In the background of Questions is a blackboard, with notes and drawings scribbled in chalk. At the bottom is the back of a man’s head as he watches the second plane strike the Towers; above that man is string linking the images of Osama Bin Laden, John F. Kennedy, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, an honorary 9/11 Museum board member. There are also bits of flags and words printed on an old-fashioned label maker scattered throughout.

Freda created the work in 2006 for a story in The Village Voice.Anthony Freda

Freda doesn’t identify as a Truther. “I’m just a person who is trying to understand the world as it really is,” says the artist, a New Yorker, who recalls watching the smoldering towers on 9/11 from the roof of his apartment 20 blocks away. He considers himself a political artist; he’s done commercial illustrations for publications such asRolling Stone and Esquire, but also takes on controversial subjects such as genetically modified food and militarized police for alternative news websites such as Activist Post, The Big Picture and Infowars.

Museum spokespeople clarify to Newsweek that acquiring Questions doesn’t mean the museum is interested in any questioning of the standard narrative. “This artwork by a witness of the terror attacks in New York City, being accepted in the collection, references a perspective held by some who dispute historical accounts of September 11,” Chief Spokesman Michael Frazier writes in a statement. “While the Museum categorically disagrees with this perspective, does not in any way endorse it, and refutes it through our historical exhibitions, we recognize these baseless views were taken by some after 9/11 and see the artwork only as an artifact of that movement.”

“We do have other Truther material,” adds Anthony Guido, director of communications.

“I particularly like Anthony’s artwork because it has so many levels and it’s not so straightforward,” says John Massaria, a documentary filmmaker who is chronicling Freda’s work for an upcoming film, Behind Truth Art. Massaria accompanied Freda to the museum in October, when the artist donated the work and discussed the piece with curators for 90 minutes.

“Unless they’re really good poker players, they didn’t seem shocked,” Freda says about that meeting. “They seemed very captivated by what I was saying.”

The 9/11 Museum has attracted 1.8 million visitors since it opened last May. Freda’s work joins a collection of more than 23,000 images and 10,300 artifacts, which include beams from the Twin Towers, emergency vehicles and personal objects that belonged to victims. The museum says it has no plans to display Freda’s work.

“You can’t have a 9/11 museum without the 9/11 Truth movement being represented in some way,” Freda says, though he concedes, “I’m still not sure what their motivations are for having this piece in there.”

You gouda be kidding me: News broke this week that a small city near Seattle has issued an executive order to ban cheese, cheese-flavored products and perhaps most importantly, cheese-shaped hats, from city hall.

Douglas Schulze, city manager of Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride across the Puget Sound from Seattle, orchestrated the ban in advance of a highly anticipated football game between the Seattle Seahawks and Green Bay Packers.

“On Sunday, January 18, 2015, the Seattle Seahawks opponent in the NFC Championship game will be the Green Bay Packers, a.k.a. Cheeseheads. Fans of the Green Bay Packers are frequently seen wearing obnoxious wedge-shaped foam hats painted yellow,” Schulze wrote in the order, issued Wednesday. Packers fans are known as Cheeseheads due to Wisconsin’s high volume of cheese production.

“Due to the relationship between the Green Bay Packers, their fans, and cheese,” Schulze continued, “the possession of and/or consumption of cheese or cheese flavored products shall be banned in Bainbridge Island City Hall.”

City employees appeared to be big fans of the ban, with staff showing up to work on Friday decked out in Seahawks colors, according to Kellie Stickney, a community specialist for Bainbridge’s city hall.

While the area is overwhelming pro-Seahawks, Packers fans were still able to act like real muensters from a distance. “We have had a couple cheese pizzas sent to us today,” Stickney told Newsweek. There were no hard feelings though, Stickney said, though it remains unclear of the pizza was or was not consumed.

City hall cheese connoisseurs likely breathed a sigh of relief when they found out the ban was temporary. From Monday, city hall employees can once again consume the delightful dairy product to their heart’s content.

Additionalreporting was provided by pun-loving Twitter users whose suggestions were solicited for this story. Herewith, the top five suggestions that didn’t make the cut but deserve recognition:

@pollyNYC New Head Coach: Oakland Raiders: Pepper Jack Del Rio

— Shaners (@ShanersMD) January 16, 2015

@pollyNYC Jay Cutler of Da Gruyeres

— melanie (@tinkermellie) January 16, 2015

@pollyNYC@tinkermellie Tom Gratey @lastbadasstion

— Shaners (@ShanersMD) January 16, 2015

@pollyNYC@donalderyan@lastbadasstion@SconsetCapital Edam Vinatieri

— Shaners (@ShanersMD) January 16, 2015

@pollyNYC Consider it a "feta accompli".

— Timothy Connolly CFA (@SconsetCapital) January 16, 2015

KIEV (Reuters) - Fighting raged on Saturday at the main airport of Ukraine's city of Donetsk as separatists resumed attempts to break the tenuous grip of government forces on the complex and Kiev's military said three more Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.

With attempts to restart peace talks stalled, pro-Russian rebels have stepped up shelling attacks to break the resistance of government troops dug in at the airport, itself a wrecked hulk battered by months of war.

Though its runways are cratered and it has long ceased to function, the airport has symbolic value for both sides and has become the main flashpoint in the fighting as prospects for fresh peace talks have dimmed.

A planned meeting of representatives from Ukraine, Russia and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and separatist leaders on the Ukraine crisis failed to materialize in the Belarussian capital Minsk on Friday.

A meeting of the so-called 'contact group' is seen as vital for getting the warring parties to observe a real ceasefire.

"In the past 24 hours three Ukrainian service personnel have been killed and 18 wounded. Yesterday evening we succeeded in evacuating the wounded from the airport," military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said.

Separatists were concentrating their fire on Saturday on the airport's new terminal and its weather station.

"Our forces are repelling the attacks of the terrorists. The fighting is heavy. Firing is going on all the time. The situation remains under control but the adversary is not letting up in its attacks to seize this strategic target," Lysenko said.

The heavy fighting is in spite of a 12-point peace blueprint mapped out in Minsk in early September which called for a ceasefire in the nine-month conflict in which more than 4,800 people have been killed, according to World Health Organization.

Lysenko accused Russia of maintaining a threatening military presence near the border with Ukraine which he said included all types of powerful weapons including Smerch and Uragan rocket launchers.

The Channel Tunnel operator said services could restart later on Saturday after it evacuated a shuttle train and closed the undersea crossing earlier in the day due to smoke from a truck.

Eurotunnel said that the incident, which shut the tunnel for several hours, had not caused significant damage.

Smoke detectors were set off by a "smoldering load" in the trailer of a truck, it said, clarifying an earlier statement in which it had said the source of the smoke was unknown.

"The smoldering has now been dealt with by the fire and rescue services, and we are now working to remove that shuttle and to get services restarted again in the other tunnel this evening," a spokesman for Eurotunnel told Reuters.

A full service in both tunnels was likely to begin again on Sunday, he added, with no information on what the smoldering load was at this stage.

British police had earlier said the tunnel closure was due to a truck fire and the Calais-Dover shuttle train had been evacuated due to the smoke. There were no injuries.

"Rail passengers are advised to expect significant delays whilst the vehicle is being recovered and fumes are cleared from the tunnels," Kent police said in an emailed statement.

Eurostar, the operator of passenger train services through the tunnel between Paris, London and Brussels, said on Twitter its passenger trains would not be running on Saturday and that all trains halted en route would return to their original stations.

It advised passengers to postpone journeys and not come to stations.

France has been on high alert since Islamist militants killed 17 people in three days of violence in Paris that began on Jan. 7 with an attack on the offices of a satirical newspaper.