For about a year now, Airbnb has been at the center of a heated battle, pitting residents and lawmakers against one another in New York City. At issue: whether the website, which allows users to list their homes and rent them out for a nightly fee, has helped create a bevy of unsafe, illegal hotels and exacerbated the city’s housing shortage.

On Tuesday, the battle played at New York’s City Hall, where the City Council held a hearing about the company’s practices. Outside, around 9 a.m., Airbnb employees passed out T-shirts and stickers promoting the company. Within an hour, however, protesters arrived on the scene, filling half a city block. Some were well-known housing activists, while others were just ordinary New Yorkers concerned with Airbnb’s impact on the city.

Inside, tensions ran high as the majority of people were there to protest against the San Francisco-based company. Some in attendance carried “My home is not a hotel” signs, and on several occasions, burst into applause despite City Council rules banning clapping during meetings.

During the hearing, four Airbnb representatives squared off against city legislators about the legality of its business. New York state law bars tenants and landlords from renting out their apartments for less than 30 days unless they’re living in the same unit. Airbnb believes the rules should changed, while the city council wants the company to obey the law, which would greatly narrow Airbnb’s customer base.

The council was particularly concerned with Airbnb’s role in promoting illegal hotels, which a landlord creates when he or she rents out an apartment for a short-term lease. Critics say this practice is unsafe as illegal hotels often aren’t up to the city’s fire and safety standards.

Last year, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed Airbnb for customer data to determine how many illegal hotels the company was supporting. Just 6 percent of Airbnb hosts, he found, controlled more than a third of all the company’s listing—a clear indication of widespread illegality. One host had 272 apartments listed on the site, earning $6.8 million a year in revenue.

As a result of Schneiderman’s findings, Airbnb removed 2,000 hosts from its website and now says it doesn’t support any illegal hotels. But Share Better, an anti-Airbnb lobbyist group, said on Tuesday the company has added 2,300 illegal hosts over the last year. Airbnb called the information “flawed,” and David Hantman, the company’s global head of public policy, said the site has started to take pains to “educate our hosts about the city's laws [and] ... make them aware of their lease and fire codes.”

Council members also questioned Airbnb about its role in promoting lease breaking. City leases generally don’t allow renters to sublet their apartment for less than 30 days, but Airbnb’s business is essentially based on short-term rentals. In a rare admittance of wrongdoing, the company acknowledged that it didn't do enough in the past to educate its users about the laws, and the company still doesn’t try and find out if its users are renting out their apartments illegally. “We do not research that,” Hantman said.

One member of the council, Jumaane Williams, was particularly miffed about the company’s lack of due diligence. “I understand if you think the law is wrong,” he said. “I don’t understand why you aren’t finding out if people are obeying the law.

The main reason the company may not be interested in following the law, Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal said, is profit. Hosting is big business in the city: The top 12 Airbnb hosts earned more than a $1 million a year, according to the New York Attorney General’s office, and Airbnb takes a cut of every transaction. But this profit, lawmakers say, comes with a catch for ordinary residents. When a landlord uses units for Airbnb, they’re no longer available to city residents, which critics say has made affordable housing even more difficult to find.  

Though the council took issue with Airbnb’s business model, they acknowledged the convenience of the service for users, noting that rooms are often less expensive than hotels. Since it came to New York in 2012, Airbnb has been popular among tourists and business travelers, many of whom may not know they’re staying in an illegal residence.

Throughout the meeting, as each side presented its argument, lawmakers and Airbnb reps found little common ground. At one point, councilwoman Helen Rosenthal asked him to remove illegal Airbnb listings on the spot. Hantman said he wouldn’t be able to do that, so Rosenthal offered to make herself available the next day, providing her personal email to the Airbnb representatives.

Though the council was quick to question Airbnb’s business model and impact on New York’s housing situation, Rosenthal did offer what she hoped would be a compromise. “Would you allow hosts to rent just one time a year?” she asked. Hantman, however, didn’t find the proposal agreeable. “You should be able to rent your home whenever you want,” he said.

Even Airbnb’s promotional T-shirts came under fire as critics said the company was using them to try and curry favor with New Yorkers. “I’m just amazed at how bad it seems,” Williams said, referring to the tension between the council and the company.  

Hartman seemed to agree. As he put it: “We are still talking past each other.” 

Delhi’s international airport was closed for two hours yesterday morning because President Obama is visiting India. He wasn’t, however, in the country and is not arriving for another four days, but everything is being rehearsed down to the finest detail, even closing the airspace around the capital.

That is partly because of intense and almost suffocating security arrangements that are being insisted on by Obama’s secret service officials, but it is also because any bureaucrat who mucks up the three day visit knows he will earn the unenviable wrath of Narendra Modi, the prime minister.

This is no ordinary visit. It will probably achieve little in terms of major decisions, but it is historic because it stems solely from a degree of personal rapport between the two men that must be envied even by David Cameron, the latest of a long line of British prime ministers who pursue high-profile special relationships with American presidents.

The idea of the visit emerged when Obama unexpectedly broke with U.S. presidential tradition and accompanied Modi on a visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorial in Washington, D.C., early last October. While they were walking round the memorial, Obama had an unusual worry, Aditi Phadnis the Business Standard’s well-connected political editor has reported.

“My daughters, Sasha and Malia, complain that I’ve taken them all round the world but not to India,” Obama told Modi. (When Obama visited India in 2010, his wife Michelle accompanied him but their daughters were left in Washington because of school commitments.)

“Then you should come to India and bring them with you!” exclaimed Modi. At the end of his bilateral meeting speech, Modi said: “I look forward to receiving President Obama and his family in India at a convenient time.” The visit was on the table and was clinched when the two leaders met again a few weeks later in Myanmar at an ASEAN summit. Obama accepted an invitation to be the official guest at India’s annual Republic Day parade on January 26, even though this meant shifting his State of the Union Speech from January 28 to yesterday.

This shows a remarkable rapport between the two men, but it does not mean there is to be a sea change in relations. The two countries are not and will not be allies, even though Modi did use that word around the time of his highly successful U.S. visit last October. This is because India’s refusal to toe the American line on various issues, which is causing considerable friction.

There is deep unhappiness in Washington about India not implementing sanctions against Iran and allowing Crimea’s prime minister to be in President Putin’s delegation when he visited Delhi in December. India is also not playing ball on a trans-Pacific treaty promoted by the U.S. There are other issues including trade policies and defense contracts, plus a failure to solve contractual liability problems stemming from a 2008 deal on nuclear-power projects. Some but not all of these have either been addressed or will be during the visit, especially on defense.

Modi sees foreign policy primarily as a vehicle for building relationships that will attract foreign investment and technical assistance to boost India’s currently poor economic growth and business investment and he does not differentiate between the sources.

In a spate of visits that started soon after he was elected last year, Modi secured (unspecified) announcements of $35 billion potential infrastructure investment in Japan and $41 billion possibilities from companies in the U.S. There was also talk of a very vague $20 billion from China when President Xi Jinping visited India in October. Putin’s trip to Delhi in December led to other possible deals, and it is significant that Russia’s defense minister has been in Delhi this week—another point that cannot please Washington.

Next weekend’s visit is, however, enabling the U.S.-India relationship to be reset and reinvigorated. It slipped during the 2009-2014 Congress-led government when there were various policy and other blockages and there was no leadership from either Obama or Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister. That was enabling critics in Washington to encourage problems that were not solved.

Modi can now be expected to try to keep the momentum going after all the hullabaloo at the weekend. His immediate task, however, is to make sure that Obama’s family trip goes smoothly, without terrorist or other interruptions, so that the American president and his wife and daughters enjoy the Republic Day parade and a visit to the Taj Mahal at Agra on January 26 and 27, and then fly safely home.

John Elliott’s new book is IMPLOSION: India’s Tryst with Reality (HarperCollins, India). He can be read at ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com.

Units in Russia’s air force are now operating with a Russian-developed navigation system,

an alternative to the U.S.-funded GPS. The home-grown navigation project called GLONASS was installed in SU-25 fighter jets which successfully completed a practice run over northern Kyrgyzstan today, according to a statement issued by regional command.

The GLONASS-equipped jets will be used in the rapid response unit of the air force, as Russia continues to experiment with the navigation technology it hopes will soon rival the U.S.’s GPS.

“Airmen from Russia’s aviation base Kant, dispatched in Kyrgyzstan, conducted a training flight in the Edelweiss air circuit (airspace east of Bishkek),” the statement read. “They successfully utilised the GLONASS navigation system in poor visibility conditions, as well as executing low flying manoeuvres over the forest terrain.”

According to the air force unit’s head command, GLONASS was integrated into Russia’s modernised versions of the popular SU-25 fighter jet units at the end of 2014.

The same system, nicknamed ‘Rook’ by Russian pilots, is also supplied to countries in Russia’s security alliance such as Belarus and also North Korea.

GLONASS, which claims to be the only global navigation satellite system other than GPS, has been a focal point of Russia’s Aerospace Defence Forces, since the branch’s creation by the Ministry of Defence in 2011.

The GLOSNASS project is a joint venture between Russia’s space exploration agency Roscosmos and the armed forces. It was spearheaded by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2001 when he unveiled plans to revive older Soviet incarnations of a satellite navigation system dating back to the 1970s.

Although GLOSNASS has reportedly become Roscosmos’s most expensive project, costing around $5 billion dollars between 2001 and 2011, and with an additional $11 billion due to be invested in the project by 2020, it has not had the success of its US counterpart.

26 GLOSNASS satellites have been produced in total with 24 of them currently in orbit, but in April last year the system experienced a power outage for half a day, leading to positions being miscalculated by more than 50km, which did little to solidify GLOSNASS’s reputation as a viable alternative to GPS.

Once perfected, the Russian military hopes to use GLOSNASS in other operations, including to provide air and space surveillance, tracking missiles and to warn of approaching rockets. 

Since 1966, the opposition party has taken the opportunity to deliver an official televised response to the president’s annual State of the Union address. On Tuesday night, after President Barack Obama delivered his seventh address on the state of the nation, Republicans delivered an unprecedented half a dozen responses.

Joni Ernst, the newly elected junior senator from Iowa, delivered the official Republican response. Ernst emphasized her roots as an “ordinary Iowan” and her time with the Iowa Army National Guard and quickly reminded voters of the Republican victory in 2014’s midterm elections. She criticized Obamacare, arguing it has “hurt so many hardworking American families.” She also touted the Keystone XL pipeline, which Republicans say will create new jobs but which Democrats are concerned will lead to environmental damage; Obama has threatened to veto the bill if it lands on his desk.

Ernst spoke of executive overreach, apparently in reference to Obama’s executive actions in November to enact immigration reform and in December to normalize relations with Cuba. She also referenced her support of the right to life and criticized Obama’s position on taxes.

Her speech was generally well received, with New York Times columnist David Brooks calling it “fluid” and “aggressive,” and with syndicated columnist Mark Shields calling Ernst “better than Bobby Jindal, better than Marco Rubio ... she was the face of the Republicans’ new majority.”

Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida was slated to deliver a translated version of Ernst’s speech for Spanish language speakers. Notably, however, Curbelo’s speech and Ernst’s had one major difference that was not publicized before the speeches were given (but received plenty of publicity Wednesday morning): immigration.

“We should also work through the appropriate channels to create permanent solutions for our immigration system,” Curbelo said, devoting a paragraph of his speech to the subject of immigration reform. The number of times Ernst mentioned immigration? Zero.

Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, both potential contenders for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, each delivered responses on YouTube.

Paul, like Obama, also spoke about the need to address income inequality, but disagreed with the president’s approach, calling his policies “more of the same ... that have allowed the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer.”

Tea party favorite Ted Cruz also delivered a response (though not on behalf of the tea party), criticizing Obama for not “[coming] with contrition” after his party received a thumping in the midterm elections.

Whereas all of his colleagues gave prerecorded speeches, Cruz delivered his response live. Apparently unsatisfied with the direction his response was taking, Cruz stopped midway through, quipping, “Meh, let me start over.” It is unclear whether Cruz knew his speech was being live-streamed to YouTube.

He later removed the video from YouTube—and uploaded an edited version—but media blog Mediaite retrieved the original.

Rep. Curt Clawson of Florida delivered a response for the tea party. Clawson used the story of his college basketball career at Purdue University to demonstrate the need for effective teamwork.

A recently released World Bank report has claimed that the chance of escaping poverty is now roughly the same in India as it is in the U.S.

The report, called Addressing Inequality in South Asia,  compares the share of consumption among three developing countries - Vietnam, Bangladesh and India - and the United States, divided along transitioning class lines - moving out of poverty, those moving from poverty into the middle class, falling back to poverty, falling out of middle class. The findings of the analysis were that “within the same generation, mobility in earnings - measured by the ability to move out of poverty and into the middle class - is comparable to that of the United States

The report says that India between 2004-05 and 2009-10, 15% of the total population also moved above the poverty line. By these measures, the report claims “upward mobility within a generation in.... India was comparable to that of dynamic societies such as the United States.”

The report attributed much of India’s upward mobility to increased urbanisation in the country, stating in a summary: “Urban jobs have become a ticket to the middle class. Upward mobility is much stronger in cities, where even self-employment and casual work can lead to substantial gains in consumption.”

While the report pointed to robust mobility, it also highlighted inequality in access to public services, which can largely be traced to factors such as gender, location and caste.

India’s population growth rates in urban areas are double those of rural areas, but the report also raises concerns about the sustainability of this growth: “Although urban areas present better prospects of economic mobility than rural areas, both the pace and the pattern of urbanization in South Asia are reasons for concern.” It adds that urbanisation is different in South Asia from other parts of the world: “Whereas people come to cities in the form of migration, cities also “come” to people through the densification of population and the transformation of economic activity in rural areas.”

Increasingly, jobs are beating class and caste routes to prosperity. While they still do matter, factors like where you were born and your parents occupation matter less and less in modern India. In fact, upward mobility has been stronger, relative to the population, among the lowest castes, known as ‘untouchables’. Where children would usually take up the jobs of their parents, occupational mobility of the younger generation has increased to greater levels than the general population.

While much is made of India’s diminishing poverty, it doesn’t necessarily stop the middle class from falling back there: “Downward mobility was much bigger in the two South Asian countries... revealing the greater risks faced by the vulnerable and even the middle class.”

Quoted in The Hindu, Onno Ruhl, a World Bank director in India, said that among the policy prescriptions that Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who himself spent his boyhood working on a tea stand in a train station, should take away are to “strive for universal health and sanitation; leverage the opportunity for urbanisation; and create jobs for all and build skills not just through technical training but also with servicing the population with primary and secondary education and nutrition”.

Katie Malouf, a spokesperson for Oxfam said: “This report rightly emphasises the need for governments in South Asia to provide universal access to basic services” and “points to tax avoidance and evasion as a serious problem.” Malouf adds that “the report should have paid more attention to a critical aspect of the solution - in a region that has some of the lowest shares of spending on social services in the world, governments must mobilize far more funding by making tax systems more progressive, and they must stop letting the poor foot the bill. The World Bank should speak out more vocally in favour of fairer tax systems to fight inequality."

Arturo Hernandez Garcia was laying floor tile on a construction site in Lone Tree, Colorado, one day several years ago when another contractor wanted to walk through the room he and his crew had recently finished. This would have ruined the floor, so Hernandez Garcia asked him not to, he explained to Newsweek in Spanish. What right does a Mexican have to tell me what to do? Hernandez Garcia says he was asked.

"Fucking Mexican!" the contractor yelled. "Go back to Mexico!" 

The hothead quickly swapped racial epithets for blows. Hernandez Garcia says he pushed the man back to defend himself. Shortly after, the police were called to the site. Construction supervisors told them that Hernandez Garcia was not to blame—and that the other man tried to fight him. Cops nevertheless cuffed Hernandez Garcia, not the other man.

Despite pressure from prosecutors to plead guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence, Hernandez Garcia, 42, insisted on his innocence and took the case to trial. In 2010, a jury acquitted him on the assault charges. And he wasn’t acquitted on a technicality—witness testimony backed up his account, according to media reports and his supporters. 

Hernandez Garcia quickly learned, however, that the construction worker’s jeer—"Go back to Mexico!"—might become his future.

Hernandez Garcia is an undocumented immigrant. In 1999, he came to the U.S. from Chihuahua, Mexico, with his wife and infant daughter on tourist visas, and they stayed. Until Hernandez Garcia's legal troubles, they seemed to embody the American Dream. Hernandez Garcia and his brother co-owned a tile-laying business with six employees. He owned a home on the outskirts of Denver. The successful family also grew, with Hernandez Garcia's wife giving birth to another daughter. His girls are now 9 and 15.

Since his arrest, Hernandez Garcia has faced and fought deportation proceedings. He showed up on Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) radar via the Secure Communities program, which President Barack Obama pledged to end in his November executive actions to reform immigration.

Secure Communities started in 2008. ICE touted Secure Communities as "a simple and common sense way to carry out ICE's priorities." In essence, Secure Communities enabled local law enforcement to share fingerprints with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of which ICE is a part. Local law enforcement agencies had already shared fingerprints with the FBI to see whether arrestees had priors. Under Secure Communities, however, "the FBI automatically sends the fingerprints to DHS to check against its immigration databases."

After he made yet another unsuccessful appeal to immigration authorities, in August, ICE decided to deport Hernandez Garcia on October 21, 2014. He took sanctuary in the First Unitarian Society of Denver's church that same day, as ICE typically does not conduct "enforcement actions" in churches and schools.

Hernandez Garcia learned about sanctuary after calling a hot line for immigrants in need of assistance. The advocacy group behind the ad then put him in contact with Jennifer Piper, of the American Friends Service Committee. Piper organizes the Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition. The group, which consists of "six Colorado faith communities," has come together to provide sanctuary to individuals such as Hernandez Garcia. The First Unitarian Society of Denver is Hernandez Garcia's host church. Four other churches are supporting him by, for example, bringing food.

Earlier this month, the chief counsel for immigration and customs enforcement in Colorado decided not to reopen Hernandez Garcia's case, so his best legal option is a "stay of removal." This is the deportation equivalent of a stay of execution, Piper says.

An ICE spokesman said of the case: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) first encountered Arturo Armando Hernandez-Garcia[sic] in 2010 following his arrest on local criminal charges. In October 2012, his request for a 60-day voluntary departure was granted by an immigration judge. The voluntary departure order reverted to final orders of removal when Mr. Hernandez Garcia did not return to Mexico as agreed by Dec. 1, 2012.

Hernandez Garcia says he did not leave in 2012 because he was appealing his case and that if he had left, he would have lost the legal standing for his appeal.

Before his fight with ICE, Hernandez Garcia and his wife had applied for legal permanent resident visas in 2005 through his father-in-law, who is a U.S. citizen. Even if Hernandez Garcia hadn't encountered legal trouble, they likely wouldn't have received a decision until 2025 because of a backlog, Piper says.

In November, Obama announced his executive actions to reform immigration, saying he was focusing on deporting "felons, not families." 

One of his initiatives, the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) program, creates: 

...a mechanism that requires certain undocumented immigrants to pass a background check to make sure that they start paying their fair share in taxes. In order to promote public safety, DHS is establishing a new deferred action program for parents of U.S. Citizens or LPRs[legal permanent residents] who are not enforcement priorities and have been in the country for more than 5 years.

 Individuals will have the opportunity to request temporary relief from deportation and work authorization for three years at a time if they come forward and register, submit biometric data, pass background checks, pay fees, and show that their child was born before the date of this announcement. 

Obama also announced an expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. According to his office:

Under the initial DACA program, young people who had been in the U.S. for at least five years, came as children, and met specific education and public safety criteria were eligible for temporary relief from deportation so long as they were born after 1981 and entered the country before June 15, 2007. DHS is expanding DACA so that individuals who were brought to this country as children can apply if they entered before January 1, 2010, regardless of how old they are today. Going forward, DACA relief will also be granted for three years. 

DHS claims Obama's executive actions could help up to 4.4 million people, according to reports. Obama reiterated his call for immigration reform in his State of the Union address on January 20.

In theory, DAPA could provide Hernandez Garcia relief, but he worries that he would get deported before he can apply, as the application process is slated to open in May. His situation is not unique, as throughout the country potential candidates for DAPA and the DACA expansion find themselves in limbo.

Meanwhile, local field offices are turning down stay applications, telling immigrants that DAPA or DACA will protect them, Piper says. 

"The response of local immigration officers in denying discretion that would allow people to access DAPA could have a chilling effect on applications and undermine the program," Piper says. "Despite recent administration changes to lay down programs like Secure Communities, we still see people like Arturo being picked up every day—people with deep roots in and contributions to the U.S. Here in Denver, we no longer see ICE holds being issued, but instead we see people picked up when they go to court for their traffic ticket."

Hernandez Garcia will claim sanctuary until he knows he will not be deported, he says. He hopes his ordeal will help spotlight the legal challenges immigrants continue to face across the country.

Though confined to the church, he keeps busy. He has painted walls in the church offices. His family, friends and supporters frequently visit, he says. And when alone, he has a television and radio to keep him company. 

The Justice Department reached a $134,000 settlement with a woman in upstate New York on Tuesday after the Drug Enforcement Administration used information from her cellphone to create a fake Facebook page in her name in an attempt to nab an alleged drug ring.  

The settlement comes more than a year after the woman, Sondra Arquiett, sued the Justice Department saying the DEA had caused “fear and great emotional distress” by creating the fake account. The government initially defended the agency, saying that Arquiett implicitly consented to the page by “granting access to the information stored in her cellphone and by consenting to the use of that information to aid in ... ongoing criminal investigations.” But as the case attracted widespread media attention over privacy concerns, the Justice Department decided to review the case.

The drama began in 2010 when the authorities arrested Arquiett and seized her cellphone as part of a drug bust. Arquiett later pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and a judge eventually sentenced her six weeks of time already served, in addition to a period of home detention and five years probation.

But as Arquiett was awaiting trial, DEA Special Agent Timothy Sinnigen used information taken from her cellphone and created a fake Facebook page. He then used this fake account to gather information about an alleged drug ring.

When a friend asked Arquiett about some of the pictures she posted on Facebook—one showed her in her bra and underwear—she instantly knew something was wrong, as she had never created an account.

In 2013 Arquiett sued the agency, claiming the page endangered her well being as it “initiate[d] contact with dangerous individuals,” such as sending a friend request to a fugitive, and made it appear as if she was cooperating with a federal investigation.

While the settlement neither admits government wrongdoing or prohibits the DEA from using similar tactics in the future, Richard Hartunian, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, said in a statement that “this settlement demonstrates that the government is mindful of its obligation to ensure the rights of third parties are not infringed upon in the course of its efforts to bring those who commit federal crimes to justice.” 

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Chile will reopen an investigation into the death of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda to determine if the poet was poisoned more than 40 years ago by a military dictatorship, after tests on his exhumed body in 2013 found no evidence to back the claims.

Neruda, famed for his passionate love poems and staunch communist views, is presumed to have died from prostate cancer just days after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup that ushered in the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

"There is initial evidence that he was poisoned and in that sense the signs point to the intervention of specific agents ... that could constitute a crime against humanity," Francisco Ugas, the head of the government's humans rights department, said on Wednesday.

The poet's chauffeur has said Pinochet's agents took advantage of Neruda's illness to inject poison into his stomach while he was bedridden at the Santa Maria clinic in Santiago.

One theory on why he was poisoned is because he was a staunch communist and loyal to deposed President Salvador Allende, and it was feared he would become an opposition leader to the dictatorship.

The new forensic testing will look for inorganic or heavy metals in Neruda's remains to try to determine a direct or indirect cause of death.

It will focus on detecting if there is any cellular or protein damage caused by chemical agents, whereas the prior testing looked specifically for the remains of poison.

Easily Chile's best-known poet, Neruda achieved critical acclaim with the publication in 1924 of "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" at the age of 19. He wrote prolifically throughout his life, and also became a political activist, even running for president at one point, before dropping his bid to throw his support behind Allende. Neruda organized a ship to bring about 2,000 refugees fleeing the Spanish civil war to Chile in 1939 and was ambassador to France during Allende's presidency.

Neruda won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 "for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams."

Truck driver Larry Scholting dozed off while making a delivery on a North Carolina highway, crashing his tractor-trailer into a bridge support. The truck split in half and while Scholting walked away unscathed, the contents of his truck, Maruchan ramen noodles, spilled across highway 1-95.

Dozens of boxes of noodles were spilled across the highway, and much to the dismay of college students everywhere, they are no longer edible. The noodles were covered in diesel fuel and are being taken away to a landfill by the truck load.

Ramen noodles scattered all over North Carolina highway after big rig crashes http://t.co/LlFN9RLCyppic.twitter.com/zRkDX7qqJ4

— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) January 21, 2015

As a result of the noodle mess, a highway detour was set up and part of 1-95 remains closed. Newsweek reached out to Maruchan for comment, they assured us they would comment on the matter later today and were pleased the driver was safe. 

The words zero and cost stood out in President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, but many higher education experts feel uneasy about a proposal to make community college more affordable. The plan, which the president first announced in a video on January 8 and is calling America’s College Promise, would have Congress and states cover tuition costs for two years of community college for qualifying students. But that proposal may not be as far reaching as some hope and is unlikely to get past Republican lawmakers.

“I am sending this Congress a bold new plan to lower the cost of community college—to zero,” President Obama said last night. “Understand, you’ve got to earn it,” he added. “You’ve got to keep your grades up and graduate on time.” But those words aren’t just general encouragement; to qualify for the program, students would have to attend community college at least half-time, maintain a college GPA of at least 2.5 (roughly between a C+ and B-), and be on schedule to complete their programs. Students must also be able to earn a certificate for a two-year degree, or half the academic credit for a four-year degree. Sandy Baum, an economics professor at Skidmore College and a senior policy analyst for College Board, says those restrictions would limit the pool to about half of community college students.

Schools face eligibility requirements too; they must offer occupational training programs or allow credits to transfer to four-year institutions.

Perhaps the most contentious aspect of the plan is its price tag. The proposal calls for the federal government to spend $60 billion in 10 years, covering 75 percent of tuition costs; states would kick in the remaining 25 percent.

Though some college affordability advocates point out that education initiatives have in the past have seen support from both sides of the aisle, higher education experts are skeptical. “Congressional approval at this point will not happen,” says Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University who specializes in higher education policy,

“The Republicans immediately said they don’t even want to talk about it, and there’s a lot of difference of opinion,” Baum adds.

One of those Republicans is House Speaker John Boehner, whose team published a blog post last week outlining his opposition with GIFs from Taylor Swift music videos.

While President Obama has repeatedly cited the “free” tuition programs in Tennessee and Chicago as inspiration for America’s College Promise, experts say it’s too early to gauge the successes of those programs because their first wave of applicants is still months away from even graduating high school.

Experts take issue with other aspects of the proposal too. Kelchen says in order to adequately cover students, the federal government would have to put up closer to $150 billion or $200 billion, not $60 billion. Many experts also say the problem regarding community colleges isn’t affordability, since the maximum Pell Grant award is higher than the average cost of tuition, and because 40 percent of community college students already receive enough financial aid to attend for free. Rather, the problem is retaining students and helping them graduate.

“It doesn’t provide any resources for colleges to improve what they’re doing,” Thomas Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, says of the proposal. The federal plan only says colleges should “adopt promising and evidence-based institutional reforms,” as a White House fact sheet puts it.

Baum, from Skidmore, is also skeptical that community colleges have the physical and resource capacities to handle a potential surge in enrollment, and she is concerned about how the federal and state governments will divide funding when schools across states have vastly different tuition rates.

While some college students’ families may save money under the new proposal, others may lose money; what the president didn’t mention last night is his proposal to raise taxes on families’ 529 college savings plans, a move one Forbes columnist called“an assault on the American dream.” Since 2001, money added to those plans in order to pay for college, up to $14,000 per year, has been tax-free. The new change would take income tax from that money upon withdrawal. Forbes and the Wall Street Journalsay that plan appeared in a memo the White House released over the weekend.

Leaders of community college organizations have shown early support for the proposal, including representatives for the American Association of Community Colleges, the League for Innovation in the Community College, and the Association of Community College Trustees.

“We think it’s a great first step toward our goal of having all public colleges and universities be tuition free,” says Morley Winograd, president and CEO of the Campaign for Free College Tuition, and a former senior adviser to Vice President Al Gore. “It gives young people the idea that regardless of their family’s income...they can go to college if they get the grades necessary to get in, and it causes them to buckle down and get those grades.”

Winograd’s organization counts 27 city or state programs that offer government money outside of federal Pell Grants. The oldest program, which began in 2005 and offers a four-year scholarship, is in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Should the proposal get through Congress, individual states can still decide to opt out. The White House estimates that 9 million students could benefit if all states participate.

The hacker cohort Lizard Squad, who gleefully shut down the Xbox Live and PlayStation networks over the holidays, has been hit with a cyberattack on its own network.

On Christmas Eve, Lizard Squad’s head honchos boasted on Twitter that they had brought down the two popular gaming networks by clogging them with a Distributed Denial of Service—basically, a ton of fake traffic. Back then, the Squad said they had hacked Xbox and PlayStation to prove a point about how flimsy the networks’ security systems were, but later revealed that the attack was a commercial ploy to promote their new “booter” or “stresser” site, LizardStresser.su. There, paying users could submit the name of a website of their choice and then ask hackers to bring it down for hours or even days, reports Gamespot.

On Tuesday, Lizard Squad’s servers were hacked, and the attackers revealed the names of over 14,000 people who signed up for the “boot-for-hire” service. Investigative cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs first reported on the Lizard Squad’s network data dump on his personal website last week. He noted that LizardStresser didn’t bother protecting its customers’ names: Usernames and passwords had been stored in plain text instead of being encrypted. Computer science student Eric Zhang said on his website he had been able to list names on the roster in just 10 minutes, during the time that public access to the site’s server remained open.

It turns out that only about 250 users had actually attempted to launch attacks, according to Ars Technica. In analyzing the data dump, the tech site found that many of the users who had signed up for the LizardStresser service were gamers hoping to halt their opponents from playing on different gaming sites, particularly Minecraft.

Authorities have been cracking down on the Lizard Squad since the holiday attacks, and several members have since been arrested, according to Krebs. Vincent “Vinnie” Omari, a 22-year-old British man, was arrested late in December on suspicion of being connected to the Squad. Another potential major player was arrested last week by authorities: Jordie Lee-Bevan, a teenager in Southport, England, is believed to be peripherally connected to the Xbox and PlayStation hacks. Lee-Bevan is also thought to be part of an ISIS enthusiast group, “ISISGang,” in Britain.

An affidavit released by the FBI says that Lee-Bevan and the gang were responsible for “swatting,” or calling in a fake threat, to Sandy Hook Elementary School in September 2014. The Newtown, Connecticut, school was the scene of a shooting massacre in December 2012. 

How do you solve a problem like Billghazi?

If the NFL concludes the New England Patriots intentionally deflated 11 of the 12 footballs—heretofore known as a “Belichick’s Dozen”—used during Sunday’s AFC Championship Game defeat of the Indianapolis Colts, what should the punishment be?

First, before anything else occurs, the National Football League needs to film a public service announcement featuring former A-list actors holding deflated footballs, weeping and beseeching, “No more.” Next, the league must revisit its football inspection policy. Cupping the pigskin from below and then saying “Cough” is clearly insufficient.

After those measures are taken? If the Patriots are guilty, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell needs to ban New England coach Bill Belichick. At the very least, Goodell needs to ban Belichick for Super Bowl XLIX on February 1, and then he should determine how many more games the suspension should cover.

Listen, I get it: The Patriots won 45-7 last Sunday at Gillette Stadium, where the venue’s name is the only suggestion that it was a close shave. Tom Brady and Gronk and the rest of the team would’ve beaten Indianapolis tossing a rugby union ball. That is hardly the point. Not even close.

To argue that the under-inflation, or deflation, of the Patriot footballs had no effect on the outcome of the game is to imply that cheating is a necessary evil. It’s tantamount to equating cheating to poor weather or injuries or the fact that I picked the Colts to win. Cheating is not a necessary evil, though; it’s a scourge. To argue that “everybody does it” is to condone it.

The amusing aspect of Billghazi and Spygate is that Belichick, 62, the man at the helm in New England since 2000, doesn’t need to cheat. He is an outstanding coach, arguably the greatest football coach of the 21st century. But, entering a home playoff game armed with one of the all-time stellar quarterbacks, Brady, and the ineffable dynamo that is Gronk (tight end Rob Gronkowski), he allegedly ordered some hapless minion to deflate a dozen or so footballs in order to gain—what is the term?—an advantage.

First there was Spygate, of which Belichick was found guilty. The Patriots were docked a few draft picks, and Belichick was fined $500,000. Now there is this alleged malfeasance. And who knows what else betwixt? Belichick does not cheat because he feels that it is his team’s only chance to win. Belichick cheats because he is addicted to the thrill of gaining an advantage over his opponent, ethics be damned. He’s the millionaire who cannot bear to watch even a T-ball game unless he has $10 on it. He’s Thrill Bill.

Which is unfortunate, because, as the titular head of an NFL franchise, he is accountable for the behavior of that team on the field. This is a coach who, five days after one of his players rushed for 201 yards in a game (at Indianapolis!), effectively sat that player (Jonas Gray) for the remainder of the season for oversleeping for a Friday practice. Gray immediately apologized—and blamed a dead cellphone battery—but Belichick cast him out as a pariah for the remainder of the Pats’ Super Bowl run. Gray has rushed for an average of 10 yards per game in the eight games since that mishap and has sat out half of them, though he is fully healthy.

Belichick’s interpretation of integrity regarding following the rules seems rather obvious, no? He had no problem imposing a draconian punishment against someone whose actions, in Belichick’s mind, threatened the sanctity of his team. I imagine you are three steps ahead of me here...

You’re going to hear pundits and fans telling you to quit being so naive, but almost all of them will be Patriots fans. The formula works thusly: deny guilt for as long as it is possible that your side may be innocent. Then, if your side is found guilty, either point out a flagrant violation of rules or law by some other party or cynically inform your accuser that this is how the real world works and that they need to quit being so naive.

It’s far simpler than that: Sports, and I am referring only to the games themselves, is the one haven in life where the concept of fair play is presumed as an inviolable concept. When Crash wins the Oscar for Best Picture, we understand there is an agenda behind it. When FIFA awards Qatar the World Cup, we smirk at the chutzpah of soccer oligarchs.

The games themselves, however, should never be compromised. Not by players who might be willing to fix them nor by coaches who cheat. An epic contest like Sunday’s Green Bay-Seattle game loses all value if we discover the outcome was in any way scripted or if one team knowingly operated outside the rules. And to those who offer the lame bromide “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’,” I can only respond, “You ain’t cheatin’ very well if you are getting caught.”

And the best way to avoid getting caught cheating? It’s foolproof: don’t cheat.

Belichick, as everyone knows, orchestrated a sophisticated system of cheating in the past. Does anyone at the league office understand head coaches? They are massive egotists. Bill Belichick has been to five Super Bowls, and he has taken teams there with a sixth-round quarterback (Brady) and an undrafted wide receiver (Wes Welker). Would a few surrendered draft picks or even a $1 million fine deter him?

Of course not. The NFL has only one chip it can play, only one item of value that it can take away from Belichick that he would truly miss: the status of being an NFL coach. Roger Goodell needs to strike at Belichick where he lives: his ego.

Ban Bill for the Super Bowl…and beyond. That would let the air out of his reputation.

After a year punctuated by hacks and data breaches, most notably a cyberattack against Sony, President Barack Obama used part of his State of the Union address on Tuesday to mention the growing threat to cybersecurity. “No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids,” he said.

The president’s speech came a week after the White House outlined a cybersecurity policy proposal that calls for more information sharing between the private sector and government, an increase in penalties for hacking and an update in the standards for when companies have to report that their customers’ data has been compromised.

Yet in a recent interview on PBS’s Nova, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked a large number of classified documents about government surveillance, argued that one of the biggest threats to American cybersecurity may actually be ourselves.

“When the lights go out at a power plant sometime in the future,” Snowden said, “we’re going to know that that’s a consequence of deprioritizing defense for the sake of an advantage in terms of offense.”

In the interview, Snowden argued that Stuxnet, a digital virus that the U.S. and Israel allegedly used to attack Iran’s nuclear program in 2007, was a tipping point in the history of cyberconflict and led to a proliferation of attacks. “I think the public still isn’t aware of the frequency with which these cyberattacks, as they’re being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world,” he said. “We really started this trend in many ways.”

It’s impossible to know how many cyberattacks have been carried out by or against the U.S. But the numbers appear to be rising. In 2013, U.S. military and federal government computers were invaded 46,605 times, up from 26,942 in 2009, according to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Underscoring Snowden’s point: Der Spiegel released a trove of documents earlier this week, which revealed that the NSA broke into North Korea’s computer network in 2010, out of fear of the country’s growing cybercapabilities. That’s why the FBI was quick to accuse North Korea of carrying out the Sony hack, which eventually led to the leak of sensitive internal documents and partially canceled the release of The Interview.

When “we start engaging in these kind of behaviors,” Snowden said, “we’re setting a standard. We’re creating a new international norm of behavior that says this is what nations do.”

Scott Shackelford, an assistant professor of business, law and ethics at Indiana University, says that Snowden “has a point,” and that Stuxnet, because of its sophistication, did set a precedent. But he stressed that the U.S. didn’t invent cyberattacks. “States,” he said, “have been doing this for a while.”

Part of the problem the U.S. faces when it comes to cybersecurity, Snowden says, is that the U.S.—and the NSA in particular—has focused too much attention, money and resources on offensive capabilities. While the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force already have their own cyberforces, the NSA alone has nearly 40,000 employees who are responsible for spying and network attacks.

Another problem: The U.S. wants to create backdoors into communication services, such as smartphone operating systems. The president says this is necessary for counterterrorism surveillance purposes, but Snowden believes it leaves the U.S. open to cyberattacks.

“That’s making us more vulnerable not just to the snooping of our domestic agencies but also foreign agencies,” the former NSA contractor said. “The reality is, when you make those systems vulnerable so that you can spy on other countries and you share the same standards that those countries have for their systems, you’re also making your own country more vulnerable to the same attacks.”

The result, Snowden predicted, is that when hackers begin to target the U.S. economy, the country won’t be prepared. “The next time the lights go off in a hospital, it’s going to be in America, not overseas,” he warned.

Shackelford agrees that the threat is real. But he cautioned that offensive capabilities are still a critical part of defense. “There does have to be a balancing act that clearly we haven’t been the best always at,” he said. “I think there is an element of shooting ourselves in the foot here, but at the same time you can’t discount the benefits and security that we gain through this intelligence gathering.”

In calling for new legislation, Obama has given renewed attention to cybersecurity and how the government can reduce the severity of the threat. Snowden may not agree with the White House’s plan, but he does seem to agree with the president on one thing: When it comes to cybersecurity, the U.S. has an awful lot at stake. As Snowden put it: “We have more to lose than any other nation on earth.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department is about to close the investigation into the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, and clear the white police officer involved of any civil rights charges, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The newspaper quoted law enforcement officials as saying that federal prosecutors had begun work on a legal memo recommending no civil rights charges against the officer, Darren Wilson, after an FBI investigation found no evidence to support charges against him.

The Justice Department declined comment.

The agency is still conducting a probe into the Ferguson police force. A St. Louis County grand jury decided last year not to prosecute Wilson.

The shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown last August led to months of sometimes violent protests in Ferguson and galvanized critics of the treatment by police and the U.S. criminal justice system of blacks and other minority groups.

A lawyer for Brown's family, Benjamin Crump, said the family would wait "for official word from the Justice Department regarding whether or not any charges will be filed against the police officer who shot and killed him.

"The family won't address speculation from anonymous sources," Crump said in a statement.

Neil Bruntrager, an attorney for Wilson, said Wilson's lawyers had received no communications from the Justice Department and would not comment until there was a final determination.

“We don’t believe he has done anything that would merit any kind of a prosecution or any kind of civil rights claims and we are just awaiting the outcome like everybody else,” Bruntrager said in a telephone interview.

Wilson, who said he was acting in self-defense when he fatally shot Brown, resigned from the Ferguson police force in November, citing threats against fellow officers after the grand jury decision.

The leader of the fast-growing German anti-Muslim movement PEGIDA resigned on Wednesday after a photo of him posing as Hitler, and reports that he called refugees "scumbags", prompted prosecutors to investigate him for inciting hatred.

Lutz Bachmann, a 41-year-old convicted burglar, had appeared on the front page of top-selling daily newspaper Bild on Wednesday sporting a Hitler moustache and haircut.

Bild and another paper said he had called asylum-seekers "animals" and "scumbags".

The news came just as supporters of PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West), which is based in Dresden, staged a march in another east German city, Leipzig.

However, the so-called LEGIDA rally attracted only around 15,000 people -- far fewer than the originally estimated 40,000 -- and they were outnumbered by more than 20,000 people who joined several counter-demonstrations, officials said.

PEGIDA has forced itself onto the political agenda with its anti-immigrant slogans that have attracted tens of thousands to regular rallies in Dresden.

Bachmann, who denies he is a racist, had heard on Wednesday that he faces a criminal investigation for incitement to racial hatred. State prosecutors in Dresden said preliminary proceedings had been launched following the Bild report.

"Impulsive"

Kathrin Oertel, another PEGIDA co-founder, said Bachmann's resignation had nothing to do with the Hitler photo, but was linked to his comments on refugees posted on the internet.

"Yes, I can confirm that Lutz Bachmann has offered his resignation and it was accepted," Oertel told Reuters.

She added: "PEGIDA will go on."

Bild quoted Bachmann as saying the Hitler photo had been taken as a joke, prompted by a recent satirical book about the Nazi dictator called "Er ist wieder da" ("Look Who's Back").

The Dresdner Morgenpost newspaper also quoted what it said were Facebook messages from Bachmann saying asylum seekers acted like "scumbags" at the welfare office and that extra security was needed "to protect employees from the animals".

Deputy Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democrat leader, said the real face of PEGIDA had been exposed: "Anyone who puts on a Hitler disguise is either an idiot or a Nazi."

In an interview with Reuters last week, Bachmann played down a ribald comment made in 2013, seized on by the media, that "eco-terrorist" Greens, first and foremost former party leader Claudia Roth, should be "summarily executed".

"I am an impulsive person...I regret I didn't resist my impulsiveness."

European shares were at a seven-year high and the euro sat near an 11-year low on Thursday as the European Central Bank prepared to take the plunge into full-scale quantitative easing.

Market expectations are sky-high for the ECB to unveil a large-scale QE program -- printing money to buy euro zone government bonds -- despite opposition from Germany's Bundesbank. Berlin is also worried that such purchases could allow spendthrift countries to slacken the pace of reforms.

A euro zone source said on Wednesday that the bank's Executive Board, which met on Tuesday, has proposed the ECB should buy 50 billion euros ($58 billion) of bonds each month from March, though it was unclear how long for.

Markets pumped up by almost a year of jockeying over the issue were awaiting the crucial details, expected to come at a 1330 GMT news conference with the bank's chief Mario Draghi.

German and other euro zone bond yields nudged up as investors locked in some profits from a recent sharp rally, while the region's shares and the euro traded sideways at 1,433.60 points and just over $1.16 respectively.

"The key market focus is likely to be on two things," said analysts at Goldman Sachs. "(i) the scale and maturity profile of the program and (ii) whether the ECB chooses to 'mutualise' the risk on its own balance sheet or place assets on national central banks' balance sheets."

Broader market sentiment remained positive for riskier assets, supported by the aggressive actions of central banks seeking to fight deflation. For European shares it was a sixth day of rises and for MSCI's world index a fifth.

Canada's dollar hit a six-year low after it became the latest country to surprise by cutting rates on Wednesday, while there was chatter that countries like Denmark may opt to move again if the ECB announces a big QE program.

The ECB has already cut interest rates to record lows, begun buying private sector assets and funneled hundreds of billions of euros of cheap loans to banks, in the hope that they would lend the money on into the economy and stimulate growth.

Now its last remaining major option is QE, a policy that the U.S. Federal Reserve, Bank of England and Bank of Japan have all used with some success.

EVERYONE'S AT IT

The euro traded narrowly, between $1.1629 and $1.1589, moving away from an 11-year nadir of $1.14595 plumbed last week as the market trimmed short positions ahead of the ECB meeting.

Market analysts reckoned there was limited room for it to fall for now, given how high and for how long currency traders had been preparing for the ECB to take the plunge into bond buying stimulus. Banks like Goldman, however, are expecting it to eventually reach parity with the dollar.

The Australian and New Zealand dollars suffered deep losses as Canada's shock rate cut fueled speculation theReserve Bank of Australia could soon follow suit.

The Aussie fetched $0.8069, having shed more than 1 percent overnight. It was pulling closer to a six-year trough of $0.8033 set earlier in the month, while the kiwi tumbled to a 2-1/2 year low of $0.7516.

Crude oil prices and gold also dipped on expectations that the ECB's decision to launch bond-buying stimulus could boost the dollar and put downward pressure on the commodity.

Brent crude futures were trading at $49 per barrel and U.S. crude was down 38 cents at $47.40 a barrel in early European trading.

The dollar meanwhile dipped against a basket of currencies and to 117.75 on the yen as Japan's central bank signaled its resolve to achieve its ambitious 2 percent inflation target.

It is an unlikely friendship that ties the fates of war correspondent Kenji Goto and troubled loner Haruna Yukawa, the two Japanese hostages for whom Islamic State militants demanded a $200 million ransom this week.

Yukawa was captured in August outside the Syrian city of Aleppo. Goto, who had returned to Syria in late October to try to help his friend, has been missing since then.

For Yukawa, who dreamed of becoming a military contractor, traveling to Syria had been part of an effort to turn his life around after going bankrupt, losing his wife to cancer and attempting suicide, according to associates and his own accounts.

A unit at Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been seeking information on him since August, people involved in that effort said. Goto’s disappearance had not been reported until Tuesday's video apparently showing him and Yukawa kneeling in orange t-shirts next to a masked Islamic State militant wielding a knife.

Yukawa first met Goto in Syria in April and asked him to take him to Iraq. He wanted to know how to operate in a conflict zone and they went together in June.

Yukawa returned to Syria in July on his own.

"He was hapless and didn't know what he was doing. He needed someone with experience to help him," Goto, 47, told Reuters in Tokyo in August.

Yukawa's abduction that month haunted Goto, who felt he had to do something to help the man, a few years his junior.

"I need to go there at least once and see my fixers and ask them what the current situation is. I need to talk to them face to face. I think that's necessary," Goto said, referring to locals who work freelance for foreign correspondents, setting up meetings and helping with the language.

Goto began working as a full-time war correspondent in 1996 and had established a reputation as a careful and reliable operator for Japanese broadcasters, including NHK.

"He understood what he had to do and he was cautious," said Naomi Toyoda, who reported with him from Jordan in the 1990s.

Goto, who converted to Christianity in 1997, also spoke of his faith in the context of his job.

"I have seen horrible places and have risked my life, but I know that somehow God will always save me," he said in a May article for the Japanese publication Christian Today. But he told the same publication that he never risked anything dangerous, citing a passage in the Bible, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."

In October, Goto's wife had a baby, the couple's second child. He has an older daughter from a previous marriage, people who know the family said.

Around the same time, he made plans to leave for Syria and uploaded several short video clips to his Twitter feed, one showing him with media credentials issued by anti-government rebels in Aleppo.

On Oct. 22, he emailed an acquaintance, a high school teacher, to say he planned to be back in Japan at the end of the month.

Goto told a business partner with whom he was working to create an online news application that he expected to be able to travel in territory held by the Islamic State because of his nationality.

"He said that as a Japanese journalist he expected to be treated differently than American or British journalists,"Toshi Maeda said, recalling a conversation with Goto before his departure for Syria. "Japan has not participated in bombing and has only provided humanitarian aid. For that reason, he thought he could secure the cooperation of ISIS."

Friends say Goto traveled from Tokyo to Istanbul and traveled from there to Syria, sending a message on Oct. 25 that he had crossed the border and was safe.

"Whatever happens, this is my responsibility," Goto said on a video recorded shortly before he set out for Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State.

That was the last time he was seen before the IS video this week.

The United States and Cuba clashed over U.S. immigration policy on Wednesday at the first session of high-level talks seeking to restore diplomatic ties between the Cold War adversaries.

The Americans vowed to continue granting safe haven to Cubans with special protections denied to other nationalities while Cuba complained the United States encourages Cuban doctors to defect, calling it a "reprehensible brain drain practice."

The talks will continue on Thursday with the two sides set to discuss restoring diplomatic relations and eventually opening up full trade and travel ties. The first day was dedicated to immigration, the 28th round of bilateral talks on the issue.

The two days of meetings are the first since U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced on Dec. 17 they would work to restore diplomatic ties that were broken off by Washington in 1961.

Even though both sides described the talks as respectful and collaborative, they exposed wide differences on immigration.

Besides the 20,000 Cubans given visas each year, another 25,000 arrived from around the world without visas in 2014 and were welcomed to the United States under the U.S. law called the Cuban Adjustment Act.

Despite Havana's objections, the Americans vowed to continue the "wet foot/dry foot" policy under which Cubans who are stopped by U.S. law enforcement at sea are returned to Cuba, while those who step foot in the country are allowed to stay.

Cuba objects to the law, saying it promotes illegal immigration, people-trafficking and dangerous journeys across the Florida Straits on flimsy vessels. The United States intercepted 3,722 Cubans at sea in 2014, almost double the number from 2012.

"We explained to the Cuban government that our government is completely committed to upholding the Cuban Adjustment Act, that the sets of migration-related policies that are colloquially known as wet foot/dry foot very much remain in effect," said State Department official Alex Lee, who led the U.S. team at the immigration talks.

Josefina Vidal, the head of Cuba's team, said the policy violates a bilateral agreement to promote safe, legal and orderly immigration.

She also assailed the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, which encourages Cuban doctors and nurses working in third countries to defect to the United States.

"This is a policy which is totally inconsistent with the present bilateral context," she said, describing it as a "reprehensible brain drain practice."

Obama has set the United States on a path toward removing economic sanctions and a 53-year-old trade embargo against the communist-ruled island.

"We are ending a policy that was long past its expiration date. When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new," he told Congress in his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday.

He urged Congress to start work on ending the embargo but critics at home say Obama first needs to win concessions on Cuban political prisoners and democratic rights, the claims of U.S. citizens whose property was nationalized after Cuba's 1959 revolution, and U.S. fugitives who have been given asylum in Cuba.

The U.S. delegation is led by Roberta Jacobson, the top U.S. diplomat for Latin America, who did not participate in the immigration discussion. When she landed in Havana on Wednesday, she became the first U.S. assistant secretary of state to visit Cuba in 38 years.

If you’re feeling cranky, confused or too tired even for sex, blame it on Thomas Alva Edison. We’re all bushed, and it’s all his fault.

Humans have been screwing with their body clocks—and getting less sleep—ever since the Wizard of Menlo Park had his very bright idea. Indeed, our classic eight-hour-night only dates back to the invention of the light bulb in the late 1800s. Historians believe that before the dawn of electric lighting most people got plenty of sleep, and practiced what they call “segmented sleep,” snoozing for several hours in the first part of the night, when darkness fell, then waking in the middle of the night for a few hours of eating, drinking, praying, chatting with friends or maybe even canoodling, before ducking back under the covers again until morning. The arrival of electricity, argues sleep historian A. Roger Ekirch, led to later bedtimes and fewer hours of sleep overall.

We’re still waging a war on sleep, and we are, alas, still winning. Researchers at the University of Chicago recently studied our sleep patterns over time and concluded that we now sleep between one and two hours less than we did 60 years ago. In the 1970s, most Americans slept about 7.1 hours per night: Now the mean sleep duration has plunged to 6.1 hours. An hour lost in 40 years? If we keep up at this rate, we’ll be down to less than four hours a night by the end of the century. And very, very cranky.

So where's all this sleep gone to? And why are we losing it?

Modern technology, which seems particularly adept at messing with our sleep schedules, is certainly a large part of the problem. Smartphones, tablets and computer screens all emit a bluish light; great for saving power (most energy efficient CFLs and LEDs burn blue, as do the backlights of most screens), but also just right for disrupting our body clocks. “The lights on these electronic devices are colored like enriched moonlight,” says Charles Czeisler, the director of Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Medicine. These blue lights drastically suppress the production of melatonin, the hormone that controls the body’s day-night cycle. So reading in bed with an iPad, he says, or any other backlit device, makes it harder to fall asleep at night and makes you more tired the next day.

Shifting all the blame for our sleep problems onto blue light, however, might be disingenuous. The bigger problem might be that we’ve created and now live in a world where stimulation doesn’t stop when the sun goes down—thanks, Tom!—and it’s making us all addicts. Research shows that every time we check our email, Twitter feed or Facebook timeline and find a new piece of information, we get a shot of dopamine—a chemical our brains release to simulate pleasure.

“We eventually associate texts, Twitter [and] Facebook with the promise of instant gratification,” says Kathy Gill, a researcher at the University of Washington who is an expert in human-computer interaction. The temptation to get that quick dopamine shot can be ignored through willpower, says Gill, but willpower’s at an all-time low when we haven’t gotten enough sleep. Hence the cycle of sitting up in bed, listlessly refreshing our email (a recent Pew study found that 83 percent of millennials sleep with their phones nearby) even when it’s way past our bedtime and we really should put our computers and phones down. And our head down on a pillow.

In our efforts to feed the dragon, the quest to eliminate sleep has veered toward the surreal. Once confined to coffee and tea, caffeine is now showing up in topical sprays that promise the rush without the crash, soap that says it’ll give you a buzz in the bath, stockings from Australia that keep you perky and (supposedly) eliminate cellulite and toothbrushes that wake you up while cleaning your teeth. Not to mention the plethora of food products that now contain caffeine: Beer, marshmallows, “perky jerky,” lollipops and bottled water are just a few examples.

Millennials are the most sleepless generation, with only 29 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 33 saying they regularly get sufficient sleep.Getty

Seeing a public that’s gobbling up all the caffeine it can find, ambitious creators of recreational stimulants are now raiding the pharmacopoeias for products, repurposing medicines and dietary supplements (methylsynephrine! creatine!) as additives to keep-awake colas. The popular energy drink Red Bull turned taurine, a formerly obscure amino acid found in the tissue of animals, into a household name and a billion-dollar global business.

Meanwhile, the military is going straight to the brain in search of wakefulness: It is researching a process called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which more or less zaps the brain with electricity, in the hope that it will keep soldiers constantly at the ready. Andy McKinley, an in-house researcher for the U.S. Air Force, helped publish a study on the phenomenon. “When we kept people up for 30 hours, we found that tDCS improved their vigilance performance twice as much as caffeine, and the effect lasted twice as long. Caffeine lasted two hours, tDCS lasted about six.” For the sleep-unhappy public, unregulated and unapproved tDCS-applying devices have already found their way onto civilian markets.

So have large quantities of modafinil, a powerful stimulant used extensively by the military during the recent war in Iraq. Modafinil, marketed in the U.S. as Provigil, was originally designed to treat sleep disorders like narcolepsy. But since the early 2000s, it’s been the drug of choice for Wall Street execs and other power users seeking an afternoon boost. Off-label use rose by more than 15-fold from 2002 to 2013, according to a study published JAMA Internal Medicine.

For those looking to sleep less without drugs or military tech, there’s the “Uberman” sleep schedule: 20 minute naps taken every four hours. That’s just two hours of sleep in every 24 hours. Uberman is based on the theory that while humans experience two types of sleep, we only need one of those to stay alive. Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is the stage in which we dream, and it also has been shown in lab tests to be critical to survival: Rodents deprived of REM sleep die after just five weeks. Then there is non-REM sleep, which itself is broken down into four separate stages. One of those is short wave sleep (or SWS). Scientists aren’t really sure what function SWS serves, and Uberman advocates argue that it may not be critical to survival at all.

We spend only 20 percent of our sleeping time in REM sleep, and, usually, we need to work our way up to it, going through non-REM sleep first. But according to the Polyphasic Society, a segmented-sleep advocacy group, that’s a waste. They say the Uberman and sleep schedules like it can force the brain to reconfigure its sleep cycle to avoid the non-REM sleep and jump straight into REM, saving a handful of precious, precious hours every day. The disadvantage? Physical stress, even to the point of lifting heavy objects, can cause Uberman sleepers to unexpectedly “black out.”

Uberman advocates are only a small subset of the many movements that today seem to be waging a war on shut-eye. Despite the conventional wisdom of eight-hours-of-sleep-to-be-healthy, in recent years, CEO testimonials, helpful life-hacking tips and even some scientific studies have tried to convince us we need only five hours of sleep to be healthy, happy and successful.

Writer Douglas Haddow has a theory why: Time isn’t money. Time awake is money. In a recent article for Adbusters, Haddow argues that the reason we sleep less today is because “sleep is the enemy of capital.” While we’re waltzing with the sandman, we can’t do anything productive and, unlike in our leisure time, we can’t even consume (and pay for) the products others make. It’s not quite clear what's happening in our minds during nap time: Theories range from storing memories and restructuring the brain to simple energy conservation and immune system restoration. But whatever we do, we certainly aren’t buying extra lives on Candy Crush or writing articles for Newsweek. Sleep is perceived to be the enemy of efficiency: inescapable wasted blocks of time that can’t be converted into anything of broader use to society.

Entrepreneurs and capitalists have known this forever, of course. The growth in popularity of coffee and tea during the Industrial Revolution was, as Tom Standage argues in The History of the World in Six Drinks, tied to the working hours and conditions brought on by that revolution. In the early days of factories, owners, Standage argues, saw what the long hours were doing to their employees’ sleep. But instead of offering more time in bed, they’d give them free tea and reap the reward: "Tea kept workers alert on long and tedious shifts and improved their concentration when operating fast moving machines,” he writes. “Factory workers had to function like parts in a well-oiled machine and tea was the lubricant that kept the factories running smoothly.”

It’s worse today. Even those of us who would never check our email at midnight now live in a world where being on call 24 hours a day is commonplace. In 1992, Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American, made headlines by revealing that U.S. citizens worked, on average, a month more in 1990 they did in 1970. Since then, the numbers have gotten worse. From 1990 to 2001, Americans added another full week to their working year: That was 137 hours longer than the Japanese, 260 hours longer than the British and 446 hours longer than the Germans, according to a report put out by the United Nations’ International Labor Organization. Fast-forward to today: The Bureau of Labor Statistics says Americans are working longer hours than at any time since statistics have been kept.

It also bears noting that nearly 7 million Americans are currently stringing together part-time jobs: That’s 3 million more than in 2007, when the Great Recession began. These people are likely to have erratic and often inconvenient work schedules; not exactly a recipe for getting proper R&R. Shift workers, in particular, have it tough: In December 2014, the Health Survey for England found that in the U.K., those who worked outside the 12 hours between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. were substantially “sicker and fatter” than those who worked daytime hours. A 2014 study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that shift work substantially increased the risk of dementia.

Again, millennials seem the most vulnerable: 40 percent of young people work part-time, contract, temp or onetime jobs, with more than half living paycheck to paycheck, according to the 2014 Millennial Study conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Wells Fargo. The Health Survey for England found that 16- to 24-year-olds were the demographic most likely to be stuck doing shift work. And a 2014 study by the American Psychological Association found that of the present generational groupings—millennials, Gen Xers, boomers and mature—millennials were by far the most stressed, and reported the highest rates of “feeling sluggish or lazy” and “having trouble concentrating on things they need to do.”

A child uses with a tablet.Cappi Thompson/Moment Open/Getty

Millennials are shaping up to be the most sleepless generation yet. While Generation X reports sleeping the fewest hours per night, millennials report the poorest habits: Nearly one-third of those between 18 and 33 say they can’t sleep because they are “thinking of all the things they need to do or did not get done,” and a similar number reports not sleeping at least eight hours a night because “they have too many things to do and not enough time.” Compare that to only 19 percent of Gen Xers and 13 percent of baby boomers.

It’s no surprise that energy drink manufacturers see youth as their primary prey. “Nobody ever wishes they’d slept more during college,” says one Red Bull tagline. And marketing to our overstressed, underslept youth has paid off big time: Globally, the energy drink market’s now worth $27.5 billion, and energy drink consumption has increased 5,000 percent in the U.S. since 1999—just when those millennials were starting to enroll in college.

Today’s youth are also at tremendous risk for long-term, sleep-related health impacts. Sleep-related disorders are on the rise, creeping upward among older workers and becoming staggeringly common in young adults. We've long known that sleep is crucial to good health: Bodies subjected to sleep deprivation undergo an ugly metamorphosis until they are in many ways fundamentally different from their sufficiently-slept counterparts. A study published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed that chronic sleep deprivation caused “shifts” in the expression levels of more than 700 genes. “Many of these [genes] are related to inflammation and immune and stress response, and overlap with the program of gene expression that is generally associated with high stress levels,” explains Malcolm von Schantz, a researcher at the University of Surrey who helped conduct the PNAS study.

Sleep loss has tremendous cognitive consequences: Dozens of studies have connected lack of sleep to deficits ranging from poor insight formation to diminished working memory. Chronic sleep deprivation is also associated with increased mortality and especially obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and impaired cognitive function, says von Schantz. REM sleep in particular is needed for maintaining brain cells: “Brain cells are some of the few cells in our bodies that we retain throughout our lives,” says Czeisler. “We store our memories, and through their complicated architecture, they are difficult to replace.” Sleep is when toxins accumulated by the body get flushed out of the brain—including big-name baddies like amyloid beta, the plaque that, if it builds up, eventually causes Alzheimer’s.

With all the talent we’ve got working on keeping us up later and later, there’s a chance one of the burgeoning “wakefulness” treatments will solve corporate America’s sleep problem without ruining our bodies and minds. But even if it turns out that zapping our brains or sleeping two hours of every 24 over the long term is completely safe (assuming we don’t, say, do any weightlifting), we can’t keep cutting down on sleep forever. We need to sleep some or eventually we’ll die.

One solution is to make a trade: What if we could cram 24 hours of work into 16, and use the leftovers to get some rest? Plenty have made that bargain by using “smart drugs”: Ritalin, Adderall and non-FDA approved nootropics—cognitive enhancers like Piracetam and Oxiracetam. If current research can be believed, smart drug use among students has become an epidemic: In the U.S., 18 percent of Ivy League students have used cognitive enhancers. Similar numbers of smart drug use has been seen among students in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Sadly, in many ways the use of smart drugs is a terrifyingly rational reaction to the parallel demands of “do more” and “sleep more”; unlike coffee, Coca-Cola or modafinil, smart drugs are thought to increase efficiency without robbing sleep. Poppers of Piracetam don’t have to worry about crashing, burnout or ominous future health risks; they can meet all the demands of daily life while still sleeping that blessed eight hours.

But do we really want an entire society running on smart drugs to keep up with our self-inflicted rat race? Though the health risks associated with the use and abuse of smart drugs haven’t been extensively studied, a 2014 study published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience indicates that long-term use of cognitive enhancers may decrease brain plasticity—especially in younger users. In other words, the cost of short-term productivity may be long-term creativity, adaptability and intelligence.

There are also some thorny ethical issues to navigate. Anjan Chatterjee, a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on what he calls “cosmetic neurology”: the use of smart drugs to enhance work performance. He says we may be headed toward an “arms race of accomplishment,” where the haves (those who can afford smart drugs and are willing to take them) will push out the have-nots (those who can’t, or won’t). And, as with any arms race, it has the potential to continue until it reaches dangerous extremes.

As millennials move from college into the workforce, their desire to beat back sleep is coming with them. The only real solution might be to make fundamental alterations to our work environment. In some places, change is already afoot. Germany has banned after-hours emails to government workers; a law passed in Brazil in 2012 says workers who have to take calls or emails from employers after work can charge their bosses overtime. In the U.S., a few progressive companies have taken the lead; The Huffington Post has installed nap rooms in its offices, while Treehouse now mandates four-day workweeks.

These efforts might be good for everyone involved. It turns out, according to a paper published by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, that productivity at work is highest when people work around 30 hours per week. And according to a 2010 study published in the journal Cognition, even short breaks at work—like, say, naps—increase engagement with work substantially. These countries, and companies that follow the science to buck the trend of “sleep less, do more” are beginning to recognize that sleep is more than just wasted time. It’s time we all wake up and recognize that sleep is a fundamental human need.

On January 22, 1973, a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in the case of Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the first three months of pregnancy across the United States.

More than four decades later, the issue of abortion and its availability to women is still the subject of heated debate, in homes and in the public sphere. It was an issue that made its way into President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday and in the GOP response by Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst.

“We still may not agree on a woman’s right to choose, but surely we can agree it’s a good thing that teen pregnancies and abortions are nearing all-time lows," Obama said.

“We’ll defend life, because protecting our most vulnerable is an important measure of any society,” Ernst responded.

Abortion coverage also became a flashpoint during the passing of the Affordable Care Act passing of the Affordable Care Act. In recent years, several states have passed laws restricting abortion, more between 2011 and 2013 than in the preceding decade, according to the Guttmacher Institute. On Thursday, exactly 42 years after the Supreme Court’s decision, the House of Representatives considered debate on a bill that would ban most abortions after 20 weeks. They delayed the bill after deciding they were short of votes.

The words of Justice Harry Blackmun from the 1973 majority opinion still resonate today: “We … acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy, of the vigorous opposing views, even among physicians, and of the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires.”

The February 5, 1973 issue of Newsweek covered the landmark decision that had been handed down two weeks prior, and questioned what its impact would be on women, doctors and nurses and the healthcare system at large.

Abortion: What Happens Now

One day last week, a pregnant 20-year-old Wayne State University coed visited the offices of a Detroit agency to arrange for an abortion. Such operations were illegal in Michigan except to protect the life of the mother, so for $200 the agency would fly her to a clinic in Buffalo, N.Y., where abortion on demand has been available since 1970. But as soon as she walked in the door, the young woman received some surprising news. Because the U.S. Supreme Court had just overturned all restrictive state abortion laws, she could receive her abortion that very day in the offices of a Detroit physician.

So it went across the U.S. last week as the reverberations of the Court’s monumental ruling were felt in doctor’s offices and hospital hallways. Inquiries from women seeking abortions swamped the switchboard at Chicago’s sprawling Cook County Hospital. In Beverly Hills, a respected gynecologist, who had been violating California law by doing abortions in his office, drank a cold-duck toast over a newly arrived vacuum extraction device with which he would perform his first legal abortion in two years. At Planned Parenthood-World Population in New York, staffers made plans to help establish nonprofit clinics in 40 states, all linked by a toll-free nationwide telephone referral system.

In its sweeping decision, the Supreme Court ruled that abortions in the first three months of pregnancy are a matter to be decided upon by a woman and her doctor and not subject to any scrutiny by the state. The decision thus voided restrictive laws in 31 states that permit abortions only to save the life of the mother; it also requires revision of the “liberalized” laws in fifteen states that permit abortions, subject to qualifications. (In the remaining four states, abortion on demand is already the law.) In many areas, however, it may be some time before the decision is felt. “We’re waiting to see what our legal counsel advises,” says a spokesman for a suburban Atlanta hospital where only a dozen abortions were done last year, “and we’re sure our legal counsel will proceed slowly.

Most lawyers active in the abortion field think that the Supreme Court decision makes it incumbent on municipal and public hospitals that have obstetrical facilities to make them available for abortions. “But you can bet,” says Lawrence Lader, director of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, “that we’re going to have trouble when it comes to heavily Catholic areas.”

Funds: Even Catholic hospitals, which do not now permit abortions, may begin to feel pressure, particularly in rural institutions with obstetrical facilities. A precedent may already have been set in Billings, Mont. There, St. Vincent’s Hospital is under a temporary injunction pending the outcome of a case in Federal court to permit sterilization procedures in violation of Catholic doctrine. In imposing the injunction, the court noted that the hospital had once received Federal funds and also that it was the only area hospital with a maternity service.

Hospital policies against abortion may not, however, prove decisive in the long run toward determining the availability of abortions, since the Supreme Court decision clearly permits such operations to be done in the doctor’s office in the first trimester. “If we find an area where hospitals legitimately refuse to perform abortions,” says Lader, “then we’ll have to get doctors who will perform them on their own.”

Some pro-abortion physicians are concerned about the Supreme Court’s green light for office abortions. “It’s possible with this ruling,” says Dr. John Marshall, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Harbor General Hospital in Torrance, Calif., “that every Tom, Dick and Harry out in the woods can start doing abortions and we’ll be back where we were before abortion was legal.”

Quick: Some observers believe the decision will even permit abortions by paramedical personnel, working under the supervision of a doctor. Harvey Karmen, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist who has been arrested numerous times for performing abortions, announced last week that he had found a physician who would act as his backup. Karmen has already trained some 60 lay women in the use of the Karmen cannula, a simple device he has invented for performing quick abortions by suction.

In an effort to eliminate the potential hazards of office abortions, NARAL and Planned Parenthood plan to run seminars around the country on how to set up outpatient abortion clinics like those in New York City. There strict regulations have produced a remarkable safety record: there have been no abortion deaths in New York City since July 1971. Many of the clinics, such as one about to open at Harbor General, will offer abortions as part of a comprehensive family-planning service that includes advice on contraception. “If a woman comes into the office and all you do is empty her womb, all you’ve treated is the symptom,” notes Marshall. “You have to treat the disease—irresponsible sexuality—as well.”

With clinics and in-office procedures, the price of abortions will undoubtedly come down. An abortion in some hospitals currently costs about $400 to $600, even in the first trimester. Outpatient clinic abortions cost as little as $100.

Another of the positive results of last week’s decision, some observers think, will be to put profitmaking abortion-referral entrepreneurs out of business. One such operator, Henry Dubin, made $100,000 last year, acting as business agent for at least five Los Angeles-area hospitals which offer abortions (Newsweek, Nov. 13, 1972). Members of the radical Feminist Women’s Health Center in Los Angeles have been getting $50 in return for referrals.

Profit: “The handwriting is on the wall,” admits Wayne Lamont, director of an Orange County, Calif., referral service. Lamong believes, however, that he can stay in business by insuring that he steers women to good hospitals offering safe abortions at reasonable cost. But Calfiornia State Sen. Anthony Beilenson plans to introduce legislation to prohibit abortion referral for a profit, on the ground that “referral belongs in abortion no more than in tonsillectomies.”

Finally as abortions become increasingly available across the country, the need for women to travel far and wide to states with liberal laws will disappear. At least two-thirds of the abortions performed in New York City involve out-of-state women. Until now, Dr. James Ham of the Garberson Clinic in Mile City, Mont., has been referring eight to ten women a month to Calfornia and Washington for abortions. “What has been happening,” says Ham, “is that if you can afford it you get an abortion, and if you can’t you have the child and go on welfare. The decision will be more fair to the individuals and also to the states that have had to take the brunt.”