For the sake of argument, let’s pretend for a moment we’re owls. I’m an owl.

Great! Nice soft feathers for quiet flying, a predilection for the eventide and dope night vision. Also wisdom. Loads. Let’s find some small live animals to eat.

But first, consider this: On Sunday, more than 100 million humans will gather near illuminated screens in each other’s houses, at bars and auditoriums and even churches for a peculiar kind of worship. Eyes will fixate on images of men in pads knocking each other down and throwing around a spheroid ball while dancing women cheer them.

Our kind gets this much attention only during a creepy ritual at a super-elite boys’ club in Northern California called Bohemian Grove, where Masters of the Universe gather together to torch a 40-foot owl. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and that’s some seriously sordid attention we don’t appreciate.

Being an owl-for-the-moment and a fan of (human) words, I recently noticed that by shifting a space in the title of Sunday’s Big Game, you get “The Superb Owl.”

Let that sink in for a moment. The superb owl! But I think we can all agree that statement is redundant, is it not? It’s like saying “ATM machine.” Or “what are you getting at?” when your quizzical expression, not unlike that of an incredulous owl, I imagine, speaks for itself.

Point is this: Owls are marvelous, and this “sporting” event appears to be named for us after all. So, without further ado, let us celebrate THE MOST SUPERB OWLS.

A burrowing owl making a home out of a piece of buried pipe. Mr Snrub / Wikimedia Commons CC3.0

1. The burrowing owl

Let’s start near to the ground. Might as well. I have to meet you humans where you are. The burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia) is a proper-looking type, with festive white “eyebrows,” and lives throughout southwestern North America, Florida and Latin America. It makes homes in the old burrows of animals like ground squirrels. They may also eat ground squirrels. In other words, they have no trouble devouring these rodents and stealing their homes.

The burrowing owl is known for its long legs. Look at this feathered fellow:

A burrowing owl in Florida. Dori via Wikimedia Commons CC3.0

The raptors also have a habit of stuffing their burrow with dung, which acts as a good insulator and may attract insects, which they also eat, as little living snacks.

2. Blakiston’s fish owl

Most owls, of course, do not live in the ground but are rather arboreal, roosting on branches or in cavities within trees. That goes for the world’s biggest owl. I’ll let Scientific American’s John Platt (a friend of the owls) describe them: “With a body the size of a small child and a wingspan of up to two meters, the Blakiston’s fish owl (Bubo blakistoni) is the largest owl in the world,” he wrote. “It is also one of the rarest, shiest and least studied.”

As Platt describes in his article, they need old-growth forest to survive and are under threat from logging and habitat destruction.

A Blakiston’s fish owl hunting in winter. Robert tdc via Wikimedia Commons CC2.0

3. Barred Owl

A classic. This large owl found throughout Canada and the eastern U.S. makes the type of loud hoot you hear in movies, so you probably know whoooooo I’m talking about. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology explains: “The Barred Owl’s hooting call, [which sounds like] “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?,” is a classic sound of old forests and treed swamps. But this attractive owl, with soulful brown eyes and brown-and-white-striped plumage, can also pass completely unnoticed as it flies noiselessly through the dense canopy or snoozes on a tree limb.”

4. Night owls

I’m going to take a little liberty here with the term owl. A new study in Current Biology suggests that night owls, or people who stay up late, tend to have their athletic peak in the evening, whereas early risers peak in the early- to mid-afternoon. This suggests that the team in the Super Bowl with more “night owls” could have a slight advantage, CBS News suggests, though this seems a bit of a stretch. I’ve got to give the advantage to the Seahawks, merely because I’m also a bird of prey.

And while we’re on the topic of the Super Bowl, let me say that it deeply frightens us owls that this Sunday you humans will devour 1.25 billion chicken wings, or more than 600 million birds. Leave a few for us, OK? (Members of owl-kind will eat hens, given the chance.)

5. The birds forced to live in owl cafés

You may have heard of “cat cafés,” wherein felines lounge about coffee shops and get petted by patrons. There also apparently owl cafés, at least in Japan. We would all love to hang out with owls. But this is a terrible and in-owl-mane idea, since the birds like the dark, solace and not being messed with by caffeinated humans, and—to let you in on a little secret—they are rabid Luddites that can’t stand the presence of laptops being typed upon. They deserve a spot on this list for not pecking out the eyes of more café voyeurs.

6. The Tootsie Pop Owl

Remember this guy? He told us that it takes three licks to get to the middle of a Tootsie Pop. Far be it for this wise old owl to endorse a corporate product. But you’ve got to admit, the Tootsie Pop Owl is really a reflection of us all. We want to resist the Tootsie. We do not resist. One lick, two licks, three strikes; the Tootsie is gone. Speaking of three strikes, that brings us to...

7. Bob “Hoot” Gibson

I’m not sure how St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson earned the nickname “Hoot.” Wikipedia suggests that it’s a reference to an old movie star of the same name. But let’s just assume that it has something to do with owls. Besides, this Hall of Famer is one of my dad’s favorite players. He won nine Golden Gloves in a row, from 1965 to 1973, and has the record for most strikeouts in a World Series game (17). If football employed a small white spherical ball, he would probably be better at the quarterback position than Tom Brady and Russell Wilson combined. Gibson was known for his precise ball control, brushing players off who were crowding the plate and a reputation for not being trifled with. Like owls. That play baseball.

8. Newly discovered species

It’s likely that most species of owls here on Earth have already been discovered, but scientists do occasionally find a new one. In a study published this month in the journal Zootaxa, researchers analyzed the genes of what they thought was a Hume’s owl and found out that it was really quite different. They named the new species, which is found in the deserts of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other nearby countries, the desert tawny owl (Strix aluco).

The newfound Rinjani scops owl, or Otus jolandae.Philippe Verbelen / PLOS ONE

In a 2013 study, researchers analyzed owl calls on the Indonesian island of Lombok and realized that one group of birds that they thought were Moluccan Scops Owls (Otus magicus) were actually a previously undescribed variety, which they named the Rinjani Scops Owl (Otus jolandae).

9. Hedwig/snowy owls

But why settle for magicus when you can have magic! Hedwig is well known to fans of the Harry Potter books and movies as the protagonist’s trusty delivery owl and pet/loyal companion. She was indeed a superb owl for her loyalty, skill at delivering parcels and excellence at catching frogs.

Hedwig was a snowy owl, a beautiful species that spends its summer in the Arctic tundra—their white coat allows them to blend in with snowy environs. In the past few years, snowy owls have been seen farther south than usual in the winter, in migrations called irruptions (due perhaps to the effects of climate change on the populations of their main food source, lemmings). These snow-loving creatures have been seen as far south as Bermuda.

Close shot of a snowy owl during a 2005 bird exhibition in Burgos, northern Spain.Felix Ordonez / REUTERS

10. Northern pygmy owl

This bird has false eyespots on the back of its neck, to convince would-be predators that the northern pygmy owl CAN SEE EVERYTHING at all times. Respect.

11. O.W.L.s

Ordinary Wizarding Level exams (O.W.L.s) are subject-specific tests taken during a student’s fifth year at Hogwarts. What’s that you say—Harry Potter is fiction? And why would a test be “superb”? Well, get off your high horse, friend, because we owls are fans of novels, and literacy. There is also a muggle meaning for the acronym O.W.L.s: Oral and Written Language Skills, a “highly regarded test [that] offers an integrated, global approach to oral and written language assessment.” But that sounds considerably more boring than an examination on how to properly deal with fanged geraniums.

OWL can also refer to a Scrabble player’s “Official Word List.” Who would appreciate the whole wordplay thing that got us here in the first place.

An elf owl in Arizona.BBODO via Wikimedia Commons

12. Elf owls

These little buggers, which get as short as 12 centimeters (five inches) tall, are the smallest owls in the world. They live in the Southwest U.S. and Mexico, are usually monogamous and live in hollows within saguaro cacti, alligator junipers or other trees.

13. The Powerful Owl

This species easily wins “best owl name.” It lives in eastern Australia, and its body shape makes it look a little bit more like a (sea?)hawk than an owl proper. Here is a terrifying photo of one at night, its eyes reflecting light:

A powerful owl on a suburban TV aerial in Australia.Poyt448 via Wikimedia Commons Public domain

They are the dominant nocturnal predators in their range and eat marsupials like possums, sugar gliders and even young koalas! Powerful indeed.

14. Barn owls

These magnificent birds have white faces and dark eyes. They fly almost silently at night and are voracious rodent predators. A breeding pair can eat as many as 1,000 mice during the nesting season. They find homes in abandoned barns and dense tree cover.

15. Noam Chomsky

Whoa there, mister. Are you actually suggesting that famous linguist Noam Chomsky is a hollow-boned bird of prey?

Many have called ol’ Owl Chomsky wise and his wit sharp, his critiques vicious. More to the point, he attended Oak Lane Country Day School as a youth, during which time it was run by Temple University, whose mascot is—surprise!—the owl. In his writing, he has also made reference to the next item on our list…

16. The Owl of Minerva/Owl of Athena

In Greek and later Roman traditions, Athena (Minerva to the Romans) was often associated and depicted with owls. Both were known for their wisdom: Owls, of course, can see in the dark—a metaphor for the ability to see and know what others cannot.

The genus of owls known as Athene (related to Athena) includes the aforementioned burrowing owls and a species called little owls (Athene noctua), which were familiar in ancient Greece and Rome and live throughout Europe and central Asia.

Athena, the little owl that belonged to nurse Florence Nightingale, is pictured on display at London’s Florence Nightingale Museum in July 2004. Toby Melville / REUTERS

German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote once that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.” What he meant, according to cultural historian Timothy Ryback, is that “philosophizing can begin only after events have run their course.”

And on that note, I shall put off any more philosophizing until another time. After all, a “Monday morning owl” would be wiser than a “Monday morning quarterback” any day of the week. But for now, I’ll leave you to your “sports.” Though we all know what Sunday’s Superb Owl is really all about. 

Although “regime change” has become a dirty phrase, the best thing that could happen to Russia, its neighbors and the world would be a change from Vladimir Putin’s brand of strongman authoritarianism to some form of democracy.

Putin’s regime is oppressive at home and imperialist abroad. Power is concentrated in the hands of Russia’s dictatorial leader, who routinely violates human and civil rights and quashes all opposition, while legitimizing his rule by appealing to Russian dreams of erstwhile glory and great-power status and systematically engaging in military adventures in supposed defense of Russian minorities in Russia’s “near abroad.”

Putin’s cult of personality centers on his hyper-masculine image as a tough leader willing and able to stand up to real and imagined internal and external foes. Russian rights and democratic aspirations will continue to be stifled, and non-Russian states will continue to be invaded, as long as Putin’s regime stays in place.

Western hopes of resolving the Russo-Ukrainian war in eastern Ukraine by means of negotiations are therefore misplaced. Whatever Putin agrees to—even Ukraine’s agreement never to seek NATO membership—will be at best a temporary retreat from his expansionist foreign policy. And Putin’s choice of countries to pressure is large, extending from the Baltic states to Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine to Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to the five Central Asian states. Russians or Russian speakers inhabit all these states and can, in principle, be used to justify Moscow’s strong-arm tactics.

The only effective short- to medium-term solution to this expansionism is the capacity of Russia’s neighbors to withstand Putin’s imperialism. The key state in any such emergent cordon sanitaire is, of course, Ukraine. But Belarus and Kazakhstan, both of which have very sizeable Russian-speaking populations, are a close second. If all three could be denied Putin, his imperialist proclivities would be effectively contained.

The only effective long-term solution to Putin’s expansionism, however, is regime change. Putin and his fascistoid regime will always be prone to repress Russians and oppress non-Russians. The Putin regime’s removal is thus the precondition of a freer and more neighborly Russia.

Naturally, no Western state will pursue regime change in Russia. Despite Russian claims to the contrary, Western policymakers have not done anything, are not doing anything and are unlikely to do anything to make Putin and his regime go.

For better or for worse, however, they need not do anything, as the regime is fast crumbling and could easily collapse in the coming months or years. Hyper-centralized states with leader cults are extremely corrupt and ineffective forms of rule, and Russia is no exception.

Thanks to high energy prices in the past, Putin’s regime could engage in massive theft and still have enough for social and military needs. Those days are over for good and continued regime theft will now come at the cost of the population.

Russia desperately needs reform, but leader-centered states such as Russia can at best engage in business as usual and exhortations to the population to work harder. The leaders of such states are also prone to make huge strategic mistakes: Convinced of their infallibility and lacking any institutional counterweight, they can pursue their madcap visions to the detriment of their country and, ultimately, themselves. Putin’s annexation of the Crimea, for instance, has worsened Russia’s economic, military and diplomatic standing and transformed Putin into an international pariah.

Finally, the legitimacy of Putin’s regime depends directly on his ability to project a hyper-masculine image of vigor and vitality. That ability is rapidly crumbling, as Putin visibly ages and comes to resemble what he is—an old man pretending to be young.

Continued Russian adventurism in the non-Russian states is the worst thing for such an ossified, corrupt and near-bankrupt state. As Russian commitments exceed its capacities, as they very soon will, the economy and polity will come under increasing strain. At some point, a relatively small shock—a riot, a killing, a death—could easily spark an uprising, a putsch, or even civil war.

Ironically, the West is likely to face the prospect of regime change in Russia even though it desperately prefers not to think about such an eventuality. There is nothing that Western states can do to manage the inevitable decay of Putin’s regime in Russia. But they can do a great deal to limit the damage that regime change will bring about by actively supporting Ukraine and other non-Russian states and thereby containing the instability to Russia.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark, specializing on Ukraine, Russia and the former USSR. This article first appeared on the Atlantic Council website.

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Fighting between the Syrian arm of al Qaeda and Western-backed rebels in northern Syria spread from Aleppo province into neighboring Idlib on Friday, the rebel group and an organization monitoring the civil war said.

Clashes began on Thursday when the al Qaeda Syria wing, the Nusra Front, seized positions from the Hazzm movement west of Aleppo, threatening one of the few remaining pockets of the non-jihadist insurgency.

A Hazzm official said by telephone clashes had spread to Idlib and that his group had retaken some areas previously controlled by Nusra.

"There is now fighting in Idlib, in the Jabal al-Zawiya area," he said. He said in Aleppo province the two groups were also fighting in Atarib, a town 20 km (12 miles) from the Turkish border.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said heavy fighting overnight focused on the Regiment 46 base in western Aleppo and overlapping areas between Aleppo and Idlib province, where the Nusra Front pushed out rebels from many areas in October.

The Observatory, which monitors the war, said Hazzm had captured some small checkpoints inIdlib.

Hazzm is one of the last remnants of non-jihadist opposition to President Bashar al-Assad innorthern Syria, much of which has been seized by the Nusra Front and Islamic State, an offshoot of al Qaeda that controls roughly a third of Syria.

FIGHTERS CAPTURED

The Nusra Front said it was forced to act after Hazzm detained two of its fighters and captured its weapons and offices. It said its forces had captured the Sheikh Suleiman base from Hazzm, about 25 km west of Aleppo, on Thursday.

"It's probably most accurate to view this as the latest instance of Nusra efforts to expand their areas of dominance in Idlib and Aleppo at the expense of Western-backed factions, which they are gradually seeking to eliminate from the north," said Noah Bonsey, senior analyst on Syria withInternational Crisis Group.

The Syrian Islamist militant Ahrar al-Sham, which has worked with both groups, called for an end to the clashes and said the disagreement should be settled in an independent sharia court.

"We are ready to bring back the rights that our brothers in Nusra claimed (were taken) by Hazzm," the statement, posted on the group's Twitter account, said.

Both Hazzm -- part of the Free Syria Army (FSA) collection of mainstream rebel groups -- and Nusra fight the government.

In Aleppo, the FSA's 16th division said Nusra had captured 11 of its fighters as they were heading to fight in the city's embattled Ashrafieh district, the Observatory said citing a statement. The division called on Nusra to release them by sunset and adhere to a local truce.

The Observatory said Nusra and other Islamist militants also fought the Syrian army in the al-Arbaeen mountain area of western Idlib on Friday. Syrian state television said the Syrian armyrepelled what it said were several terrorist attacks in the area.

Hazzm has received what it describes as small amounts of military aid from foreign states opposed to Assad, including U.S.-made anti-tank missiles. But it has lost ground to better armed and financed jihadists.

The weakness of the mainstream Syrian opposition has complicated diplomatic efforts to end the conflict that has killed around 200,000 people.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela said on Friday it shot down a civilian plane after it ignored communications off its Caribbean coast near the island of Aruba, but denied any violation of international airspace.

Authorities on Aruba, a semi-autonomous island that is part of the kingdom of the Netherlands, had said on Thursday the aircraft being pursued by Venezuelan military jets went down off its coast, with human remains and packages of drugs visible in the water.

Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino told reporters the plane, which first landed in Apure state, was shot down after ignoring communications on takeoff.

"It didn't obey orders and it was annulled 25 nautical miles northeast of the Josefa Camejo (military) base, that is to say, in our territorial waters," the Venezuelan minister said.

"Some are saying we violated international air space. No. All military actions are taken in our geographical space to exercise sovereignty and independence under the constitution."

Padrino gave no more details of casualties or what the plane was doing. Venezuela for several years has operated under a shoot-down policy when drug flights are suspected.

The plane was U.S.-licensed, and 400 drug packages, mostly of cocaine, were found near the wreckage, Aruba officials said on Friday.

Before there was Osama Bin Laden, there was Imad Mugniyah, Hezbollah’s terrorist mastermind.

He was called the "father of smoke," because he disappeared like a wisp after engineering his spectacular terrorist attacks, including two that took the lives of hundreds of Americans in Lebanon in 1983 alone.

By most accounts, Imad Mugniyah killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda before most people had even heard of Bin Laden. By the mid-1980s, he topped the FBI’s Most Wanted list. But to the CIA, especially, he was public enemy number one, having engineered the 1983 obliteration of the American Embassy in Beirut, which killed legendary CIA Middle East hand Robert Ames, as well as directing the kidnapping and murder of Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley. Mugniyah was also credited with quarterbacking the bombing of the Marine and French paratrooper barracks at the Beirut airport in 1983, the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 843, which resulted in the death of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, and a score of other kidnappings and assassinations. He was also suspected of orchestrating two bombings in Buenos Aires, the first on the Israeli embassy in 1992 and a Jewish community center two and a half years later.

But in February 2008, the CIA caught up with the terrorist kingpin in Damascus. A powerful car bomb liquidated him in the same way he had killed so many others.  

Media reports fingered Israel's legendary Mossad for the hit. But according to former U.S. intelligence officials interviewed by Newsweek, it was a CIA operation, authorized personally by President George W. Bush and carried out by the CIA under the direct supervision of then-director Michael Hayden and a very, very small group of top CIA officials.

"That was us," said a former official who participated in the project, on condition of anonymity to discuss the operation. "The Israelis told us where he was and gave us logistical help. But we designed the bomb that killed him and supervised the operation."

Said another source, a former senior CIA operative with deep Middle East experience: "It was an Israeli-American operation. Everybody knows CIA did it—everybody in the Middle East anyway.” And the CIA’s authorship of Mugniyah’s bloody death, he said, should have been told long ago.

“It sends the message that we will track you down, no matter how much time it takes,” he said. “The other side needs to know this.”

“GO WITH GOD”

Mugniyah’s death warrant may have been signed as far back as the Reagan administration, in a presidential “finding” authorizing the terrorist’s capture or assassination after the bombings of the Marine barracks and American embassy, the former CIA official said. But apparently U.S. counterterrorist operatives couldn’t find him.

In 2007, however, Mossad’s then-chief, Meir Dagan, tipped the CIA to a Mugniyah hideout in Damascus, said another source involved in the hunt.

“Dagan said basically, ‘We have acquired the location of him and we know that he has a lot of American blood on his hands and so we would like to offer this up to you in terms of what would you like to do with him?” [Dagan did not respond to a request for comment.]

On the CIA’s seventh floor, Hayden convened a discreet meeting on Mugniyah. The initial discussion group was at first limited to his deputy Steve Kappes; Michael Sulick, boss of the Directorate of Clandestine services (the agency’s spy corps); and Mike Walker, chief of the Near East Division; and a few aides.

(The CIA and all the participants named in this story refused to acknowledge any agency involvement in the operation when queried by Newsweek.)

At first, Hayden, a former Air Force general, was excited about the chance to exterminate a man who had killed so many Americans, including some of the CIA’s finest officers, recalled one former official. But he soon had second thoughts.

“General Hayden, at first, was all for this,” the former official said, “But slowly, or maybe not so slowly, the realization set in for him that he was ordering an assassination, that basically he was putting out a hit. And once he became pretty much cognizant of the fact that he was basically ordering the murder of someone, he got cold feet. He didn’t fancy himself as a Corleone.”

And he wasn’t, really. That role would ultimately fall to the president.

“Obviously he had to get authority for this, and authority could come from only one person, and that would be POTUS,” the acronym for the President of the United States, said the participant. “So he went down to see President Bush. It took Bush apparently only about 30 seconds to say, ‘Yes, and why haven’t you done this already? You have my blessing. Go with God.’”  

A ban on assassinations had been in place since 1975, but evidently suspected terrorists weren’t protected by it.  (Bush’s former national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, refused comment when contacted by Newsweek last year.)

CHOOSING A WEAPON

On the seventh floor, planning for a hit lurched forward. CIA Acting Counsel John Rizzo green-lighted the project, an authoritative source said. The group tossed around various assassination scenarios involving poison or a rifle shot, but discarded them as too difficult or risky in Damascus, a city tightly controlled by President Bashar al-Assad’s secret police.

“Shooting—you got to make sure he’s dead, for one thing,” a participant said. “You got to get close to him. And how do you get the shooter out? Even if it’s a sniper from aways out, there’s got to be an egress route for the person, or persons, to get out before the Syrians shut the area down. So that was ruled out.”

“There was no way to capture him,” the source added. “I mean, what would you do with him? So it came down to being a kill operation.” And the decision was made to use a bomb. But what kind of bomb?

Weeks, and then months, passed as the CIA’s bomb technicians presented Hayden with various devices. They were all too big.

Frustration was building, both inside the building and out. In Israel, the delays were “driving Dagan and Mossad absolutely bonkers,” said a participant in the planning. “If it was up to them, he would’ve been dead long before this. Because of all the controls, it was taking a long time.”

Bomb experts in the CIA’s Office of Technical Services were being sent back again and again, on Hayden’s orders, to make a device that would limit its lethal blast to a small radius.

“It went from being a traditional car bomb, with a load of C-4 or Semtex or something packed into car chassis, into a very narrowly focused, very tailored weapon, which turned into basically a very large claymore mine, if you will, a shaped charge” hidden in the center of a rear tire mounted on the back of a Toyota or Mitsubishi sports utility vehicle, a source said. “It was designed to throw out everything in a specific direction.”

Hayden liked the idea. The technicians tested bomb prototypes at a clandestine facility at Harvey Point, near Myock, N.C.

Meanwhile, CIA and Mossad agents in Syria were keeping an eye on Mugniyah, the participant said. “We had folks in Damascus and we’re doing this as well but nobody could do it like Mossad.”

The CIA’s Near East Division, meanwhile, was working on the logistics of getting a bomb into Syria and placing it in a car that Mugniyah would walk by.

“The vehicle would be purchased locally in Damascus,” the planning participant said. “The device would be taken into Syria. Everybody figured we would fly it into Jordan and get it across the border from Jordan into Syria clandestinely.”

But in late December, with the bomb ready and Mugniyah firmly in their sights, Hayden “started to get really cold feet again,” the participant said. He decided to go see Bush personally—on Christmas Eve, 2007, at Camp David.

“On Christmas Eve morning, he and [Deputy CIA Director Steven] Kappes fly up to Camp David to see POTUS, to say, ‘Okay, look, here’s what we got, everything is in place, do we still have the go-ahead?’ And POTUS basically threw both of them out, saying, ‘Why are you up here wasting my time on Christmas Eve? Get the fuck out and go do this. Not quite in those terms. But it was, ‘Yes, I’ve already given you my approval, go do this, go with God.’”

Hayden and Kappes choppered back to CIA headquarters and called a meeting in the director’s conference room. With Christmas Eve fast approaching, the corridors were nearly empty.

“He comes back, he holds one last meeting where he got together everyone involved,” recalled someone involved in the planning. “It was mid-afternoon, Christmas Eve. There were not a lot of people in the building. Everyone’s already scooted out for Christmas. But they go over everything one more time: Here’s a device, it’s not too big, it’s not too small…”

Hayden was in his seat at the head of the long, shiny table. A model of the bomb had been placed in front of him, a planning participant said. The real thing had been flown to Jordan.

“He looks at it, asks some questions, and after about a 30-second delay—you could hear the seconds ticking away in the clock of his credenza—he says, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’”

SIX SECONDS IN DAMASCUS

A call came from Jordan the next day, Christmas. The bomb had been successfully driven into Syria. A rendezvous was made with another CIA operative in Damascus, who took possession of the bomb and installed it on an SUV obtained locally.

Then the waiting began—again.

“One of the things they had to wait for, believe it or not, was for a parking space to open up. There were a couple of spaces outside the apartment building that gave them the opportunity, but there was one in particular that that would be the most efficient, if you will,” for killing Mugniyah, the participant said.

Finally, the car was in place. But then there were always other people around.

Weeks more went by. Hayden’s demands that only Mugniyah be killed, and no one else, with no collateral damage, had to be met.

“It was always either he wasn’t alone, or he had his kids with him, or somebody else with him, or there were casuals in the area, or he was gone, he was in the Bekka [Valley] or someplace else, he wasn’t in his apartment,” the participant said. “The rules of engagement were so tight that he probably walked past the thing dozens of times but they just couldn’t do anything because somebody was there or it just didn’t fit into the rules of engagement.”

“They were keeping watch on this just about all the time,” he added. “They were taking shifts, a station officer and a Mossad officer. The Mossad officer was there just to make the confirmation that, yeah, that’s him.”

The kill was made all the harder by the way the bomb would be detonated. There was a two-second delay from the time the CIA and Mossad agents in the lookout post pushed the button to when the bomb exploded. Under the plan, the Mossad agent would ID Mugniyah—”that’s him”—and the CIA man would press the remote control.

“So you would have to count—one thousand, two thousand... “ the participant said. “They had about six seconds from the time he came out of the apartment door to the time he moved out of the danger zone. So they had to do it really fast.”

Finally, on the night of Feb.12, 2008, after two months of round-the-clock surveillance, they caught Mugniyah alone.

“They made a positive ID. Click. One thousand...two thousand...ka-boom. It separated Mr. Mugniyah’s arms, legs, and head from the remainder of his torso, which was catapulted about 50 feet through a window,” the participant said. “It worked exactly like it was supposed to.”

IMPLAUSIBLE DENIALS

Twenty thousand people turned out for Mugniyah’s funeral in Beirut, many screaming “Death to Israel.”

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert denied responsibility. "Israel rejects the attempt by terrorist elements to ascribe to it any involvement whatsoever in this incident," his office said in a statement .

The CIA was pleased with Mugniyah’s murder, but not so much to take credit for it. Agency officials always feared Hezbollah would feel a need to retaliate. Since Mugniyah’s demise, no Americans are known to have died at the hands of Hezbollah. Experts on the region ascribe that to the organization’s evolution from a guerrilla and terrorist group to a key political party in Lebanon, beginning in 1992. Today, its military arm is fighting the Islamic State in Syria, in parallel with, if not in coordination with, the U.S.

But its tit-for-tat war with Israel continues. Last week, Hezbollah ambushed several Israeli vehicles patrolling the Lebanese border, killing two IDF soldiers and wounding seven. The attack was in response to an earlier Israeli air assault that killed an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general and several Hezbollah commanders. One of the latter was Jihad Mugniyah, the son of the legendary terrorist.

At an event to commemorate his death in Beirut, mourners held pictures of his late father, Imad. They are now buried side by side.

Newsweek senior writer Jonathan Broder contributed to this report

“My thought was I must fight this, otherwise I’m dead. Lying in bed, I’m thinking I need to focus on what it’s all about. My thoughts are jumbled but my physical being, it’s . . . precise.”

Ten years ago, on 20 February 2005, the Scottish singer and songwriter Edwyn Collins was in a deep coma after suffering a stroke at the age of 45. He couldn’t speak or move, but he could hear people around his bed in London’s Royal Free Hospital trying to reach him. “Before it happens, people say they wouldn’t want to live like that,” says Collins in his slow halting staccato. “But when it does happen, you fight. It’s just like in the film. They captured it perfectly. The scariness.”

Collins, tall, alert and still able to flash his winning pop star smile, is sitting in the living room of the house he shares in north London with his wife and manager Grace Maxwell and their son Will. Maxwell, tiny and bubbly, is curled up on the floor by his side, occasionally butting in to finish Collins’s sentences, sometimes being told to “shut up” by her husband. They’re talking about The Possibilities Are Endless, a remarkable documentary film about their story which has now been released on DVD in the UK and is set for a US cinema release shortly.

The opening 25 minutes is challenging cinema, a painfully slow pulling back into focus as the patient rebuilds his identity. Cut to a soundtrack of snippets from audio interviews with Collins as he begins to recover his speech, mixed with ethereal music.

The film tries to capture the sensation of being in a coma. An underwater swimmer struggles in slow motion to regain the surface. Lights flash. A piano picks out a haunting melody. There are fragments of home movies and archive TV shows. Gradually the third star of the film comes into focus, the small Scottish highland fishing port of Helmsdale, 70 miles north of Inverness. The Collins family have had a house there since the 1820s and, as a young man, Edwyn spent much of his childhood with his grandfather walking the rugged coastal paths, bird-watching and dreaming. Now it’s what is pulling him back from what Maxwell calls “the far away place”. As he starts to re-discover the power of speech he startles everyone by conjuring up and repeating the phrase, “the possibilities are endless”. “It may sound very deep,” says Maxwell, “but when you hear it 85 times a day it’s a little less so.”

Behind the scenes of The Possibilities Are Endless. Edwyn Collins/The Possibilities Are Endless

The film’s directors, Edward Lovelace and James Hall, are both 30, too young to remember Collins in his pomp as the lead singer of the Glaswegian art-punk band Orange Juice in the 1980s or as the solo singer of A Girl Like You which made the UK Top 10 and the US Top 40 in 1995. They met at film school and discovered a shared vision about how to tell true stories through impressionistic cinema techniques.

Inspired by Michael Azerrad’s 2006 take on Kurt Cobain, About A Boy, and Gideon Koppel’s 2009 homage to a dying Welsh village, Sleep Furiously, Hall and Lovelace looked first at music being made by homeless and poor people in Werewolves Across America and followed it with Katy Perry: Part Of Me, which “described what happens when an ordinary person finds themselves in a massive storm”.

Searching for a new subject, they came across Collins through interviews with one of their favourite bands, Franz Ferdinand, who hailed him as a major influence. They discovered that Collins had released a new album, Losing Sleep, and that, in spite of losing the use of his right arm, he was taking tentative steps to resume his live career.

“We liked them straight away,” says Maxwell. “They knew exactly what they wanted and we trusted them.” What emerges is a delicate and heart-warming portrait of a love affair. “She’s my wife, maybe she’s my life,” says Maxwell during the opening sequence.

Constantly chiding, encouraging, cajoling and yes, nagging, Maxwell has brought back the Edwyn Collins she knew as friend, lover and husband. And it’s clear that the process is ongoing. Asked how his new material is shaping up for a promised new album, Collins states confidently that the music is better but the lyrics are a struggle.

“No, no, no,” Grace interrupts. “What have I been nagging you about? Read some books!” She looks at him with a mixture of love and despair. “He’s feeling pleased with himself. He pats himself on the back and says well done, but I’m sick of it. He needs to improve his vocabulary. This is work!” Collins looks a little mournful. “Grace is hard on me.” “

But has that ever been a bad thing?” she chips in. “Sometimes,” says Edwyn as a cheeky grin spread across his face. They both collapse into laughter, his infectious braying snorts filling the room. The couple agree they are greater than the sum of their parts. “It can be tumultuous, tempestuous,” says Collins, “but when the bad thing happened she came to visit me every day.”

Maxwell’s own account of their struggles with hospitals, therapists and each other, Falling & Laughing, is a harrowing but compelling read. What does she think of the NHS now? “Well they saved his life, but the overall stupidity levels and lack of common sense are amazing.”

The aphasia Collins suffered allowed him to repeat only four phrases, "yes", "no", "Grace Maxwell" (his wife, pictured above) and "the possibilities are endless". Edwyn Collins/The Possibilities Are Endless

While she was coping with her husband’s rehabilitation, teaching him to read and to write and draw with his left hand, she was also bringing up their teenage son, Will. It’s not clear until towards the end of The Possibilities of Endless that the actor playing the young Edwyn during some of the flashback sequences is not an actor at all. It’s Will Collins. Or Will Maxwell as he likes to describe himself when he’s performing with his own band, which he does in the film. It’s a touching performance which adds real drama to the documentary.

By the time they reach the 10th anniversary of the stroke, Maxwell and Collins will be fully ensconced in Helmsdale. The old house has been renovated and a nearby farm building is being converted into a state-of the-art recording studio with an attached holiday home. In the aftermath of the referendum on whether Scotland would leave the UK last year, do they feel British or Scottish?

“British,” says Collins, “definitely.” But they both voted ‘Yes’, tired of Tory England and resigned to the popularity of the revamped SNP.

Will has chosen to stay in London to be close to his beloved Arsenal football club. From his vantage point at the Emirates Stadium, high on the north bank, he will no doubt keep up his customary torrent of expletive-laden advice to players of both sides, always in a strong Scottish accent, even though he was born in England and has never lived north of Kilburn.

“He had to speak Scottish. This is a loud house,” says Maxwell. “Especially you,” barks Collins. More laughter. 

In 1965, America found itself facing a new industrial revolution. The rapid evolution of computers provoked enormous excitement and considerable dread as captains of industry braced themselves for the age of automation.  

Newsweek devoted a special edition to discussing “the most controversial economic concept of the age” in January 1965. “Businessmen love it. Workers fear it. The government frets and investigates and wonders what to do about it,” the report began. “Automation is wiping out about 35,000 jobs every week or 1.8 million per year.”

For some interviewees, the computer age was “a big, cold thing”. But Newsweek’s reporter was more cheerful: “To some, automation is the tide of the future, carrying golden galleons laden with untold riches. It is a mechanized, transistorized cornucopia which may someday free mankind from drudgery, fill his cupboard with abundance, and pave new ways to self-fulfillment.”

These aren’t your grandmother’s libraries. Well, they are, but they’re tackling projects that would have been inconceivable two or three decades ago.

On Friday, the Knight Foundation announced the winners of its latest Knight News Challenge, which asked: “How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities?”

The foundation's fundamental goal is to ask, "How can we make sure Americans have access to the news and information so they can be active participants in our democracy,” says John Bracken, vice president for media innovation. “Libraries are really key in improving Americans’ ability to know what’s going on around them.”

Over the past several years, Knight has posed a dozen such questions as calls for proposals, focusing on open government, health data or other areas. “One of the ways we use this contest is to better understand trends,” explains Bracken. The previous round in 2014 had asked, “How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation?” When three of those winners were libraries, it helped inform the next challenge.

The foundation announced eight winners Friday at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting in Chicago. They’ll receive grant amounts of between $130,000 and $600,000 each. Another set of 14 winners will get smaller grants from Knight’s Prototype Fund to test earlier-stage ideas.

“It looks more like a design firm than what the stereotypical approach in libraries is,” Bracken said on Thursday, peering at a room where the winners were participating in a design thinking workshop.

The Culture in Transit project, which won $330,000, will use mobile scanning kits to help individuals and communities as well as smaller museums and heritage organizations that don’t have the resources to digitize and archive images.

It’s an “opportunity to have digital literacy training” as well as “to democratize the archives and diversify the holdings” in local history collections, says Natalie Milbrodt, director of the Queens Memory Project and part of the Culture in Transit team, which includes the Brooklyn and Queens public libraries and the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Three new staff members, one based at each of these organizations, will coordinate 10 events at Brooklyn Library branches and 10 at counterparts in Queens, as well as 15 to 20 partnerships with museums, historical societies and other organizations. They’ll bring a mobile kit with a scanner, laptop and all the other equipment needed to digitize materials on the spot. The goal is to share the digitized archives with the Empire State Digital Network and subsequently the Digital Public Library of America to make them widely accessible.

Cori Blanco uses a mobile scanning kit to digitize scrapbooks that belong to the Broad Channel Historical Society at the Broad Channel Community Library.Natalie Milbrodt/Queens Memory Project

“Capturing the exciting, diverse, international culture in Queens is really something we need help from the public to do,” Milbrodt says, speaking from a local perspective. She recalls meeting Frank Carrado at a Queens Memory event. The longtime resident of Long Island City has watched the neighborhood undergo rapid transformation, and he captured some of it on camera. He brought before-and-after photos of certain street corners five or 10 years apart that help visualize the changes in the neighborhood.

Frank Carrado with Natalie Milbrodt during a Queens Memory event at the Court Square Library in Long Island City on February 11, 2014. Queens Memory staffer Cori Blanco, is in the background at the scanner.Cassia Campbell/Queens Memory Project

Two photos showing the same building, located at the corner of Jackson Avenue and 49th Avenue in Long Island City, before and after renovation. It was renovated in 2003. Later, Ever Green Cleaners and Modern Spaces businesses occupy the ground floor.Frank Carrado/Queens Memory Project

The initiative is “a wonderful way for us to connect with our customers” and help them preserve the tangible things of their memories, says Milbrodt, and a way to help future researchers gain a fuller and deeper understanding of local history.

In the same city, the New York Public Library received $380,000 for its Space/Time Directory, what it calls its “time travel service.” Over the past few years, the NYPL has already begun working toward this goal by digitizing roughly 26,000 old maps, including 12,000 specific to New York City. Many of these were originally created by insurance companies documenting buildings at great detail to assess damage and construct policies.

An archive map of Revolutionary War era New York City. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division/The New York Public Library

“We want to make information about New York City’s past as accessible, through the geography and place, as contemporary New York is,” says Ben Vershbow, director of NYPL Labs. Building on tools they’ve already developed, like Building Inspector and Map Warper, to begin extracting data from maps, they hope to assemble various kinds of data to create a “full-fledged historical mapping service,” Vershbow says.

They could add information from years of city directories, which Vershbow calls “proto-White and Yellow Pages,” as well as tax records, census data, newspapers, playbills, menus and more. By marrying all of this data into one environment that relates time and space, he explains, they would create a “time travel service” for the public and researchers of urban planning, architecture, history, economics and other fields. Users could navigate a Google Maps or Google Earth–like system to locate individual people or businesses as well as trends such as where a particular industry was clustered at a given point in time.

A screengrab from the Building Inspector tool, which asks the public to help extract accurate information from digitized historical maps. The New York Public Library

The team plans to document its methodology to help make it easier for other cities to tackle similar projects. As with Building Inspector, they’ll continue to ask the public to participate in the project, and seek collaborations with other groups. Vershbow mentions, for example, Culture in Transit, whose focus on archiving local history artifacts could make for a promising partnership.

“There’s an amazing connection between these projects,” he says.

Other winning projects include “The Library Freedom Project: Bringing Privacy Education and Digital Tools to Local Communities Through Libraries,” to help people better understand digital rights and privacy issues; “Library for All: A digital library for the developing world,” which will make library resources available on low-cost mobile devices; and “From open data to open knowledge: Using libraries to turn civic data into a valuable resource for citizens, researchers, and City Hall alike,” which will help Boston make its city data more accessible.

Prototype grants include a group of librarians in Illinois who want to replicate an interlibrary loan system for maker tools (like 3-D printers) and the Miami-Dade Public Library, which wants to provide freelancers, entrepreneurs and others with co-working space.

“I’m encouraged to see an emerging set of leaders in the library space who are passionate about taking core values as curator of information… [and as] a unique civic institution that’s open to everyone,” says Vershbow, “and couple that with the dynamism and the potential of new technology.”

“What an exciting moment this is for libraries,” he says. 

A growing body of evidence shows the impact that unsustainable levels of meat consumption – particularly of meats like beef and lamb – have on the planet.

As shown in a recent Chatham House report, the livestock sector contributes nearly 15 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, roughly equivalent to those from transport. Yet minimal attention has been paid to the unsustainable manner in which we produce and consume meat, and public awareness of the impact of dietary choices on our environment is low.

The U.K. Department for Energy and Climate Change recently launched an interactive web tool that allows users to explore various lifestyle choices and energy uses, and their effect on global greenhouse gas emissions and subsequent temperature rise by the end of the century.

The “Global Calculator” provides a striking visualization of what experts already know: If adopted globally, the Western diet is incompatible with staying below the limit of two degrees above pre-industrial levels, deemed necessary to avoid dangerous climate change.

The results are compelling. If the energy sector is successfully decarbonized by 2050, our diets can make the difference between the two-degree scenario in which dangerous climate change is averted and the four-degree scenario described by the World Bank as one of “cataclysmic” climate change.

If current consumption trends continue, with meat consumption in emerging and developing countries increasing but remaining considerably below Western levels, we will stay on track for a global temperature rise of two degrees.

But if the Western diet becomes the norm by 2050, even with cleaner energy and ambitious action in other areas of our lifestyles, we are headed for a global temperature rise of four degrees. Such a scenario implies a considerable escalation compared with current trends but is not inconceivable: Consumption in emerging and developing economies is rising rapidly, and China, Brazil and India are among the world’s largest and fastest growing meat-eating countries.

If this scenario were realized, additional emissions resulting from the growth in global consumption of beef, lamb and other meats would be significant enough to derail successful mitigation efforts in other sectors. Put simply, the Western diet is a four-degree diet. The rest of the world cannot afford to converge around such levels of excess.

Thankfully, there is a positive side to this sobering conclusion. Unsustainable consumption represents a significant and untapped area for relatively low-cost mitigating action that, if harnessed, would offer grounds for more ambitious international climate goals.

As the “Global Calculator” demonstrates, if decarbonization is accompanied by a push to curb unsustainable levels of emissions-intensive meat consumption, a 1.5 degree world – which offers the best chance of avoiding drastic climate impacts and ensuring the survival of low-lying island states − begins to look like a very real possibility.

A shift toward less meat-intensive, emission-intensive diets would also realize important co-benefits. The average European today consumes over twice as much meat as is recommended by the World Health Organization. A move to promote a diet that is less rich in meat, and that has a greater share of chicken and pork as opposed to beef and lamb, would bring significant benefits to public health, including reduced incidence of heart disease, cancers and diabetes associated with overconsumption of meat.

Shifting diets will not be easy. A recent survey commissioned by Chatham House and undertaken by Ipsos MORI revealed a marked lack of public awareness of the impact of meat consumption on climate change. Furthermore, it outlined the importance of awareness as a precondition for behavior change. Addressing this awareness gap will therefore be a critical first step in legitimizing interventions at the national and international level.

As consumers around the world look to experts and environmental groups to inform them about climate change and its causes, communication tools like the “Global Calculator” could be an invaluable means of broadcasting a message that has gone largely unheard.

And with such powerful evidence, the need for urgent action on diets will be difficult to ignore.

Laura Wellesley is Research Associate, Energy, Environment and Resources at Chatham House, the Royal Institution of International Affairs. This article first appeared on the Chatham House website.

When it comes to clothing, being fresh-dressed is close to godliness. At least, that’s what director Sacha Jenkins posits in his new documentary about the evolution of hip-hop through fashion, Fresh Dressed. The film, which was screened this week at the Sundance Film Festival, takes viewers on a journey through hip-hop’s origins in the Bronx, analyzing style as expression and then as an enterprise through the likes of Roc-A-Wear and Phat Farm. Jenkins pulls in impressive archival material and speaks to key players of the era, including Dapper Dan and Nas, as well as contemporaries like A$AP Rocky, to form a story that’s continuing to unfold.

We spoke to the director about Fresh Dressed, the relationship between capitalism, confidence and colorful clothing, and how important conversations about race are unfolding as a consequence.

What catalyzed this documentary?

I’ve been writing about hip-hop for a long time, and just being involved. A lot of the folks in the film are people I’ve known for a long time, you know, being on the scene. A lot of the key footage I knew where it would come from, documentaries where people are in the know. The initial round of stuff was easy for me to identify, but when you go digging you find all kinds of stuff to tell the story. I must have done 75 interviews for the film, and in those conversations it opens up other doors and makes you go search for other things that are going to help tell the story.

In that process of digging through archival footage, did anything take you back?

There’s a scene at the top of the film where all these gang members are on a television show and it’s hosted by this guy. We had that footage for a long time, but then I stumbled--literally, at the eleventh hour--on this notion where he’s like, you’re all dressed like warriors, who are you warring against? Why are you all dressed this way? And the reaction is, we live in the south Bronx, the cops are racist. And yeah we are dressed like warriors because they’re abusing us, and we’re tired of that, and we’re not going to stand for it. And so when you think about that in 1971, and you look at where we are now, how so many things have not changed.… It’s moments like that in the film, for me, every time I watch it, I see something that I didn’t see before. There’s a lot of information in there. As a filmmaker, I have to continue watching it.

What was it like seeing the film with an audience?

When you’re looking at it on a small screen for months and months and months, it’s such a completely different experience seeing it on the big screen. There’s so much more detail you see, for some of the older footage it’s not as crisp because it’s blown up so big. But the audience here at Sundance is not typically a hip-hop audience.

So we’ve been able to lay it to people who are not initiated at all. Some folks have come up to me on the street and have been like, “Hey, I’m from Utah, I don’t know anything about any of this stuff. A lot of this stuff was over my head and I never thought to think about it.” So now, hopefully more folks will see it and will have more of an understanding of where it comes from. A lot of the emphasis on it has been fashion, fashion. Really, to me, the film isn’t about fashion: it’s about environment, it’s about climate, what created the fashion, what inspired it, and what inspired the fashion, this environment, what these kids did as artists and creative people would inspire mainstream fashion or high fashion.

When were you first conscious of the term “fresh”?

Growing up in Queens, New York, in the ’70s and ’80s. It was just an extension of how we dressed. There were several periods of time that were crucial in the ’hood, so to speak: Easter, it was a time when you had time off during the Easter break. When you went back, it was important to have new clothes. It was like, “Yo, you get fresh for Easter?” or “How you getting fresh?” It just speaks to this idea of...it’s kind of capitalist in that it speaks to the notion of it being brand new. So the connotations are, it’s new, it’s out of the box, it costs money. It looks good, it’s clean, it’s expensive, I have it. So that’s what that term ultimately translates to.

Speaking to that, Damon Dash, from Roc-A-Wear, says in the documentary that fashion is a status symbol for insecurity.

Yeah. And, looking back on it...I was interviewed by a journalist yesterday who said, you don’t see the same thing in rock and roll. You know, who are the great clothing moguls? Bon Jovi doesn’t have some hip streetwear line, why is that? And I think clothing to white folks in America doesn’t have the same value as it does for people of color. You’re white; you’re comfortable, you have this level of identity that folks of color don’t have. So how you dress, I mean obviously everyone wants to dress for success, but if you saw your average billionaire on the street he’s not going to be blinged-out. He’s not going to be wearing all these expensive accoutrements to show people that he has money and status. So for some people clothing is a tool, it’s just what you need to walk the streets and get around. For others, it’s a status symbol.

Your film is coming out at a time when we’re having important cultural discussions about appropriation and expression. How did you navigate that duality?

Talking music, talking Iggy Azalea or something?

I wasn’t think about her in particular, but more about how this generation’s musical reference point tends to gravitate toward hip-hop.

You know, rock and roll was not accepted by America in the beginning. The term “rock and roll” is slang for basically having sex. Black slang. And then eventually rock and roll went from that thing that those people did to what we do, as in we Americans, as in we white people. So rock and roll became the establishment. Rock and roll was inspired by the blues, and all this other stuff that came before it and was pioneered by people of color. So rock and roll became the voice of America. Hip-hop came along, it’s these black kids from the inner city, what are they talking about? We don’t care. Rock and roll was still very dominant at that point.

But now I meet young kids all the time who you ask, you like Led Zeppelin? They say no. How do you not like Led Zeppelin? When I grew up, white kids knew Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and this music was old to them in the ’80s! And they say, “Oh, DMX is the first cassette my mom bought me.” So now that hip-hop is “American,” meaning it’s not black anymore, once America embraces it, it’s OK to appropriate without guilt. And I think that’s kind of what’s happened. I mean, Iggy Azalea. Cut her a little slack, she’s not from America. At the same time, people are really troubled by her vocals--are you affecting a black woman? When you speak, you sound like a nice Australian girl, then it becomes this other thing, and people become sensitive. If she sold no records, it wouldn’t be an issue. But because she has the success, because she’s on the radio, there are so many other artists, particularly females of color, don’t get that attention and their voices actually sound like that based on where they come from. That’s where it gets complicated.

Tens of thousands marched in Madrid on Saturday in the biggest show of support yet for anti-austerity party Podemos, whose surging popularity and policies have drawn comparisons with Greece's new Syriza rulers.

Crowds chanted "yes we can" and "tic tac tic tac", suggesting the clock was ticking for the political elite. Many waved Greek and Republican flags and banners reading "the change is now".

Podemos ("We Can") was formed just a year ago, but produced a major shock by winning five seats in elections for the European Parliament in May. It is currently topping opinion polls in the run up to local, regional and national elections this year.

"People are fed up with the political class," said Antonia Fernandez, a 69-year-old pensioner from Madrid who had come to the demonstration with her family.

Fernandez, who lives with her husband on a 700-euros-a-month combined pension check said she used to vote for the socialist party but had lost faith in it because of its handling of the economic crisis and its austerity policies.

"If we want to have a future, we need jobs," she said.

Spain is emerging from a seven-year economic slump as one of the euro zone's fastest growing countries, but the exit from recession has yet to ease the hardship for thousands of households, in a country where nearly one in four of the workforce is out of a job.

Greek leftist leader Alexis Tsipras promised that five years of austerity, "humiliation and suffering" imposed by international creditors were over after his Syriza party swept to victory in a snap election on Jan. 25.

A British military healthcare worker was flown back to England from Sierra Leone on Saturday following a needle-stick injury sustained while treating a person with Ebola, the Public Health England (PHE) service said on Saturday.

The patient, who has not been named, has been taken for testing to the Royal Free Hospital in London.

"They are likely to have been exposed to the Ebola virus but, at this time, have not been diagnosed with Ebola and do not have symptoms," PHE said in a statement.

Last week, a British nurse who had been critically ill with Ebola after working in Sierra Leone was discharged from the same hospital after making a full recovery.

The Royal Free, Britain's main centre for Ebola cases, also successfully treated British aid worker William Pooley who contracted the virus in West Africa last year.

To date, more than 21,700 cases of Ebola have been reported in nine countries, including nearly 8,650 deaths, according to the World Health Organisation, although it said this week it believed the disease was declining.

A new film about the Prophet Muhammad is slotted to have its debut this Sunday at the Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran. Directed by Majid Majidi, the biopic’s cost has exceeded $30 million, making it the most expensive Iranian movie shot to date. Well before its release, the film was the subject of criticism due to the physical presence of Muhammad on screen. Although the Prophet’s facial features are camouflaged through light and shade strategies, the Sunni clerics at al-Azhar in Cairo nevertheless attempted to halt its release so that “an undistorted image of the Prophet can be preserved in the minds of Muslims."

This latest disagreement over filmic portrayals of Muhammad reveals ongoing anxieties regarding visual representations of the Prophet in the Islamic world. However, such divergences do not appear to be based on sectarian grounds, as the movie covers Muhammad’s childhood until the age of 12. Sunni and Shi‘i debates over the life of the Prophet tend to revolve around the events of his adulthood, especially whether he appointed ‘Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, as his rightful successor. As Majidi himself has noted, the film purposefully skirts these sectarian debates over the life of the Prophet in order to present a positive and united presentation of Muhammad to international movie audiences.

This new Muhammad film does not emerge out of thin air. In addition to earlier movies (like Akkad’s The Message) and others still in the making (by Qatar), Majidi’s large-scale project is part of an effort to visually reclaim the Prophet and his legacy in Iran that has been under way since the Danish cartoons of 2005. While reactions to the cartoons in some Arab, Sunni and especially Salafi quarters included issuing of decrees stipulating that “images of prophets are disrespectful and caricatures of them blasphemous," a vastly different response has unfolded within Iran over the past decade. Indeed, Iran has launched a number of artistic, educational and public relations projects since 2006, itself dubbed by Ayatollah Khamenei“The Year of the Noble Prophet." As a result, celebratory depictions of the Prophet have emerged in full force, with Majidi’s film the latest outcome of these officially sanctioned endeavors.

Figure 1: A five-story mural depicting the Prophet Muhammad’s celestial ascension, in Tehran, Iran, in 2008.Christiane Gruber

Among them, one of the most visible Iranian responses to the Danish cartoons is a colorful mural depicting Muhammad’s celestial ascension, which was painted in 2008 on a five-story building located on a major thoroughfare in central Tehran (Figure 1). Sponsored by Tehran’s municipality, the mural beautifies the capital city’s urban space much like the vibrant and sometime surreal compositions by Iranian artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo. Notably missing here are portraits of ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, as well as Palestinian and Iranian martyrs. In their stead appears a pictorial eulogy of the Prophet based on a 15th-century manuscript painting. While the original illustration shows Muhammad’s facial features, the contemporary mural renders his face as if a blank slate. This erasure of the Prophet’s facial features most likely is because the image is in the public domain instead of tucked inside a private manuscript. It is also a likely result of the more reactionary and intransigent Muslim responses to images of Muhammad in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy.

Besides this mega-mural, a number of other Prophet-centered products have been made for the Iranian market since 2006. Targeting a juvenile audience in particular, a series of illustrated books written in simple prose and verse aims to teach children about Muhammad’s life and miracles. These books include images of the Prophet, who often is depicted with a veiled face and solar halo, as can be seen in one image in which he is shown extending his arms to receive revelations at Mount Hira (Figure 2). The text that accompanies the colorful illustration informs its young readers that Muhammad was like the summer sun and the full moon, emitting both light and enlightenment into the world.

Figure 2: The Prophet Muhammad receives revelations on Mount Hira in an illustration from the children’s book “Greetings, Rose of Muhammad,” Tehran, 2006.“Greetings, Rose of Muhammad”

Just like these Iranian children’s books, Majidi’s film takes up the question of childhood. The film’s major scenes indubitably will reiterate some of the more famous episodes of the Prophet’s youth, including his highly auspicious birth and his being recognized as a prophet by the Christian monk Bahira. Visually depicting these pivotal moments of Muhammad’s early life is by no means a new phenomenon in Persian lands. Indeed, from 1300 CE onward a number of manuscript paintings represent Muhammad’s birth as a luminous, angelic event (Figure 3). The texts that buttress these images inform us that, when he was born, Muhammad illuminated the entire world with his cosmic radiance, which rose upward to set the heavens and stars alight.

Figure 3: A radiant Muhammad is born and held aloft by angels in Hafiz-i Abru's “Quintessence of Histories.”Freer/Sackler, Smithsonian Institution

Persian illustrated manuscripts also depict Muhammad’s foretelling as a prophet at the tender age of 12, when he visited the city of Busra in Syria. It is at this time that the Christian monk Bahira recognized the signs of the young boy’s future prophethood through a series of natural phenomena, like the bending of a tree’s branches and/or a cloud providing him with shade, as well as the “seal of prophecy” mark imprinted on Muhammad’s body (Figure 4). The latter episode belongs to a corpus of Islamic narratives that relate that the Prophet was announced and foretold as a prophet by a Christian holy man, who had read about his coming in the Bible.

Figure 4: The young Muhammad is recognized as a prophet by the Christian monk Bahira in Rashid al-Din's “Compendium of Histories.”University of Edinburgh

The story of Muhammad’s youthful “seal of prophecy” recognition is a popular one across Islamic lands even today. Over the course of the 20th century, a number of mass-produced images of the young Muhammad—composed in a wide array of creative variants—were made in Iran. These appeared in banners, posters (Figure 5), postcards, carpets and stickers until they were banned in 2008.

Figure 5: The young Muhammad, identified as “Muhammad, the Messenger of God,” on a poster made in Iran in the 1990s.Victoria and Albert Museum

While the recent Iranian prohibition of these images is certainly a response to the Danish cartoon controversy, it also emanates from the discovery of its original pictorial source: an early 20th-century Orientalist photograph of a young Arab boy. Along with the anxieties brought about by this borrowed image, “severe security” concerns in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo caused the Victoria and Albert Museum to attempt to dissimulate its possession of one of these modern Iranian images of the young Muhammad.

Not shying away from depicting this pivotal moment in the Prophet’s youth, Majidi in his biopic shows the young Muhammad arriving at Bahira’s monastery (Figure 6). In this film still, the adolescent protagonist walks down the main aisle of a church as a burst of sunlight streams in from the open doors. This radiance symbolic of Muhammad’s future prophecy floods into the interior space and overwhelms his facial features. This carefully designed visual strategy allows the Prophet to be both visible and invisible—represented and unrepresented—all at once.

Figure 6: In a still from the film "Muhammad, the Messenger of God," the young Muhammad enters a monastery, where he is recognized as a prophet by the Christian monk Bahira."Muhammad, the Messenger of God"

These paintings, murals, children’s books and films about the Prophet that have been made in Iran since 2006 are illuminating in several ways. First, they show that traditions of representing Muhammad are still well and alive in some areas of the Muslim world. These still and moving images aim to commemorate the Prophet, present his status and legacy in a positive light, and teach a variety of audiences about his life and miracles.

Unlike in Sunni-Salafi spheres, in which recent responses to the Danish and Charlie Hebdo cartoons have largely comprised a flurry of obdurate injunctions, the response in Iran has been markedly different. Indeed, rather than shying away from or banning images of the Prophet, Iranian leaders, artists and filmmakers have harnessed the creative arts to recover and restore the image of Muhammad in the public domain.

Such images serve as powerful reminders that there is no universally accepted ban on the figural arts in Islam and that traditions of prophetic representation still continue to flourish in Iran today. Above all, they highlight the fact that in Islamic lands there exist two diametrically opposed reactions to defamatory European cartoons: While some actors engage in censorship and suppression, others actively seek the promulgation of the Prophet Muhammad by reasserting the positive power of picture-making.

Christiane Gruber is associate professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Michigan. Her primary field of research is Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic ascension texts and images, about which she has written two books and edited a volume of articles. She also pursues research in Islamic book arts and codicology, having authored the online catalog of Islamic calligraphies in the Library of Congress as well as edited the volume of articles, The Islamic Manuscript Tradition. Her third field of specialization is modern Islamic visual culture and post-revolutionary Iranian visual and material culture, about which she has written several articles. She also has co-edited two volumes on Islamic and crosscultural visual cultures. She is currently writing her next book, titled The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images.

I remember the potato. It had looked so ordinary, its bland familiarity a comforting contrast to the spread of unusual delicacies that greeted me upon my arrival in the Faroe Islands, the remote archipelago between Norway and Iceland. While most of the tourists come for the natural beauty—the windswept vistas, craggy gorges and adorably chubby seabirds—I’d traveled all the way from Tokyo to learn about Faroese cuisine and how it’s transforming into a new style of refined cooking.

Three hours after leaving Copenhagen, I found myself on the edge of a cliff overlooking the tempestuous Atlantic, sitting at a table in a small, wooden hut covered with a turf roof. The hut, used for curing meat and fish, belonged to the restaurant Koks, the area’s top fine-dining establishment, located inside the sleek Hotel Føroyar in the capital city of Tórshavn. A whole leg of skerpikjøt—air-dried and fermented lamb—hung from a rod beside the door, along with aged cheese, pilot whale meat and loaf of garnatálg, a rolled sausage made from sheep’s fat and innards.

The Koks team had wanted to show me the roots of the islands’ food culture. After explaining the region’s specialties, Johannes Jensen, managing director of the Hotel Føroyar, offered me a platter of waxy new potatoes and instructed me to place one atop a canapé of fermented pilot whale and a square of salt-cured whale blubber the size of a pat of butter. “First the whale meat, then the blubber and last the potato,” he said, layering the ingredients on his plate. The whale meat was the color of onyx, arranged in thin slices that resembled black truffles. The translucent pieces of blubber looked like miniature daikon-radish cakes and gave off a faintly floral aroma. The potato was a potato.

“Now, into the mouth,” he said with a chuckle, chewing merrily.

“Into the mouth,” I echoed. Living in Japan, I’d encountered whale before in many guises—raw as sashimi (reminiscent of venison), cured as “bacon” (gamy as well as fishy), simmered in dashi broth (persistently metallic) and marinated in soy sauce and sake before being deep-fried (ironically, my least favorite iteration). But I’d never had it prepared in the traditional Faroese way, hung to dry and ferment in the salty sea air until it’s reached the consistency of soft jerky. This technique of preserving fish and meat is unique to the islands (before the 1800s, the Faroes didn’t produce or import much salt), a result of the region’s geographic and climatic conditions as well as the scarcity that has historically defined life on the islands.

Within seconds my palate was flooded with a cacophony of intense flavors. High-toned treble notes of herbaceous and floral flavors were followed by deeply funky, musky earthiness. The texture was thick and oily, and the potato had prolonged the act of chewing it. The experience remains firmly fixed in my memory.

“It’s an acquired taste,” Jensen shrugged, before adding with a note of concern, “I hope we haven’t shocked you.”

Fish fillet with radish and red peppers cooked by Fareose chef Uni GullfossBenjamin Rasmussen

Shocked, no. Confounded, yes. But to say that pilot whale was the most unusual thing that I ate during my time on the Faroes would be false. Almost all of the food was unlike anything I’d ever tasted before. There were turnips so sweet that they reminded me of Asian pears; horse mussels the size of my palm, with orange flesh the texture of custard; and langoustine with crystalline meat that tasted of the sea. Faroese fermented foods offered an entirely different spectrum of visceral flavors: dried lamb laced with the tang of blue cheese, and the indescribable pungency of cured whale meat and blubber. Faroese food culture is a culinary distillation of nature’s extremes, a reflection of the contradictions inherent in the environment. On the Faroe Islands, the psychedelic green landscape is veined with streams and waterfalls but nearly devoid of trees. Although the stormy weather regularly turns planes back to Bergen or Copenhagen, the sky can suddenly explode with sunlight, shooting rainbows in every direction.

My fascination with the Faroe Islands began two years ago, when my friend Adrien Norwood, an American chef based in Denmark, mentioned that he was going there to do a pop-up cooking event with the avant-garde Scandinavian chefs’ collective NaCL. Thanks in large part to René Redzepi and his restaurant Noma, Nordic cuisine has become a global phenomenon, attracting an unprecedented number of food tourists to Copenhagen and launching offshoots abroad. Noma has even set up shop in Tokyo, albeit temporarily, for a residency at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel from January 9 to February 14. In recent years, New Nordic enthusiasts have started exploring the culinary terrain beyond the Danish capital.

Even so, I’d remarked, the Faroe Islands, with its scant population of 50,000 people, seemed like an unlikely destination for gourmets.

“The products are amazing,” Norwood replied, describing the giant cod and succulent langoustines. Almost more intriguing, though, were the idiosyncratic dried and fermented foods, which have been made the same way since the 600s. I couldn’t imagine what they tasted like.

“It’s a full-on experience,” he told me. “I don’t think you can duplicate a lot of the things on the Faroe Islands outside of the Faroe Islands. You don’t have the same wind blowing, the same saltwater going through the streams under those little wooden shacks.”

Faroese preserved foods were born of necessity. Winters on the islands are long and frigid, and even during the temperate summer months, very little grows. According to University of the Faroe Islands professor Jóan Pauli Joensen, who has written a book on the local food culture, prior to the arrival of tubers and root vegetables, edible plants cultivated on the Faroe Islands had been limited to a handful of species, mainly barley and the herb angelica, which was the primary source of vitamin C for early settlers. Sheep, fowl and seafood were the archipelago’s most abundant resources. But without a ready supply of timber, cooking with fire was considered something of a luxury.

“Basically, you had drying and fermenting. That’s it,” Joensen said, reminding me that salt was scarce on the islands. The Faroese made “black salt” from dried seaweed, but it wasn’t suitable for preserving food.

In light of these challenges, the idea of creating haute cuisine based on Faroese products sounds like a quixotic endeavor, but Leif Sørensen, the region’s most famous culinary personality and former head chef at Koks, has made it his life’s mission for nearly a decade. When I met him in Copenhagen, he was en route back to the Faroes from Greenland, where he’d been researching how to develop the food culture there.

Over a couple of beers, he described the uphill battle he had faced on the Faroe Islands. The restaurant scene had been nonexistent until 1992, when the prohibition of alcoholic beverages was repealed, and had consisted mainly of steakhouses using imported ingredients. At his first restaurant, he ran into trouble sourcing fresh local fish because the industry was focused on exports. Procuring meat was equally difficult due to government restrictions. On top of it all, the Faroese guests “didn’t want to come to eat Faroese dishes” because they saw it as “food for poor people.”

But Sørensen is an optimist, although a pragmatic one. While he appears somber at first, he has an easy laugh and a deadpan sense of humor. When talking about the history of food on the islands, a lot of Faroese use two phrases to describe the alternating states of scarcity and plenty that have defined the culinary culture: “It was terrible” and “It was a feast.” Those familiar expressions came up as Sørensen recounted funny anecdotes about the monotonous diet he endured as a child: fish, served fresh and then fermented, and then dried, in an endless rotation. Or dried whale meat “so tough it was like leather.”

When he helped launch Koks in 2011, he tried to “tell the story of Faroese food in a contemporary way” by incorporating traditional ingredients as accents to the dishes. At the same time, he embarked on a project to classify the edible plants that grow wild on the islands and started cooking with seaweed, which, although plentiful, had not been eaten by the Faroese. In a sense, Sørensen has been doing more than telling the story of Faroese cuisine. He’s been rewriting it—and turning a tale of paucity into one of surprising bounty.

Sørensen’s work has paved the way for a new wave of chefs on the islands, including his young protégé, Poul Andrias Ziska, who has helmed the kitchen at Koks since February. When I dined there in late August, the food Ziska served moved through the culinary history of the islands, artfully presenting the region’s staple ingredients. Cubes of beetroot were topped with angelica, while dots of salted fish were piped onto circles of mashed potato. The flavors I’d experienced at the start of my trip made an elegant return: The depth of skerpikjøt was rendered as translucent, feather-light crisps, and a thin layer of garnatálg was roasted over potatoes in a smoky cheese sauce (fermented whale hadn’t made it onto the menu, to my relief).

At the end of summer, the focus was on seafood: crab, veiled in thinly sliced turnips and drizzled with a concentrated crab oil, and langoustine, lightly smoked in hay and quickly pan-fried so that it was still rare in the center. A dish of sweet scallops and cauliflower had been dusted with a fine powder of sea tangle seaweed that gave off a flavor and aroma reminiscent of truffles.

Before leaving the restaurant, I took one last look at the city of Tórshavn below. With its gently twinkling lights and quiet harbor, the view was so different from the chaotic, neon cityscape I was accustomed to in Tokyo. In the distance lay an island shaped like a whale, and beyond that, the rest of the world. I couldn’t help feeling that I’d landed at the edge of the earth, a place of improbable possibilities. “I’m sure you would like whale meat if you tasted my recipe,” Sørensen later joked. Maybe. 

Last spring, Dennis Doyle left his mind-numbing job as a lawyer and committed to a once in a lifetime project: He would go and see every single game his favorite team, the New York Knicks, were playing for an entire season.

He ponied up $3,500 for season tickets at home and spent an additional $21,500 on travel and tickets for away games. The 32-year-old, who is not married, had enough money saved up for rent and other expenses, meaning he would not have to hold down a job during the NBA season.

While the Knicks started off the year with a loss, the second game was a big win: They beat the Cleveland Cavaliers on their own turf and upset LeBron James’s much-ballyhooed homecoming. It was Doyle’s favorite game of the season. As for his least favorite: “There are,” he sighs, “too many to choose from.”

After that second game, the Knicks would stumble mightily, heading toward what could become one of the team’s worst seasons of all time, with a winning percentage so far of .191 and a 9-38 record.

Devoted to his project, Doyle still attends every single game. “They aren’t spectacular seats,” he says of his season tickets at Madison Square Garden. “For away games, I’ve sat everywhere from courtside to the last row. Whatever was available.”

He says a few other die-hard fans sit in his section at home. They aren’t close, Doyle explains, but they are in this together.

Despite the awful record, the Knicks have managed to pack the Garden during home games. “They are still listing games as sellouts, still filling the Garden close to capacity, which is kind of amazing at some level,” Doyle tells Newsweek. “Sometimes I kind of wonder what everyone is doing here, then I look at myself and think how I could ask that question in the first place.”

The Knicks are aware of what Doyle is doing, but he doesn’t believe the public relations team is all that fond of him. “I tend to be pretty candid in terms of my opinions about the team,” he says. “I don’t sugarcoat anything. But it’s kind of hard to sugarcoat anything in terms of players like this.”

When asked what went wrong to create this perfect storm of a season, Doyle says: “Everything.” He faults the freshman coach, poor draft choices, aging players, a difficult owner and what he calls a general “talent deficit.”

Doyle will see more basketball games in a year than some fans will see in a lifetime, and he is fully tuned in to the professional league, but he hasn’t been keeping much of an eye on college ball. That’s somewhat surprising because when teams are as bad as the Knicks, they at least know they’re in line to receive high draft picks, and Doyle could have his eye on talented college players that may join his team next season.

At the time of publication, the Knicks are technically the second worst team in the league—the Minnesota Timberwolves are 8-37, which puts them at a .178 win percentage. The Knicks recently saw their record improve slightly due to a three-game winning streak, which was bittersweet for Doyle: “I still think the Knicks should tank to try and get the best picks possible. That being said, it is still nice to see them win some games.”

While many basketball fans can ease the sting of a rough season by seeing another team that they like doing well, Doyle is purely a Knicks fan. He doesn’t follow any other professional or college sports teams. “I don’t have any other team to root for. This is it,” he explained. That kind of loyalty has led Doyle to describe himself as “definitely not emotionally balanced.”

Though many would disagree, Doyle doesn’t view himself as a superfan. “I get why I’m categorized that way, but this is a one-off experience. I’m not going to be doing this beyond this year; usually I only go to one or two games a year. I would say I’m a diehard fan, but not a superfan.”

To his point, Doyle says he doesn’t bring signs to the games or own dozens of jerseys. “I’m not overly demonstrative, but I’m emotionally invested,” he explained. “Go New York,” a chant from the 1990s, is his favorite.

The Knicks season has been a lonely one for Doyle, as many friends won’t go to games with him because of the team’s abysmal record. His family is quite supportive, and at the end of the long road he hopes to maybe write a book about the experience. For now, though, he’s stuck with the team, living an NBA player’s lifestyle without any of the glory.

Ukrainian and Russian representatives and separatist envoys met in a new round of peace talks on Saturday as fighting between Kiev's forces and the Russian-backed rebels raged on in Ukraine's east, claiming more civilian and military lives.

The main members of the so-called contact group - Ukrainian former president Leonid Kuchma, a Russian diplomat and an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe official - met at a state residence in the Belarussian capital Minsk, where they were joined by two separatist officials.

The sides have held only one inconclusive meeting since agreeing a ceasefire last September as part of a 12-point blueprint for peace. Much-violated from the start, that truce collapsed completely with a new rebel advance last week.

Both sides have accused each other of deadly artillery and mortar strikes on civilian targets in the past two weeks, including on a cultural centre in the main regional city of Donetsk on Friday which killed at least five people waiting for humanitarian hand-outs.

In a three-way phone call, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande discussed the situation in Ukraine which has brought the worst crisis in Russia-West relations since the end of the Cold War more than 20 years ago.

A German government spokesman said that the three leaders had agreed that the Minskmeeting should at least produce a ceasefire agreement.

"That would be the starting point for a broader solution to the problem," the spokesman,Steffen Seibert, said.

The September Minsk peace plan also called for tighter control of the joint Russia-Ukraineborder, through which Kiev says Moscow is funnelling fighters and equipment, and the freeing of prisoners held by the sides.

Much has changed on the ground, however, since September.

The separatists have set up self-proclaimed 'people's republics' while their forces, which Kiev says are supported by 9,000 Russian regular troops, have seized more than 500 square km (193 square miles) of territory beyond that agreed in the Minsk talks and threaten to seize control of the east's two main regions entirely.

Heavy shelling continued on Saturday in Ukraine's eastern regions as the separatists sought to tighten a circle around government forces clinging on to control of the strategic rail and road junction of Debaltseve.

Regional police chief Vyacheslav Abroskin, in a Facebook post, said 12 civilians had been killed on Saturday by separatist artillery shelling of the town, which lies to the north-east ofDonetsk.

Defence Minister Stepan Poltorak said 15 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 30 wounded in clashes across the east.

"The toughest situation is in the Vuhlehirsk area where the terrorists are trying to seize the town and occupy positions to move forward and encircle Debaltseve," military spokesmanAndriy Lysenko said in a separate briefing.

Debaltseve is on the main highway linking Donetsk and the other big rebel-controlled city ofLuhansk and is also a vital rail link for goods traffic from Russia which Kiev accuses of arming the rebels.

The rebels were also continuing to threaten Mariupol, a town of half a million in the south-east of the country on the coast of Sea of Azov, Lysenko said.

More than 5,000 people have been killed in the Ukraine conflict which erupted last April following Russia's annexation of Crimea in response to the ousting of a Moscow-backed president in Kiev by street protests.

The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Russia because of what they say is incontrovertible proof that its troops are fighting on behalf of the separatists and providing them with military equipment. Moscow denies this is so.

BERLIN/HELSINKI (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel ruled out a debt writedown for Greece on Saturday, and a European Central Bank policymaker threatened to cut off funding to Greek banks if Athens does not agree to renew its bailout package.

The euro zone's paymaster and the ECB are both taking a tough line with Greece's new leftist government, whose leader swept to victory last Sunday promising that five years of austerity, "humiliation and suffering" were over.

Greece's prime minister, Alexis Tsipras has also promised to renegotiate agreements with the European Commission, ECB and International Monetary Fund "troika" and write off much of Greece's 320 billion euro ($360 billion) debt, which at more than 175 percent of gross domestic product is the world's second-highest after Japan.

Merkel flatly rejected such a possibility.

"There was already a voluntary waiver by private creditors; Greece has already been exempt from billions by the banks. I don't see a further debt haircut," she told German daily Die Weltin in an interview published in its Saturday edition.

"Europe will continue to show solidarity for Greece, as for other countries hit particularly hard by the crisis, if these countries undertake their own reforms and savings efforts," Merkel added in a thinly veiled threat to Athens.

Without the support of international lenders, Greece would soon find itself back in an acute financial crisis.

Unable to tap the markets because of sky-high borrowing costs, Athens has enough cash to meet its funding needs for the next couple of months. But it faces around 10 billion euros of debt repayments over the summer.

"I'M WAITING," MERKEL TELLS ATHENS

Greece's new government opened talks on its bailout with European partners on Friday by refusing to extend the program or to cooperate with the international inspectors overseeing it.

Separately, the French finance ministry said on Saturday that Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis will meet with his French counterpart Michel Sapin in Paris on Sunday and issue a statement afterwards.

Europe's bailout program for Greece, part of a 240 billion euro rescue package also involving the International Monetary Fund, expires on Feb. 28. A failure to renew it could leave Athens unable to meet its financing needs and cut its banks off from central bank liquidity support.

The ECB does not accept Greek sovereign bonds as collateral in its refinancing operations as they are below investment grade. However, it allows central bank financing to Greek banks as the country is in a bailout program.

Erkki Liikanen, a member of the ECB's policymaking Governing Council, said that funding, too, could dry up if Greece does not remain in a program.

"Greece's program extension will expire in the end of February so some kind of solution must be found, otherwise we can't continue lending," Liikanen, also the governor of Finland's central bank, told public broadcaster YLE.

Merkel said the ECB's Jan. 22 decision to pump billions of euros into the euro zone with a bond-buying program did not mean countries would end efforts to shape up their economies with structural reforms.

She put the onus on the new Greek government to present a credible economic policy.

"The goal of our policy was and is that Greece remains a permanent part of the euro-community," Merkel said.

"To that end, Greece and the European partners make their contribution. Apart from that, I am now waiting to see what concepts the Greek government will present."

In the five years since the Citizens United decision was handed down, there has been plenty of evidence to document the magnitude of the flow of dark money and the effects it has had on American politics.

In one of the most impassioned moments of the State of the Union address, President Obama decried the corrosive influence of anonymous money in politics. “A better politics is one where we spend less time drowning in dark money for ads that pull us into the gutter,” he said.

His comment could not have been more timely, coming as it did a day before the fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations and labor unions to engage in unlimited spending to advocate for or against candidates.

Advocacy groups used the occasion (and the Twitter hashtag #CU5) to start new conversations about the impact big money is having on our democracy, and how to fix it. The Brennan Center hosted a summit on the topic with Common Cause, Demos and others. The American Constitution Society delved into one of the ruling’s more insidious effects: In states where judges are elected, the judiciary is effectively for sale. The Center for American Progress talked about how to mitigate the decision’s impact through executive action.

Fifteen members of Congress also gathered to reintroduce a slate of bills designed to deal with the outsize influence of money in politics in a variety of ways: increasing disclosure and transparency, mending holes in the regulatory system, and taking steps to improve campaign funding by encouraging small-donor participation and public financing. And the action wasn’t just in Washington, D.C.; in state capitals around the country, activists rallied to support similar initiatives in their cities and states.

But addressing the fallout from the Citizens United case is not merely a cause for progressives to embrace. The head of the Stuart Foundation thinks conservatives have reason to take up its banner, too. The Washington Post profiled one such group, led by the architect of Eric Cantor’s defeat at the hands of a Tea Party challenger. This new group, Take Back Our Republic, is making the rounds to argue the conservative case for reform, and finding willing listeners among tax hawks and Tea Partiers alike.

In the five years since the Citizens United decision was handed down, there has been plenty of evidence to document the effects of dark money on American politics. Still, there is room for hope.

The 2014 elections saw signs of life in unusual places, with Arkansans passing ethics and campaign finance reforms; voters in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Montana rejecting well-funded special interest takeovers of their state courts; and organizers in Maine collecting the necessary signatures to put public financing for elections on the ballot in 2015.

In the longer term, the Open Society Foundations and its grantees are working to correct the flawed understanding of the Constitution that led to Citizens United and other recent decisions that have allowed the voices of the privileged few to overwhelm those of everyday citizens. This work aims to challenge the court’s current cramped constitutional interpretation while advancing an alternative—one that would foster a vibrant democracy with a breadth of viewpoints and voices represented.

The coalition of people working for change keeps growing. More than 130 organizations have signed onto a simple statement of principles: Our democracy should be a place where everyone participates and everyone’s voice is heard; where everyone knows who is buying influence in our elections and government; and where politicians play by common-sense rules and are held accountable with enforceable penalties to deter bad behavior.

Those signatories are joined by an ever-increasing number of small-business owners, unions, civil rights organizations, environmentalists—and, yes, former conservative political operatives—in calling for an end to the overwhelmingly dominant role wealthy individuals and corporations have come to play in American politics. Their work may help make #betterpolitics the next big Twitter hashtag.

Sarah Knight is a program officer with the Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs. This article first appeared on the Open Society Foundations’ website.

Many have called it a game-changer. On December 16, gunmen loyal to the Pakistani Taliban attacked a military school in Peshawar, killing 148 people. Most of the victims were children, and many were killed as they hid under the desks. The violence was so gruesome it seemed to rattle the country like never before. Quickly, the Pakistani government rushed to assure people it had the situation under control. In the aftermath of the attack, the government set up special military tribunals in which to try suspected terrorists, and the penalties are expected to be harsh. Meanwhile, the army reportedly broadened its crackdown in the federally administered tribal areas, in hopes of thwarting terrorism. “There will be no differentiation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban,” Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said. As Matthew Green wrote in Newsweek, Sharif’s words were “a rare public acknowledgement of Pakistan’s murky record on state sponsorship of extremist proxies.” But more than a month after the massacre in Peshawar, has anything really changed? To explore that question, I chatted with Christine Fair, a professor of South Asian political and military affairs at Georgetown and the author of Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Was the school shooting a turning point for Pakistan?

It absolutely was not. The army has said very clearly that they’re hoping these [tribunals] are going to give Pakistanis confidence that the military has the situation under control, but they don’t have anything under control.

Who are the “bad militants” in Pakistan?

For the most part, almost all of the so-called bad militants have their origins in groups that the state has long sponsored, aided, abetted, trained and in some cases even developed from the grassroots, either to fight in India or in Afghanistan. So there would be no Pakistan Taliban if there had not been this flotilla of militant groups that the state developed.

The groups targeting the state follow the Deobandi interpretative tradition of Islam. This is important because this means that they share a significant common organizational infrastructure. For example, they rely on mosques and madrassas that adhere to the Deobandi tradition of Islam. When 9/11 happened and Pakistan was forced to work with the Americans, these Deobandi groups were furious. Many of these groups came to know Al-Qaeda through their association with the Taliban in Afghanistan. [The Afghan Taliban emerged from Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan.] And these Deobandi groups were furious that the Pakistani state was aiding the overthrow, not only of the Taliban government, but the only government in the world that was exercising a Deobandi version of Sharia [Islamic law]. After 9/11…[some] of these Deobandi groups began fracturing and disobeying the [Pakistani] state. That's when the insurgency began. Over time these Deobandi organizations began calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban.

Who are the “good militants”?

The “good militants” are, of course, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani Network, which continue to be loyal to the Pakistani state. And elements of the Pakistani Taliban that refuse to kill Pakistanis. All of those groups kill in Afghanistan on behalf of Pakistan’s interests. The other “good militant group” is Deobandi is Jaish-e-Mohammed, which was raised to kill Indians in Kashmir and beyond. Over the past year or so, Pakistan has been trying to resurrect Jaish with the aim of luring away some members of the Pakistani Taliban into Jaish for operations against India. There's one other group that we haven't talked about, because they’re not Deobandi, and that’s Lashkar-e-Taiba. That organization belongs to the Ahl-Hadith tradition of Islam. This organization has never conducted an operation in Pakistan. They have exclusively focused on India for the vast majority of its history. In recent years, they have been operating against Americans and our Afghan and other allies in Afghanistan.

Is Pakistan unable to crack down on the “bad militants”? Or do they simply choose otherwise?

The problem is they want to preserve the networks that produce terrorists because those networks are the same networks that also produce the “good militants.” When the “bad militants” come after the state, the Pakistanis do try and kill them. And they try and kill them rather than arrest them because Pakistan’s [civilian] legal system is so decrepit, judges are afraid to convict. But they can’t shut down the system comprehensively because Pakistan still hopes to use “good militants” as tools of foreign and defense policy in the region.

What purpose do these “good militants” serve?

Pakistan is an ideological state, not a security-seeking state. Pakistan was founded as the homeland for South Asia’s Muslims. The Pakistan movement mobilized around the Two Nation Theory, which held that Muslims and Hindus are equal nations even if Muslims are fewer in number than Hindus. The proponents of the Two Nation Theory argued that Muslims cannot live under Hindu domination. Pakistan needs to wrest Kashmir away from India to fulfill the dream of the Two Nation Theory because Kashmir is the only Muslim majority area in India.

Pakistan also hopes to retard India's ability to impose its will on Pakistan and other countries in the region.The only assets Pakistan has to accomplish these goals are its jihadis, who operate with impunity thanks to Pakistan’s growing nuclear weapons. Also, these groups undertake operations with plausible deniability.

The so-called good militants also have an important role to play in Afghanistan. Pakistan prefers a manageable chaos in Afghanistan rather than an Afghanistan that is friendly to India. Pakistan is trying to bring some of the “bad militants” back into the fold of the “good militants.” Pakistan’s efforts to reorient part of the Pakistani Taliban in this way also explains why the Pakistan military gave a five-months warning before undertaking operations in North Waziristan. They wanted to make sure they could return as many of their assets as possible to the category of good militants. And they were pretty successful. What remained in North Waziristan are committed foes who can be dealt with through violence and death.

How does the American drone strategy play into Pakistan’s crackdown?

You can’t really decouple the Pakistani strategy in North Waziristan—which has killed a lot of civilians, I might add, and displaced the majority of inhabitants of North Waziristan—from the drones. The drones, more than anything, have disabled some of the terrorist networks in Pakistan. There’s probably considerable issues of illegality here because the Americans aren’t targeting the Afghan Taliban or Al-Qaeda. We’re actually targeting Pakistani terrorists because the Pakistanis can’t kill them at all or without massive civilian casualties. And then, of course, in keeping the Pakistani role in the drones program secret, we're basically allowing the Pakistan military and intelligence agencies to use us as a scapegoat. The Pakistani military doesn't want to admit that they can't kill these terrorists on their own. The military runs the country based on the claim that it's the most suitable organization to protect the country’s interests. Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, does not want this to become public so the organization insists that the United States hide their role in the despised drone program. The Pakistanis are very happy when a drone operation goes well, but when something goes wrong [such as civilian deaths], they pin all the blame on the Americans.

Why do the Americans put up with this?

Nuclear weapons. The U.S. government has a pre-eminent interest that Pakistan's domestic insurgent groups do not get these nuclear weapons and the U.S. government will do whatever it thinks it can to prevent that from happening. That’s the dirty secret. If these groups have nuclear weapons, they harm U.S. interests. The Pakistani Taliban, because they’re Deobandi, they do have ties to Al-Qaeda, so Americans are absolutely morbidly afraid of that outcome. That's why they’re writing checks and it's why they are going to keep writing checks.

So our fear of nuclear weapons is why finding Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan wasn’t a turning point?

Bingo. There’s another reason, too. The United States became dependent on Pakistan because it moved most of the supplies for the war in Afghanistan through Pakistan. This was and is a really bad strategy. I've been an opponent of the Afghan war for ages because we can’t win there with Pakistan as our partner. We’re not in a position to put pressure on Pakistan to stop supporting these groups because we’re dependent on Pakistan for logistics. We're basically blackmailed by their nuclear weapons and they know this. Pakistan wins no matter what. We lost that war the day we decided to fight that war with Pakistan as our key ally.

How do nuclear weapons help Pakistan?

Nuclear weapons help Pakistan in at least three key ways. First, nuclear weapons are how Pakistan protects itself from an Indian military attack in response to a terrorist attack. The logic goes that if India responds conventionally, and is close to defeating Pakistan, that Pakistan, under its ambiguous rules of nuclear engagement, could use them against India. This is how they keep the Indians from responding militarily to a terrorist attack. Second, the international community will always get involved in a crisis. This generally involves putting pressure on India to prevent further escalation. And the Pakistanis understand this. So nuclear weapons intimidate India and coerce the international community to tell India to back down. Third, because of these nuclear weapons, the Americans will never have the courage to write Pakistan off and treat it like the enemy of the United States it actually is.

Is Pakistan more dangerous today than it was on September 11, 2001?

Of course it is. And we have subsidized this development. On our dime Pakistan has been developing this capability for miniaturized [nuclear] warheads and delivery vehicles. These are easily stolen. Imagine if these weapons fall into the hands of terrorists? The congressional hearings will all converge around the question, “Why did we cut Pakistan off? Why didn’t we prevent this?” Everyone is afraid of the next “9/11 commission report” which would follow such a terrible event. By possessing these nuclear weapons, Pakistan has us and our money. The Pakistanis can pull us around like we’re on roller skates.

So what should we do instead?

I’m a fan of saying, “Look, we can't hold your hand. You’re taking our money, you’re proliferating. If these weapons get into the hands of a non-state actor, we don’t care who uses them, we’re going to hold you responsible per our nuclear doctrine. And by the way, our nuclear doctrine doesn’t treat countries well who use nuclear weapons.”

“With my last name, people are always throwing film ideas at me,” producer Nancy Spielberg says. “But when I read Al Schwimmer’s obituary, who some people call the godfather of the Israeli air force, I knew this had my name on it. Not to use all my brother’s projects, but it was like Indiana Jones and Band of Brothers and Catch Me if You Can—all rolled into one.”

Above and Beyond, directed by Roberta Grossman, is a moving documentary about the improbable band of mostly Jewish-American volunteers who helped build the Israeli air force and the nation itself.

As the son of an Israeli air force pilot, I grew up seeing black-and-white photos of my father in his glory days. He was tan, thin and handsome and stared directly into the camera. But the reality behind the bravado was quite different. The creation of the Israeli air force and the country itself were miraculous feats of bravery, naiveté, luck and chutzpah.

In 1947 Britain, which controlled mandatory Palestine, realized that a civil war was about to break out between the Jews and the Arabs. It handed Palestine over to the United Nations, which decided to partition it into two states. The Jews accepted the plan; the streets of Tel Aviv erupted with dancing. The Arab states rejected partition; David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, knew that if he declared an independent state, the neighboring Arab armies would attack.

The only way to prevent a second Holocaust for 600,000 Jews, surrounded by hostile Arab nations openly calling for their destruction, was to quickly build a modern army with an air force superior to that of the Egyptians. With thousands of traumatized refugees flooding the country, little money with which to buy arms and few soldiers with combat experience, this seemed an impossible task.

Schwimmer, using skills and contacts he’d picked up during World War II, began buying dozens of rickety surplus American warplanes and built an air fleet. Once he had purchased enough second-hand crafts, however, he still needed pilots. His team began recruiting crews, scouring public records searching for pilots with Jewish-sounding names.

Although most American Jews were not Zionists, one by one the pilots signed on. Some had to convince their spouses, and in some cases their mothers, why they should fly halfway across the world to fight in another war. “I didn’t like being a Jew,” says Gideon Lichtman, a former U.S. Army Air Forces pilot who grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the film. “What changed me was knowing what Hitler did to the Jews. I was risking my citizenship and possibly jail time. I didn’t give a shit. I was gonna help the Jews out. I was going to help my people out.”

Lou Lenart combated the anti-Semitism he’d faced as a kid by sending away for Charles Atlas’s muscle-building books. “By the time I was 15 years old, nobody was beating me up.” After serving in the Marines in the Pacific Theater, Lenart volunteered to fly for Israel.

Once he had the planes and pilots, Schwimmer’s next mission was transporting the shaky fleet from the United States to Tel Aviv. Not only was there no direct route to Tel Aviv, but doing so would require defying a strict American arms embargo to the region. Nevertheless, the pilots helmed the rickety retrofitted planes from Panama to Brazil to Casablanca to Rome, and paid off anyone who threatened to stand in their way.

When the armies of Egypt, Syria, Trans-Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia attacked, the pilots were still in Czechoslovakia learning to fly their makeshift planes. With an Egyptian force of more than 10,000 advancing swiftly past Gaza toward Tel Aviv, there was no time to prepare. The Israeli air force’s first official flight would also be its first combat mission.

On May 29, 1948, four junk Messerschmitts, led by Lenart, took off toward the Egyptian lines. They represented the entirety of the Israeli air force. When they reached the Egyptian positions, Lenart said a prayer and then dive-bombed and strafed the enemy’s tanks, trucks and munitions. The brazen attack stopped the advance in its tracks and most likely saved the newborn country.

Throughout Israel’s 10-month War of Independence, hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers flew thousands of missions in ill-equipped planes, low on fuel and short on ammunition. Among other feats, they stopped the Iraqi westward advance into the Galilee and supplied vital supplies to cut-off Jewish communities in the Negev Desert. Perhaps most important, however, was the effect the volunteers had on boosting the morale of the Jewish people, still reeling from the devastation and abandonment of the Holocaust.  “It was a godsend,” former Israeli president Shimon Peres says of the volunteers.

The war took a heavy personal toll on the pilots as well as Israel, which lost an estimated 1 percent of its population. What shines through in the interviews with the surviving pilots, however, is that these men, now in their 80s and 90s, are relaying exploits from the best time of their lives: a time when choices seemed simpler, their bodies were in peak physical condition, and they were driven by a mission to help their fellow Jews. They partied, picked up girls, got into bar fights and laughed a lot along the way. “I was born to be there at that moment in history,” Lenart says. “It’s the most important thing I did in my life.”

“I finally felt proud of being a Jew,” says another pilot.

Despite its dramatic subject matter, Above and Beyond is not without its lighter moments and surprises. Milton Rubenfeld, a brash former stunt pilot who flew for the Royal air force and the U.S. Army Air Force, was shot down and surrounded by Jewish farmers who, not knowing Israel possessed an air force, assumed he was an enemy. Rubenfeld, who spoke no Hebrew, began screaming Yiddish words and Jewish foods like gefilte fish, pesach and matzo. The improvisation saved his life, and he returned to America where his son Paul Reubens became the famous comic actor best known for his character Pee-wee Herman.

“It’s not just a Jewish story but an American one,” Spielberg says. “I would love for people to give this movie a chance. If you say Israel to certain people, they turn off because they have a certain image of the country they get from the media. This film reminds of a time when Israel was voted into statehood by the U.N. The Jews accepted the partition, and the Arabs chose to fight. I hope it reminds people that we could have had a two-state solution in 1948.”