The number of foreign nationals that have travelled to Iraq and Syria to join and fight for Sunni militant groups has reached an all-time high, in part due to successful use of propaganda as a recruitment tool abroad, according to experts.

New figures released by the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) show that up to 20,730 people have travelled to the region in order to fight under the banner of various radical Islamist groups, including the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qaeda affiliate Jubhat al-Nusra, since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in March 2011.

Of these fighters, 3,950 - almost a fifth of the total figure - western European citizens. The highest numbers of western European fighters originated from France from where 1,200 nationals have travelled to the Middle East. In the rest of the world, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia are the country’s from which the largest number of fighter’s originated from - producing between 1,500-3,000 and 1,500-2,500 fighters respectively.

Torbjorn Soltvedt, principal MENA analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, a leading global risk analytics company, suspects that the figures are the highest they have ever been because they now take into account ISIS’s advance into Iraq last summer and its mass recruitment and propaganda campaign.

“Most of the focus was on the number of fighters in Syria. I think these recent figures, 18,000, 20,000, are catching up to this mass recruitment of the Islamic State and the advance into Iraq last summer that really boosted their profile,” said Soltvedt.

Despite the growth in the numbers, Soltvedt believes that groups such as ISIS have reached their “peak” when it comes to their recruitment efforts because of the US-led campaign against militant groups in the region and conditions which are forcing would-be jihadists to return home.

“There have been problems recently with morale within the Islamic State [ISIS]. In terms of their recruitment within Europe, the main message that they’re trying to convey is that there is this great injustice going on in Syria and in Iraq. Some people turn up and see the reality is often very different,” he says.

“Initially, the Islamic State had a lot of momentum, driving forward, pushing the Iraqi army back, pushing the rebels in Syria back. Whereas now, since the start of the airstrikes, the dynamic has changed a bit more, it’s more of an insurgency now. They’ve had to rely on more on insurgent tactic and guerrilla tactics.”

He adds that the brutality of the radical militant groups, such as ISIS, often causes foreign jihadists to try and return to their home nations: “Clearly the group relies on very high-level brutality and reprisals to maintain control in the areas it occupies. So I think that accounts for why we see a lot of fighters initially going there and then wanting to get help to get back here [to Europe],” he adds.

“I think they have probably reached their peak in terms of recruitment. It’s not to say that more people won’t join them but I don’t think we will see the same growth as they have since last summer mainly because of these sort of morale concerns.”

To gather the figures, ICSR monitored foreign fighters travelling to the region using official government figures, media reports and claims made by the militant groups.

Despite reports of a number of foreign fighters attempting to return home, ICSR’s director, Peter Neumann, told Vox that the fighters fleeing to the region "have completely absorbed [radical] ideology, and see themselves more-or-less as fighters".

"What happened after the Afghanistan conflict in the 1980s was an internationally networked core of activists who were seeing themselves as a rapid reaction force to whatever happened in the Muslim world."

Nuemann estimates that 25% of foreign fighters who travelled to the region will return home to plan and carry out attacks and warns that these “tend to be [among] the more lethal and more viable terrorist plots”.

Paweł Bramson grew up in a white, Catholic country, and he liked it that way. As a teenager in Warsaw, he despised the rare Arab and African immigrants who were starting to settle in Poland in the 1990s. He and his friends, their heads shaved to the skin, used to chase them around, sometimes beating them up. Once, they threw burning objects through the windows of a dormitory to scare the Arab students living there. He also knew that he and his pals despised Jews, even though he’d never encountered one.

“There were no Jews,” he says. “Nobody ever saw them.”

That’s because for past few decades, Poland has been an ethnically and religiously homogeneous country—according to the 2011 census, 97.7 percent of the population is ethnically Polish. But it hasn't always been that way. Hundreds of thousands of Jews lived in Warsaw before World War II, and nearly 3 million lived in Poland—the largest such population in Europe. Bleak estimates suggest fewer than 50,000 survived the Holocaust.

The Communist regime that came to power under Soviet leadership after World War II was intolerant of religion and campaigned against the new Israeli state. The underground opposition movement against the Communist government, called Solidarity, wasn’t much better: It did not allow Jews to have leadership roles because it feared a backlash. By 1969, almost all of Poland's Jews had either fled or assimilated. Even after the fall of Communism, the wordJewish carried a stigma: During Poland's first-ever presidential campaign in 1990, a front-runner candidate was falsely accused of hiding Jewish roots, and lost.

Polish skinheads shout anti-German slogans during a demonstration outside the German Embassy in April 1992 protesting against what they called German and Jewish occupation of Poland.Alik Keplicz/AP

Around that time, Bramson, then 18, married his high school sweetheart, Ola. Like 90 percent of Poles, both Ola and Bramson were Catholic. Or so they thought.

In 1996, Ola came home from a genealogy archive with a pile of documents. She’d gone to learn about her ancestry, but she’d also done some research about her husband's. Among the documents was a copy of the Bramson family tree, which went back to 1835. Paweł's grandparents had lived in the southeast of Poland, near Ukraine, and according to the documents, they were Jewish.

Bramson, then 21, didn't believe it. He took the papers to his parents, thinking they would assure him these weren't any grandparents of his. But they only confirmed his fears. Though both were raised Jewish, Bramson’s parents hid their identity because they feared anti-Semitism. “I was angry. I was outraged. I was also disappointed,” he says, through a translator. He says his memory of that time is foggy because he bought some vodka and drank for an entire week.

He might have ignored the discovery, but, remarkably, Ola found Jewish roots in her family tree, too. She went through similar shock and confusion, and emerged with the desire to learn more about the religion she had come from. And she wanted Paweł to join her. They talked, he sobered up, and they talked some more. For six months, he did nothing.

Then they went to the synagogue.

A Pole First

Outside of Europe, Jews still sometimes call Poland the Old Country, a place where villages were once built around synagogues, and where you could find a Yiddish newspaper and a kosher butcher on nearly every corner. Memories of the Old Country, however, are tightly entwined with the trauma of the Holocaust. Treblinka, where nearly a million Jews died during World War II, is less than an hour from Warsaw. Auschwitz is an hour from Krakow. Dozens of tourism companies will take you to the death camps—but you'd be hard-pressed to find a tour of living, thriving Jewish Poland.

A group of Polish Jews are led away for deportation by German SS soldiers, in April/May 1943, during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by German troops after an uprising in the Jewish quarter.AP

Slowly, that’s changing. Poland’s first Jewish Community Center opened in Krakow in 2008. Another such center, this time in Warsaw, was inaugurated in 2013. A year later, the opening of the starkly elegant Museum of the History of Polish Jews made international headlines. By focusing on Jewish culture and social history, rather than just World War II, the museum emphasizes that there's more to Jewish life in Poland than the Holocaust.

Severyn Ashkenazy, who was born in Poland in 1936, survived the Holocaust and founded the Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland, recently argued that his country might be the safest place for Jews in contemporary Europe. It’s a plausible claim, given the recent displays of anti-Semitic violence in France, which is home to the world’s third-largest Jewish population. At the same time, several recent polls suggest that at least half of all Poles believe Jews have too much influence in finance and the media. That’s a very high number, comparable to poll results in countries with robust right-wing movements like Austria, Hungary and Spain.

The oldest synagogue in Poland sits squarely in the middle of Warsaw, tucked in between office buildings and skyscrapers that offer a little seclusion from surrounding car horns and sirens. Nożyk Synagogue symbolizes both the long history of the Old Country and the reinvigoration of a new Jewish Poland. It's a modest building, made of old stone and brick, but it stood through the German and Russian shellings and demolition campaigns of World War II that destroyed 85 percent of the city.

A tramway travels around a street of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto, displaying a star of David in the 1940s.AFP/Getty

These days, a few hundred Orthodox Jews worship at Nożyk. Konstanty Gebert, a member of the synagogue who works as a journalist and activist, remembers just how thin the Jewish community was worn under the Communist government. In 1967, Israel fought a war with its Arab neighbors, and the Soviet Union sharply criticized Israel. Poland, dependent on Soviet support, followed suit. Polish politicians equated Jewish roots with support of Israel and launched a countrywide “anti-Zionist” campaign. “Organized Polish Jewry practically ends in 1968,” Gebert says. Those who stayed were Poles first and Jews second.

In the early ’60s, Adam Szyc attended Jewish summer youth camp and winter camp too. At home, his mother used to prepare homemade challah and gefilte fish. “I remember I was a member of a choir,” he says, smiling and stroking a peppery beard. Today, Szyc is a shopkeeper who laughs a lot and presides over his shop counter like it's a lectern.

When I ask Szyc about 1968, though, he pauses for a long time to collect himself. He switches from lighthearted English to quiet Polish. “It was the most emotional time in my life,” he says. That year, Poland forced Jews to leave the country or renounce their religion, along with any ties to Israel. Tens of thousands emigrated, including almost everyone Szyc knew, and numerous Jewish institutions, like cultural clubs and summer camps, were shut down. As Gebert puts it, the Jewish community “had a kind of skeleton existence after that.”

Szyc's family stayed because making a living seemed more important than religious practice. His parents had survived World War II by hiding out in Russia, at the brink of starvation, and had returned to a city devastated by some of the war's worst fighting. So when Szyc's father found out he could support the family by making shoes in the new Poland, he told his son, “I have a flat. You can go to school. It's a good country.” They stayed, even if it meant stifling their cultural identity.

Poland's restrictions on Jews started to lighten around 1980, as the grip of Communism weakened. Gebert says that small groups of Jews started meeting in private, to discuss faith and culture. He remembers attending one of those early meetings and seeing a man standing in the doorway, peering in at the two dozen men there. The man was weeping. Gebert asked him what was wrong. “I've never seen so many Jews in my life,” the man replied.

The few hundred who now worship at Nożyk, then, represent progress. So does Adam Szyc's little store. It’s attached to the synagogue and specializes in kosher food like his mother used to cook, along with frozen chickens, dill pickles and Israeli snacks. “It's enough to live, but not enough to live good live,” says Szyc, smiling. “But, you know, at my age, OK.” So what if the Israeli tourists rarely buy his overpriced Israeli snacks? He has plenty of repeat customers. One of them is Paweł Bramson.

Pawel Bramson is seen in the Warsaw synagogue, July 2, 2010. A former truck driver and neo-Nazi skinhead, Pawel, 33, has since become an Orthodox Jew, covering his shaved head with a yarmulke and shedding his fascist ideology for the Torah.Adam Lach/The New York Times/Redux

I Had Become My Own Enemy

Back in 2001, Bramson was sober but still confused, and afraid to talk to a rabbi. “Maybe some extreme emotions could awaken in me,” he remembers worrying. “Maybe I could become aggressive. I was going to talk with an enemy. Even though I had already learned that I had become my own enemy.”

The inside of Nożyk Synogogue is lined with dim corridors, old stairwells and an elegant central chamber that seats several hundred. When Bramson and his wife arrived, they sat down not with a Polish Jew but with an American rabbi named Michael Schudrich. He'd worked in Poland for most of the 1990s, and has been chief rabbi of Poland since 2004. When Schudrich speaks in English, you can hear New York City in his voice. He speaks like you might hope a rabbi would speak—almost improbably reassuring, always ready with a well-worn aphorism and a meaningful shrug

The meeting impressed Bramson. The rabbi was calm, composed and willing to tell the couple as much about Judaism as they wanted to hear.

There was a great historical irony to that first meeting. In the 19th century, long before the state of Israel was created, Poland was a world capital of Jewish scholarship. Young American men traveled there to study the Talmud under some of the world's best-known rabbis. But here was an American rabbi, explaining the finer points of kosher food preparation to a Jewish Pole.

“It was complicated,” Bramson recalls. Prayer, rules, ritual. It was all strange and confusing: no meat with milk, no work on Saturdays, no women on the lower level of the synagogue during worship. He was like a soccer player at his first tennis match, wondering what the racquets were for and why there was a net across the center of the court. But he kept coming back.

Two Death Marches

In late 2013, Warsaw’s first Jewish community center opened on a quiet residential street near the Old Town. It's a three-story building with big windows, long tables and bright, modern decor. On Sundays during its first summer, a different sort of Jewish community gathered here over challah, cucumber salad and potato casserole. The day I visit, at least a dozen 20-somethings, several atheists and some young mothers are in attendance. Outside in the sun, a few kids are spraying each other with water.

22-year old Damian (2L) holds the 'havdalah' candle as Slawek (R) reads a prayer in the presence of other young Jewish students of the Jewish Community Center (JCC) Krakow, during a 'havdalah' ceremony, in the home of one of the students in Krakow, Poland, Sept. 28, 2013.Miriam Alster/Flash90/Redux

Two Jewish women, Agata Rakowiecka and Helise Lieberman, are telling me how much things have changed in recent years. Rakowiecka, a young Pole, runs the JCC. Lieberman, an American who's lived in Poland for two decades, directs the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland. Neither institution could have existed before Communism fell here.

Marian Turski, an 88-year-old who chairs the board of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, is visiting the community center for the first time. “We try—we both, Jews and Gentiles—to fill up the vacuum which appeared after the Shoah,” he says, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. Turski went to Auschwitz long before it was a tourist attraction—he was sent there in 1944 and survived two death marches. “We cannot cover [the vacuum] with people. But we can cover it with ideas, with imagination, with remembrance.”

Twenty-five years have passed since Communism fell. In that time, Lieberman argues, a new and diverse group of Jews has emerged, one that doesn't overlap much with the attendees of Nożyk Synagogue. The community is growing. There aren't many children in attendance, but only because they're all at summer camp. Lieberman argues that this diversity marks a return to the past—it replicates the diversity of Jews in prewar Poland, which included casual Jews, Yiddish speakers, Hasids and atheists. “A to Z—anti-Zionist to Zionist,” she says. Jews here try to overcome the burden of Poland's history, but at the same time, they embody it. “This is not the Old Country,” she says.

‘What the Hell Is This?’

Across from Nożyk Synagogue, there's a smaller building, with cracked paint and a courtyard. It houses a kosher restaurant on the second floor, which is where Paweł Bramson now works.

After learning about their Jewish roots, Bramson and his wife thought for months about what they should do. Bramson's mother cautioned him that conversion would be a bad idea—there was just so much anti-Semitism in Poland, she said. On the other hand, Paweł and Ola were thinking about the they hoped to have. “I couldn't imagine raising them without awareness of family history,” said Paweł.

Bramson grew a beard and started wearing a yarmulke. He and Ola began attending synagogue regularly, and Paweł decided to learn how to prepare kosher food. He trained to be a kosher butcher, serving Jewish tourists who traveled through Warsaw.

Jan Dawid Spiewak, founder of Jewish youth organization ZOOM, with ZOOM members in a cafe in Warsaw, Poland, Dec. 12, 2009.Rafal Milach/Anzenberger/Redux

The complicated rules and rituals now seem second nature to him. Before meeting me in the bright sunlight in front of the restaurant, he was supervising a factory that produces kosher chocolate. He still likes the same soccer team, though, and he’s even going to a game tonight. It must be an interesting sight: Bramson with his beard and yarmulke surrounded by proudly rowdy Poles.

There are other flashes of his old life. One day a couple of years ago, Bramson was walking in Warsaw. He had just finished his work and was wearing his yarmulke. As he rounded a corner, he saw a familiar, well-built man with a shaven head. They looked at each other. “Bramson?” the man asked. “Is that you? What the hell is this?”

It was an old friend he hadn't seen in over a dozen years, since the days of window breaking and nationalistic soccer chants. Bramson took a step back. “I was getting the feeling that it could get aggressive.” Bramson had spent his youth creating fear; now he felt afraid.

But the feeling proved misplaced. “He just hugged me,” Bramson says. The man asked how things were going. Then he explained: He'd seen Bramson in a TV documentary. Ever since Rabbi Schudrich encouraged him to share his story, Bramson has made regular appearances in the headlines.

The kosher store on 6 Twarda St., owned by Adam Szyc, in Warsaw, Poland. Pawel helps run the kosher restaurant nearby, and sometimes sources food from there.Daniel A. Gross

Word has gotten out. For Jews in Warsaw, the so-called “renewal” is by now old news. Agata Rakowiecka compares the Jewish community to a house that is quickly becoming a home. “In the beginning, you're excited about the curtains and the sofa,” she says—you are amazed at the mere existence of the most basic things. Then, slowly, you start to figure out how to actually live in the house. “You start saying, This sofa is comfortable,” says Rakowiecka. “This is good for reading.”

In Poland, Rakowiecka and others were, at first, overwhelmed by the basics of a Jewish community: the weekly brunch at the community center, a Jewish summer camp for their sons and daughters to attend. Only now that they’ve settled in are they beginning to discover the real rhythms of their new lives.

Pawel and Ola have two children that they are raising Jewish; their teenaged son even spent time in America, studying at the Talmudic Academy of Baltimore. Some of Warsaw's best-attended Jewish institutions, meanwhile, are a kindergarten and a school, the sorts of places that create and perpetuate a small community like this one.

Poland’s not the Old Country it once was, but a small community of Jews is creating a vibrant new home there. It's only when the carpets begin to wear thin and the stairs round out that you know you've really built something.

Krzysztof Ignaciuk worked as an interpreter on this story.

You can follow Daniel A. Gross on Twitter @readwriteradio.

This story was co-produced with Latterly magazine, an independent publisher of international storytelling.

Latterly

For years, whenever Saudi Arabia and the United States bickered over Middle East policy, the relationship never seemed dangerously strained. The two sides have frequently clashed over Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a solution to the Syrian civil war and Washington’s efforts to ink a nuclear deal with Riyadh’s rival, Iran. But what held the alliance together, most assumed, was an immutable mutual dependence: The U.S. needed Saudi oil, and the kingdom needed American security.

Today, that line of reasoning appears to be wearing thin. As President Barack Obama meets in Riyadh with King Salman on Tuesday, the two leaders will be discussing a once-expansive relationship that has been relentlessly whittled down by deep and abiding differences over Middle East policy. Not only do the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have profound disagreements on Syria, Israel and Iran, but over the past few years Riyadh has been charting its own foreign policy path, coordinating with Washington only when it serves Saudi interests. King Salman, Riyadh’s new monarch, is expected to continue this policy that began under his predecessor, King Abdullah, who died last week. “The relationship is now transactional,” says Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “The main question now is what’s in it for them.”

Such hard-nosed realpolitik is a long way from the days when the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia brimmed with good will and overlapping interests. Since the end of World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt first met King Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of the kingdom, aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Suez Canal, the relationship centered on the exchange of Saudi oil for U.S. guarantees to protect the kingdom.

Relations deepened during the Cold War, when Washington and Riyadh collaborated against Soviet-backed Egyptian forces in Yemen’s civil war in the 1960s and later conspired to arm the Afghan mujahideen against occupying Soviet soldiers in the 1980s. Before the Iranians got involved, it was Saudi money that allowed aides to President Ronald Reagan to get around a congressional ban on funding the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The Saudis allowed some 500,000 American troops to be stationed inside its borders in preparation for the first Iraq War. And when the global price of oil periodically rose to levels that threatened U.S. economic growth, successive U.S. presidents could count on Saudi Arabia to increase production and ease the pain at the pump.

Today, such Saudi gestures largely belong to a bygone era. The relationship suffered a devastating blow when it turned out that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. Despite the sworn enmity between Al-Qaeda and the Saudi royal family, some Americans still suspect official Saudi support for the terrorists.

If U.S. attitudes toward Saudi Arabia changed after 9/11, Riyadh’s confidence in U.S. security guarantees dimmed with the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. King Abdullah watched as his predictions of growing Iranian influence in the region came true. In response, Riyadh eliminated its subsidy for transporting oil to the North American market. Within months, China became Saudi Arabia’s chief customer. “They downgraded us,” Freeman said. “We were a very acceptable and desirable security partner so long as we had no imperial agenda of our own in the region.”  

In addition to President George W. Bush’s blunder in Iraq, Obama disappointed the Saudis by backing away from his threat to bomb Syria and failing to push harder for an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan put forward by King Abdullah. “We’re no longer the partner we once were," Freeman said. “The Saudis don’t think they owe us very much of anything.”

At the same time, the Saudis have shown they’re willing to fund their friends. When Arab Spring protests erupted in Egypt in 2011, Riyadh was furious with Obama for failing to support the country’s embattled strongman, Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally for more than 30 years. Riyadh’s anger only intensified when the Obama administration embraced Mubarak’s successor, Mohammed Morsi, the leader of Muslim Brotherhood, a group that is banned in Saudi Arabia. So when Egyptian Gen. Abdel Fatah al Sisi overthrew Morsi last July and then replaced him as president, Saudi Arabia lavished him with $12 billion in unconditional aid. By contrast, Congress appropriated $1.5 billion in mostly military aid to Egypt last year, but Obama held up distribution for several months because of Egypt’s poor human rights record.

Last year, Saudi Arabia also gave Lebanon $3 billion to modernize its military so it could confront Iran-backed Hezbollah, the country’s most powerful militia and political party. And in a pointed message to the United States—which provided Lebanon with only $75 million—Saudi Arabia stipulated that the Lebanese government had to buy the military equipment from France.

Another change in the relationship involves U.S. overflight rights. Saudi authorities used to grant U.S. military aircraft near-blanket permission to fly over Saudi territory on their way to East Asia. Now, said one U.S. official, who spoke to Newsweek on the condition of anonymity, “they periodically withdraw permission to remind us it’s their airspace,” forcing the American planes to add hours and thousands of miles to their flights as they avoid the Arabian peninsula.

Saudi Arabia’s new independence in foreign policy also extends to trade as Riyadh moves to diversify its commercial relations. In 2013, U.S. exports to Saudi Arabia totaled $19 billion, down from $25 billion in 2012, according to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. A report from the Economist Intelligence Unit attributed some of the decline to Saudi Arabia’s shift away from big American-made gas guzzlers to cheaper Chinese cars.

Some Americans see a bright spot in the decision by Saudi Arabia — the world’s largest oil exporter — to maintain its production levels in the face of falling oil prices. But the Saudis are not doing the United States any favors. Riyadh, which can fall back on its enormous cash reserves, not only wants to see the low prices punish rivals Iran and Russia for their support of Syria; it also wants to cripple competition from the U.S. shale oil industry.

The one area where U.S.-Saudi cooperation is flourishing is in counterterrorism. When Obama launched the first sorties of the bombing campaign against so-called Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, Saudi Arabia scrambled its fighter jets to join in the air strikes. Saudi Arabia is also hosting a training camp for Syrian rebels and a small base for U.S. drones. Intelligence sharing has never been stronger.

But the coup in neighboring Yemen last week that toppled the pro-U.S. government and saw the rise of the Shiite Houthi movement now presents Obama and Salman with a fresh set of challenges. With the Houthis allegedly close to Iran, Saudi Arabia feels caught in a Shiite pincer. At the same time, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are concerned that any breakup of Yemen will take pressure off the country’s Al-Qaeda affiliate.

The uncertain situation in Yemen represents a major setback for both U.S. and Saudi efforts to stabilize the nation. With the Houthis now the dominant power in Sanaa, Riyadh has cut off funding to the Yemeni government and is bolstering its border defenses to contain any spillover of violence into the kingdom.

Bernard Heykal, a Middle East expert at Princeton, hopes that Obama will try to convince King Salman not to rule out talks with the Houthis. “One way in which American can play a very productive role in the region is to encourage the Saudis to reach out to all Yemeni factions, including the Houthis,” he told NPR Monday. “That would be one way of stabilizing Yemen.”

Amid the new climate of distrust, much will now depend on whether the Saudis can muster the confidence that Obama knows what he’s talking about. Then again, they just might conclude they’re better off taking their own advice. 

It’s official: The eurozone will have its dose of medicine.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has announced that a programme of quantitative easing (QE), totalling some €1.1 trillion ($1.24 trillion), will begin in March 2015 and run until June 2016. The ECB regards QE as a necessary evil to fend off deflationary pressures in the eurozone—in December alone, consumer prices in the 19 countries that use the common currency dropped by 0.2 per cent.

It is, however, a highly controversial measure—only financial markets are at ease with it and have already priced it in. That had not been the case, and there were no political issues around the central banks’ stance, when the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, in the throes of the global financial crisis, embraced QE to overcome the constraint of zero-interest rates. Even the reaction to the Bank of Japan’s more recent program of quantitative and qualitative easing has been, in comparison, much more muted.

But the ECB is the last guest to arrive at the party, and the scene has changed in the meantime. After the global financial crisis, the once-unconventional tools of QE—mainly buying assets in private markets—have become the new normal in the hands of the main central banks. The world is already swamped with liquidity and also more aware of the negative side effects of QE, for instance, on the currencies of some developing countries.

QE is a high-risk strategy to anchor inflation expectations. A central bank needs to be prepared to buy as many securities as is necessary. In the case of the ECB, the amount committed to QE is larger than expected, but it will be buying only 20 percent of sovereign bonds—the rest will be bought by national central banks.

Of course, politics plays a big part in the implementation of unconventional monetary policy in the eurozone.

ECB President Mario Draghi’s doctrine of “whatever it takes” goes only so far as Germany allows it. The German members of the ECB have been very clear that QE goes against Berlin’s conviction and policy stance. To keep Germany on board, therefore, the ECB has put a stop to the mutualization of debt—that is, buying bonds issued by all eurozone countries, even those with large public debt. The risk, however, is that this will create more fragmentation in Europe’s monetary policy and exacerbate the existing gap between core countries and the periphery.

Besides the impact on the eurozone itself, QE is likely to produce some adverse spillovers in other countries, in particular through the exchange-rate channel. One notable innocent bystander so far has been Switzerland—though there may not be much sympathy for the bankers in Bern.

Foreseeing large capital inflows as a result of the eurozone QE, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) braced itself early and on January 15 announced the abandonment of the unilateral cap, in force since September 2011, on the value of the Swiss franc against the euro. The result was dramatic: The franc rose by 40 percent against the euro.

But there will be some significant risks down the road for Switzerland, in particular the worsening of deflationary pressures and exposure to considerable losses on its reserves. However, the drastic move to uncap the franc will probably spare the SNB from some spillovers from the eurozone QE, notably a further expansion of its balance sheet—i.e. printing money—and of its official reserves. Switzerland’s foreign exchange holdings (currently the equivalent, in total, of 480 billion francs, or $537 billion) expanded tenfold since the burst of the global financial crisis in 2008 and are now among the highest, per capita, in the world.

What will the eurozone gain as a result of the latest moves? At best, QE will help assuage some deflationary fears and provide some oxygen to the peripheral countries by keeping under control the costs of serving their public debt.

But it is unlikely that QE will make a significant difference in terms of economic growth. The expected impact on GDP across the eurozone will be, at best, marginal, especially in the periphery.

Unlike in the United States and Britain, where purchases of financial assets financed by central bank money increased liquidity and pushed up asset prices—thus stimulating expenditure by increasing wealth and lowering borrowing costs for households and companies—in the eurozone this transmission mechanism is not as powerful.

Securities markets are comparatively smaller, and wealth effects are thus, too. In addition, European banks are now more risk-averse than they were before the crisis, so QE is unlikely to boost bank lending (unlike in the United States, where it has grown 3 percent a year for three years).

The only area where QE might provide some stimulus to the eurozone economy is through the exchange-rate channel—by weakening the euro against the dollar. To the extent that central bank liquidity is used to purchase foreign assets, it will drive down the exchange rate and stimulate exports—which in turn will boost corporate earnings and, ultimately, investment.

If, in addition, QE induces foreign investors to sell their sovereign holdings in eurozone countries and convert the proceeds in other currencies, it should drive the euro down further and thus reinforce the exchange-rate channel.

But it seems that the ECB is going through a lot of pain for not much gain. So why bother? In the end, because there are no other options. Quantitative easing is the only tool left available, with fiscal policies seriously constrained because of the need to reduce the deficit.

And trends confirm the urgency: With sluggish demand, large debt stock and deleveraging still in progress, deflation remains a serious threat that could push the eurozone (or some part of it) into a dreaded “liquidity trap”—when people postpone consumption on the expectation that prices will be lower in the future.

One need only look to Japan’s two “lost decades” for an example of what might then come.

In the end, QE is a way to gain time and allow countries, especially those in the periphery, to go through adjustments and reforms. But it alone is not the answer: QE is a second-best solution—good enough to keep Germany on board and to please the markets, but not incisive enough to make a real difference.

Dr. Paola Subacchi is Research Director, International Economics at Chatham House, the Royal Institution of International Affairs. This article first appeared on the Chatham House website.

Just before Christmas, Atheel al-Nujaifi, a leading Iraqi politician, quietly slipped into Washington, D.C., with an urgent request that the White House provide arms and training for his 10,000-man Sunni militia. For seven months now, the United States has been bombing Iraq and Syria, trying to beat back the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). But dislodging the world’s most notorious jihadist group hasn’t been easy, and Nujaifi was offering to help. The governor of Iraq's Nineveh province, he was forced to flee last summer when ISIS militants overran the country’s Sunni-dominated north and west. In meetings with American officials, Nujaifi warneda that unless the United States and its allies can quickly liberate the parts of Iraq under ISIS control, people there may soon learn to live with the militants. “Time,” he said, “is not on our side.”

Other Sunni leaders appear to be following his lead and asking the U.S. to support their militias, which they claim are willing to take up arms against the jihadist group. The White House is still weighing Nujaifi’s request, but in a sign of where things may be headed, U.S. and Canadian special forces are training some 5,000 former Sunni policemen from Mosul at a camp that Nujaifi set up near Erbil, in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.

The scramble to join the fight recalls the vaunted sahwa, or “awakening” of 2005, when Sunnis joined forces with the U.S. to root out Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq, the precursor to ISIS. And it comes as U.S. and coalition forces are training thousands of members of the Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces for a ground offensive this spring. Many American veterans of the first awakening say a second round isn’t a bad idea. “We need allies,” said James F. Jeffrey, who served as the charge d’affaires, then ambassador to Iraq during the American occupation. “If you’re looking for a Sunni face to put on any kind of offensive, this is helpful.” Patrick Skinner, who served as a CIA officer in Iraq, agreed. “Right now, there are a lot of bad options in Iraq,” he said. “This might be one of the better ones.”

A second awakening also would help advance an important U.S. goal in Iraq: Integrating Sunnis back into the Iraqi military and government. A minority group in Iraq, Sunnis have long feared that leaders in Baghdad are doing the bidding of their Shiite neighbors in Tehran. After U.S. combat troops withdrew in 2011, sectarian tensions flared as former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki reneged on his promise to incorporate Sunni fighters into the army, cracked down on Sunni politicians and allowed Shiite militias to terrorize Sunni towns. When ISIS fighters stormed into Iraq last summer, the group exploited local anger and alienation, and convinced some Sunni former military commanders to join its ranks. With Washington now pushing for a nuclear accord with Iran, and cooperating with its longtime adversary in the war against ISIS, some Sunnis remain highly suspicious of allying with the Americans.

Since Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi has been in office, the U.S. has pushed a plan to form national guard brigades in Iraq’s 18 provinces, largely to encourage Sunnis in the western and northern parts of the country to defend their territory. A bill to create these brigades has been bottled up in the country’s Shiite-dominated parliament, so in the short-term, some experts say, a new awakening could help bring Sunnis into the fold. “What Nujaifi and the other Sunnis are effectively saying is, ‘OK, if we can’t go the national guard route yet because it’s getting hung up in Parliament, let’s do this informally and get Sunnis into the battle, fighting and feeling like they’re part of the reconquest of Iraq,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, an Iraq expert at the Brookings Institution who met with Nujaifi in Washington.

Nujaifi isn’t the only influential Sunni looking to take part in this reconquest. Last month, a group of political and tribal leaders from Anbar Province in Iraq’s Sunni heartland met with Vice President Joe Biden at the White House to discuss ways they could help combat ISIS. The delegation included Anbar Governor Sohaib Al-Rawi and Sheikh Abu Risha, the head of the Iraq Awakening Council.

Another prominent Sunni leader joining the fray is Mudhar Shawkat, a former member of Parliament and an old-line patrician. Now living in London, where he fled in 2012 to escape death threats from Shiite supporters of Maliki, Shawkat says his followers include Sunni luminaries such as former Lieutenant General Ra’ad al-Hamdani and former Major General Nouri al-Dulaimi, both highly respected Iraqi commanders now living in exile in Jordan. “We can put forward a really big force very, very easily,” he told Newsweek. “All we need to do is get these generals to go on the radio and ask people to sign up as recruits, and there will be tens of thousands of them.”

Shawkat said he plans to hold a conference in Erbil later this winter that will include hundreds of former Sunni Iraqi officers, along with the leaders of Iraq’s largest and most influential Sunni tribes. Shawkat said that, during an upcoming visit to Washington, he will ask the Obama administration to send an observer to the event. Eventually, he said, he would like the U.S. to endorse his militia to win funding from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. “The American role is essential,” he said. “I don’t think anything can happen without the Americans.”

But a second Sunni awakening is only a good idea if the U.S. can be sure the Iraqi warlords appealing for arms, money and training can muster the necessary strength to defeat their jihadist foe. In Shawkat’s case, it’s not clear if the former military commanders and prominent tribal figures he claims as allies are on his side. “If I were the U.S. government and I were assessing this, I would ask, does this guy really have a force?” Pollack said. “I’d say, ‘You want us to arm, equip and train your men? Show me the men. Give us the names.’” Pollack said U.S. officials also need to determine if the Sunnis seeking American assistance are proxies for other regional players, like Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Iran. “There are a lot of different questions you want to ask before you start training these guys,” he said.

Pentagon planners say 50,000 troops, backed by U.S. airpower, are needed to break ISIS’s hold. They hope to do this by cutting off ISIS supply lines from Syria, besieging the militants in Mosul and other Iraqi strongholds, and then systematically picking the jihadis apart. But since the Iraqi army and Kurdish units now being trained amount to a force about half the necessary size, adding more men to the mix is critical. The 5,000 Sunni policemen now being trained outside Erbil are a good start. And given the Sunnis’ eagerness to join the fight—and the White House’s aversion to sending U.S. combat troops back to Iraq—there’s a good chance other Sunni militias may bring the anti-ISIS force up to full strength.

Sunni leaders know that a savage battle lies ahead, and many warn that if the counteroffensive works, they won’t repeat the mistake they made after the first awakening, when they stood by as Maliki ran roughshod over them. This time, these Sunni leaders say, they’ll demand a quasi-autonomous region, defended by their own militia, much like the arrangement the Kurds enjoy with the federal government.

Shawkat envisions an Iraq composed of self-governing Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions, with Baghdad serving as the country’s capital inside a federal zone. It’s an idea that President Barack Obama rejects, but Biden and many Iraq experts have long championed. “There is no other solution,” Shawkat insists. “There has been too much blood, too much destruction. Now we need to make the best of what we have.”

Pollack agrees with the idea of breaking Iraq into three federal regions, but strongly doubts Abadi and the ruling Shiites would ever allow the Sunnis to form a semi-autonomous area. Any such move would effectively remove a third of the country from Baghdad’s control, yet still require the Iraqi government to pay all its bills. Unlike the Kurdish region, the Sunni areas have no oil and therefore little means to contribute to the treasury. “It’s a terrible deal,” Pollack says. Yet without separation, he says, Iraq’s Shiites and Sunnis could remain locked in a sectarian war.

Nujaifi, however, remains committed to the old Iraq. Though he’s a prominent Sunni figure, he rejects the idea of a semi-autonomous state, saying he’s confident Abadi will work to make Sunnis feel part of the country. “This isn’t the time to talk about autonomy,” he says. “First, we Iraqis all have to come together to defeat ISIS.” 

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has responded to a Moscow court’s refusal today to shorten his house arrest by organising what he called an ‘anti-crisis’ protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin, echoing language used against the financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures in southern Europe.

“Putin and his government have not been able to pull the country out of the crisis and they must go,” Navalny wrote on his blog today, having heard the results of the court’s ruling. He also posted images of the mass protests which gripped Moscow in 1991.

“I plead all muscovites and visitors to the capital to come out on the streets on March 1 2015 and take part in a peaceful manifestation against the financial crisis,” Navalny wrote.

Earlier this morning, a Moscow high court refused Navalny’s appeal to be released from house arrest before February 15. The opposition leader was given a suspended sentence in December last year, when he was convicted of embezzling two companies in a highly controversial trial.

In response to this latest decision by Moscow authorities which will keep him away from public events, Navalny has begun drumming up support for a protest in Moscow in March, although it might be that a court will extend his house arrest to this date.

“The idea is simple,” Navalny wrote today. “Those sitting in the Kremlin have not managed [to halt the financial crisis] and they are still not managing to do it. They have had 15 years and three trillion dollars at their disposal, all from our natural resources. A government such as this cannot stand strong,” Navalny added.

The legal precedent for Navalny’s detention has been much contested - he believes the case against him has been levelled illegally, while the EU has branded his house arrest a “politically motivated” move from Moscow authorities to stifle his anti-Putin activism.

Navalny and his brother Oleg were found guilty of embezzlement in a trial last month, for which Oleg was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, prompting Russian opposition leaders to question the legality of Oleg’s detention, referring to him as a “political hostage”.

Meanwhile Alexei Navalny has continued to protest the verdict, violating the terms of his house arrest and even voicing his criticisms of Putin on national radio.

The protest planned in March will be the first that Navalny would attend since the day if his verdict on 30th December last year. That same night he joined protesters in the Red Square in front of the Kremlin, in a demonstration which resulted in more than 100 protesters being arrested.

Navalny has continuously criticised Putin both online and in the Russian media, specifically using the country’s economic downturn to argue for the president's removal.

The fall of oil prices and the rouble’s volatility, caused in part by US and EU-backed sanctions against Russia over its military presence in Ukraine, has led to rates of inflation in the country not seen since the global financial crisis in 2008.

The Russian rouble devalued by 40% last year, suffering a steeper downturn than in 1998 when then-President Boris Yeltsin resigned from office.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras unveiled a cabinet of anti-austerity veterans on Tuesday, signaling he has no intention of backing away from election pledges despite warning shots from the euro zone and financial markets.

Greek markets endured a second day of turmoil on Tuesday, with bank shares diving and investors fearing the anti-bailout government might be set on a collision course with the country'sEuropean Union and IMF creditors.

Promising to reverse budget cuts and renegotiate Greece's huge debts, Tsipras's leftist Syriza party stormed to power in Sunday's snap election on a wave of anger against the German-backed austerity policies that have driven up poverty and left one in four Greek workers out of a job.

Among a team spanning the radical and more pragmatic wings of Syriza, Tsipras named academic economist Yanis Varoufakis as his finance minister. The defense portfolio went toPanos Kammenos, leader of the right-wing Independent Greeks party which is the junior partner in the Tsipras coalition.

Varoufakis, who left a position at the University of Texas to enter Greek politics only in the run-up to the election, stressed he would keep writing a blog which he has used to denounce the austerity policies demanded by Greece's creditors in return for 240 billion euros in bailout loans.

"The time to put up or shut up has, I have been told, arrived," he wrote on his blog. "My plan is to defy such advice."

Varoufakis has railed against the bailouts of struggling euro zone states as "fiscal waterboarding" that risked converting Europe into a "Victorian workhouse".

But speaking to Irish radio, he said on Tuesday he planned to negotiate a solution with lenders, and that he had already had an "encouraging and inspiring" chat with the head of the euro zone finance ministers, Jeroen Dijsselbloem.

"Make no mistake: what is beginning today is a process of deliberation with our European partners," he said.

BANK SHARES DIVE

On the financial markets, yields on Greek three-year bonds jumped above 14 percent. This was up four percentage points since Sunday's vote although down from 16 percent at the beginning of the year, before the European Central Bank announced plans to stimulate the euro zone economy by buying debt issued by the bloc's governments.

A collapse of banking stocks pushed the Athens bourse down by 3.69 percent.. Investors are worried about Greek banks' liquidity and whether they will have continued access to ECB funding, with an extension to the country's bailout deal with the euro zone due to expire at the end of this month.

Bank of Piraeus, Alpha Bank and National Bank of Greece all fell between 10 and 12 percent.

Moody's credit rating agency said uncertainty created by the Syriza victory is negative forGreece's credit rating, adding that it "undermines depositor confidence and has an adverse effect on economic growth prospects".

The government's plan to negotiate a new debt deal has already run into resistance from its euro zone peers, which fear allowing Athens to write off some of its obligations would encourage other troubled countries to seek similar relief.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Dijsselbloem would visit Athens, but he would do so without a mandate from his peers.

Europe has shown a willingness to give Athens more time to pay its debts, but has stressed it will not yield to the demands for debt forgiveness.

On Monday Dijsselbloem warned Greeks against excessive expectations following their empathic vote against austerity. "We all have to realize and the Greek people have to realize that the major problems in the Greek economy have not disappeared and haven't even changed overnight because of the simple fact that an election took place," he said.

The new cabinet includes a number of lawyers, professors and some former journalists. Former Communist politician Yannis Dragasakis - who in the run-up to the vote demanded an investigation into Greece's bailout - took the deputy prime minister's role that is expected to oversee economic issues.

The government, installed within 48 hours of Sunday's win, is expected to pursue social welfare policies such as handing out free electricity and food stamps to the poor and cutting heating oil prices, alongside a crackdown on tax evasion.

On the labor front, Tsipras is expected to reverse a cut to the minimum wage and restore collective bargaining agreements abolished under the bailout out deal, as well as instituting a 5-billion-euro plan of incentives for firms to hire workers.

Privatization plans are expected to be reconsidered. Syriza officials have also promised to take on business tycoons, though in the run-up to the vote they said little about whether they will implement earlier pledges to slap new taxes on big Greek shipowners.

Tsipras has also promised that he will scrap unpopular crisis-era taxes, prompting critics to question how he will be able to afford his lavish social spending while battling depleting cash coffers and exasperated foreign lenders.

Syriza is also expected to freeze public sector layoffs as demanded under the bailout, and stop an unpopular evaluation process for civil servants.

Foreign flights into Baghdad have been canceled after shots were fired in the vicinity of a flydubai passenger jet, hitting the plane as it landed in the city on Monday evening.

Two passengers on flydubai flight FZ 215, which was carrying 154 passengers, were “lightly injured” when three or four bullets hit the plane, an aviation official told Reuters. The source of the gunfire remains unknown.

Damage to the plane’s fuselage “was consistent with small-arms fire,” a spokesperson for flydubai told Al Jazeera.

“All the passengers disembarked normally through the jet bridge.  No medical attention was required at the airport.  Passengers from Baghdad to Dubai were accommodated on a replacement aircraft.  An investigation is underway to establish what happened,” a flydubai spokesperson said in a statement.  

Flydubai, a budget carrier also known as Dubai Aviation Corp., and other Middle East airlines including Emirates, Air Arabia and Etihad have all suspended flights into Baghdad. The airlines followed an order from the United Arab Emirates’ civil aviation authority issued Tuesday, Al Jazeera reports.  
Turkish Airlines and Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines have also suspended flights, while flights from Iraqi Airways and Iranian carrier Caspian Airlines are still operating as usual, Al Arabiya reports.

Earlier this month, Turkish Airlines became the last foreign carrier to stop flights into Libya due to the deteriorating security situation in the country. The airline was still flying into Misrata, which was the site of airstrikes, shortly before flights were suspended.

Last year, a number of airlines re-routed flights or began avoiding Iraqi airspace after the growing threat from the Islamist extremist group Islamic State meant passenger jets might be at risk of being hit by gunfire. 

A lot of people develop dry skin in the winter, and turn to moisturizers. But do you know how they actually work?

This video from the American Chemical Society explains it nicely:

The body’s blood vessels supply water and moisture to the dermis, the middle layer of skin. From there, the moisture travels to the epidermis, the outer layer. This is what you see covering your body; the dermis is typically only exposed if you get scraped or scratched. Moisture is lost through transepidermal water loss, mostly via evaporation.

Moisturizers are divided into three types: occlusives, emollients and humectants. Some products may contain all of these, or any variation thereof.

Occlusives include products like petroleum jelly, and these chemicals form a protective barrier that prevents moisture from evaporating.  

Emollients are chemically similar and often contain fatty acid chains, a good example being castor oil. They are designed to penetrate into the skin, making it feel softer and less itchy, which makes them sufficient for treating many cases of the common skin problem eczema. They also fill gaps left by protein chains damaged by excessive water loss.

Finally, humectants are absorbed by the epidermis and help attract and retain moisture. They can also increase production of waxy chemicals called ceramides that help prevent water loss. One drawback to humectants is that some of them can increase moisture evaporation by enhancing water absorption from the underlying dermis, exposing it to the air and elements. So for that reason they are usually combined with occlusives, according to a 2005 paper on moisturizers. 

Patrick Lang doesn’t like leaks, not after decades as a Green Beret and a second career at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he ran worldwide spying operations. But on Monday, he called the conviction of former CIA operative Jeffrey Sterling on espionage charges, for allegedly leaking classified information to a New York Times reporter, “an injustice.”

Sterling, 47, a 10-year veteran of the spy agency, was accused of telling reporter James Risen about a bizarre, failed CIA operation to derail Iran’s nuclear weapons program by providing it with deliberately misleading technical blueprints, supposedly from a disaffected Russian scientist code-named Merlin. (Sterling was Merlin’s handler, or case officer, in spy jargon.)

Risen published an account of the operation in his 2006 book, State of War, calling it “hopelessly botched, and possibly backfiring by giving the Iranians blueprints that could be useful to them if they sorted out the good information from the errors,” according to an Associated Press summary.

But the government failed to produce any proof that Sterling talked with Risen about the Iran operation, Lang and other close observers of his trial have noted. Prosecutors could show only that Risen and Sterling, an African-American, talked and traded emails after an appeals court rejected a race discrimination suit by Sterling against the CIA in 2005.

As Edward MacMahon, Sterling’s defense attorney, said in court, “You’re not going to see an email [relaying information to Risen]. You’re not going to hear a phone call. It doesn’t exist.” He added, “What we really have is a cloud that needs to be lifted off Mr. Sterling.”

On Monday the Justice Department hailed the conviction of Sterling, who worked in clandestine operations beginning in the 1990s, as “a just and appropriate outcome.”

But Lang, a Middle East expert who was the DIA’s first director of the service’s foreign spying program in the 1990s, called the verdict a travesty.

“I was a consultant on the trial and I sat through all the testimony, and there was zero direct evidence that Jeff Sterling was one of Jim Risen’s sources for the book,” Lang told Newsweek.“It was entirely circumstantial and the poor [man] is going to go away for a long, long time.”

Sentencing is set for April, although Sterling’s lawyers have announced they plan to file motions to set aside the verdict and file an appeal. If the verdict holds, the former spy could theoretically face a 100-year sentence.  

Sterling’s is the latest in a series of cases in which the Obama administration has used a 1917 act meant to deter spies against alleged leakers, whom supporters hail as whistleblowers.

Lang, who was appointed to aid Sterling’s defense team by the court, was never called to testify because, he said, Sterling’s lawyers thought the government had utterly failed to prove its case and didn’t need him.

But Sterling’s race, he believes, was a factor in the decision by the all-white jury. “In my opinion, this guy has just been victimized in this—a black boy from Missouri, risen up from the gutter, all that stuff,” Lang said.

Government prosecutors argued that the failure of the former operative’s racial discrimination suit drove him to leak details on the failed operation to Risen.

But Lang, who worked on the case for over three years, disputed that. Sometime in 2003-2004, Sterling revealed details about the botched Iran operation, which arguably helped Tehran’s nuclear program, to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is responsible for oversight of U.S. spying operations. Any number of staffers at the Senate Intelligence Committee, who gossiped among themselves about the explosive revelation, could have been Risen’s sources, Lang said. The reporter, who fought a long battle against Justice Department subpoenas ordering him to testify in the case, has said he had “multiple sources” for his account of the operation.

Sterling “told the House Intelligence Committee about his [racial discrimination] problem in 2003,” Lang said. “He then went to SSCI [the Senate Intelligence Committee], told them about Merlin and how it might have an effect on our foreign policy. A staffer told other staffers.” Testimony from committee staffers during the trial backed up Lang’s assertion.

Shortly after Sterling’s trip to the Hill, Risen called a CIA spokesman, told him what he knew about the Merlin operation and asked for comment. The CIA talked Risen’s bosses out of running the story on national security grounds.

Three years later, the reporter published an account of the operation in State of War.

“It had a lot more stuff in it than Sterling knew,” Lang says. “After all, Sterling left the CIA in the middle of 2000. [The book] has data in it that only the CIA supervisor at headquarters could know.” Lang theorizes that “the CIA got its act together and they formed a position based on what all these [CIA] people knew and they told Risen a version of what they wanted him to know.”  

The CIA’s version was that Sterling had jeopardized a last, desperate chance to derail Iran’s nuclear program. That was false, Lang said.

“In fact, the Iranians had never responded to [this donation of blueprints],” Lang said. “They never did that. There is no proof whatsoever that they did anything with that. And it was certainly not a viable operation in mid-2003. But the CIA led the White House to believe it was ongoing and was a big hopeful thing.”

A CIA official did not return a call seeking comment. Risen also declined through his lawyer to talk about the case Monday.

The government alleged that Sterling had destroyed Merlin’s usefulness by leaking the operation. But government documents made available during the trial showed that the CIA continued to pay the unidentified Russian—and his wife as well—more than $413,000 over seven years after Sterling supposedly blew their covers.

Another oddity in the case was the trial’s setting in Virginia. Sterling lived in Washington, D.C. and later in his hometown in Missouri during his alleged criminal acts. Risen lives in Maryland, and the New York Times’ Washington bureau is in the District of Columbia.

Yet the Justice Department filed its case in Alexandria, a favorite jurisdiction of prosecutors in espionage cases, because the jury was sure to be composed of people with close ties to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. Prosecutors were able to file the case there because they argued that emails between Sterling and Risen passed through a server in Virginia. They also found a hairdresser to an FBI agent in the case, who testified she bought Risen’s book in Virginia—supposedly showing Sterling’s criminal activities extended to the commonwealth.

On cross-examination by Sterling’s lawyers, however, she wasn’t so sure.

“It was probably Virginia, but it might have been Bowie,” a Maryland suburb where her boyfriend lived, she said, according to blogger Marcy Wheeler, who has decried government conduct in the case.

“You don’t remember whether you bought the book in Virginia or Maryland?” the defense asked again.

She was sure enough for the judge. The trial went on in Virginia.

Tuesday marks 70 years since the Soviet Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in 1945. A decade ago, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that designated the anniversary of that day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Around 300 survivors participated in a commemoration ceremony at the site of the former death camp with officials, while leaders in cities around the world marked the day with speeches and ceremonies, including in Paris, Kiev and Moscow. A U.N. ceremony planned for Tuesday morning in New York City was canceled due to inclement weather.  

“Recalling also the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind,” and “reaffirming that the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice,” the assembly agreed in its 2005 resolution that the U.N. would designate an annual International Day of Commemoration, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. 

The January date is separate from Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, designated by the Israeli Knesset (parliament) in 1951 to be marked on the 27th day of Nissan on the Hebrew calendar (and which usually falls in April).

Updated | After a two-foot drone went undetected by White House radars and crashed into a tree on the South Lawn at 3 a.m. on Monday morning, President Obama, in his first public comments since the incident, admitted that the United States has failed to keep pace with the technology.

The pilot of the drone works for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and had been drinking at an apartment nearby the White House, according to a New York Timesreport.  When he lost control of the drone during a recreational flight, he hoped it had not hit the White House premises, but the next morning friends alerted him that his drone was all over the news. He first called his employer, and then notified authorities.

Following an investigation, the Secret Service identified the operator as a non-White House government employee. It is unclear from reports why the unidentified man was flying the device at that hour, but he claims he lost control during a recreational flight and did not intend to fly it over the White House fence.

For security reasons, drones are mostly banned from flying in Washington, D.C., yet people still continue to fly them. The government employee has not been charged with a crime.

In an interview with CNN, Obama said drones have the potential to empower people in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago, but the federal government is trying to catch up with the technology’s progression in order to enact laws that ensure safety and privacy. He said a goal in his final years as president "is seeing if we can start providing some sort of framework that ensures that we get the good and minimize the bad.”  

While a Secret Service agent was able to hear and see the drone, radars failed to detect it and agents were unable to bring it down before it crossed the fence. Officials toldThe New York Times it was too small and flying too low to be detected.

James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Associated Press there really was nothing that could have been done.

"The sniper would be shooting at the drone and his bullets would be going past it into the buildings on Connecticut Avenue. If it's a crisis or emergency, sure, that makes sense, but what goes up comes down, and that includes bullets,” he said.

The drone incident follows a series of Secret Service security blunders in recent years. They include an armed security contractor with an arrest record sharing an elevator with the president, a knife-carrying fence hopper running deep into the White House and a shooting taking place on the White House grounds in 2011 with little notice.

A militant group affiliated to the Islamic State (ISIS) has claimed responsibility for today’s attack on a luxury hotel in the Libyan capital which left nine people - including five foreign nationals - dead, according to analysts.

The attack saw a car bomb detonate outside the building and at least two gunmen storm the five-star Corinthia hotel, where government officials and foreign delegations regularly stay.

Tripoli’s prime minister and an American delegation were evacuated during the assault in which the attackers reached the 24th floor of the hotel, killing three security guards, five foreign nationals and a hostage.

Political risk company, Risk Advisory Group, confirmed that a militant group affiliated to the Islamic State, IS Tripoli, had circulated photos of the attack at the hotel with the title reading: “Tripoli Province: Pictures of the Raid of Sheikh Abu Anas Al-Libi”.

The image caption reads: “Pictures from the site of the explosion of the car bomb” and say, “The lions of the caliphate have invaded” the hotel. The accompanying text on the images also claims that clashes were still ongoing inside the building, although officials have confirmed that the two gunmen blew themselves up after the attack.

Al-Libi, an al-Qaeda suspect who had been on the FBI’s most-wanted list, recently died in U.S. custody just days before was set to stand trial for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 224 people.

He was captured in Tripoli by U.S. special forces in October 2013, and taken into custody for his alleged involvement in the attacks.

At the time of Al-Libi’s death, a minister in Libya’s National Salvation government - which is not recognised by the international community - said that U.S. authorities “must shed light on details of his death” as there “is speculation about how he died in prison”.

While local security official Mahmoud Hamza did not divulge the nationality of the foreign nationals killed in today’s attack,  Kayla Branson, the lead North African analyst at the Risk Advisory Group, confirmed that the assault marked the first time that this ISIS branch had targeted western interests in Libya but pointed out that different ISIS factions have had an increasing presence in the country over the last six months or so.

The image that is being circulated by the IS-affiliated militant group on jihadist forums, claiming responsibility for the attack.IS Tripoli

As well as the formation of IS Tripoli in the country’s west, two other ISIS-affiliated branches have emerged in the country - Barqa in the east and Fezzan in the south.

“It would certainly be the first targeting of an area in which Westerners are frequently present and often take up residence, in their current form as IS Tripoli,” she said.

“They [IS Tripoli] have just established themselves in the latter half of 2014. It [the attack] is definitely one of the most significant incidents we have seen in the capital.”

It is Branson’s view that the chaotic situation in the country will allow the three ISIS branches to grow, as it will give the jihadists “more time to organise, to coordinate and to establish networks”.

Other militias have carried out small-scale attacks against the hotel in previous years but Branson believes that unrest in Libya, which has seen the country descend into civil war between rival factions following the death of ex-president Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011, has allowed the IS Tripoli to carry out its first attack against the perceived western target.

“Now, there is significantly less control than there was before, which would enable them to carry out such an attack,” Branson asserted.

Max Abrahms, professor of political science at Northwestern University and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, agrees that the “anarchical nature” of the country, following the western coalition to oust Gaddafi, has allowed ISIS to thrive.

“It’s no surprise that the Islamic State is infesting Libya, given its anarchical nature. There’s no governing authority,” he said.

“This creates opportunities for terrorists to seize control. Terrorists gravitate to power vacuums,” he added. “I think everybody would agree that the removal of Gaddafi made Libya more chaotic, not less, more violent.”

Last November, the terror group’s eastern branch, known as IS Barqa, took control of the coastal town of Derna while the US Africa Command has claimed that the group have created a number of training camps in the country’s eastern regions.

Entire battalions of the terror group’s Libyan fighters have also left fighting in Syria and Iraq to return to the country, according to Torbjorn Soltvedt, principal MENA analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, a leading global risk analytics company.

“I think there are at least 300 Libyan nationals who had been fighting in Iraq for the Islamic State who, in late 2014, had returned back to Libya,” said Soltvedt. “However, I would not expect them [total ISIS fighters] to be more than a 1,000 in Libya.”

The country is in the midst of what is essentially civil war between two rival factions in its western and eastern regions, Solvedt says. One faction is linked to the internationally-recognised government in the east, which is based in the city of Tobruk, and the other is allied to the Islamist-backed Fajr Libya (Libya Dawn) who took control of Tripoli last summer.

Drama is afoot in Blink-182.

The confusion began Monday afternoon, when reports began circulating that founding vocalist and guitarist Tom DeLonge had quit the band.

This was followed by DeLonge denying that Tom DeLonge had quit the band and mass confusion all across the Pop-Punk Industrial Complex.

What's going on? Here, let us explain.

pic.twitter.com/J526jj0caI

— Dan Ozzi (@danozzi) January 27, 2015

Which one is Tom DeLonge again? And Mark who?

This can be tricky for non-fans, since both Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus are (or, um, were) founding members and songwriters of Blink-182, both shared lead vocalist duties, and both have faintly similar appearances (Hoppus has spikier hair and fewer tattoos). But DeLonge is the guitarist and has a higher, whinier voice (he tends to drag out syllables in emotive fashion: “Don’t waaste! / Your tiiime! / On meee! / You’re already the voooice inside my head”), while Hoppus plays bass and has a lower, older-sounding vocal delivery.

A trick is to remember that DeLonge primarily wrote and sung 1999 mega-hit “All the Small Things,” while Hoppus primarily wrote and sung other 1999 mega-hit “What’s My Age Again?” DeLonge is the one who is now, evidently, out of the band. He’s been splitting his time between Blink-182 and his other band, Angels & Airwaves, which emerged in the midst of Blink’s 2005 hiatus.

What’s their age again?

Not so young anymore! Mark Hoppus is 42, while Tom DeLonge and drummer Travis Barker are both 39. The band—sans Barker—was formed back in 1992.

I cannot sleep, I cannot dream tonight. What’s a good moody song to help me absorb the loss?

This should help:

Work sucks!

I know.

The Russian spy ring, which the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced it had busted in New York earlier this week, had allegedly been tasked with looking into U.S. trading patterns, in a possible bid to destabilise the US stock market, according to a court document made public today.

The document contains the transcript of a phone call between two of the three men charged with espionage - Evgeny Boryakov, a banker for Russia’s state-owned Vnesheconombank and Igor Sporyshev, a diplomat for Russia’s UN mission.

In the exchange Boryakov instructs Sporyshev to contact an unnamed news organisation and use it as a guise to question New York Stock Exchange employees about a process called high-frequency trading, which causes dramatic spikes and falls in stock prices.

According to Gregory Monaghan, the FBI agent testifying against Boryakov, the news organisation in question is owned by the Russian state and is already known to the FBI for its possible link with Russian foreign intelligence.

Monaghan testifies that the unnamed organisation has been used “to gather intelligence under the cover of news media” before, and that it had reached out to Sporyshev in May 2013, offering him an opportunity to formulate questions for them which they would then pose to the stock exchange employees.

Monaghan believes the two men were charged with “intelligence gathering” for the benefit of the wider “Russian economic intelligence community,” using the cover offered by the news channel.

In a phone call intercepted by the FBI that same month, Sporyshev asks for Boryakov to help him with deciding “what we want to know” in just 15 minutes and saying he had received instructions “from the top”.

Boryakov is then recorded instructing Sporyshev to use the anonymous news channel to probe New York Stock Exchange employees for “mechanisms of use for market destabilization in modern conditions”. Boryakov says that Sporyshev is to also ask about methods of “limiting the use of trading robots.”

The use of automated robots is not an illegal practice - they help to identify optimal points to buy and sell as stock prices fluctuate, but glitches or malfunctions in these trading algorithms can have huge effects on share prices.

Boryakov’s insistence that Sporyshev should enquire about these things indicates that the men were keen to investigate ways that the U.S. markets might be mainpulated.

Russian intelligence has denied any ties with Boryakov and Sporyshev, as well as with their third alleged accomplice Viktor Podobny. Russian MP Sergey Mironov told Russian news agency Interfax today that the charges against the three Russian nationals was “100% a political ruse”.

“To accuse these people of industrial espionage is just hilarious,” Mironov said, urging Russian authorities to respond by targeting US businessmen and diplomats in Russia.

“The correct practice should be an ‘eye for an eye’,” Mironov added, calling for Russia’s authorities to provide the FBI with a ”mirror reaction”.

After four months of battle, Kurdish fighters were able to regain control of Kobani, Syria from the Islamic State (ISIS). United States Central Command told the Associated Press it believes 90 percent of Kobani is now in Kurdish control, though much of the city has been destroyed during the fighting.

“The city has been fully liberated, [it is] nearly destroyed,” Idriss Nassan, a Kurdish official, told the AP by phone from Kobani. The city lacks water, electrical and sewage systems and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party hopes international support is made available for rebuilding purposes.

Though the city is faced with a difficult process ahead, Syrians took to celebrating the Kurdish victory in pushing the Islamic State out of a major stronghold. 

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, on Tuesday publicly announced its support for a statewide ban in Utah on housing and employment discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

The church has come out in favor of similar measures in the past, most notably in Salt Lake City in 2009. But the Utah legislature, most of whose members are also members of the church, has been hesitant to pass a statewide measure without official church sanction, according to Cliff Rosky, an associate professor of law at the University of Utah and chairman of the advocacy group Equality Utah.

“We’ve been trying for a statewide bill for seven years,” Rosky told Newsweek, “but it’s been fought back at every turn.”

Now, with the church’s announcement that it would support such a  bill, Rosky expects the Utah legislature to approve it. “The legislature is out of excuses now,” he said. “That’s a very big deal.”

In the past, the church has received heated criticism from LGBT rights groups for its support of Proposition 8 in California, which in 2008 made same-sex marriage illegal in the state. The proposition was overturned by the California Supreme Court in 2010.

“Basic human rights such as securing  a job or a place to live should not depend on a person’s sexual orientation,” said Mormon leader Neill Marriott during a press conference Tuesday. But other Mormon leaders stressed that LGBT rights must not trump religious freedoms, arguing that pastors should not be forced to offer marriages to gay couples if so doing goes against their religious beliefs.

“The culture wars have had the most adverse impact on Christian and Mormon families who have gay family members,” said Troy Williams, executive director of Equality Utah. “Hopefully, soon we’ll be able to reunite families that have been strained or fractured by these culture wars.”

With the 49th Super Bowl set to be played in the 48th state, allow us to enumerate 47 things for visitors to do in the Valley of the Sun. The University of Phoenix Stadium, located in the western suburb of Glendale, will not only host Super Bowl XLIX between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks, but also the 2016 college football National Championship Game and the 2017 Men’s Final Four. That’ll be the first Men’s Final Four held west of the Rockies since 1995.

With outlying towns boasting names such as Carefree and Paradise Valley, this Sonoran desert city is the ideal oasis from… winter. After all, it was 78 degrees and sunny on Sunday (but then every day here is a sun day). And how many feet of snow is your town shoveling out from under this week?

With a few exceptions, the Valley’s top attractions are all located at least 10 miles east of the football venue. If you don’t have tickets to the game (if only scalper prices deflated by 15%), you may never venture near it. That’s okay: from outdoor activities to outstanding cuisine, Phoenix is hopping like a jackrabbit. It may be situated in a desert, but it is far from a cultural one.

1 Camelback Mountain, Phoenix/Paradise Valley

Arguably the city’s signature landmark, Camelback may be ascended from either of two trails. Cholla Trail begins at the mountain’s eastern edge and is the easier of the two. Echo Canyon Trail, which recently reopened after being closed an entire year for maintenance (it is literally a comeback trail) is the more arduous. Both are popular with locals and tourists alike.

Give yourself at least two hours to get up and down the tallest peak (2,706 feet) in the Valley, and bring water (perhaps you could tote it in a CamelBak). It’s okay to step to the side and snap a photo, but talking on your cell while hiking is a major party foul.

2. Bottled Blonde, Old Town Scottsdale

We could have named any one of a dozen or so nightspots within projectile-vomiting distance of one another here (American Junkie Cake, Dakota Bar, Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row, El Hefe, Majerle’s Sports Grill, Hi-Fi, Maya. Mint, etc.). Put Usher’s “Yeah” on 11 and picture a scene that would leave even Vincent Chase and his crew slack-jawed and you have this bazaar of bottle-service-and beyond establishments. More NBA games have probably been lost here on the eve of tip-off than during the games themselves. Arizona’s epicenter of off-the-hook. 7340 East Indian Plaza

Tiger Woods (right) walks with Andy North during a practice round for the Waste Management Phoenix Open at TPC Scottsdale. Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

3. Waste Management Phoenix Open, Scottsdale

The rowdiest hole in all of golf – the 16th here at the TPC Scottsdale – welcomes back Tiger Woods after a 14-year absence. Tickets are $30 for general admission and patrons aged 17 years and under get in free. Thursday through Sunday. Corner of Bell and Hayden Roads

4. Steak 44, Phoenix

They could serve cow pies at this, the trendiest of Valley steakhouses, and you’d still be wowed by the bold, futuristic interior. They just happen to serve up magically marbled ribeye and T-bones, too. 5101 North 44th Street

5. Arizona Biltmore, Phoenix

The Valley of the Sun does resorts really, really, really well. For decades, before a surge in properties came about in the Nineties, the Biltmore was the crown jewel of Phoenix resorts. Opened in 1929, it still possesses a stately charm. Find that turquoise bolo tie that is hiding in your drawer and head to the lobby for a drink. 2400 East Missouri Ave

6. Fan Fest at Scottsdale Fashion Square, Scottsdale

Unofficially, the crossroads of Scottsdale is the intersection of Camelback and Scottsdale Roads, and here is where ESPN and the NFL will set up shop all week. It’s quite the cultural --and climatic--shift from Times Square, home of last year’s Fan Fest, and Fashion Square. Corner of Camelback and Scottsdale Roads

7. Sip Coffee and Beer House, Scottsdale

No need to overthink this one: the name says it all. Go from caffeinated to inebriated (or vice versa)  at this Old Town Scottsdale spot whose decor looks like an independent filmmaker’s celluloid dream.3617 North Goldwater Boulevard

8. The Heard Museum, Phoenix

The state’s, if not the entire Southwest’s, premier showcase for Native American art and history. Currently the Heard is running an exhibit titled “Beautiful Games: American Indian Sport and Art.” This Friday night at 7 p.m., as part of the exhibit, the Heard will host a symposium on “Indigenous Stereotypes in Sports” that will ask, “Why is there broad acceptance and tolerance of American Indian stereotypes in modern society and in the sports world?” Should I save a seat for you down front, Daniel Snyder? 2301 N. Central Ave

9. Greasewood Flat, Scottsdale

Located in the foothills of the Mcdowell Mountain preserve in northeast Scottsdale, this outdoor saloon is located in and around a bunkhouse that dates back to the 1880s. Open fire pits, first-rate burgers and a killer view for sunsets make it worth the trek. 27375 North Alma School Parkway

10. Los Dos Molinos, Phoenix

The quality of a Mexican restaurant, it is hereby proposed, is inversely proportional to that of the surrounding neighborhood and the eatery’s decor. Visit the original location in South Phoenix for an authentic experience. 8646 South Central Ave.

11. Kelly’s at SouthBridge, Scottsdale

When your watering hole is voted by a local magazine as the “Best Place to People Watch” in Scottsdale, well, game over. That’s like being voted the shark with the sharpest teeth. Mouth-watering food and an amped-up atmosphere, too. 7117 East Sixth Avenue

12. Scottsdale Quarter, Scottsdale

One of four upscale shopping centers in town (along with Scottsdale Fashion Square,  Biltmore Fashion Park and, across Scottsdale Road, Kierland Commons), SQ is plush with high-end retail outlets (Nike Store, Apple Store, etc) and bistros (e.g., Dominick’s Steakhouse, True Food Kitchen). Even if your credit card never leaves your wallet, you could cast three seasons of MILF Island in just one hour of strolling the grounds. 15037 North Scottsdale Road

13. Little MIss BBQ, Tempe

Patrons who wait in line for Scott and Bekke Holmes’ Central Texas-style barbecue refer to the couple’s smoked meats as “a life-altering experience.” The best barbecue in town. 4301 East University Drive

14. Crescent Ballroom, Phoenix

The city’s most popular live music venue is also a lounge that boasts a kitchen. While there are no nationally known live acts on stage during Super Bowl week (someone find them a new booker!), it’s still worth a visit. 308 North Second Avenue

15. South Mountain Park, Phoenix

The largest municipal park in the United States at 17,000 acres is home to coyotes and a few other critters you may not want to happen upon unawares, but its 56 miles of rugged running/hiking/mountain biking trails are popular with locals. Elite runners abound here.

16. Top Golf, Scottsdale

Of course, you should try and reserve a tee time at Troon North or the Arizona Biltmore, but this driving range-cum-party place makes golf accessible to everyone. Depending on your handicap, this place is utopia or anathema. 9500 East Indian Bend Road

17. Rita’s Kitchen, Paradise Valley

Located on the grounds of one of the area’s most beloved resorts, the Camelback Inn, Rita’s provides distinctive Southwest flair with killer happy hour views of Mummy Mountain. Walk through the same lobby that movie stars Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne once did. 5402 East Lincoln Drive

18. Harkins Camelview 5, Scottsdale

Specializing in films where things do not blow up, the Camelview is an oasis of quality cinema tucked behind the Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall. Currently showing: The Imitation Game and A Most Violent Year, among others. 7001 East Highland, Scottsdale

19. Frank and Lupe’s, Scottsdale

This hole-in-the-wall family-owned Mexican restaurant  will have you dreaming of a siesta afterward. An Old Town Scottsdale favorite for more than a quarter-century. 4121 North Marshall Way

20. The Vig, Phoenix

That upscale tavern with the feel of a neighborhood joint, The Vig is also a trendy spot to take a date. Smart decor and stylish clientele, but you always feel welcome. Fire pits and televisions outside. 4041 North 40th Street

21. Matt’s Big Breakfast, Phoenix

You are going to wake up for breakfast? God bless you! Matt’s, located in downtown Phoenix, believes in keeping it simple (notice the menu) and delicious. Honorable mentions include Scramble in North Scottsdale and Mrs. White’s Golden Rule Cafe, a Valley staple since the 1960s, also in downtown Phoenix. 825 North First Street

22, Piestewa Peak and the Phoenix Mountain Preserve

Formerly known as Squaw Peak, this is the second-tallest summit in the area (2,608 feet) and arguably a more challenging climb than Camelback Mountain. Enter East Squaw Peak Drive off Lincoln Drive

23. Chicago Bulls at Phoenix Suns, Friday, 8:30 p.m.

The Suns (26-20) are a band of brothers, boasting twins Markieff and Marcus Morris as well as Slovenian siblings Goran and Zoran Dragic. Chicago’s Pau Gasol was named as a starter for next month’s All-Star Game, a contest in which his brother, Marc (Memphis Grizzlies), will start for the West. U.S. Airways Arena, Phoenix

23-A. The Real McCoy

Anyone who has lived in Phoenix the past 40 years reveres and recognizes the voice of Al McCoy, the longest-tenured broadcaster for one professional sports team this side of Vin Scully. McCoy, 81, made his debut in 1972 with the Suns and is as much a part of the local fabric as the magnificent sunsets. Listen to him on KTAR (620 AM) radio. “It’s a wham, bam, SLAM!”

24. Jade Bar at Sanctuary, Paradise Valley

Located partially up the backside of Camelback Mountain, Sanctuary is the resort James Bond would find lodging if 007 ever had business in the Valley. You can bet the mixologists at the swank Jade Bar would know how Mr. Bond prefers his martini. 5700 East McDonald Drive

25. RnR Restaurant and Bar, Scottsdale

Yet another Old Town Scottsdale joint that is jumping, this two-story gastropub specializing in southwestern fare often appears to be overflowing with humanity. Prime location, too. 3737 North Scottsdale Road

26. Four Peaks Brewery, Tempe

Highly popular with Arizona State students, as it is located closer to most dormitories than the more tourist-friendly Mill Avenue bars, Four Peaks brews its eight mainstays on-site. Another popular homegrown Tempe product, musician Roger Clyne, is known to frequent the spot. 1340 East 8th Street

27.  The Henry, Phoenix

A phenomenal neighborhood restaurant in what is perhaps the Valley’s most esteemed authentic neighborhood: Arcadia. The Henry is a breakfast joint and a coffee bar by day, a sexy eatery after sundown. If you are not here, you feel as if you are missing out on something. 4455 East Camelback Road

28. El Chorro, Paradise Valley

An Arizona landmark that has been around since the late 1930s and was a favorite of screen legends such as Clark Gable and John Wayne (who must have loved it down here), El Chorro has surrendered some of its charm since a recent renovation. Still, if you venture inside to the famed Classroom Bar, pull up a stool and order a shot of whiskey, you may just channel the spirit of the Duke himself. 5550 East Lincoln Drive

29. Carefree

Whenever you have the opportunity to put yourself on the corner of Ho-Hum Road and Easy Street, you take it. This secluded town (pop.,4,000) due north of Scottsdale has more going for it than just its happy-go-lucky sobriquet: the hemisphere’s third-largest sun dial is located here. Just past the city limits, in neighboring Cave Creek, you’ll find The Hideaway Grill where you, your Harley and your leather vest are more than welcome. If you prefer a dining experience where sleeves are encouraged, we highly recommend Binkley’s.

30. Second Story Liquor Bar, Scottsdale

No, that isn’t Don Draper and Roger Sterling in the booth behind you, but it may as well be. A high-end cocktail bar and eatery that mixes swag with swank. 4166 North Scottsdale Road

31. Cactus Aquatic Center, Scottsdale

Finding it difficult, or just a tad chilly, to swim laps in your resort pool? Hit this north Scottsdale natation nirvana that features two heated 25-meter pools boasting approximately 20 lanes. Cost? $3 per session. 7202 E. Cactus Road

32. The Madison, Tempe

Full name: The Madison Improvement Club. This Tempe sweatshop offers yoga and also peddles a “Party on a Bike” program with neon lights, a DJ and bass-thumping music (not mentioned: ASU coeds). A first-timer class is just $10. 149 South Farmer Avenue

33. Culinary Dropout, Tempe

Also known as “The Yard,” this gastropub and acoustic music setting (which is associated with the aforementioned Madison) aims to be the perfect understated undergrad hangout. That group project in Marketing class is due tomorrow? Meet here. Ping-pong tables and cornhole boards are located on the patio. 149 South Farmer Avenue

34. Orange Sky at Talking Stick Resort, Scottsdale

I’ll be blunt: this casino has fewer oxygen tanks-per-patron than the other reservation casinos around the Valley, according to my informal poll. Double down on the sunset vistas at the penthouse-level Orange Sky restaurant, located 15 floors above the Pima Indian Reservation grounds. 9800 East Indian Bend Road

35. San Tan Flat, Queen Creek

Located on the far southeastern edge of the Valley, this outdoor grill and saloon promises “all the fun of camping without having to sleep on the ground.” Two languages are spoken here: country and western. 6185 West Hunt Highway

36. Tempe Corona del Sol at Tempe Mountain Pointe, Friday, 7 p.m.

Six-foot-ten freshman Marvin Bagley III achieved virality with this dunk in his home debut. Corona del Sol has won three straight state Division I basketball titles and those who have seen Bagley say he has the potential to be the best prep hoopster the state has ever produced. Bagwell’s grandfather, “Jumpin’” Joe Caldwell, was an All-Star in both the NBA and ABA, as well as an Arizona State legend. 4201 E. Knox Road

37. O.H.S.O. Eatery and nanoBrewery, Phoenix

Tucked between Indian School Road and the Arizona Canal in the historic Arcadia neighborhood, this indoor/outdoor saloon is more comfy than your favorite pair of cargo shorts. Dogs are welcome and the bar even provides locks for your bicycle. Try the brisket sandwich. 4900 East Indian School Road

38. Scottsdale Gun Club, Scottsdale

You are in Arizona, after all, home of the O.K. Corral. The SCG offers lessons as well as rentals on handguns, rifles and even machine guns. So if you feel at home on the range… 14860 N. Northsight Blvd

39. Mill Avenue, Tempe

What State Street is to the University of Wisconsin or 6th Street is to the University of Texas, Mill Avenue is to Arizona State. A bevy of bars and street urchins await you. Too many of both to mention here and we prefer not to play favorites.

40. XTERRA Trail Run--McDowell Mountain

Before embarking on a sybaritic Super Bowl Sunday, why not get in a serious workout? The XTERRA offers two trail races in the scenic McDowell Mountains on the morning of Sunday, February 1st: a 15-miler that begins at 8 a.m. and a 7K (4.34 miles) that starts at 9 a.m. Entry fees are $55 and $45, respectively.

41. The Chuckbox, Tempe

Located in the heart of ASU’s Tempe campus, this cash-only burger joint has been tempting Sun Devils to skip that 12:05 Econ class for 35 years. The very definition of rustic, the Chuckbox features mesquite-grilled burgers that are not to be missed. 202 East University Drive

42. The HI-Liter, Phoenix

Dig it, we are not actually suggesting you step inside the Valley’s most popular gentlemen’s club. We are just saying that if you are avidly seeking autographs from professional athletes, the parking lot here may be a better spot to stake out than Fan Fest (p.s. steak and lobster, all day, Thursdays, $11). 4716 North 12th Street

43. The Wigwam Resort, Litchfield Park

One of the few, if not the only, attractions in the Valley west of the site of Super Bowl XLIX, the Wigwam is steeped in history – it opened on Thanksgiving Day, 1929 -- and an appreciation for golf. The resort boasts three championship-level 18-hole golf courses, two of which were designed by Robert Trent Jones, Sr. 300 East Wigwam Blvd

44. Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix

Housing more than 6,000 instruments from approximately 200 countries, MIM is the largest museum of its type on the planet. An Artist’s Gallery features instruments that have been played by everyone from John Lennon to Taylor Swift, while the Experience Gallery invites visitors to make some noise. Oh, and they’ve heard every variation of the “One time at band camp…” joke.  4725 East Mayo Boulevard

45. Portillo’s Hot Dogs, Tempe

Chicago may be known as the Second City, but many Windy City folk consider Phoenix their second city. Which helps to explain the cult-like popularity of this Chicago-style wieneria. 65 South McClintock Drive

46. Butterfly Wonderland, Scottsdale

Not to be confused with “Boogie Wonderland.” A 10,000-square foot atrium, the largest of its type in North America, hosts numerous species of butterflies that number in the thousands. Why should Buffalo Bill have all the fun, right, Clarice? 9600 East Via de Ventura

47. Tent City, Phoenix

Actually, we strongly advocate that you never spend an hour within Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s al fresco jail, but this is a real thing. Prepare to spend at least an evening “camping out” if you are stopped and cited for DUI, and do not for a moment underestimate the zeal of Phoenix and/or Scottsdale police. Local sports legends Tom Chambers, Mark Grace and Diana Taurasi can all vouch for that. 2939 W. Durango St.

During one of my last semesters in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant for a course called “How Do You Know?” The goal of the class was to expose students to the way different disciplines in the social sciences, humanities and hard sciences evaluate evidence.

It was a terrific course. The students loved it and the instructors loved it.

I hope the University of Pennsylvania still offers it because many of the people writing about Saudi Arabia after King Abdullah’s death on Friday morning (Saudi time) should enroll. It may not help, however.

In too many instances commentators, be they declared “experts” or run-of the-mill pundits, are not dealing with any evidence at all. They are just repeating rumors or making up deep-sounding pronouncements after apparently crash-watching David Lean’s 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, which, by the way, had nothing to do with the al-Saud family, but rather their Hejazi rivals, the Hashemites.

Here is my advice: Let’s everyone step back from their metaphorical desert tent, take a deep breath, sip some cardamom coffee, munch on a date and understand—as best we can—what has and what has not happened in Saudi Arabia.

Shortly after King Abdullah was admitted to a Riyadh hospital on December 31, there was a flurry of instant analyses indicating that Saudi Arabia was headed for a succession “crisis” with dire implications for the United States. Everything is always a crisis when you have to beat a rival pundit to the punch, but the reality of Saudi Arabia’s leadership change was much different, of course.

The mechanics of now-King Salman’s succession was smooth. Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud was elevated to crown prince and Mohammed bin Nayef—a grandson of the founder of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman bin Faisal al-Saud—was named deputy crown prince, setting in motion a generational change in Saudi leadership.

There may have been politics around all of this, but no one outside the royal family could see it, and once the princes came to a consensus on how things would go once Abdullah died, they closed ranks. There was no disruption in U.S.-Saudi relations, though ties have been under strain lately. To reinforce the importance of the relationship, President Barack Obama announced he would  be traveling to Riyadh to pay his respects.

Of course, Abdullah’s death comes at a challenging moment for Saudi Arabia with the combination of the ISIS threat, Yemen’s apparent fall to Houthi tribesmen—who the Saudis regard as agents of Iran—Syria’s continued civil war, Iraq’s fragmentation, Egypt’s instability and low oil prices.

“Don’t speak ill of the dead” is a proper and decent admonition that well-meaning people should follow. At the same time, we should not lionize the deceased when they do not necessarily deserve it. I am perfectly willing to accept that people in Saudi Arabia supported King Abdullah, but the press reporting would suggest that he was “popular.” How would anyone actually know that? I am not aware of any reliable metric of public opinion in Saudi Arabia that would lead anyone to draw that conclusion.

In addition, let’s be clear that the departed monarch’s accomplishments in 20 years in power—initially as de facto ruler while his predecessor, King Fahd, was incapacitated and then as king in his own right—were rather limited.

I know, I know: Change is frustratingly slow and incremental in Saudi Arabia. Building consensus among the royals and the religious establishment is a painstaking process, but even so, two decades is a long time. There were persistent stories alleging that Abdullah was a reformer, but no one could ever articulate for me what he actually stood for and wanted. It seemed to me that he wanted what everyone in the Saudi royal family wants—stability and business as usual.

Maybe top-down social and political change in Saudi Arabia is just too hard, but Abdullah failed in other areas as well. I remember attending the Jeddah Economic Forum in early 2006 where I attended a presentation on Abdullah’s plan to construct five new, high-tech smart cities—the centerpiece of which would be the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC). About 60 miles north of Jeddah along the Red Sea coast, the city is supposed to be an economic center and a place where Saudi Arabia’s notorious social strictures are relaxed.

When I had the opportunity to visit KAEC four years later, the developers—the Dubai-based Emaar Middle East—put on a good show, but it was clear that they were scaling their grand plans way back, focusing on activity around the King Abdullah Port, which is not yet complete. Things were so bad that Emaar was forced to accept leaseback agreements to the few people who bought into the KAEC dream early on.

There has been progress at KAEC since I visited, but it has fallen short of what Abdullah promised. Of the other four cities, one has been shelved, there is some infrastructure development at the site of Jazan Economic City and the other two—Prince Abdul Aziz Bin Mousaed Economic City and Knowledge Economic City in Medina—remain big ideas enshrined in marketing materials.

When considering Abdullah’s legacy, let’s also keep in mind that he presided over a society that produced the majority of the September 11 hijackers. As I have written elsewhere, Al-Qaeda was, in its earlier incarnations, a largely Egyptian organization that benefited from Osama bin Laden’s personal wealth. Still, there is no denying that the Saudis under Abdullah had an extremism problem, about which they were apparently in abject denial until terrorists started targeting them in 2003.

More recently, Abdullah oversaw the beheading of 87 individuals in 2014, mostly poor guest workers that no one cares about. So far this year, which is only 27 days old, Saudi executioners have separated 10 more people from their heads.

Perhaps King Salman—whom the British journalist Robert Lacey, author of the widely owned, but critically panned bookThe Kingdom, hilariously (but not in a good way) described as a “tall, upright son of the desert”—will end this gruesome practice, but it is not likely.

Steven A. Cook is Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article first appeared on the Council for Foreign Relations website.

Cook writes: Saudi Arabia is a complex society whose politics are notoriously obscure and thus difficult to comprehend. The newspapers stories, columns, editorials, and instant analyses of all types do not help. If folks want to understand it better, I recommend reading these:

Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Stephane Lacroix, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

Toby C. Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Dormant for a decade and a half, the Russian Woodpecker appeared to return in December 2013. Once, the notorious tapping of the massive Soviet over-the-horizon radar had frustrated and puzzled Western radio operators, who could discern neither the origin nor purpose of the strange signal. It was coming from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain; its frequency, 10Hz, made some think it was intended for mind control. In 1981, an NBC newscaster wondered, “Are they trying reduce us to a zombie stumbling and groping around and waiting to be told what to do?” And, no, he wasn’t hosting Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live.

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the 14,000-ton military radar installation in northern Ukraine, near the border with Belorussia, has remained a mystery to outside observers, largely because it sits right next to the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, where a reactor meltdown in the spring of 1986 rendered the surrounding area uninhabitable for the next, oh, several thousand years. Then again, a nuclear wasteland is just the sort of thing to attract a jaded 21st century tourist who doesn’t want to hear about your wild week on Phuket, and the Exclusion Zone has recently seen a drastic increase in visitors, even if it remains a potential radioactive tinderbox. The site deemed Chernobyl 2—a tiny military outpost that housed the operation of The Russian Woodpecker, known formally as Duga-3—is also opening up to tourists, albeit more slowly. (It was tacked on to my Exclusion Zone itinerary and ended up being the strangest part of a deeply strange trip.)

And despite the fact that Russian President Vladimir V. Putin does seem intent on restoring some version of a Cuban Missile Crisis sensibility to world affairs, the Russian Woodpecker has not gone back to terrorizing the airwaves with its maddening tap: the radioactivity and ruin of the Exclusion Zone guarantee that the radar installation will stand as a sturdy but utterly obsolete monument to the bloody and bellicose 20th century. The sound radio operators picked up in the winter of 2013-14 may have been a new Russian over-the-horizon radar of the “Kontainer” family. It may sound like the Woodpecker, true—and Justin Timberlake can dance like Michael Jackson. There was only one genuine article, and it’s gone.

And yet the Russian Woodpecker continues to exert its pull on the imagination of geeks, adventurers and conspiracists partly because of its shadowy Cold War provenance but also by dint of its location, as a sort of younger sibling to the nuclear ruins down the road. The creaky radar even made it (metaphorically, alas) to the Sundance Film Festival in the form of The Russian Woodpecker, a documentary by the American filmmaker Chad Garcia.

The star of the documentary is Fedor Alexandrovich, a young Ukrainian performance artist whose wild hair and bouncing eyes recall Dostoyevsky’s Prince Mishkin. In the film, Alexandrovich plays the role of an investigative journalist, one who is seized by the conviction that the Chernobyl disaster of April 25, 1986—without question the worst nuclear catastrophe in world history—was staged by Moscow to cover up for the expensive failure of the Russian Woodpecker, which cost 7 billion rubles to build: that is, twice as much as the nuclear power plant.

Alexandrovich’s claims strain credulity, and as he interviews former workers of both Chernobyl and the Russian Woodpecker, some don’t mind telling him so: “Bullshit,” one says; “Extremely fantastical,” another warns him fruitlessly. Others, though, are more amenable to his conspiracy theory, puzzled as they still are 28 years later by how what should have been a routine test of Reactor 4 went so disastrously wrong. We are, after all, talking about a country where no depravity is impossible, no principle sacrosanct.  

Still, it’s hard to call Alexandrovich’s version of events anything other than a conspiracy theory; if he were not such a magnetic subject, or if Chernobyl weren’t so eerily telegenic, I doubt there would have been a sleek American documentary for me to write about. The film records Alexandrovich’s increasingly strong conviction that the Russian Woodpecker was the pet project of a high-ranking Communist Party bureaucrat named Vasily A. Shamshin. Alexandrovich—who does not have a background in the sciences, though he assiduously interviews many people who do—argues that the radar was never going to be any good at intercepting American missiles, that it was like so much of the Soviet Union, superficially impressive but fundamentally pointless.

The radar’s own political midwife, Shamshin, had come to realize as much; he also knew that inspectors were about to discover his expensive failure, goes the narrative in The Russian Woodpecker. According to Alexandrovich, Shamshin personally commanded the Chernobyl power-down test to proceed on the evening of April 25, knowing full well that the conditions were ripe for disaster. Alexandrovich is devoutly convinced that Shamshin figured a meltdown at Chernobyl would easily eclipse whatever problems plagued the Russian Woodpecker.

If he truly thought this, then he was right.

Then again, that’s sort of like cutting off your hand to get rid of a hangnail. Even in the venal culture of the Kremlin, ordering a nuclear meltdown to save your career seems a tad excessive. And while it is true that Alexandrovich is zealous in his quest, all of his evidence regarding Shamshin is circumstantial. There is no smoking gun, just images of the smoking reactor core, and a dearth of explanations for how we could let it get that way.

More credible is the feeling of injury he evinces, a deep-seated Ukrainian suspicion of Russia, especially, the Russia of Vladimir Putin that has already taken Crimea and has designated large swaths of eastern Ukraine as “Novorossiya,” an archaic Soviet term that just happens to serve Putin’s rapacious ends. When I visited Kiev last spring, in the midst of the pro-democracy uprising centered on Maidan, or Independence Square, I picked up a magnet that juxtaposed Hitler and Putin (one always needs tchochkes to bring home, and none are better than those bearing the visages of tyrants). “Why shave your mustache, Vlad?” the captioned goaded. The Russian Woodpecker makes the same point much more forcefully, with images of emaciated corpses, victims of the famine foisted on the Ukraine by Stalin in 1931-32. First hunger, then radiation, then who knows what else? Those who occupy the borderlands—whether the peasants of Ukraine or the Chechens of the Caucasus—are always fated to suffer at the hands of the unfeeling empire.

Near the end of the film, Alexandrovich takes the stage at Maidan, where others had given rousing speeches for Ukraine’s sovereignty. Voiced in front of thousands, his Russian Woodpecker theory sounds misguided, almost maniacal. The demonstrators gathered evince an obvious unease, wanting to be swept up in his rhetoric but acutely aware of its paranoid tinge. They want to hear about freedom, not Chernobyl. The connection between the two, between past sins and present ones, so clear in Alexandrovich’s mind, passes like a gust of wind high above the crowd.

Yet while Alexandrovich may just be an artist trying to wrest a narrative out of inexplicable disaster, he does reach a troubling conclusion beyond both nuclear reactors and radar installations. “Ukraine is just the first step in the rebirth of the Soviet Union,” he says into the winter air, vapor spewing from his mouth like dragon’s breath. “The next step is World War III.”

I was more convinced by these words than by much of what had preceded them.