BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - An Argentine prosecutor found dead in mysterious circumstances last month had drafted a request that President Cristina Fernandez be arrested for conspiring to derail his probe into the deadly bombing of a Jewish center, the investigator into his death said on Tuesday.

The papers were found in the trash at Alberto Nisman's apartment while his property was being scoured for clues over whether the father-of-two committed suicide or was murdered.

He was found in a pool of blood with a single bullet to the head on Jan. 18.

"The drafts are in the file," Viviana Fein, the lead investigator into Nisman's death, told a local radio station.

The request for Fernandez's arrest, which the prominent pro-opposition daily newspaper Clarin said Nisman drafted in June, was not included in his final 350-page submission to the judiciary delivered days before his death. Instead Nisman called for Fernandez to face questions in court.

On Monday, Fein's office had denied the existence of the document containing the arrest request and the government denounced a Clarin story about it as "garbage".

Cabinet Chief Jorge Capitanich even dramatically tore up a copy of the paper in his daily news briefing. But on Tuesday, Fein backtracked, saying there had been a misunderstanding between her and her office, and the documents did exist.

"They are properly incorporated into the case file, nothing is missing," Fein said of the papers on Tuesday.

Nisman spent almost a decade building up a case that Iran was behind the 1994 attack on theArgentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) that killed 85 people. Iran's government has repeatedly denied the allegation.

Nisman had been due the day after his death to answer questions in Congress about his allegations that Fernandez sought to cover up Iran's involvement in return for Iranian oil. Fernandez has called the claim "absurd".

Argentine judges are proving reluctant to take on a case some are calling a "judicial hot potato". Two judges turned down hearing the case on Monday, including one who is already presiding over separate charges of attempts to derail the investigation into the 1994 bombing.

The other cover-up charges involve ex-President Carlos Menem, who ruled the South American country from 1989 to 1999.

Fernandez, who had come under fierce criticism for her handling of Nisman's death, is currently on a trip to China.

Updated | Several people were killed and a dozen seriously injured when a Metro-North train crashed into a Jeep at a railroad crossing about an hour north of New York City Tuesday evening.

The northbound Harlem line train had departed Grand Central Terminal at approximately 5.44 p.m. and collided with a black Jeep Cherokee at approximately 6:30 p.m. near Valhalla, New York, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) confirmed. The collision ignited an explosion that engulfed in flames both the Jeep and part of the train, according to The Journal News.  

The MTA said in a statement that there were "numerous confirmed fatalities" with at least a dozen people seriously injured as a result of the collision, adding that the female driver of the Jeep as well as train passengers were among those killed. Initial news reports suggested at least six people died.

Officials brought 400 passengers to a nearby rock-climbing gym for shelter and plan to have buses pick up these passengers and take them to Pleasantville, New York, the MTA said. Metro-North is also organizing buses to ferry riders between Pleasantville and North White Plains, the MTA said. 

More than 700 people were believed to have been on board the train, Reuters reported.

Service between Grand Central and North White Plains is normal with a shuttle train operating between Pleasantville and Southeast, the MTA said.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated with developments. 

Updated | AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan has executed by hanging a jailed Iraqi woman militant whose release had been demanded by the Islamic State group that burnt a captured Jordanian pilot to death, a security source said on Wednesday.

Responding to the killing of the pilot, whose death was announced on Tuesday, the Jordanian authorities also executed another senior al Qaeda prisoner sentenced to death for plots to wage attacks against the pro-Western kingdom in the last decade.

Sajida al-Rishawi, the Iraqi woman militant, was sentenced to death for her role in a 2005 suicide bomb attack that killed 60 people. Ziyad Karboli, an Iraqi al Qaeda operative, who was convicted in 2008 for killing a Jordanian, was also executed at dawn, the source said.

Jordan, which has been mounting air raids in Syria as part of the U.S.-led alliance against Islamic State insurgents, said it would deliver a "strong, earth-shaking and decisive" response to the killing of pilot Mouath al-Kasaesbeh.

The fate of Kasaesbeh, a member of a large tribe that forms the backbone of support for the country's Hashemite monarchy, has gripped Jordan for weeks and some Jordanians have criticized King Abdullah for embroiling them in the U.S.-led war that they say will provoke a militant backlash.

The king cut short a visit to the United States to return home following word of Kasaesbeh's death. In a televised statement, he said the pilot's killing was an act of "cowardly terror" by a deviant group that had no relation to Islam.

TAIPEI (Reuters) - A TransAsia Airways plane crash landed in a Taipei river, injuring more than 10 people, television reported on Wednesday.

No other details were immediately available.

Richard M. Cohen leans forward as the needle plunges into his back. He kvetches as its tip pushes toward his spinal column, though it is a good-natured plaint. He has, after all, been through this before. We are on the far West Side of Manhattan, 57th Street, with the dusky Palisades of New Jersey looming on the far bank of the Hudson River. Right across the street are the studios of CBS, where Cohen, a television reporter and producer, came to work for the legendary Walter Cronkite in 1979 and then for Dan Rather, who replaced Cronkite two years later.

Cohen went everywhere back in those bygone days when journalists still went to wherever the world was exploding. He reported from Poland in 1981 about the rise of the Solidarity movement, then from Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, then from the conflict in El Salvador. The entire time, he harbored a secret: He had multiple sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disease that afflicts 400,000 Americans and which Cohen calls “a grim pileup on the highways of the central nervous system,” an erosion of the insulating fat, called myelin, that surrounds the nerves. Once those myelin sheaths wear away, the nerves can no longer properly conduct electrical signals, leading to a host of neurological and physical symptoms. Cohen’s walking, for example, eventually became so unsteady that people assumed he was drunk.

Cohen was diagnosed when he was 25. He was living in Washington, D.C., working on a PBS documentary on disability. He was making coffee for his newsroom colleagues when the pot slipped from his hands, crashing to the floor. He thought nothing of it, but then, later that day, he lost his balance and lurched forward into the street. Shaken, he went home to have a beer. As he sat down on the couch, he felt a strange numbness in his leg. “I think you have multiple sclerosis,” Cohen’s father, a physician, said upon hearing his son’s symptoms. He had it himself, after all. So did Cohen’s paternal grandmother.

Richard Cohen, author of book "Strong at the Broken Places" sits in his home on Dec. 13, 2007.Enid Alvarez/NY Daily News/Getty

“The diagnosis came with a perfunctory phone call,” Cohen wrote in The New York Times in 2000 of the day in 1973 when he definitively learned he had MS. “There was no mention of treatment, no helpful advice. I could feel the neurologist's shrug through the wire. I sat alone and in silence. I was only 25, and did not know what to do. No neurologist I’ve come across has much to offer, beyond a few new drugs. I reach out, but with nothing to touch.” Like all those who receive the diagnosis, Cohen had to confront the bleak reality that his brain would eventually give out on him.

Today, Cohen is 66 and retired. His hair is still thick, but it is now fully gray. He walks with a cane, and there is a tremor in his voice. A stud in his left earlobe alludes to a younger self, a self who is aware of the disease festering in his brain but not yet cowed by it. Perhaps worst of all, for a man whose life has been lived in images, he can barely see: The memoir he wrote in 2004 is calledBlindsided.

Though we met across from the CBS studios where he made his career, Cohen did not choose the location out of nostalgia. We were at the Tisch MS Research Center of New York, where Cohen is one of the first 20 or so patients to be enrolled in a stem cell therapy treatment pioneered by Dr. Saud A. Sadiq, whom Cohen had met at a conference. The therapy, still in the early stages, harvests stem cells from subjects’ bone marrow and transforms them in a laboratory into “neural progenitors.” Injected into the patient’s spinal fluid, the neural progenitors could eventually lead to the repair of the myelin sheaths in the brain, an organ Cohen calls in his book “that exotic place just north of the neck.”

Biogen Idec employees check on the progress of the Multiple Sclerosis therapies being made in the manufacturing room on March 13, 2013.Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe/GettyCohen has been chronicling his struggle with MS on a blog called Journeyman. There, he wrote of his first treatment from Sadiq, which was so uncomfortable he joked about it being “in violation of the Geneva Conventions.” Despite the discomfort, the trial appears to be safe. Whether it is effective remains unknown: One critic, Dr. Sally Temple of the Neural Stem Cell Institute, has said that it “is unlikely that these cells will replenish lost neural cells,” because harvested neural progenitors aren’t exactly like those native to the body. But after four decades of fighting his own brain, Cohen is willing to take chances, even those that involve long dates with long syringes.

Sadiq’s effort is part of a broader push to understand neurological disorders that affect the structure of the brain. As the baby boomers pass into senescence, more and more of that generation’s members will be felled by disorders like MS, Alzheimer’s (which affects 5 million Americans) and Parkinson’s (1 million). “Neurological disorders are going to be a rising tide of trouble,” says Dr. Dennis J. Selkoe, co-director of the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Selkoe is the co-director of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases, which the former first lady of Massachusetts intends to seed with $50 million in donations, including a reported “substantial gift” from herself and husband Mitt. Romney was diagnosed with MS in the late 1990s, and the center’s co-director will be her longtime neurologist, Dr. Howard L. Weiner of Brigham and Women’s. And to underscore the fact that brain disease knows no political distinction, the center’s board will reportedly include both true-blue Democrats, like Massachusetts congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III and Chelsea Clinton spouse Marc Mezvinsky, and high-profile Republicans like Mitt Romney and Fox News host and MS sufferer Neil Cavuto. Also on the board will be Richard Cohen’s wife, NBC talk show host Meredith Vieira.

And the push for a cure is folded within a greater mission to understand the brain, a task the White House has deemed one of its “grand challenges,” allocating some $100 million in federal research funds to that effort. The quest has been a long time coming. Selkoe explains that, for many years, a sort of “therapeutic nihilism” afflicted the study of the brain, a helplessness stemming from a lack of knowledge. That, in turn, scared off researchers. “There was only one guy in my medical school class who went into neurology,” he recalls. “And that was me.”

Neural progenitor cells in a culture medium.Eye of Science/Science Source

There's a Thief in the House

In 1868, French pathologist Jean-Martin Charcot described “la sclérose en plaques,” a buildup of lesions caused by injury to the myelin sheaths, the resulting damage to the nerve filaments (called axons) underneath and the scars that form in response. Though others had spotted the effects of MS on the brain, Charcot—often called the father of neurology—was the first to fully understand MS as its own disease (he also discovered amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).

We have learned plenty about MS in the 150 years since. We know, according to Selkoe, that it is “the quintessential autoimmune disorder,” one in which white blood cells (T lymphocytes, to be exact) cross the usually impermeable blood-brain barrier, eating away at the fatty myelin covering the nerves and thus leading to barren patches that, on a brain scan, are the telltale sign of the disease. We know MS does not have overly high heritability; we do know that there is a genetic component, rooted principally in a family of immune genes called the major histocompatibility complex, though dozens of other genes may have their say. Environment plays a role, too, with a lack of vitamin D seen as a risk factor: MS is more likely to afflict people who live far from the Equator. Smokers are at greater risk too, as are people who’ve had infectious mononucleosis, or mono.

While the mechanism of some brain disorders—autism, for example—remains poorly understood, we at least know some of what multiple sclerosis does and how it does it. Problem is, that hasn’t made it any easier to halt the ravages of the disease, at least in part because most MS lesions produce no symptoms. By the time a person is diagnosed, plenty of damage has already been done, the brain riddled with lesions. We come to realize that a thief has plundered the house, but that chilling knowledge won’t hamper his sure return.

The neurologist, then, plays the part of the overmatched but relentless detective, looking desperately for clues. “If MS is an immune disease, then you should be able to have an immune marker,” says Weiner, one of the nation’s leading authorities on the disorder. He has called finding a biomarker that could be discerned by a simple blood test “one of the next major frontiers” in MS research.

A patient suffering from multiple sclerosis in its primary progressive form works on a precision and manual dexterity test.ASTIER/BSIP/Corbis

Awareness of MS often comes slowly, especially since the vast majority of patients have the relapsing-remitting form of the disorder, which waxes and wanes. (About 10 percent have the more severe primary progressive form of MS, in which there are no such periods of retreat.) The first symptoms may be hardly noticeable: numbness in the limbs, a tingling down the spine when the head is bent forward (a sensation that has its own name in neurology: Lhermitte’s sign). But there are no lumps, no bleeding, and one may have plenty of time before the disease strikes again, though strike again it certainly will. In Blindsided, Cohen acknowledges that because MS is a chronic, nonfatal condition, it “occupies a lowly position in the hierarchy of suffering.”

The disorder will usually advance haltingly, covertly, slipping past even the hypochondriac who studies the shape of every mole but may think nothing much of the seemingly innocuous tingling in his right arm. That’s an unfortunate aspect of the disorder: Dr. Mark S. Freedman, a neurologist at the University of Ottawa, has found that early intervention could have a significant effect in shaping the outcome of MS treatment.

Weiner’s team has identified potential biomarkers that could signal the presence of MS, with circulating MicroRNA as one promising agent. A researcher at the University of Geneva, Dr. Cindy Salvisberg, has discovered that MS patients have an elevated level of a protein called serpin A3 in their tears. But until large-scale testing confirms either these or others as viable biomarkers, it will take the dropped coffee mug or persistently numb leg for the realization to dawn that something serious is amiss.

Stripped Bare

The breakthrough everyone’s after is the one that will heal the brain, not just seal it off from future attacks. The first true therapy for MS appeared in 1993: betaseron, which belongs to a class of drugs called interferons, compounds that disrupt the way rogue T lymphocytes communicate with each other and help keep them from crossing the blood-brain barrier. They are able to slow the progress of MS and perhaps lessen the severity of symptoms. They cannot, however, erase extant ravages. “None of the therapies are restorative or reparative,” explains Dr. Rohit Bakshi, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s.

I met Dr. Ari J. Green of the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), at the medical school’s gleaming new campus in the city’s Mission Bay neighborhood. Green, an ebullient young South African expatriate, calls himself “Weiner’s grandson”—his mentor at UCSF is Dr. Stephen L. Hauser, who was in turn mentored by Weiner. The world of MS research may be bigger than it once was, but it’s still not that big.

Myelin, the protective sheath covering nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord is slowly replaced by sporadic patches of scar tissue (sclerosis), thus progressively paralyzing the central nervous system.Cavallini James/BSIP/Corbis

Green isn’t just trying to stop the disease; he is trying to reverse it. He and a colleague at UCSF, Jonah R. Chan, along with several other collaborators, are trying to find a way to stimulate cells called oligodendrocytes, which make myelin, to repair the axons stripped bare by MS. Instead of injecting stem cells, like Sadiq in New York, they are trying to galvanize the body to do the work itself. In August, Green, Chan and their colleagues published a paper in Nature Medicine called “Micropillar arrays as a high-throughput screening platform for therapeutics in multiple sclerosis.”

The title is daunting, but the premise is simple. A culture dish is dotted with synthetic glass pyramids that act the part of an unsheathed nerve. In a sort of forced prom dance, the pyramids are paired with oligodendrocytes. Then comes the potentially magic potion. Green and Chan wanted to see which compounds could stimulate the oligodendrocytes to wrap myelin around the pyramids. They applied 1,000 different molecules to the plates, then measured the thickness of the myelin rings. They discovered that no compound was as effective as an over-the-counter antihistamine called clemastine. The same medicine you take to treat a runny nose during the spring allergy season might also play a crucial role in regenerating the brain.

Of course, plenty of study remains: Clemastine may be safe for human use, but that doesn’t make it an effective MS therapy. Nevertheless, Green is optimistic, and expects initial results by the spring. He also admitted to some challenges. While Green believes his method is more sophisticated than Sadiq’s, he does not know whether in vitro results can be replicated in human subjects.

Others are working to halt MS that is no longer in the intermittent relapsing-remitting stage but has entered a progressive stage in which the brain’s degeneration continues at a steady clip. There’s “very little we can do about progressive MS,” explains Lior Mayo, a young Israeli neurologist who joined Weiner’s lab five years ago. He is working on a nasal vaccine, which is intended to enhance the immune system’s ability to regulate itself. If his research holds up, there would be no needles, no lengthy infusions, just a quick spray into the rich mucosal lining of the nose. From there, the antibodies would travel to the immune system, where they would forfend attacks on the central nervous system.

Like most of the other researchers I spoke to, Mayo is both deeply hopeful and thoroughly uncertain. The brain, after all, does not easily give up its secrets.

A patient has an MRI scan performed on him in a hospital.Blend Images/Vetta/Getty

Diagnose and Adios

When the Olympic flame arrived at Salt Lake City for the Winter Games in 2002, it was carried in part by Ann Romney, whose husband Mitt was then heading the city’s committee for the event. Romney did not carry the torch for long: a fifth of a mile, perhaps. But it was momentous journey nevertheless, because four years earlier, she had been diagnosed with the remitting-relapsing form of MS. “We were looking at, potentially, us seeing a wheelchair in her future,” her husband told CNN in the summer of 2012, as the Olympics in London were about to start.

The brief run with the flame in Salt Lake City signaled a turning point in her fight. “That was when I knew I was going to be OK,” Ann Romney told me, shortly after she announced the pledge to raise $50 million for the Romney center.

Romney says she was a “pretty athletic, pretty healthy person,” an accomplished equestrian who raised five sons. Her first symptom was a common and seemingly innocuous one: a numbness in her right leg. She thought it was a pinched nerve. But then other symptoms appeared: loss of balance, fatigue. She described these to her brother James A. Davies, who is an ophthalmologist. His advice was ominous: “You need to call a neurologist.”

Romney went to a major Boston hospital, where “the diagnosis was clear.” But despite that, there was little sense of urgency. “A pat on the head, and call us when it gets really bad,” she remembers, incredulously, of the treatment she got there. “That was it.” (In Blindsided, Cohen calls that approach “diagnose and adios.”)

“I remember thinking my life was 100 percent over,” Romney says. On a friend’s advice, she went to see Weiner two months after her initial diagnosis. He immediately put her on a steroid treatment, and though he was able to stop the progression of the disease, he could do nothing about the lesions already blemishing her brain. Romney says that for the next four or five years, she was “hanging on there by a thread,” and even though the progression of her MS has been halted, she says “there’s always a Charlie Brown black cloud” looming over her.

On the day I spoke to Romney, a niece to whom she had been close passed away from complications relating to Alzheimer’s, a disorder that in many ways remains less understood than MS. In addition to those two ailments, the Romney center will focus on ALS, Parkinson’s and brain tumors, which have more in common with neurological diseases than with other cancers.

“There are gonna be some breakthroughs in the next decade,” Romney told me. “I really believe that.”

Romney has been lucky, with some of the finest medical care in the nation keeping her MS at bay. But the disorder has plenty of other prey. Others are now feeling the first tremors of multiple sclerosis, the initial numbness, the suspicious tinge. They, too, will need someone to help them run again.

Carly, 32, is an Italian cross-border commuter. In order to work freely five days a week she drives 6.9km from Como, northern Italy, through the Alps to Chiasso in Ticino, the Italian-speaking area of Switzerland. Carly is a sex worker. “Switzerland offers safer spaces to work,” she says. “In Italy streets are dangerous, you do it in the car and you never know what may happen. Italians are lewd because prostitution in our country is still a taboo”.

And in Ticino there are no pimps: “What I earn, once I’ve paid taxes, goes straight into my pockets.” In Chiasso Carly’s income is higher than what it was in Como – about 8,000 Swiss francs per month. “My husband knows what I do and supports me. He’s a mason and earns just €500. We need the money, we’ve got a three-year-old daughter. We’d like to buy a house in Switzerland and settle here one day.”

Carly works six hours a day – from noon to 6pm – and shares an apartment with another Italian commuter colleague. At the end of her shift, she drives back to her family in Como. When she’s away for holidays she rents her room to other co-workers from Milan. “Things here are much simpler. First, differently from Italy, prostitution is regulated. All you need to do is register at the police office, tell them you’ll be prostituting yourself and get an official work permit as a self-employed worker.”

The great thing about Ticino, explains Carly, is this special police section, called Teseu, which is in charge of controlling the sex industry by cracking down on abuses and violences. “They have my mobile number and you can call them up anytime in case of danger or need. They know where I live.” The police then forwards personal details to the taxman and regional health unit, handing over to the sex worker a list of doctors for free health checks. “Health controls are not compulsory but it’s a good way to show your clients that you’re not infected.”

Carly has a registered VAT and regularly declares her income: “I prefer to pay taxes, even if they’re high, in exchange for perfect services and social security. I’ll have a pension one day when I decide to retire. Plus, all expenses related to my job are deductible: mobile calls, travel, health checks, beauty parlours and even plastic surgery.”

A man stands in front of an enclosed wooden booth used for the sex trade in Zurich.Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

Getting the business running in Ticino is also pretty easy. “After I registered as sex worker I bought ads in newspapers and on sex-selling websites. Advertisement can be quite expensive but it’s certainly worth it: your mobile number is there for clients to reach you.” Yet finding an apartment may be tough: many owners either ask for enormous sums of money or demand “services” in exchange for a good rate. Carly settled with the latter option and currently pays 70 francs per day.

Ticino has always been considered a haven of the Swiss sex industry. Dozens of Italian sex workers, both women and men – regularly commute to Ticino especially on Saturday nights. Even university students who can’t afford to continue with their studies are lured by the profits of the Swiss red light scene. And it’s not just prostitutes. Sex seekers also commute to the Swiss border towns of Lugano, Cadenazzo and Bellinzona. Carly’s clients are all Italian, she says, mainly businessmen from Milan and Varese.

There are estimated to be roughly 600 registered sex workers in Ticino out of a total population of 340,000 residents. Nightclubs, private apartments, brothels and massage centres are the landmarks of the red light industry. Street prostitution is banned. But things are changing. The local government is trying to push through a new law aimed at cracking down on unregulated prostitution by confining the oldest trade to just licensed brothels, apartments and authorised sex districts. Carly however is optimistic: “Even if the legal framework gets tougher, Switzerland will remain a paradise for Italian sex workers compared to Italy. It will always be more convenient to us. So no matter what happens, I’m staying here.”

On the other side of the Alps it’s a different story. In Italy prostitution is legal but not regulated. Brothels were shut down in 1958 and, since then, sex workers have walked the streets at the mercy of pimps, local mafia clans and human traffickers. Those who can afford it work at home or as escorts and disguised massage therapists. “The act of selling one’s body is not considered as a crime but inducing or aiding prostitution is. The paradox is that clients and even taxi drivers are treated as pimps,” explains Democrat Senator Maria Spilabotte, who has presented a bill aimed at regulating sex trade across the peninsula. “It’s forbidden to stop in the middle of the street to pick up sex workers because this is seen as a danger to public order as it may cause car accidents. Owners who rent-out their apartment to prostitutes also commit a crime,” she says.

Italian mayors are criminalising clients with fines ranging from €150 to €500. Dimitri Russo, mayor of Castel Volturno, a mafia stronghold near Naples, is in the spotlight for having sent two of his female councillors out on the street dressed like prostitutes to lure and fine potential clients. “I have nothing against sex workers nor their clients. I just find it disgraceful to see these people walk the street. It goes against public safety and city decorum,” says Russo. “The institutions have abandoned us.”

In Zurich, where prostitution is legal, a sign explains the rules of a new sex drive-in. Drivers, who must be alone in their vehicles, negotiate a rate with one of the 40 prostitutes stationed and drive on to one of the nine partially enclosed wooden booths to have sex. Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

No wonder many Italian sex workers have fled to prosperous Switzerland. But there are also others who would like to stay in Italy and pay taxes like ordinary citizens. Efe Ball, Italy’s most popular transgender spokesperson, has waged war against the taxman. She recently staged a nude street protest against four tax notification letters with a total payment request of €700,000 despite the fact that she’s not considered a worker. “The state checked my bank account and now I’m seen and treated like a tax dodger but I’ve always wanted to register for VAT as a professional. It’s the first time in Italy’s history that the taxman knocks at a sex worker’s door.” Efe would like to enjoy the huge sums of money she earned in 15 years of hard work but now, even if she wants to, she can’t buy a car, nor a house: “Dogs in Italy have more rights than us. We’re ghosts.”

This is why Spilabotte would like to adopt the Swiss model. “Prostitution is just like any other job and we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Sex workers must be given rights, be free to pay taxes and contribute to their country’s GDP through VAT registration, which would also boost state coffers,” she says. According to a recent parliament survey there are over 70,000 prostitutes in Italy for nine million clients and a total turn-over of €5bn per year. Regulation would also help combat human trafficking. More than 60 criminal groups are currently exploiting streetwalkers, argues Spilabotte.

“Prostitution is added to Italy’s GDP calculations only when it helps to avoid European sanctions, but it’s not recognised as an economic activity,” points out Pia Covre, founder of the Prostitutes Civil Rights Committee, the country’s largest sex workers’ lobby. There are other 10 pro-prostitution bills pending in parliament, including one for the re-opening of brothels. But Italy, home to the Vatican, isn’t ready for the big leap forward. 

The fiery crash between a Metro-North train and sports utility vehicle Tuesday evening killed six and seriously injured 15 others, officials say, renewing safety concerns about the nation's second-largest commuter rail line.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo described the Westchester County crash to reporters as a "truly ugly and brutal sight" on Tuesday night.

Cuomo told reporters at a press conference at the site that seven died, but on Wednesday morning he told CBS This Morning that the number had been amended to six, according to Reuters.

"The number of deceased in the train itself dropped from six to five, so that was actually good news," Cuomo told the CBS program.

The SUV stalled at a railroad crossing near Valhalla, New York, AM New York reports. The collision ignited an explosion that engulfed the vehicle and part of the train in flames. The explosion then caused the track's 750-volt third rail to tear through the SUV and into the train's first car, Cuomo said. The vehicle's driver was killed, as were five people on board the train. The vehicle involved in the accident was originally reported by news outlets as being a black Jeep Cherokee, but according to a Metropolitan Transit Authority spokesman, it was actually a Mercedes.

Cuomo was surprised that there weren't more casualties, he admitted to reporters at the press conference.

This particular train's average ridership is 650 passengers, a spokesman for the MTA (which operates Metro-North) told Newsweek. The MTA did not have an exact figure of the total passengers at the time of the accident, but officials evacuated some 400 to a local rock-climbing gym.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is traveling to the scene of the accident, the agency announced on its website.

The grisly accident, the deadliest in Metro-North's history, comes after a series of fatal and injurious incidents since spring 2013.

For example, a Metro-North Spuyten Duyvil train derailment on December 1, 2013, killed four and injured 61. The NTSB concluded in a report that the driver's undiagnosed sleep apnea caused him to fall asleep at the controls, resulting in the train taking a curve at 82 miles per hour. The speed limit on that stretch of track was 30 miles per hour. On May 28, 2013, a New Haven Line train fatally struck a track foreman. A northbound train on the Hudson Line struck dead a railroad electrician on March 10, 2014.

The NTSB said in November that accidents from May 2013 to March 2014 killed a total of six and injured 126. The board slammed Metro-North leadership in a recent assessment, stating that "safety programs that were in place were not effectively used to manage the safety of its operations and employees.... Metro-North did not effectively investigate accidents and incidents to identify and fix safety deficiencies. In addition, known deficiencies were not corrected."

The NTSB also blamed the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for allowing fatal safety gaps to develop. "Had previous NTSB recommendations been implemented by the FRA, many of the safety issues encountered in these accidents could have been prevented," said an NTSB press release on its investigative report.

"Examination of the FRA’s national inspection program revealed that its system for prioritizing enforcement efforts was ineffective and that current methodology may not be effective in identifying systemic safety issues," the release continued. "This resulted in a lower FRA presence at Metro-North while track conditions were deteriorating, which increased the risk of a catastrophic accident."

This is a breaking news story and will be updated with developments.

France has entered the campaign to tackle the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram by conducting reconnaissance flights along the borders of Chad and Niger, according to French officials.

Despite French president Francois Hollande’s previous claims that French warplanes were operating in Nigerian airspace, French officials have since confirmed that French operations are limited to the airspace of Nigeria’s neighbours, Chad and Niger.

“Our air force is carrying out reconnaissance missions, but not over Nigeria,” a French defence ministry source told Reuters today. “Our support is limited to neighbouring countries such as Chad and Niger,” the source added.

The French government established an anti-Islamist operation in the Sahel region last year, entitled Operation Barkhane, with 3,200 troops stationed in the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, and 20 combat helicopters, six fighter jets and four drones located in the wider Sahel region.

Discussing how France’s involvement will work in the fight against the terror group, Imad Mesdoua, a political analyst at Africa-focused advisory Africa Matters, says that the country will probably play a supporting role to fill in gaps in its partners’ military and intelligence capabilities.

“My guess is that the French would help their counterparts spot any unwanted intrusion or incursions or pick up anything noteworthy,” he said. “These are really vast and arid territories and it’s tough for the already overstretched Chadian, Nigerian and Cameroonian forces."

Mesdoua says that cooperation between these three regional players is becoming increasingly important, as Boko Haram expand their attacks to the borders of Nigeria and they must work together to combat the jihadist threat.

The borders being monitored by the French air force and the borders being contested by the Chadian and Cameroonian militaries with Boko Haram.Luis Ouriach

France launched Operation Barkhane in order to tackle jihadists groups in the Sahel sub-region and protect its former colonies. Niger and Chad both used to be colonised by France and analysts say that the threat to Paris’ economic interests in the region, such as uranium mining and oil production, may have played a role in bringing France into the fight against Boko Haram.

“There is a lot of French economic interest in Niger and Chad, given that they are former colonies,” notes Manji Cheto, vice president at political risk consultancy Teneo Intelligence. “It’s clear that there are very strong French economic interests, not only in Chad and Niger, but also in the Sahel more broadly.”

France has been reluctant to deploy ground troops into other regions of the Sahel given that they already have over 4,000 troops on the ground between Mali in the west and Central African Republic (CAR) in the east.

However, France dispatched a number of security service operatives to the Nigerian capital, Abuja, last May in order to help find the Chibok schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram.

French nationals have previously been targeted by Boko Haram. In November 2013, a French priest was kidnapped by the group and a French family of seven were seized by the Islamists in northern Cameroon. A confidential Nigerian government report, seen by Reuters, confirmed that French and Cameroonian hostage negotiators had agreed to pay the Islamists £2.07m ($3.15m) in exchange for the French family.

The news of the French surveillance flights comes after the African Union (AU) agreed last week to the creation of a Multinational Joint Task Force [MJTF] of 7,500 troops to tackle the radical Islamist group.

On the ground, more than 2,000 Chadian troops crossed the Nigerian border yesterday to attack Boko Haram militants in the town of Gamburu, which was captured by the group last year. Chadian and Cameroonian forces also battled the group in the Cameroonian border town of Fotocol, where 200 Islamists and nine Chadian soldiers were killed in exchanges.

"Our valiant forces responded vigorously, a chase was immediately instituted all the way to their base at Gamboru and Ngala [in Nigeria], where they were completely wiped out," Chadian military spokesman Col. Azem Bermendoa said in a national television address on Tuesday night.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Nigeria Security Tracker estimates that Boko Haram have killed up to 10,404 people since January 2014. In its four-year-long insurgency, which seeks to create an Islamic caliphate in similar vein to that of the Islamic State, the group have captured territory equal to the size of Belgium.

The Hunt for Boko Haram, an in-depth ebook on the terrorists tearing Nigeria apart by Alex Perry, is available now from Newsweek Insights.

Ukraine’s armed forces could call up all female citizens of Ukraine aged between 20 and 50 to join the fight against pro-Russian separatists in the country’s eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, Vladislav Seleznev, spokesperson for the armed forces’ high command told Ukrainian news agency Unian today.

The former Soviet republic has been hard pressed for resources to combat the Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk since fighting erupted in the regions between the newly formed pro-EU government and pro-Russian groups a year ago.

Ukrainian finance minister Natalya Yaresko estimated the war is costing Ukraine $10 million dollars a day, earlier today. European finance ministers agreed to loan Ukraine €1.5 billion in addition to the €15 billion loan programme agreed by the EU and Ukraine last March, as the Ministry of Finance has estimated that the war has shrunk the country’s economy by 20%.

However, Kiev is unwilling to scale back its military in response to its economic problems as it is now prepared to extend the bracket for the nation-wide call to military service towards female citizens in a bid to reinforce its national security services and deliver on its plans to mobilise and enlist 200,000 Ukrainians in its arm forces by the end of 2015.

According to Seleznev, throughout the mobilisation period which began last month and will continue until April, Ukrainian women between the ages of 20 and 50 could be called up to serve as officers, while others aged between 20 and 40, could be called up to assist the military in support positions.

The spokesperson for the armed forces told press the personal records of female citizens will be screened and potential candidates for military services will be called up, based on evidence for previous desire to serve in the military, indications that they are of the right health to for army service or at the very least that their profession has given them some “army-relevant education”.

Seleznev did not elaborate on the specifics of the criteria, however he did indicate that however many women are successfully recruited into the Ukrainian armed forces, the “majority” of the will be in charge of medical duties, communications or logistical assistance, as opposed to regular combat duty.

By the end of the current recruitment cycle in April the Ukrainian armed forces have set a target to mobilise 60,000 new recruits.

According to Seleznev, near the end of 2014 as an emergency provision around 100 women were recruited for army service.

Yesterday Andriy Lysenko, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s National Security Services told journalists that 95% of army call-ups for the current recruitment cycle were completed with around half of the new recruits expected to join the armed forces by April, having already been sent to training.

According to a statement issued last month by major general Vladimir Talaylay the deputy head of command of Ukraine’s armed forces, 78,000 call-ups have been sent to Ukrainian citizens over the current recruitment cycle, and 46,000 of those having already been successfully assimilated into the army.

The Ukrainian army consists primarily of men aged 18-60 years old, however, according to Talaylay, any servicemen between the ages of 50 and 60 are not obliged to serve in the military during the call-up but have chose to do so voluntarily.

Britain has turned to a New Zealand High Court judge in a third attempt to find a chairman of a major inquiry into decades of child abuse and whether powerful figures covered it up.

The government ordered the inquiry last July in response to abuse allegations dating back to the 1970s that politicians and others did not follow up on and, in some cases, are accused of actively keeping secret.

Two previous chairmen appointed by Home Secretary Theresa May had to quit even before starting work because of their links to figures connected to the allegations, angering victims who question the authorities' desire to get to the truth.

It has been so hard to find someone with suitable experience and no establishment connections that May was forced to cast the net wide, reviewing 150 candidates before appointing Justice Lowell Goddard from New Zealand on Wednesday.

"I am now more determined than ever to expose the people behind these despicable crimes and the people and institutions that knew about abuse but didn’t act ... and that - in some cases - positively covered up evidence," May told parliament.

Over the last few years, Britain has been rocked by a series of child sex abuse scandals and revelations that celebrities and politicians were involved in widespread abuse.

These included high-profile cases such as those of BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, who abused hundreds of victims for decades, and accusations about Cyril Smith, a former lawmaker in northwest England. Both are now dead.

In the most shocking case, some 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were abused in Rotherham, northern England, by gangs of predominantly Asian men.

"I have said before, and I shall say again, that what we have seen so far – in Rotherham, Oxford, and Greater Manchester and elsewhere – is only the tip of the iceberg," May said.

"With every passing day, every new revelation, it is clear that the sexual abuse of children has taken place and is still taking place on a scale that we still cannot fully comprehend."

Some abuse victims said they would not cooperate with the inquiry unless its scope was widened and format changed.

May also announced the investigation would be placed under a statutory footing, meaning witnesses would be compelled to appear. The police would set up a national operation to coordinate all child abuse investigations into high-profile figures.

Republicans, who are inclined to snort at anything President Barack Obama does, were quick Tuesday to dump on the administration’s budget for fighting ISIS, saying it’s not enough to defeat an enemy that makes Al-Qaeda seem pale in comparison.

And if these critics of Obama’s strategy needed any more ammunition to make their case, ISIS gave it to them in spades, releasing a video that showed them executing a captured Jordanian pilot by burning him alive. Until now, the group’s preferred method of killing prisoners has been beheadings or machine-gunning them en mass.

Obama called the pilot’s execution by fire “just one more indication of the viciousness and barbarity of this organization.” And he proclaimed that “it will redouble the vigilance and determination on the part of the global coalition to make sure that they are degraded and ultimately defeated.”

But on Capitol Hill, where a growing number of critics have questioned Obama’s commitment to defeating ISIS, Republicans used the group’s latest atrocity to call attention to what they say is the paltry amount of money—$5.3 billion—that Obama requested in his proposed fiscal 2016 budget for the fight against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria, which he had presented to Congress just the day before.  

“His budget request is inadequate,” Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Newsweek. “He is not committed to actually defeating Islamic terror. He’s just trying to contain it the best he can and push it off until some other president has to deal with it.”

Johnson may have a point. The president has asked for $4 billion to continue his seven-month bombing campaign against ISIS targets, $700 million to train and equip Iraqi security forces, and $600 million to prepare and outfit moderate Syrian rebels. That’s out of a total $585 billion request for defense. Even nonpartisan independent experts say the request isn’t enough to wipe out ISIS anytime soon.

Around 4,500 U.S. military advisers are either in or on their way to Iraq to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces for a planned ground offensive later this year to recapture the northern city of Mosul, which was overrun by ISIS last summer. But on that front, too, Obama’s detractors say his strategy is doomed unless he commits more U.S. troops to the fight.

“I don’t care if it’s $700 billion,” Republican John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Newsweek. “The strategy is not going to work unless we have forward air controllers, special forces, intel and a whole bunch of other people on the ground.”

McCain called the $600 million budget request to train and equip moderate Syrian rebel “minuscule.” And he and other Republicans described as “immoral” Obama’s strategy in Syria, where ISIS controls roughly a third of the country.

“It’s militarily unsound and immoral to train any Syrian Free Army to go back into Syria unless you neutralize [President Bashar] Assad’s air power,” Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. “He will kill any force we generate.”

Thus, it looks as if Obama’s requests for funding for his anti-ISIS strategy will face a steep climb as the Republican-controlled House and Senate begin their annual process of assessing the president’s budget request and legislating appropriations. Graham said that he, for one, is “not going to spend a penny training an army that has no chance of succeeding. The Syrian training model is doomed to fail because the product that you’re creating is subject to being barrel-bombed out of existence by Assad, and [the administration] will not answer the question: Will we engage Assad’s air power to protect the troops we train?”

McCain, who is responsible for shepherding the annual defense authorization bill to the Senate floor, agreed. “It’s an immoral and flawed strategy that they’re employing,” he said. “I’m not going to add any money until I find out if there’s a strategy—none.”

Independent strategic analysts also agreed that the money Obama is seeking for the fight against ISIS is not enough to fund the kind of campaign that they say will be needed to uproot and destroy the terrorist group. According to Pentagon officials, the strategy calls for the training of 12 Iraqi and Kurdish brigades—roughly 24,000 men. The U.S. hopes that provincial militias—so called “national guards—can muster a similar number of fighters. U.S. intelligence officials estimate ISIS’s strength to be around 20,000 troops, along with American tanks and artillery captured from the fleeing Iraqi army. Although the U.S. bombing campaign has killed an estimated 6,000 ISIS fighters since it began last August, U.S. officials say the group recruits about 1,000 new fighters per month, raising questions about the aerial campaign’s overall effectiveness.

“For the mission at hand, the money is totally inadequate,” Christopher Harmer, a strategic analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Newsweek. “If we are trying to destroy a terrorist outfit that has morphed into an insurgency that has now morphed into some form of a state-based military, it’s going to take a lot more than that.”

Harmer, a 20-year U.S. Navy veteran, said the U.S. air campaign against ISIS can only accomplish so much. To defeat ISIS, a capable Iraqi ground force will be needed to root out the militants in house-to-house, door-to-door combat and coordinate with U.S. warplanes providing close air support. “It’s going to take a lot of money for them to get manned, trained and equipped at that operational level of expertise,” he said.

Harmer compared the looming ground battle against ISIS to the U.S. military’s so-called Iraq “surge” in 2006, when Sunni tribes in Anbar province allied with U.S. forces against the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, the forerunner of ISIS. Back then, the surge required tens of thousands of U.S. troops, thousands of Sunni tribesmen on the U.S. payroll, U.S. airpower and U.S. intelligence to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq. And it was a two-year effort that cost tens of billions of dollars.  

“Today ISIS is bigger than Al-Qaeda in Iraq ever was,” said Harmer. “So if it took us tens of billions of dollars to execute the surge eight years ago against an enemy that was smaller and less capable than the one we’re facing today, it’s going to take at least that much money now to go against an enemy that is bigger, better financed, better trained, better equipped and a lot more radical.”

Robert Gates, who served as Obama’s first defense secretary, has joined the chorus of those who say he can’t defeat ISIS on the cheap. “The president has set an ambitious and—I think under current circumstances—an unrealistic goal when he talks about our intent being to destroy ISIS,” Gates told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “With the means he has approved so far, I think that’s an unattainable objective.”

Analysts also note that during the surge U.S. troops had close, around-the-clock air support. Today, they say, it will be extremely difficult for U.S. warplanes to provide such support to Iraqi ground forces without American forward air controllers—usually U.S. special forces on the battlefield that direct airstrikes at enemy targets. So far, Obama has been unwilling to put such U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq.

But that may be changing. Outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Sunday that the U.S. may need to send more noncombat ground troops to Iraq to help defeat ISIS forces. He said such troops could include forward air controllers to identify and direct fire on ISIS targets, as well as intelligence officers. “I think it may require a forward deployment of some of our troops,” he told CNN.

But Hagel also seemed to confirm Republican concerns about Obama’s reluctance to order a larger U.S. footprint in Iraq. “I would say we’re not there yet,” he added. “Whether we get there or not, I don’t know.”

Dear Anti-Vax Parents,

In the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak, there’s been a lot of heated talk about parents who choose not to vaccinate their children. It seems like the medical community is now protesting even louder than the anti-vax groups were a couple years ago. But I want to take a moment and apologize for the harsh tone some of us have taken. It’s not personal. We’re not mad at you.

We are mad at people like Andrew Wakefield, who fabricated a study linking vaccines to autism and scared millions of parents into avoiding vaccinations. We are confused by Jenny McCarthy, who has zero medical training, but somehow managed to lead a massive movement against immunizations (although she now claims that she’s not anti-vaccines). We are infuriated by Dr. Bob Sears, who certainly knows better, but capitalizes on your fear for his own profit, while placing your children’s lives at risk.

It’s not your fault. You’ve been misled. You’ve been lied to. And all you wanted to do was to protect your children, whom you love deeply. We’re really not that different. Pediatricians across the country have dedicated their lives to protecting your children. None of us picked pediatrics for the money (although I like to make surgeons laugh by telling them that I did). We don’t get kickbacks from vaccine companies. None of us sells millions of books recommending that you follow the CDC’s immunization schedule—that’s a hard book to get published. We get no joy from sticking your kids with needles (and neither do our nurses). We do it because we care, and because we love your kids, too.

Really, the only difference between you and us is that we know how effective vaccines can be. We know the diseases they prevent. We know that about two in 1,000 kids with measles will die, that pertussis can kill babies and that varicella (chickenpox) can cause more than just an itchy rash. We understand that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a quality control system designed to monitor for potential complications, not a registry of adverse events that are indisputably linked to vaccines. We view immunizations as one of the most important medical advances in the prevention of infectious diseases. We know that immunized children are less likely to die from preventable diseases.

So let’s band together. We’re not evil—and you’re not, either. We all want nothing more than healthy, happy kids. And you don’t have to trust us—feel free to do your research. But get your facts from reputable sources. Talk to your doctor openly about your concerns. And if your child isn’t immunized, tell the health care providers that take care of her; it changes our management, and it could save your child’s life.

 - Your Child’s Pediatrician

Chad Hayes writes a blog, Chad Hayes, MD, which is where this article first appeared. Follow Hayes on Facebook and Twitter @chadhayesmd   

Infamous hacker group Anonymous have called for several demonstrations in the UK to protest against what they believe is a huge coverup of paedophile networks by “those who are meant to protect”.

Anonymous have recently turned their attention to international and institutional paedophiles, including those connected to the Westminster child sex abuse scandal currently unfolding in the UK. The group are now calling for people to ‘take to the streets’ next Friday in London’s Trafalgar Square, Glasgow and Essex.

Heather Marsh, speaking on behalf of  the group, explained that “Operation Death Eaters”, as the project is referred to, is not only seeking to expose those responsible for the crimes, but also those who enabled the sexual abuse to continue.

On the Facebook page for the march, the OpDeathEaters write that the protests will take place “in the street, on social media, in your communities everywhere” and the aim is to inform the public of “the high level complicity and impunity in the paedosadism and child trafficking industry and the need for independent inquiries [sic]”.

Friday the 13, #OpDeathEaters Global Solidarity for Independent Inquiries Action | http://t.co/TFwDb35xF5https://t.co/FTB3OaOFg8

— OpDeathEaters (@OpDeathEaters) February 4, 2015

Britain has been rocked by allegations of historic child abuse since following his death it emerged that DJ and TV presenter Jimmy Savile had sexually abused children throughout his career. Several people have now come forward to say that they were abused by powerful members of the establishment, including senior Westminster politicians, and that police covered up the accusations.

Today marked the appointment of the third head of the ongoing inquiry into historical child sex abuse, almost four months after Dame Fiona Woolf stepped down. New Zealand judge Justice Lowell Goddard will now lead the panel after her two predecessors were forced to withdraw from the roles due to their connections with the establishment.

Despite being announced last July, the inquiry has faced difficulties both in finding a leader, and also in organizing a panel which the survivors of abuse are happy with. Its purpose is to investigate claims of a ‘VIP’ Westminster paedophile ring operating in the 1980s.

New revelations also emerged today about the child sex abuse scandal in Rotherham, Yorkshire as the Times revealed that a police officer and two councillors have now been accused of also being involved. The police officer faces allegations of passing information about vulnerable children to abusers who then targeted them.

The revelations were published on the same day that a report, carried out by the National Crime Agency and government official Louise Casey, declared that the Rotherham Council cabinet is "not fit for purpose". The entire cabinet have now said they will resign. Among other findings, the report declared that the council’s failings include whistleblowers being paid off and officers ignoring a local youth project’s warnings that abuse was occurring in the town.

In August 2014 it was revealed that almost 1,400 children had been abused in the town over a 16-year period from 1997 to 2013.

The new details are likely to spur on Anonymous’s mission to expose paedophiles in the establishment. One of their first objectives of OpDeathEaters is to create a database which can track all the figures who are, or were, involved in known child sex abuse cases and also to collect victim’s testimonies.

Marsh explains that the group have two obstacles in their search for justice: “The powerful support and perceived credibility of the accused and the frequently very vulnerable positions of the accusers.”

Two days ago it was revealed that Margaret Thatcher tried to step in to stop Sir Peter Hayman, a senior politician at the time, being linked to a paedophile scandal, despite the fact she was shown documents detailing his “obscene correspondence” and “sexual perversion”.

Oil plays an even bigger role in influencing foreign military intervention than is generally acknowledged, according to a new economic analysis, lending support to so-called “conspiracy theorists” who claim that oil helps drive these sorts of decisions.

The study, published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, found that a country was more likely to intercede in another nation's civil war if the latter had large oil reserves, and if the intervener was a net importer with a high demand for the resource.

It sounds pretty intuitive, but the theory had never before been systematically tested using a large data set, says Andrea Ruggeri, who studies quantitative methods in international relations at Brasenose College in the United Kingdom.

“The debate on the role of oil and foreign military interventions has been always characterized by anecdotal evidence, in the best cases, and weak conspiracy theories, in the worst ones,” says Ruggeri, who wasn’t involved in the study. “This is clearly... the most sophisticated and thorough statistical analysis on whether and how oil can matter.” The study concludes that it does, in fact, matter—a conclusion that, Ruggeri says, is “an important scientific leap for our understanding of international relations.”

The larger the demand for oil in a given country, the more likely it is to intervene in another’s civil war. “The magnitude of this effect is bigger than other factors usually [cited as] reasons for intervention, such as the presence of ethnic ties between countries, or the balance of military power between the government and rebels,” says study co-author Vincenzo Bove, an economist and assistant professor of politics at the University of Warwick.

France’s foreign policy in its three former African colonies of Chad, Niger and Mali since the 1970s provides a good example. In Chad, large oil reserves were discovered in 1969. Civil war broke out in the 1970s, and France became heavily involved, supporting the standing government in its fight against rebels. Unrest also broke out in Niger around the same time, but France didn’t intercede—and as it happens, Niger has no oil.

Likewise, there was civil war in Mali in the 1990s, during which time the country wasn’t thought to have much oil, and France didn’t intervene. But oil was discovered in the mid-2000s, and after it was found, the French took an active role in supporting the government after a secessionist attempt in 2012. “Although the key reason cited by France for intervening was to contain Islamic extremism, the incentives for intervention have arguably also increased with the presence of oil in the country and high oil prices,” the authors wrote in the study.

The study covered the period from 1945 to 1999, and didn’t analyze wars between countries, such as United States military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although the demand for oil may have played a role there, Boze’s research isn’t directly relevant in this case, he says.  

The team analyzed involvement in civil wars because these internecine struggles represent 90 percent of current armed conflicts in the world, vastly outnumbering the amount of wars between sovereign nations, he says.

Boze says that as America becomes less dependent on oil imports, “we might expect U.S. to intervene less” around the world. Meanwhile, it stands to reason that China might become more involved in civil wars elsewhere because the country imports much of their oil—something already hinted at by their military involvement in United Nations peacekeeping activities in Africa and elsewhere, he says.

For example, China will send 700 troops to South Sudan as part of a U.N. peacekeeping mission. China has major oil claims in that country—they have spent billions of dollars and own at least 40 percent of South Sudan’s biggest oil field, for example, according to Foreign Policy. 

A Japanese man has been arrested following allegations that he drugged and raped over 100 women while pretending to run a clinical trial, though detectives have said that this number could be considerably higher.

For two years, until November 2013, 54-year-old Hideyuki Noguchi reportedly posted adverts asking for volunteers to participate in "clinical research measuring blood pressure during sleep", despite having no medical expertise.

He then lured the women to hotels or hot springs where he gave them a powerful sedative before raping them. Police have also disclosed that he filmed the assaults while broadcaster TBS said that Noguchi sold on the footage to porn companies or posted them on the internet, making more than $85,000 in the process.

The women’s ages are believed to have ranged from teenage to 40. 39 of the women are known to have come from  Tokyo, Osaka, Tochigi, Shizuoka and Chiba.

Let me say this much in defense of the embattled fraternities of Dartmouth College: As a pledge during the winter of 2000, I was never forced to wade in a “kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen,” as one student claimed he did in a dismayingly viral 2012 Rolling Stone article titled “Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy.”

Oh, there were veritable oceans of bad beer. And, for some reason, everlasting brotherhood involved the ingestion of several Taco Bell gut-bombs in a freakishly short span of time, with predictable results. I am also pretty sure that I consumed a living goldfish. Reason, again, unclear. There was, near the end of the boozy affair, a pig that we pledges were forced to roast on a spit for the duration of a whole night. It was many years before I could eat barbecue again.

But at least there was no thrashing in the bodily effluvia of others. Or, if there was, I had enjoyed too much of Milwaukee’s Best to remember.

The fraternities of Dartmouth are proof that there is very much such a thing as bad publicity. To wit, holding a “ghetto party” (1998) or a Bloods and Crips party (2013). What parent can justify spending $50,000 a year for that? In 1999, the Gamma Delta Chi fraternity actually staged a “panty raid” at two sororities. This seemed hilarious to my still-teenage mind, the very stuff that made college the proverbial four best years of one’s life. It seems a lot closer to brute sexual aggression today.

Dartmouth’s current president, Philip J. Hanlon, was himself once a member of Alpha Delta, the fraternity on which Animal House is based. Hanlon—or “Juan Carlos,” to his onetime brothers—arrived on campus to assume the presidency in the midst of the fallout from the Rolling Stone article, along with other unflattering revelations about the legendary depravities of Webster Avenue’s frat row. After watching applications plummet, he spoke out last spring against a “culture where dangerous drinking has become the rule,” a refreshingly strong rebuke to the fraternities that have long controlled social life on campus.

Dartmouth is hardly an outlier in this respect, its notoriety replicated at virtually every college in the nation with a Greek system. Peggy R. Sanday, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist who has extensively studied rape at fraternities, has written that these so-called brotherhoods often have a “superior status” because they are older and more numerous than sororities, which rarely hold parties. Fraternities relish their power, Sanday argues, fostering a culture “that makes sexual exploitation a condition of manhood.”

The evidence is on her side. Fraternity brothers are three times more likely than their nonaffiliated peers to commit rape, a 2007 study found. Greek houses are often the primary purveyors of alcohol on campus, which is involved in 89 percent of collegiate sexual assaults. Women are not guests at fraternity events but, as one Georgia Tech fraternity deems them, “rapebait.” An intelligent, accomplished young woman becomes a “girl” whose own will can easily be disregarded or subverted. Or, to borrow from the chant of a Yale fraternity, “No means yes, yes means anal.” And it is just as clear that fraternities exercise their “dark power” (to borrow a phrase from Caitlin Flanagan’s masterful plunge into the Greek abyss) over administrators who are supposed to monitor them. Of the 95 colleges being investigated by the federal government for the mishandling of sexual assault complaints, all but about a half-dozen boast an active Greek system.

Among those facing investigation is nearly half of the Ivy League: Dartmouth, Harvard and Brown. Yale isn’t on the list but was recently the subject of a similar probe. So was Princeton. Columbia, where a female student has taken to carrying a mattress around campus until her alleged rapist is expelled, is under investigation along with Barnard, its sister school. If these are the colleges that produce our leaders, it’s no wonder that so many Manhattan investment banks and Silicon Valley tech firms replicate the sexual politics of a fraternity basement on a Friday night. Same players, same rules. Impunity is a powerful drug, especially when laced with a dusting of silence.

To his credit, Hanlon appears unwilling to let the present state of affairs continue. Late last week, he released a plan, called “Moving Dartmouth Forward,” whose centerpiece is a ban on hard alcohol at the college, a bold measure predicated on his well-grounded belief that the consumption of liquor is inordinately responsible for the social ills plaguing Dartmouth. Hanlon is also moving to eliminate semester-long pledge terms, a sign that he intends to weaken the Greek houses. And he is instituting residential clusters, hoping students will choose to stay on campus instead of flocking to Webster Avenue.

Combined, these tough new rules may be enough to vitiate the Greek system and send the national media looking elsewhere for tawdry frathouse exposés. There will be a little less drinking; the next panty raid or ghetto party will be met with the summary expulsion of the responsible house. Alumni will praise Hanlon as the savior of Dartmouth and its U.S. News & World Report rankings. They will call him a moderate with a vision.

Moderation, though, is precisely the problem. The moment clearly calls for a national leader to articulate why fraternities, a vestige of the 19th century, have no business on a 21st century campus. Why boys can no longer just be boys. Someone who diagnoses campus sexual assault as an epidemic, not something perpetrated only by the occasional outlier. A president who can eloquently equate the treatment of female students today to that of Jewish and black students 50 years ago—a matter of moral principle, not administrative policy. Someone who is unafraid of phone calls from angry alumni.

While some colleges have already closed down their Greek houses, Dartmouth’s fraternities are among the best known in the country, often landing the school on lists of the nation’s frattiest colleges. Hanlon could trade in this notoriety, instead of merely disguising it, using the bully pulpit of an Ivy League presidency to boost similar frat-busting efforts across the nation.

Often, the Ancient Eight are accused of being self-interested institutions where one-percenters are minted and polished. Once in a while, though, these schools recognize that their prominence carries with it a greater responsibility. In the 1960s, for example, Yale’s patrician president Kingman Brewster Jr., declared that he would not “preside over a finishing school on Long Island Sound,” according to his biographer Geoffrey Kabaservice. Despite the chagrin of some hidebound Elis, he admitted women and welcomed greater numbers of Jews and minorities, thus announcing that a first-rate student could come from Harlem or Brooklyn, not just Hotchkiss or Dalton. Hanlon, who has the support of most alumni, could similarly become an agent of change, instead of merely playing a custodian of tradition.

My own sojourn on Webster Avenue lasted two years. I drifted from the house and, eventually, helped administrators de-recognize it over a crude internal publication that demeaned women. Some called me a traitor. And maybe they were right. But I distinctly remember the horror of one of the victims, a woman who had just learned that the men whom she considered friends had used her as a lascivious punch line. One of the offending newsletters, for example, had promised to reveal a brother’s “patented date rape techniques.”

This was a joke, I guess. I hope. But there is no place for it Dartmouth. There is no place for it at Florida State. There is no place for it anywhere. 

Greece's new leftist government appealed to the European Central Bank on Wednesday to keep its banks afloat as it seeks to negotiate debt relief with its euro zone partners, but Germany rejected any roll-back of agreed austerity policies.

Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said after meeting ECB President Mario Draghi in Frankfurt he believed Athens could count on central bank support during the short period it would take to conclude talks with international lenders.

Banking sources told Reuters that two Greek banks have begun to tap emergency liquidity assistance from the Bank of Greece after an outflow of deposits accelerated after the victory of the hard left Syriza party in a general election on Jan. 25.

The Greek government wants that funding to continue because if the ECB were to halt it, Greek banks could collapse, forcing the country out of the euro zone.

Promising to end five years of austerity, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Varoufakis are meeting senior officials across Europe to seek support for a new debt agreement.

However a document prepared by Germany for a meeting of EU finance officials on Thursday made clear Berlin wants Athens to go back on promises to raise the minimum wage, halt unpopular sales of national assets, rehire fired public sector workers and reinstate a Christmas bonus for poor pensioners.

"The Eurogroup needs a clear and front-loaded commitment by Greece to ensure full implementation of key reform measures necessary to keep the programme on track," the document, seen by Reuters, said in reference to euro zone finance ministers.

"The aim is the perpetuation of the agreed reform agenda (no roll back of measures), covering major areas as the revenue administration, taxation, public financial management, privatisation, public administration, health care, pensions, social welfare, education and the fight against corruption."

A Greek official said the document showed Germany was entering into negotiations, but he added: "It is obvious that these suggestions will not be accepted by the Greek government. They are clashing with the recent mandate given by the Greek people and this not help with the growth perspective of Europe."

The new Greek leaders have had a cautious reception so far, even in left-leaning countries such as France and Italy which Athens had hoped would support its case for debt relief.

French President Francois Hollande said the euro zone's rules applied to everyone. European Parliament President Martin Schulz, a Socialist, said Greece risked bankruptcy if the country didn't stick to its commitments to EU partners.

European Council President Donald Tusk said after meeting Tsipras in Brussels that any solution must be acceptable to all member states.

"NO DOUBT"

Tsipras, 40, said after talks with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker that Greece respected European Union rules and would find a solution to its economic problems within the framework of EU law. There was no agreement yet, but talks were going in the right direction, he said.

After meeting Draghi, Varoufakis told Reuters: "The ECB is the central bank of Greece ... The ECB will do whatever it takes to support the member states in the euro zone."

"I have no doubt that we can conclude our discussions with our European partners, as well as with the IMF and the ECB, in a very short space of time so that we can kick-start the Greek economy," he added.

Without the support of its creditors and the ECB, Greece would soon find itself back in an acute financial crisis. Unable to tap the markets because of sky-high borrowing costs, the government has enough cash to meet its funding needs for the next couple of months. But it faces around 10 billion euros ($11 billion) of debt repayments over the summer.

The ECB's policy-making Governing Council is meeting to discuss whether to extend emergency funding for Greek banks, on what conditions and for how long.

"We outlined to him the main objectives of this government which is to reform Greece in a way that has never been tried before and with a determination that was always absent," Varoufakis said after his session with Draghi.

"We also stated categorically that the debt-deflationary cycle in which Greece finds itself is detrimental to all efforts to reform Greece. He was good enough to explain to us his own constraints."

An ECB source said Draghi had clarified the ECB's institutional mandate and "urged the new government to engage constructively and speedily with the Eurogroup to ensure continued financial stability".

Under ECB rules Athens needs to be in a bailout programme or actively negotiating a new one to qualify for emergency funding. The government's ability to issue short-term treasury bills to refinance itself is also limited by the bailout agreement.

With the Greek public determined to cast off the stigma of supervision by a troika of EU, IMF and ECB inspectors, and to regain economic sovereignty, the semantics of any new arrangement may be crucial.

A source familiar with the Greek position said after the talks with Draghi: "We are thinking of a bridging programme. You may not call it a 'programme' for political reasons but perhaps a contract."

The German document demanded that troika oversight continue.

ECB officials in the meeting talked about the rules on emergency funding and their desire that the Greeks reach an interim arrangement with the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers, which next meets on Feb. 16, the source said.

Varoufakis has so far said Greece will not extend the bailout programme when it expires on Feb. 28.

Tsipras won the election promising to negotiate a debt write-off, reverse some key reforms and end budget cuts.

Varoufakis has since struck a softer tone, saying Greece aims to swap its official loans for growth-indexed bonds and its ECB loans for perpetual interest-yielding bonds with no repayment date. Euro zone officials responded coolly, noting that the ideas amount to a partial write-off by other means.

Thousands of Iraqi Christians have established their own militia and are training to fight the Islamic State (ISIS) in the Nineveh Plains of northern Iraq.

The Nineveh Plains Protection Units (NPU) has 3,000 Christian men registered to be trained, while another 500 are already training for combat. The militia was founded by the Iraqi political party, the Assyrian Democratic Movement.

Another 500 volunteers from the group are already situated in Assyrian villages in northern Iraq, the majority of which were captured by ISIS when they marched across the country last summer. Approximately 30,000 Christians have since fled the Nineveh Plains for fear of falling into the hands of the radical Islamists.

Last November the American Mesopotamian Organisation, whose aim is to support the NPU, said that the primary mission of the militia is to “protect the remaining Assyrian lands from further attacks by ISIS” and then “liberate the Assyrian homeland of the Nineveh Plain” from the grasp of the radical Islamists.

John Michael, a British-Assyrian in Iraq, told the Catholic Herald: “This is our last stand, if this fails then Christianity will be finished in Iraq.” The religious outlet reported that the militia are receiving funds from the Assyrian diaspora in countries such as United States, Australia and Sweden and are also receiving training from an American security company.

Iraq expert Sajad Jiyad, asserts that the creation of the militia sends an important message to ISIS that these minorities will not allow their territory to be taken without a fight: “It’s also important for the locals to send a message to ISIS that they are not going to allow the demographic change to become permanent.”

Jiyad continues: “The Assyrians want their land back and they - as well as the Turkmen and the Yazidis - are sending a message that: ‘We are going to come back and we are not going to leave our villages and towns and our cultures to be destroyed. We want to come back to our homes and, no matter what we face, we’re willing to fight and take that back.’ I think that is a positive message for the entire nation.”

Last year, ISIS captured Iraq’s largest Christian town, Qaraqosh, forcing tens of thousands of residents to flee. The Christian towns of Tal Kayf, Bartella and Karamlesh were also seized by the Islamists. It is estimated that over 100,000 Christians have been displaced in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of northern Iraq because of the ISIS advance.

In areas now controlled by ISIS, minorities are routinely targeted by the group, specifically Christians and Yazidi Kurds. In Mosul, Christians were warned to convert to Islam or pay jizya (a tax paid by non-Muslims) and were told if they did not do either of these things they would have to leave the city for good or be killed.

Before 2003, the number of Christians in Mosul - a city believed to be the birthplace of Assyrian Christianity - was approximately 60,000, but the town’s Christian population has rapidly decreased in the last decade.

In the weeks before ISIS advanced in June last year, the number of Christians in Mosul reportedly dwindled to 3,000. After the group seized control of the city, residents reported churches and Christian shops being attacked. According to Christian Today, the ISIS fighters based in Mosul have also created a new marketplace to sell Christian goods which they looted from houses during their takeover of the city, entitled ‘Spoils of Nasara (Christians)’.

Since the advance of the Islamic State, some minority fighters have had success in their fight to reclaim lost territory in northern Iraq. In an offensive against the terror group last month, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters killed over 200 ISIS militants, ousting the group from almost 300 square miles of territory. They encircled Mosul on three sides and cut off vital supply lines to the nearby towns of Tal Afar and Sinjar.

The Kurdish forces were able to capture Makhmour, to the east of the city; the towns of Zimar and Wannah, and several Arab villages located in the Sinjar Mountains, west of Mosul; and the area around Mosul Dam, in what amounts to a Kurdish land-grab backed by Western airstrikes.

Assyrian Christians are one of the oldest ethnic groups in the Middle East whose foundations lie in Assyria, a historical region of northern Mesopotamia, but since the beginning of the 2003 Iraq War they have faced persecution from Islamic extremists. 

It takes a thick skinned man to serve as Vladimir Putin’s ambassador to the world for a term, let alone for almost two decades, but it seems Moscow’s most senior foreign official, hailed as “the formidable face” of Putin’s foreign policy has a softer side.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, who has headed the ministry since 2004 after spending the decade prior as Russia’s ambassador in the UN, has published a series of beat poems in today’s issue of the Russian arts magazine Russkiy Pioner (Russian Pioneer).

The Moscow-based monthly magazine, which collects submissions from aspiring Russian writers of both poetry and prose based on a set theme has printed three of Lavrov’s poems in its February edition, under the theme “foreign lands”, each set in a “loud, metropolitan, arrogant city”.

Lavrov’s first poem, written in 1989 as his term as Russia’s ambassador the UN’s New York headquarters had come to an end, is entitled One for the Road and it draws inspiration from a Manhattan horse carriage ride bordering on profundity with such illuminating turns of phrase such as the line: “How the hooves pound at the bay, and shake off the dusty inscriptions, old debts were duly paid, but at the expense of brand new bills.”

At the end of the poetic tour de force Lavrov’s narrator emerges from the carriage and remarks: “Ever-heavy I step into the clay, with a single step I cross the bay, I must not strain the umbilical cord, that stretches far across the land.”

His sequel to One for the Road, creatively titled One for the Road - 2 was written nearly 10 years later in 1996 and largely consists of the line “as it was yesterday”, repeated no less than 16 times, on every other line.

“As it was yesterday there is no house nor home for the soul, as it was yesterday - both first love and betrayal, as it was yesterday we didn’t put the guitar away until the morning,” goes one Kerouac-esque verse.

The poem also contains other cryptic gems such as “this hunger is no babe of mine, this drunk satiety in my throat, the road ahead - only the start of the road back”.

In Lavrov’s third poem, written in 1995, he narrates the voyage of “the two waves of immigrants in the last century”, where he laments on how the word immigrant “is not Russian but it has become such” and prophecies of a tragic outcome for the “third wave of immigrants” who will have to “guess where the bridge for their return lies”.

While he is perhaps better known for being Russia’s negotiator during the wars in Chechnya, Syria, Afghanistan and most recently Ukraine abroad, Lavrov has received high praise for his poetic works in his homeland as he was tasked with writing the official anthem for Moscow’s state university of International Relations.

Lavrov is not the only poet in Russia’s cabinet of ministers as his colleague, economics minister Alexey Ulyokaev has regularly published his verses in Russian journal Zname since 2011, most recently submitting a poem last month.

According to Russian politics and entertainment journalSnob, Ulyokaev has published three books of his poetic works to date.

While the Russian president has never publicly followed the example of his ministers and ventured into the world of poetry, in 2009 Putin, gave a glimpse of his artistic side by submitting artwork inspired by Ukrainian folklore for auction.

The news and images of ISIS burning Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh to death in a cage comes just days after the group decapitated a second Japanese hostage. Such horrific murders provoke, shock and dismay, which is their goal. By combining medieval brutality with 21st century social media, ISIS seeks the largest possible amount of attention for itself and its distorted variant of religio-messianism.

Such incidents require a more vigorous military, as well as messaging, response. The United States can intensify the role it has been playing in leading the coalition. But it is incumbent on senior religious figures indigenous to the Muslim world to counter ISIS’s narrative.

Holding al-Kasasbeh hostage had helped provoke a limited backlash against Jordan’s participation in the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS. Before the news of his murder, some of al-Kasasbeh’s Bararsheh tribesmen protested in Amman against King Abdullah and his decision to participate in the anti-ISIS campaign. Such demonstrations, particularly among tribesmen, are unusual in Jordan.

In its barbaric killing of al-Kasasbeh, ISIS hopes to drive an even greater wedge between Jordan’s Hashemite rulers and the small but not insignificant number of Jordanians sympathetic to ISIS, or at least opposed to Jordan’s fight against it. With Jordan now hosting over half a million Syrian refugees, there is considerable unease and conflict fatigue in the Hashemite Kingdom.

Employing its media savvy, ISIS released the images of al-Kasasbeh’s murder the same day as King Abdullah’s visit to Washington, even though the Jordanian pilot had apparently been murdered a month ago, according to sources in Amman. ISIS no doubt wanted to drive home the image of the Western-backed Abdullah being received in the capital of the anti-ISIS coalition’s leader.

Not wanting to play into this narrative, King Abdullah immediately cut short his visit to return back home. Upon return, he will likely rally the vast majority of Jordanians outraged by the murder of the pilot and take strong measures against incarcerated accused terrorists. ISIS knows and expects that.

But ISIS nonetheless hopes its defiant and gruesome murder of Jordan’s pilot, like the beheadings of other ISIS prisoners, will make some Jordanians question their country’s military support of the U.S.-led coalition and suggest that its participation is not worth the cost. ISIS calculates that provoking anguish and anger among its enemies will help generate new friends and recruits, or at least weaken its adversaries’ resolve. Doubtlessly, King Abdullah will try to prove this notion mistaken.

ISIS is seeking to project an image of itself as fierce. Such tactics could successfully distract attention from the significant battlefield setback that ISIS has just suffered at the hands of Kurdish fighters in Kobani, Syria, and elsewhere.

Yet ISIS’s projections of fierceness are not just a contrivance. Its capture and control of Mosul, Iraq, and large chunks of Syrian and Iraqi territory last June demonstrate the very real military power at its disposal. But it adds, as an ideological force multiplier, its brand of Islamist ideology.

That ISIS poses an ideological threat well beyond the battlefield suggests that the U.S.-led coalition’s reliance largely on air power is too limited. Sure, determined Kurdish fighters were successful in countering ISIS on the ground in Kobani with coalition support, but only after a protracted and deadly fight.

Similar fighters prepared to challenge ISIS on the ground in Iraq and Syria appear sorely lacking. But the ugly murder of al-Kasasbeh demonstrates that the anti-ISIS coalition needs a robust strategy to battle the Islamist militant forces on the ideological as well as the military battlefield.

Robert M. Danin is Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations website.