After watching the State of the Union address two weeks ago, 72 percent of viewers, according to one CNN poll, said that they felt President Obama’s policies would move the country in the right direction. And this is understandable—Obama’s speech had an upbeat tone and State of the Union addresses historically have been well received by the public. When reflecting on the past year of American foreign policy, for instance, Obama said, “[I]t is making a difference.”

“In Iraq and Syria, American leadership—including our military power—is stopping ISIL’s advance,” Obama said, though earlier reports indicated that the group was gaining ground. And when mentioning the highly controversial use of drones, Obama said, “I’ve...worked to make sure our use of new technology like drones is properly constrained.”

Is it true that Obama-led American deployments of drones has been “constrained”?

The January report on U.S. drone use by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), a nonprofit based in London, suggests otherwise.

Pakistan

According to the BIJ’s findings, the U.S. stepped up its drone campaign in Pakistan last month with five confirmed drone strikes and between 26 to 37 killed—the most strikes and the highest casualty rate in six months.

But more strikes doesn’t necessarily mean Obama is failing to keep his promise, argues Christopher Swift, adjunct professor of National Security Studies at Georgetown University. “What we really need to be looking at is: What’s the nature of the operations themselves.” It is true that the president never claimed that there were fewer strikes, only that the use of drones would be properly reined in.

Swift argues that if strikes occur amid a large-sized war, and the majority of the casualties are combatants, there is little reason to believe that this violates international law. Conversely, if there are a small number of drone strikes when there is not much of a war and everyone killed is a civilian, there is high cause for concern. The argument goes that it is the quality of strikes not the quantity.

But Swift acknowledges that there is an issue about whether the targets chosen are covered by the acts passed following 9/11. “The United States is hitting targets,” Swift says. “I worry that they are covered under the authorization for the use of military force.”

In Pakistan’s case, four out of five of the strikes reportedly targeted the Shawal area, known to be a major stronghold for armed groups in the country’s tribal areas. As the BIJ report implicitly indicates and Swift says upfront, the American tallies of strikes on Pakistani soil are questionable.

Part of the reason, Swift says, is that the Pakistani government openly opposes and criticizes U.S. drone strikes while covertly providing targeting lists and strike requests. The information aggregated by groups like BIJ is what is available with limited government cooperation. One can’t be entirely sure that there aren’t unreported strikes or who is being killed in each strike.

But BIJ also addresses that civilians are being killed outside the Afghan-Pakistan theater.

Yemen

The number of drone strikes continue to decline after peaking in 2012. While there was only one confirmed drone strike in January, there was a child around the age of 12 amongst the three people killed.

According to Naional Org for Victims of #Drones:12yr old Mohamed Tuaiman was killed in #Marib today by a drone #Yemenpic.twitter.com/rEVtJNw4eV

— Atiaf Alwazir (@WomanfromYemen) January 26, 2015

The confirmed drone strike took place during Yemen’s worst political crisis since the 2011 revolution, four days after the government resigned due to armed rebels overrunning the capital.

While Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said that all three killed belonged to the organization, an AQAP source rhetorically asked the Yemen Times, “How can a 12-year-old be a member of al Qaeda?” Although the use of child soldiers is well documented, for instance, in myriad African conflicts.

Swift attributes civilian deaths in Yemen to a multitude of factors, including the reliance on poor intelligence—overhead surveillance and Yemeni security services—to determine where adversaries are located, as well as AQAP deliberately sheltering amongst civilians. “That’s a war crime,” Swift says of insinuating guerilla forces among a noncombatant population.  

Somalia

There were two strikes in Somalia on January 31, with between 45 and 69 people killed—a death toll uncharacteristically higher than any other U.S. drone strike in the country.

While it is unclear if they were drone strikes versus another type of aerial assault, BIJ notes that 2014 saw the highest number of confirmed U.S. drone strikes in the east African nation of any year despite the administration’s praise of Somali government reforms.

In a televised interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, French reporter Didier François offered some insights on what it’s like to be an ISIS captive, after he was held for over 10 months in Syria, transported eight times around the country and then released.

ISIS typically demands ransom for its hostages, but France has denied paying any amount to the terrorist group. François believes it was “never only a question of money” and suggests that political pressure may have helped free him, as he was freed before France became heavily involved in the fight against ISIS.

François was held with a number of Western hostages who have since been killed, including James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig and Alan Henning. Though he would not speak at length about his interactions with a female American hostage, one of the few Americans thought to be still alive in ISIS captivity, he did say that the women were held in a separate area from the men. The female hostages “had a bit more freedom of movement” than the men did, but “being a woman doesn’t make it easier.”

It has been widely reported that several Western hostages converted to Islam, some before captivity and some during. François, however, said he was not offered a Koran, nor did he see guards with the book. “They didn’t even have the Koran; they didn’t want even to give us a Koran,” he told Amanpour. “There was never really discussion about texts or—it was not a religious discussion. It was a political discussion.”

As for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reclusive leader of ISIS, Francois describes him as a leader who pits groups against each another for his own advancement. “He always tries to push the Sunni tribes, the Bedouins, to fight against the Shiite, or the Yazidi, or the Christians. And...trying to play communities one against the other. That’s how he survives. That’s how he recruits.... The strongest parts of his organization are the tribes, the local Sunni tribes,” François explained.

Most of the prisoners were beaten, and while François escaped torture, he said local Syrians and Iraqis faced brutal punishment. “We could see some of them in the corridors when we were taken to the toilets, and we could see some people lying in their blood. You could see the chains hanging, or the ropes hanging, or the iron bars,” he said. He described his own beatings as “strong” but not constant, and he was not beaten every day.

During his captivity, François was guarded by “Jihadi John,” believed to be an executioner who came from the London area. “John” has appeared in the beheading videos of Foley, Sotloff, Henning and other hostages. “You can see on the video—he’s not somebody you’d like to have to deal with,” François said, adding that British members of ISIS are “harsher in their violence.” While the Brits also treated the hostages to more food and occasional sweets, they also gave them the harshest beatings.

Opponents of action to mitigate climate change often suggest that regulation could have a negative impact on jobs. But such a view may diminish the importance of other factors and obscure a fuller understanding of the big picture.

To accurately assess climate change mitigation activities, stakeholders need to consider other benefits, too. For instance, lower emissions could produce savings in the form of lower health care costs, reductions in premature death and greater well-being.

Research backs this up.

In a recent study published in Climatic Change, we examined the potential health care savings from reducing greenhouse gas emissions through different CO2-reduction activities in the United States. We found the reduction in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution that would accompany such activities could result in fewer health problems, potentially saving between $6 billion and $14 billion in health care costs in 2020, depending on the activity pursued. That’s $40 to $93 in health care savings per metric ton of CO2 reduction.

These same reduction activities could yield $10 billion to $24 billion in savings if implemented more rapidly. This is because, in our rapid-implementation scenario, 40 percent of the reduction activities’ CO2 goals for 2060 are achieved by 2020, compared to 20 percent under normal implementation.

Our results also indicate that avoiding adverse health outcomes from emissions offsets the costs of implementing climate change policies.

We also looked, specifically, at the health care savings associated with increasing the efficiency of coal-fired power plants, a pillar of the new EPA rules. We found that doing so could result in nearly $8 billion in health benefits, or $13 billion under the rapid-implementation scenario.

This kind of rigorous assessment of the health impacts of climate change mitigation is essential for guiding policy decisions, particularly as EPA’s emissions rules often face significant legal challenges.

But just as jobs and emissions aren’t the only issues, there are considerations beyond the health care sector, too. It’s important to account for the full range of a given climate policy’s costs and benefits, as well as the costs and benefits of inaction.

Stakeholders should be asking about the effect of each decision on issues such as disaster preparedness and recovery, international development and aid, and agriculture and food supply, to name a few. Who wins and who loses—and by how much—under both the proposed regulation and the status quo?

The world is quickly approaching a point where the question isn’t whether to respond to climate change—it’s how. Answering that question means seeing the big picture, which can be obscured by debates operating only on the prevailing emissions-versus-jobs spectrum.

The health impacts of mitigating climate change are just one part of a complex puzzle, albeit an important one. Stakeholders need to embrace a larger policy framework if they’re ever going to piece it together.

Ramya Chari is an associate policy researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. Jeffery Greenblatt is a staff scientist and Dev Millstein is a project scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Kristie L. Ebi is a professor in the Department of Global Health and the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof, or The Regents of the University of California.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Russia is leading a U.N. Security Council initiative to ratchet up pressure on countries to cut off the cash flow to Islamic State militants, Russia and council diplomats said on Wednesday.

The announcement comes after the 15-nation Security Council condemned Islamic State's burning alive of a captive Jordanian pilot.

Moscow is drafting a legally binding resolution on the subject.

"We are preparing (the resolution) and we hope it'll be adopted by the U.N. Security Council in the coming days," a spokesman for Russia's United Nations mission said.

Russia circulated a draft to the council's other permanent members - the United States, Britain, France and China - and is expected to distribute it to the full council soon, Western diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity. They noted that Moscow rarely drafts council resolutions.

The diplomats said Russia's concerns about Islamic State are acute given the number of Chechens that have joined the group.

Diplomats said the group's brutal killings of the Jordanian, Japanese and other hostages have strengthened the resolve of U.N. member states to act. They said one benefit of such a resolution is that it will highlight how unified the vast majority of countries are against Islamic State.

The resolution will focus on the three main sources of revenue for Islamic State: oil, the sale of antiquities and ransom from kidnappings.

The resolution will demand that countries not purchase oil from Islamic State, stop paying ransoms and not buy antiquities looted by the group.

"We know that the Syrian regime has bought oil, some of the Turkish have bought oil," a senior Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

He added that despite a council resolution banning the ransom payments, some countries continue to pay money to secure the release of hostages.

Prior to a U.S.-led air campaign against the group in Syria and Iraq, where Islamic State controls a wide swath of territory, its main source of revenue was oil.

In October, the International Energy Agency said the coalition's targeting of oil infrastructure held by the group had knocked crude production down to around 20,000 barrels per day (bpd) from a high of about 70,000 bpd achieved after the group took more territory last summer.

The Pentagon said on Tuesday that oil was no longer the Islamic State's top source of cash.

A second senior Western diplomat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the Islamic State's oil revenue has fallen to around $500,000 per day from more than $1 million two months ago.

According to a U.N. report in November, Islamic State raises several million dollars a month from illegal taxation and approximately $96,000 to $123,000 per day from ransom payments. In addition to antiquities, it said private donations were also a source of revenue.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates has withdrawn from flying air strikes in the U.S.-led international coalition campaign against Islamic State fighters, who are occupying parts of Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the UAE had suspended its participation in the air campaign after a Jordanian air force plane went down over Syria in December. The pilot was captured and subsequently killed.

"I can confirm that UAE suspended air strikes shortly after the Jordanian pilot's plane went down, but let me be clear that UAE continues to be an important and valuable partner that is contributing to the coalition," one official said.

The United States has said that the coalition includes more than 60 countries, carrying out various tasks, including military attacks, humanitarian support, propaganda and cracking down on Islamic State's finances.

Along with the United States, Washington says Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Bahrain have also participated in or supported air strikes in Syria. Australia, Britain, Canada and France have joined U.S. operations against Islamic State targets in Iraq.

President Barack Obama has sought to attract a broad coalition, drawing on as many regional countries as possible, to avoid the appearance that the campaign is just an endeavor involving outside powers.

The U.S. government has not acknowledged that the UAE has withdrawn from the flights. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told a regular briefing on Wednesday: "We are not going to confirm any reports about other countries and their military operations."

Nobody likes to think his or her iPhone was made from minerals derived from a country where warlords and mass rapists profit from the mines. So a year ago, Apple made a bold claim: It had audited smelters in its supply chain and none of them used tantalum from war-torn regions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

While Apple acknowledged that it could not make the same claim for gold, tin and tungsten—three other important commodities essential to modern electronics but mined in war zones—the announcement about tantalum was an important step for human rights advocates who have long called for more transparency from international companies.

But how can Apple be so sure?

Experts note the widespread smuggling of ore across porous borders in areas racked by conflict, with scarce paper trails for ore mined by villagers in small artisanal mines in countries where warlords control exports. Moreover, audit procedures at smelters in China and Russia are opaque and vulnerable to corruption. “We’re concerned that the audit procedures are not as transparent as they should be,” says Sasha Lezhnev, who oversees DRC conflict minerals issues at the Enough Project, part of the Center for American Progress think tank.

The disclosure by Apple, which just reported the largest quarterly profit of any company in corporate history, was unusual in that it went beyond a new regulation passed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2012 under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation act. That new rule requires U.S. publicly traded companies to audit their supply chains and disclose any use of conflict minerals—but not the names of smelters, as Apple did.

Apple’s data came through the Conflict-Free Sourcing Initiative (CFSI), a self-policing, voluntary group created in 2009 to vet smelters for the sources of potential conflict minerals. Backed by Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric and other major consumers of such ores, the audit program has seen various tweaks to its procedures as it clears smelters in recent years.

Nearly all computers, cellphones and other high-tech gadgets use tantalum, a pearly, blue-gray mineral found in Brazil and Australia but also in Rwanda and the DRC, which has endured what the International Rescue Committee calls the bloodiest conflict since World War II. More than 5 million people have been killed there since 1998, rape has been used as a weapon of war, and slave labor and conscription of child soldiers are common.

Named for a Greek mythological figure doomed to spend eternity in shallow water, with fruit hanging forever out of his reach, tantalum is traded on a market that is one of the world’s most secretive. Tantalite, the ore bearing tantalum, is not traded on commodities exchanges but instead bought and sold through shadowy networks of dealers, so its origins are easily disguised. Refined into coltan at smelters in countries such as China, Kazakhstan and the United States, the mineral is sold to manufacturers that make capacitors, high-tech devices that hold electrical charges and are essential to everything from iPads to airplanes.

In February 2014, Apple for the first time named all the smelters in its supply chain that handle the four conflict minerals (tantalum, gold, tin and tungsten). They were in countries including China, Brazil, the U.S., Japan, Germany, India, Austria, Estonia, Russia and Kazakhstan. It said CFSI audits showed the smelters did not use any tantalum mined in war-torn regions in the DRC. This month, Apple is expected to disclose fresh details on CFSI audits of its smelters.

Last November, Apple said that of the 219 smelters it uses globally to process gold, tin, tungsten and tantalum, 106 were fully compliant, 55 were in the process of being audited, and 58 fell into the sketchy we-don’t-know category. The figures show progress—more smelters refining clean metal or undergoing audits to ensure they do—compared with just six months earlier, when Apple said that of the 186 smelters it used for the four metals, just 59 were compliant, 23 were undergoing audits, and 104 had not participated in audits.

“CFSI has successfully lured some metal processors into the gaze of public scrutiny,” says Sophia Pickles, who oversees Congolese conflict minerals issues at Global Witness, a global-development advocacy group. But, she adds, “the scheme risks being seen as a green-washing, ‘tick-the-box’ exercise.” She was referring to various steps in CFSI’s lengthy audit procedures that allow auditors to scrutinize smelters to check off various areas of compliance—such as spot checks on paperwork, and interviewing smelter employees. Such procedures fall short of global standards set by the Organisation for Cooperation and Economic Development because they do not require smelters to publicly report on risks uncovered or any corrective steps.

Some 6,000 companies, in industries ranging from telecommunications to health care, are expected to spend an initial $3 billion to $4 billion to comply with the new SEC rule, and up to $609 million annually after that, according to SEC estimates. So when barely 1,300 companies filed initial disclosures last summer, there was some concern and disappointment. With just 23 percent of reporting companies declaring that all of their products were DRC conflict-free, according to Audit Analytics, expectations are higher for this year’s disclosures.

Michael Littenberg, a lawyer at Schulte Roth & Zabel who focuses on legal issues surrounding conflict minerals, says that “right now, the reputational risk is higher” due to disclosures by many tech firms last year that raised expectations of more and better to come. “Big consumer brands” like Apple “are the low-hanging fruit for nonprofits and investor advocates, and they’re increasingly focused on this issue.”

Scrutiny of conflict minerals has increased over the past decade, but the trade remains hard to track. In December 2014, Rwanda disclosed that in 2013 it dramatically boosted tantalum exports to become the world’s largest exporter, shipping out to foreign smelters, mostly in China, some 2,460 tons, 28 percent of the global total of around 8,800 tons. That is more than double 2012’s exports, despite the fact that Rwanda has consistently produced around 1,500 tons annually, according to United States Geological Survey data.

The spike deepened suspicions that ore was being smuggled across the border from conflict areas in the DRC. In April 2013, more than two years after the CFSI began auditing smelters, Global Witness reported that “much of the tin, tantalum and tungsten produced in North and South Kivu” in the DRC “benefits rebels and members of the state army. The minerals are smuggled out of Congo into Rwanda and Burundi for export. Tin and tantalum smuggled into Rwanda is laundered through the country’s domestic tagging system and exported as ‘clean’ Rwandan material.”

The CFSI audits of smelters rely on a screening initiative created by the International Tin Research Institute (ITRI) that provides data on the source of the minerals. Although it is run by the global tin industry, ITRI tracks all four conflict minerals, screening mines and allowing local producers to “bag and tag” conflict-free material. But ITRI audits are not made public, and none of the screening initiatives, including the CFSI, have undergone third-party reviews.

“When you think about the context of these mines being primarily artisanal, very informal, there is no paperwork, so what evidence do any of the audits have to rely on?” asks Lawrence Heim, director at Elm Sustainability Partners, a conflict minerals consulting firm in Marietta, Georgia. “At the end of the day, we don’t really know what the reality is.”

William Quam, an industry consultant in Vienna who in recent years managed 3,800 miners and staff across six tantalum mines in Rwanda and who has also worked in the DRC’s North Kivu region, says patchy rollout of the screening initiatives was fueling smuggling—something flagged in a U.N. Group of Experts report last August. “Owning the bag and tag process is more profitable than smelting,” Quam tells Newsweek.

Asked about its audit procedures and how it can be sure the tantalum it uses is conflict-free, Apple declined to provide an official for an interview or to answer on-the-record questions sent by email.

Rob Lederer is executive director of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, one of the industry groups that developed the CFSI. He says: “While we cannot certify specific sales or shipments as conflict-free, we do provide assurance to companies that their smelters have procedures in place to source responsibly.”

In June 2010, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs admitted the depth of the problem in a widely disseminated email sent to a reporter at Wired magazine: “Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.”

Other tech companies have complied with the SEC regulation by admitting that they just don’t know. Dell says on its website that “the mining of these minerals takes place long before a final product is assembled, making it difficult, if not impossible, to trace the minerals' origins. In addition, many of the minerals are smelted together with recycled metals, and at that point, it is virtually impossible to trace the minerals to their source.” Taser International said it could not determine whether conflict minerals used in almost all of its products came from DRC conflict areas.

The SEC rule, unusual in that it puts the agency in a humanitarian watchdog role, requires only transparency and that companies conduct a “reasonable country of origin inquiry.” It does not require companies to do anything about their suppliers, as long as they are open with investors and the public about them.

Even parts of that requirement are being challenged. Last April, a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court struck down the SEC rule’s requirement that some reporting companies might have to disclose their products as not found to be DRC conflict-free. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought against the SEC in May 2013 by the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, all powerful trade groups. They argue that the disclosure requirement violates the First Amendment right to free speech by forcing some companies to publicly wear a scarlet letter and to make a “forced confession that a company has blood on its hands,” court papers say.

However, the outlook remains uncertain after an appeals court decision last November to rehear the issue. The label "conflict free,” Raymond Randolph, the judge overseeing the case, observed in court papers, “is a metaphor that conveys moral responsibility for the Congo war.”

Across Syria, photographers have captured soldiers of the Free Syrian Army caring for stray dogs and taking them in as their own. Some fighters, like Ahmed al-Hussein, care for entire packs of dogs.

Photographer Hosam Katan works on the front lines of the city of Aleppo. “I have been going there for nearly four months,” he explained via Facebook message to Newsweek. “A few days ago, I went to a village near Azaz [a town outside Aleppo near the Turkish border], and there are now more puppies and dogs, the largest group I’ve seen so far.”

Ahmed al-Hussein, a Free Syrian Army soldier, spends part of his time surrounded by stray dogs. “He told me that he cares about these dogs and is securing them with food and drink,” Katan said. In addition to feeding the dogs, al-Hussein finds them safe places to sleep and cares for the pregnant dogs, arranging places for them to give birth and take care of their puppies. 

The dogs are grateful to have protection from the nearby fighting, Katan said. “When the dogs see Ahmed, they go to him. If they want to play, they go to Ahmed.”

Katan knew al-Hussein before he joined the army and said he always had a passion for animals. “Before the revolution, Ahmed lived in the southern countryside of Aleppo, and he loved dogs. He was always interested in the dogs but never took care of them before the war.”

"There are so many homeless animals in Aleppo, but you find people who care for them," Katan said. Across Syria, a number of puppies have found homes with Syrian Free Army soldiers, keeping close to their side even during mortar launches.  

(Reuters) - The suspected operator of the underground website Silk Road was convicted on Wednesday on narcotics and other criminal charges for his role in orchestrating a scheme that enabled around $200 million of anonymous online drug sales using bitcoins.

Ross Ulbricht, 30, was convicted on all seven counts he faced by a federal jury in Manhattan, following a closely-watched trial that spilled out of U.S. investigations into the use of the digital currency bitcoin for drug trafficking and other crimes.

After less than a day of deliberations, the jury of six men and six women found Ulbricht guilty of charges including drug trafficking, and conspiracies to commit money laundering and computer hacking. Ulbricht faces up to life in prison.

A marine engineer who recovered millions of dollars’ worth of gold from a 19th century shipwreck but was accused by his investors of cheating them out of their share of the treasure has been arrested after nearly three years on the lam, according to The Associated Press.

Tommy Thompson, 62, was detained January 27 in a Palm Beach, Florida, hotel room along with a companion, Alison Antekeier. The two were arrested and charged with criminal contempt and civil contempt, respectively. Thompson had been on the run since failing to show up at an Ohio court in 2012. Although Thompson has been accused by his former partners of cheating investors and crew members of their promised share of the treasure, it is unclear whether he will face any criminal charges over those allegations.

In 1988, Thompson led an expedition that unearthed more than $40 million in gold from the sunken SS Central America using a state-of-the-art deep ocean explorer craft he developed, named Nemo. The ship sank during a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina in 1857, at the peak of the California Gold Rush, and took more than 400 lives with it. The so-called “Ship of Gold” is estimated to have carried between three and 21 tons of gold.

Last April, Newsweek reported, divers returned to the wreck and discovered more artifacts, including daguerreotypes, coins and luggage pieces. In March 2014, the Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration company was granted by a court-appointed receiver the exclusive right to recover what was left of the SS Central America.

Thompson’s company had struggled with British and American insurance firms that contended that since they had insured the ship’s cargo in the 1800s, they were entitled to a cut of the gold today. Thompson agreed to divide up the profits from the wreckage in 1993, with his company taking 92.5 percent of the treasure, according to the Newsweek story.

Ten years ago, though, it came to light that people who had helped fund the excursion weren’t content with their portion of the profits. In 2005, two investors who had chipped in $12.7 million for the gold-hunting expedition filed a lawsuit against Thompson, Newsweek reported. When he didn’t show up for a hearing in Ohio in 2012, a federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest.

According to AP, Thompson managed to keep a low profile by paying for everything in cash, using various transportation methods to avoid being followed, and using several pseudonyms, which authorities believe he used to hunker down in a hotel suite in Palm Beach County along with Antekeier. In 2012, authorities tracked down the pair to their last known location, an abandoned Vero Beach, Florida, mansion, where they had been living like squatters for more than eight years, reports The Columbus Dispatch. There authorities found 12 cellphones, metal pipes that may have been used to store bills underground and a book titled How to Live Your Life Invisible.

In a statement, U.S. Marshal Peter Tobin said that “Thompson was smart, perhaps one of the smartest fugitives ever sought by the U.S. marshals, along with almost limitless resources and approximately a 10-year head start.”

Last week, Thompson went before Magistrate Judge Dave Lee Brannon in West Boca Raton, Florida, in a preliminary federal hearing. There he attempted to plead with the judge, saying he was in a “very fragile situation” health-wise and had been suffering from encephalitis, an immune system disorder. Thompson was taken back to custody and went before a judge in West Palm Beach on Wednesday, where he was expected to be extradited to Ohio.

Since he has yet to hire an attorney who can identify and defend him in federal court, the hearing was postponed, according to The New York Times. Antekeier wasn’t granted bond and may also be extradited, the Times said.

Sara Myers isn’t suicidal, but she wants to choose when to die. Four years ago, doctors diagnosed Myers, 60, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which typically kills those who have it in three to five years.

“Each day I become more and more dependent on the assistance of others,” Myers told reporters gathered around a conference table at a midtown Manhattan law office Wednesday. Largely paralyzed, she cannot feed herself, and she expects to soon lose the ability to speak and breathe without a machine. What she wants, Myers said, is “a peaceful and dignified death, at the time and place of my choosing.”

Myers is one in a group of patients and doctors challenging the New York penal code’s so-called “Assisted Suicide Statute” in a lawsuit filed Wednesday against New York state. The nine plaintiffs argue that a doctor who provides life-ending medication to a terminally ill, mentally competent patient should not face manslaughter charges, as the penal code currently mandates.

Lawyers at the firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP and advocates with the groups Disability Rights Legal Center and End of Life Choices New York (EOLCNY), which is listed as a plaintiff, announced Wednesday morning that they had filed the suit in New York State Supreme Court. “No dying person should have to endure more suffering than he or she is willing to endure,” EOLCNY Executive Director David Leven said at the press conference.

Under the existing statute, said lawyer Kathryn L. Tucker, patients “find themselves trapped in a dying process that they find unbearable.”

Another plaintiff, New York City resident Steve Goldenberg, 55, has been living with AIDS for two decades and is now dying from complications. “I have fought the debilitating disease with all my strength,” he said. “I’m not ready to die yet...but I do see the day coming when I will no longer have the strength to fight my numerous ailments.” When that time comes, Goldenberg says, he wants the choice to be in control of his death.

The defendants in the case are New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and district attorneys in Westchester, Monroe, Saratoga, Bronx and New York counties, where the plaintiffs reside or practice.

End-of-life advocates and other health professionals prefer the term “aid in dying” to “assisted suicide” because, they argue, terminally ill patients do not necessarily want to die and are not suicidal.

Should the state supreme court decide in favor of the plaintiffs, New York could become the sixth state where doctors can prescribe medication to qualifying patients in order to induce death, joining Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico. It may not stay this way, however. In New Mexico last week, lawyers began the appeals process to overturn a 2014 decision there to legalize a doctor’s right to help patients in this way.

Oregon was the first state to legalize the practice, in 1994. Some 700 people there have chosen to end their lives with a doctor’s help. The 2011 documentary How to Die in Oregon chronicles a patient in the state as she goes through the process of deciding to end her life.

At the federal level, a 1997 Supreme Court case, in which Dr. Timothy Quill was the lead plaintiff and Tucker was counsel, left the decision up to the states. Quill is now a plaintiff in the New York case.

The “Assisted Suicide Statute”—officially New York Penal Law 120.30 and 125.15—states that intentionally causing or aiding someone to “attempt” suicide or “commit” suicide is a crime. The plaintiffs in this case are challenging that law on the grounds that the term suicide should not apply to a doctor aiding in a terminally ill patient’s death and that such equating denies the patient’s right to equal protection and privacy.

Tucker argues that lawmakers never intended for the statute to include doctors treating patients as they do today, when treatments sometimes prolong the dying process. “I hope the court will say, ‘We’re not going to stretch the statute to apply to something that’s not mentioned,’” Tucker told Newsweek following the press conference.

The plaintiffs also argue that the right to administer “aid in dying” would be exercised only sparingly. At the press conference, Leven, the EOLCNY executive director, said that when adjusted for New York’s population, data from Oregon suggest that some 200 to 300 New Yorkers per year would likely choose to end their lives with the help of a doctor.

On the legislative side, last month New York State Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal introduced the Death With Dignity Act, which has been referred to the Health Committee.

“Each state has a somewhat different constitution,” Tucker told Newsweek, adding, “I hope [the jury] will look to the New Mexico and Montana decisions. We will certainly be citing them and talking about them.”

“Aid in dying” advocates have previously challenged state and federal laws. In 2005, disabled protesters gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court during one such case.REUTERS

Tucker served as lead counsel for the patients and physicians in the 1997 U.S. Supreme Court case and participated in the New Mexico and Oregon cases that resulted in changes to statutes there. She also helped develop aid in dying campaigns in Washington and Vermont, where permission for doctors came through legislation, not court cases.

According to the group Compassion and Choices—the New York chapter of which became EOLCNY—the debate over aid in dying dates back to 1967, when end-of-life advocates tried to introduce legislation in Florida but were unsuccessful. The issue returned to the headlines last November, after a terminally ill woman named Brittany Maynard had to move from California to Oregon in order to end her life. She had become an activist for end-of-life choices.

One frequent critic of the end-of-life choice movement, University of Chicago medicine and ethics professor Daniel Sulmasy, says the new case is unsurprising given the previous campaigns, many of which have “the same cast of characters” recycling arguments. “This has been a political strategy on the part of Compassion and Choices since the U.S. Supreme Court decided there was no federal constitutional right to assisted suicide,” Sulmasy says. “The basis for it I think, from my view, is very weak.”

Sulmasy and other critics often point to a line in the Hippocratic Oath that states, “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.”

According to the complaint that lawyers filed Wednesday, Myers, the plaintiff, “feels trapped in a torture chamber of her own deteriorating body” and is “functionally paralyzed.” While reading her statement from her motorized wheelchair, Myers alternated between making lighthearted comments and holding back tears. “I hate this,” she said, becoming choked up while speaking about loved ones. A moment later she joked, “I should have taken a Xanax.”

Myers later told Newsweek that she hasn’t thought of where, given the opportunity, she wants to be when ending her life. But she said she had “a handful of people” in mind whom she would like to be present.

Goldenberg, who spoke with physical difficulty and, according to the court complaint, takes more than 24 medications and sleeps about19 hours per day, told Newsweek he wants his sister, partner and dog with him in his final moments.

Yesterday we dissected the infamous 2nd-and-goal from the 1 call from Super Bowl XLIX. Today we will examine the rest of the circus, from NBC’s telecast (well done, Cris Collinsworth) to the commercials (a shoutout for Mauritius?) to an MSNBC host garnering unexpected mentions.

The Best of Climes, the Worst of Climes

It rained an inch or so in Phoenix last Friday, followed by intermittent drizzling and cloud cover on Saturday morning and afternoon. On Sunday morning parts of the Valley of the Sun were enshrouded in what resembled a Bay Area marine layer. Football fans making their initial pilgrimage to the Phoenix area did not experience typical Arizona weather. For the next five days, though, beginning Wednesday, it will be sunny and 81 in the Valley.

Let it Go, Barbarino!

Idina Menzel performed the national anthem. The Broadway star, who also sang last year’s Academy Award-winning song, “Let It Go,” from the film Frozen, is best known for having John Travolta mangle her name (“Adeem Dazeem”) when he introduced her at the 2014 Oscars. Travolta also attended Sunday’s game, and perhaps it’s time for Menzel to file for a restraining order.

Pre-Game Intros

New England’s LeGarrette Blount, who was suspended most of his final season at the University of Oregon after punching a Boise State player in a post-game altercation in the season opener, went against the grain for the taped player introductions and provided the name of his high school (Taylor County High in Perry, Florida) instead of his college. Seattle punter Jon Ryan, a Canadian, caused a few double-takes with the name of his alma mater: “The University of Regina.” Long “i”...

Ad Hoc

As was widely reported, advertisers paid NBC $4.5 million per 30-second spot. And why not, since the game was viewed by a record-number 114 million people domestically. Skittles gpt the best deal, as NBC’s cameras panned to Seattle running back Marshawn Lynch digging into a plastic cup of the hard-shelled candies just before kickoff as NBC’s Al Michaels mentioned the name of the brand.

Bittersweet Symphony, Indeed

The Seahawks took the field to The Verve’s late-’90s classic, “Bittersweet Symphony.” Near the end of the first quarter, Seattle’s Jeremy Lane intercepted Brady in the end zone, halting a drive that had lasted 13 plays and nearly eight minutes. During Lane’s return, he was upended by New England’s Julian Edelman and suffered a brutal fracture of his lower left arm.

Lane’s pickoff was a pyrrhic victory for Seattle. While it ended the Patriots’ early scoring gambit, Lane was lost for the remainder of the game and Seattle was forced to insert inexperienced second-year player Tharold Simon, whom Brady picked on the remainder of the contest.

Fast Start

With just one penalty (declined...even if the referees made the incorrect call on Seattle running into the Patriot punter) and no scoring, the first quarter came and went as swiftly as a military flyover. ESPN’s Brett McMurphy, alluding to the call that robbed the Dallas Cowboys of a fourth-quarter score in their playoff loss at Green Bay, was moved to tweet, “Dez Bryant held on to his catch longer than the first quarter lasted.”

Best Ad: First Draft Ever

A perfect parody of NBA and NFL draft coverage with The Creator as commissioner and Cro-Magnon man as an analyst. Continents, instead of teams, select flora and fauna (“and North America selects wheat….wheat”). One tweep wondered, “Where is Mel Viper’s draft analysis?” The client? Avocados from Mexico. Guacamole well-spent.

Fans cheer during the New England Patriots Super Bowl XLIX victory parade in Boston, Massachusetts February 4, 2015. Katherine Taylor/Reuters

Slow Start

The Super Bowl was nearly 25 minutes old—on the game clock—before Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson completed his first pass. The third-year pro had already been sacked twice by that time.

The Courtship of Everyone’s Father

One analyst referred to it as “dadvertising,” the shameless exploitation of the father-son dynamic. Dove had a dad-themed ad. First Bank’s ad shamed dads into wondering if their bank’s limited ATM access would prevent their tow-headed son from purchasing a puppy (a puppy that would probably end up wandering off the Budweiser Clydesdale farm, anyway). No dadvertising was more egregious than Nissan’s, though, as an absentee race-car driving father neglects his wife and son to the soundtrack of Harry Chapin’s absentee dad anthem, “Cat’s in the Cradle.” Anyone remember that Chapin died in a car wreck?

Hardball!

Where would the Seahawks have been without Chris Matthews? The six-foot-five rookie, who had never caught a pass in an NFL game, hauled in a 45-yard bomb —his first NFL reception— that woke up the Seattle offense near the end of the first half and set up a tying touchdown. With :06 remaining in the first half, Matthews caught a game-tying TD pass.

Michaels and Collinsworth ably filled in viewers on Matthews’ backstory —two years ago he was the Canadian Football League Rookie of the Year and last spring he had been working at a Foot Locker. Two questions left unasked: 1) Was Matthews, 25, the first player in Super Bowl history who had previously worn a referee’s jersey to his job? and 2) How do you go from CFL Rookie of the Year to working at Foot Locker in just a year?

Mom, May We Go To Sleep Before Halftime?

Before halftime NBC aired one ad in which accidental child deaths were the theme and another in which a blue Viagra pill was a key plot element.

Thank You for Not Scouting!

Matthews attended college at tiny Northwestern State in Texas and was not chosen in the NFL draft. Malcolm Butler, who made the game-clinching interception, attended Division II West Alabama, and also went undrafted. As did Ricardo Lockette (Division II Fort Valley State), to whom that pass was intended. Patriots Danny Amendola and Julian Edelman, who caught Brady’s two fourth-quarter touchdown passes, were undrafted and taken in the seventh round, respectively (Brady was selected in the sixth).

Middle Seat? No, First Class

Scott Zabielski, an executive producer on “Tosh.O,” won $1 million for submitting the winning idea for a Doritos ad that ran during the Super Bowl. The spot, in which a passenger employs creative —and non-hygienic—methods to dissuade passengers from taking the vacant seat next to him, cost the USC alum $2,000 to make and was filmed in four hours. The attractive woman who winds up occupying the seat is former USC Song Girl Michelle LaRue. Her baby was played by Zabielski’s son.

Premature Articulation

On Jermaine Kearse’s inconceivable grab late in the fourth quarter, a catch that ricocheted off all four of the Seahawk wideout’s limbs and ended up with him securing the ball while flat on his back, NBC’s Michaels initially intoned, “...and it’s broken up again.” Earlier this season, when New York Giant rookie Odell Beckham, Jr., made one of the most impossible catches in NFL history, Michaels’ first reaction was, “Oh, there’s a flag…” If you pay attention, you’ll notice that on the NFL.com official video, Michaels’ call has since been doctored. Do you believe in sound editing? Yes!

All Bets Were On

For most of the fortnight leading up to kickoff, Las Vegas had the contest as a pick ‘em. Then the Patriots were one-point favorites with most bookmakers. Either way, the $116 million wagered legally in the state of Nevada all hinged on that interception. Malcolm Butler’s pick with less than :30 remaining reversed the fortunes, good and bad, of everyone who wagered on the outcome of the game.

You Won, Bro

When Richard Sherman was a rookie and his Seahawks beat the Patriots in Seattle, the future All-Pro first came on the radar by taunting Brady on the field afterward with, “You mad, bro?” As Brady knelt down to run out the clock on the game’s final play, Sherman, who played the entire game with torn ligaments in his elbow (he’ll soon undergo Tommy John surgery), stood before him with his right arm extended. A classic sports photo,

Talk is a Two-Way Street

Just a reminder that Marshawn Lynch was threatened with a fine for not speaking with the media, while NFL commissioner Roger Goodell turned down NBC’s request for a pre-game interview. President Barack Obama did accept NBC’s invitation to speak on camera, but then his job is less heavily scrutinized than Goodell’s.

To be fair, Goodell did hold a press conference on Friday, in which he stated, “I’m available to the media almost every day of my job professionally.” On the other hand, ESPN investigative reporter Don Van Natta tweeted in response, “Goodell has rejected every interview request I’ve made since 2012.”

A drawn out legal battle over the release of approximately 2,100 pictures depicting U.S. military abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are said to possibly be more disturbing than the Abu Ghraib images, reached “a line in the sand” for the presiding judge on Wednesday evening. U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in New York gave the Department of Defense (DoD) a week to decide whether it would provide a reason for withholding each individual photograph or appeal his ruling.

“I could give you more time to satisfy my ruling...but I am not changing my view,” Hellerstein told the government in court.

The case began back in 2004 when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued for the images’ release under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A handful of images showing detainee abuse in Abu Ghraib surfaced in media reports that year, prompting a larger discussion about prisoner treatment during enhanced interrogation.

Hellerstein ruled in 2005 that the government had to release the photographs. But in 2009, before the images became public, Nuri al-Maliki, the then-president of Iraq, asked the U.S. to withhold the images in order to avoid further destabilizing the country.

The same year, Congress gave the Secretary of Defense the power to keep an image concealed for up to three years if its release would endanger Americans—a power that then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates invoked to keep the collection sealed. Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta followed suit in 2012 offering the same blanket reasoning.

But Hellerstein ruled on August 27, 2014 that the lump concealment was no longer sufficient and U.S. government would have to review“each and every photograph, individually and in relation to the others,” and demonstrate why the release of each would endanger American lives. “Three years is a long time in war, the news cycle, and the international debate over how to respond to terrorism,” he wrote at the time.

But the DoD did not provide an individualized assessment by the late December deadline. Instead, the government argued, that an evaluation carried out by associate deputy general counsel Megan M. Weis on Panetta’s orders sufficiently covered the judge’s requirement.

In a submission to the court from December, Weis said she reviewed each photograph and placed them into three categories based on content: the extent of injury suffered by the detainee, if a U.S. service member was depicted and the location of the photograph.

She then selected between five and 10 photographs from each of the three categories and presented the representative sample to three senior military officials: General John R. Allen, commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, General James N. Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All three recommended that Panetta keep the photographs classified.

Hellerstein conceded on Wednesday that by performing this item by item review Weis technically fulfilled a portion of his ruling, but he wasn’t satisfied. He gave the government one week to decide whether it would comply with his original ruling by providing a reason for keeping each individual photograph concealed or appeal. Discussions surrounding what disclosure would look like would happen at a later date.

Addressing the government’s concern for release, he admitted that the U.S. has never confronted an enemy like the Islamic State before and understood how the interest of saving lives could outweigh the desire to produce the photographs. But overall he argued that conditions are similar to when he originally ruled for the images' release back in 2005—“soldiers and citizens were exposed, but the courts championed release,” he said.

He also suggested that many of the images could be released without redaction. As part of previous rulings, he has seen around 29 of the still-classified images at the center of the suit. “Some are harmless” he told the court, others he called “highly prejudicial.” By not complying with his ruling, Hellerstein said the government has made this an all or nothing case, “and I don’t think you want that,” he said.

Later in his decision, Hellerstein offered a third option—to look through the images with the government. This option, unlike submitting individual reasoning to the court or appealing, would let the government comply with his ruling without creating a public record.

Speaking after the hearing, the ACLU team indicated that it doesn’t seems to think the government is interested in complying. But Hellerstein said that if the government appeals, years could go by before a release, which would further delay the “day of reckoning.” ACLU Attorney Lawrence Lustberg who has been on the case since the beginning is ready, though. “We would try to expedite the appeal,” he said. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to address Congress next month on the need for stronger sanctions against Iran is turning into a major political and diplomatic blunder for the Israeli leader just weeks before that country’s elections.

Many Democrats are considering boycotting the speech, scheduled for March 3. Others took the highly unusual step Wednesday of meeting with the Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer in an effort to get Netanyahu to postpone his address.

The speech, cooked up by Dermer, who served as an assistant to GOP consultant Frank Luntz in an earlier life, and Republican House Speaker John Boehner without informing the White House, has infuriated President Barack Obama, who says he will not meet with Netanyahu during his March 3 visit.

Publicly, the White House has said the president didn’t want to appear like he was influencing Israel’s March 17 election, in which Netanyahu is seeking another term, but the significance of Obama’s snub is  clear. It would be the first time in the 66-year history of the U.S.-Israel relationship that the White House has closed its doors to a visiting Israeli premier.  

Secretary of State John Kerry also has refused to see Netanyahu during his visit, and Vice President Joe Biden, who presides over the Senate, won’t say if he will be in attendance for the speech.

Polls show Netanyahu in a dead heat with Isaac Herzog, leader of the center-left Labor Party. Many people, including Michael Oren, Netanyahu’s former ambassador to the U.S., have accused Netanyahu of turning support for Israel into a partisan political issue in Washington and have called on him to cancel the speech.

Many Democrats also have taken offense—not only at what many regard as Netanyahu’s boorish violation of diplomatic protocol but also over the prospect of the Republicans’ giving the Israeli leader a national soapbox from which to attack Obamas efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran.

Forced to choose between the Israeli leader and the president, many Democratic lawmakers are now privately threatening to skip the speech. Last week, Democrat Earl Blumenauer of Oregon penned an angry commentary for the Huffington Post, in which he urged Boehner to cancel Netanyahu’s speech. “If he does not, I will refuse to be part of a reckless act of political grandstanding,” he wrote.

In the Senate, where both Republicans and Democrats have been pushing for additional sanctions on Iran, Netanyahu’s maneuver has prompted 10 Democrats to peel off and give the White House until the end of March to negotiate an agreement.

Behind the scenes, officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest pro-Israel lobby, have been leaning on Democrats to attend the speech. But in an unusual move, a group of pro-Israel House Democrats met Wednesday with Dermer, the Israeli ambassador, in an effort to persuade Netanyahu to postpone his speech until after Israel’s elections. “The conversation was: ‘What do we need to do in order to get back to the substance [of U.S.-Israel relations] so that you’re not writing about the thumb in the eye and the F-yous,’ Democrat Steve Israel of New York told reporters on Capitol Hill.

The congressmen said the talks with Dermer focused on the possibility of postponing the speech until April, when it should be clear whether a nuclear deal is possible.

Meanwhile, American and Iranian negotiators resumed their work in Vienna this week, and reports said they’re discussing a compromise that would allow Tehran to keep much of its uranium-enrichment technology but restrict its potential to make nuclear weapons.

Greece's plans to make its debt more manageable by swapping rescue loans for growth-indexed bonds may be deemed illegal under European Union rules, according to a lawyer who worked on the country's 2012 debt restructuring.

Greece's creditors will probably object to proposals for such a swap, said Yannis Manuelides, a partner at Allen & Overy, because they cannot accept losses on their loans. That would remain the case even though the creditors would lose less from the swaps than they would from writing down the loans, as Athens originally demanded.

Greece's new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, proposed on Monday that the creditors -- euro zone member states and their bailout fund, the EFSF -- swap their loans to Greece for debt that only pays interest if the Greek economy grows. His proposal has met a cool reception in Brussels and beyond.

"I anticipate that there will be legal obstacles to overcome," said Manuelides, who was among the bankers and fund managers who attended the meeting in London where Varoufakis made his proposal.

To finance their loans to Greece, the creditors borrowed in financial markets. The interest that Greece pays on the loans covers the cost of the market financing.

But if the loans are swapped for so-called performance bonds, the interest that Greece pays will be determined by how the Greek economy performs. If it performs badly one year, it might not pay any interest that year.

And, Manuelides said, "There will inevitably be some years when (Greece is) not paying the full cost of those loans," said Manuelides.

Greece's economy grew 0.7 percent in the third quarter of 2014, according to the latest data.

"If they (Greece's creditors) don't recoup the interest payments, they actually suffer a loss -- and again we come up against ... the EU law," Manuelides said.

The Treaty of Lisbon, one of the founding acts of the European Union, says the Union and member states "shall not be liable for or assume the commitments of central governments."

That is commonly known as the no-bailout provision.

Varoufakis, who met European Central Bank President Mario Draghi on Wednesday, has also proposed swapping ECB loans for "perpetual" interest-yielding bonds with no repayment date.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras pledged on Wednesday to find a solution to its economic problems within the framework of EU law.

But Manuelides said the current plan for Greek debt relief might prove to be a non-starter.

"I am not convinced that the Europeans, or the Greeks when they think about it within the context of the no-bailout constraints, the technical complexities and the other alternatives, will go for this."

NATO defense ministers met on Thursday to sign off on a network of command centers in eastern Europe to rapidly reinforce the region in the event of any threat from Russia, as well as a new regional headquarters and a bigger rapid reaction force.

They were expected to agree to more than double the size of NATO's existing rapid reaction force - to 30,000 soldiers from 13,000 - and to flesh out details of a 5,000-strong "spearhead" force with a faster reaction time of only a few days.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the measures, part of the alliance's response to Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea, were defensive.

"It is a response to what we have seen from Russia over a period of time and it is in full accordance with our international obligations," he told reporters.

The U.S. ambassador to NATO, Douglas Lute, said on Wednesday that the first seven NATO flags in the region would fly over the newly expanded Polish headquarters and the six command centers in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the three Baltic states, where the alliance has had little presence until now.

The plan, which builds on decisions taken at NATO's summit in Wales last September, falls short of the hopes of some eastern European countries for NATO to set up large bases in the region, but may still alarm Russia, which is deeply hostile to NATO's presence closer to its borders.

The ministers' meeting comes at a time of high tension between the West and Russia over fighting in Ukraine, that has raised the specter of a return to Cold War-style confrontation.

NATO officials believe its small-scale measures comply with the alliance's 1997 commitment not to permanently station substantial combat forces in eastern Europe while providing allies in the region with a visible assurance that the rest of NATO would come to their aid if they were attacked.

Ministers are also set to discuss growing concerns within NATO over Russia's nuclear strategy and indications that Russian military planners may be lowering the threshold for using nuclear weapons in any conflict, diplomats say.

Britain, France and Germany are expected to announce on Thursday that they will be among the "framework nations" that will take turns to lead the new rapid reaction force that will be set up over the next few years. Spain, Italy and Poland may also take on a lead role.

Taipei's mayor hailed the pilot of a crashed TransAsia Airways plane a hero on Thursday for narrowly avoiding buildings and ditching the stalled aircraft in a river, likely averting a worse disaster.

At least 31 people were killed when Flight GE235 lurched between buildings, clipped a taxi and an overpass with one of its wings and crashed upside down into shallow water shortly after take-off from a downtown Taipei airport on Wednesday. There were 15 known survivors and 12 more unaccounted for.

"He really tried everything he could," Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je said of the pilot, his voice breaking with sobs.

Amateur video recorded by a car dashboard camera showed the plane nose-up as it barely cleared the buildings close to Taipei's Songshan airport before crashing into the river.

"The pilot's immediate reaction saved many people," said Chris Lin, brother of one of the survivors. "I was a pilot myself and I'm quite knowledgeable about the immediate reaction needed in this kind of situation."

Aerospace analysts said it was too early to say whether the pilots intentionally pulled the plane above the buildings, and noted that the crew may have been aiming for the river to reduce casualties.

A more conclusive picture will emerge only when authorities release details from the plane's cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were recovered on Wednesday.

“He’s missed the buildings but it is premature to make an analysis of what happened on this flight. We have to wait for the data from the cockpit voice recorder and flight recorder,” said aviation analyst Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of airlineratings.com

The pilot and co-pilot of the almost-new turboprop ATR 72-600 were among those killed, Taiwan's aviation regulator said. TransAsia identified the pilot as 42-year-old Liao Chien-tsung.

Taiwanese media reported that it appeared Liao had fought desperately to steer his stricken aircraft between apartment blocks and commercial buildings

The head of Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration, Lin Tyh-ming, has said Liao had 4,914 flying hours under his belt and the co-pilot 6,922 hours.

Taiwanese media reported that Liao, the son of street vendors, passed exams to join the air force. He later flew for China Airlines, Taiwan's main carrier, before joining TransAsia.

The aviation regulator ordered TransAsia and Uni Air, a subsidiary of EVA Airways Corp, to conduct engine and fuel system checks on the remaining 22 ATR aircraft they still operate.

TransAsia's shares closed down 6.9 percent on Wednesday, its biggest percentage decline since late 2011, and were down another 3.3 percent on Thursday. The crash was the latest in a string of aviation disasters in Asia in the past 12 months and TransAsia's second in the past seven months.

Macau's Civil Aviation Authority said the engines of the plane had been replaced at Macau Airport on April 19 last year, during its delivery flight, "due to engine-related technical issues".

It said the engines were replaced by TransAsia engineers and the plane left Macau airport two days later.

Lin from Taiwan's CAA said the aircraft last underwent maintenance on Jan. 26.

The plane was powered by two Pratt & Whitney PW127M engines. Pratt & Whitney is part of United Technologies.

The last communication from one of the pilots was "Mayday engine flameout", according to an air traffic control recording on liveatc.net.

A flameout can occur when the fuel supply to an engine is interrupted or when there is faulty combustion, but twin-engined aircraft can usually keep flying with one engine.

Taiwan's United Daily reported that a flight attendant, identified only by her surname of Huang, told her family she had crawled out of the rear of the plane and found herself in the water. "I thought I was going to die," she said.

It also said a family of three who survived the crash had changed seats before take-off to the right of the plane, most likely saving their lives.

A TransAsia official said the airline would give the families of those killed T$1.2 million ($38,198) for funeral expenses and T$200,000 to each of the injured. Two people on the ground were also injured, it said.

The plane was bound for the Taiwan island of Kinmen.

Zhang Zhijun, a Chinese official forced to cut short his trip to Taiwan last year after he was pelted with paint by anti-China protesters, will delay a trip to Kinmen planned for Saturday because of the crash, the Taiwan government said.

Like many people in their seventies and eighties, Buddy Elias and his wife Gertie are downsizing – clearing out the attic and getting rid of several generations’ worth of papers, clutter and possessions from their family home in Basel, Switzerland. Unlike most other pensioners, however, Elias is Anne Frank’s cousin and the last living blood relative who remembers her. The papers and artefacts are not family trivia, meaningful only to a few close relatives and destined for the dustbin, but an extensive testament to the Franks and the Eliases, and a remarkable and rare history of a German-Jewish family that will be part of a permanent exhibition at the new Family Frank Centre, housed at the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt.

Researchers from the centre have been staying with Elias and his wife for a week, sorting through final possessions, and now the removal trucks have arrived to take the archive north into Germany. “When the chair goes, I will be sad,” Elias says, referring to a small chair that Anne used to sit on when she visited him as a girl on holiday.

Elias has lived a double life for decades, on the one hand a successful German-speaking actor who made his name as an ice-dancing clown in Holidays On Ice, on the other the keeper of the Frank family flame who, in his role at the Anne Frank Foundation in Switzerland, has fought numerous battles over the years to make sure, he says, that the work of Anne Frank is not exploited. Yet since its very first publication in 1947, the legacy of the diary has been controversial and bitterly contested.

It is more than 70 years since Otto Frank unwrapped his daughter’s diary with trembling hands and discovered a girl he hardly knew – a witty, acerbic, observant teenager who chronicled with piercing honesty the struggles, and humour, of life in hiding from the Nazis, including painful details about her parents’ relationship and her own passage through puberty. Now, as the 70th anniversary of her death in the concentration camp at Bergen-­Belsen approaches, Elias and the Anne Frank Foundation are preparing to commemorate and rethink her legacy by endorsing (but not funding) a series of projects, including the creation of the Family Frank Centre in Frankfurt, an animation in a similar vein to Waltz with Bashir, and the staging of a new play based upon the diary.

The play, the latest reincarnation of the 20th century’s most poignant pop-culture icon, is so far out of tourist Amsterdam that even the taxi drivers don’t know where it is. “You want to go to the Anne Frank House?” they say, determined to head into the warren of canal-sided streets, before fiddling with their satnavs and frowning.

The spectacle of the new Theatre Amsterdam – built specifically for this production – rises from flat scrubland, facing an oil terminal and ageing barges that gently rise and fall in the grey water. The black building, held up by pillars shaped like elegant pencils, sits imposingly next to other recently-constructed office buildings whose varying styles give the area a hasty, temporary, appearance. Outside, giant yellow letters spell out one word: Anne.

The diary of Anne Frank, on display in the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam.Cris Toala Olivares/Anne Frank House Amsterdam

Since Otto Frank decided to publish his daughter’s writings, first in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool, and then as a book, more than 31 million copies of The Diary of Anne Frank have been sold, more than one million people have visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam where the family hid in the attic, and more than three million people in the UK have seen a touring Anne Frank exhibit organised by the London-based Anne Frank Trust. There are currently over 40 language versions of the international exhibition, Anne Frank – A History for Today, which are being shown all over the world. The story of Anne Frank has been so pervasive that in the 1960s a series of “Anne Frank villages” was founded in Germany for refugees. In Japan – where the diary proved to be an astonishing phenomenon – girls referred to menstruation, something that had never before been discussed publicly in Japanese culture or literature, as “getting their Anne Frank”.

What we think we know about Anne Frank, though, is often sketchy, sometimes far from the truth – something the latest series of projects seeks to rectify. “It’s a very strange idea for me that the whole world knows Anne – but she would have loved to have so much attention. She would have loved it,” says Jacqueline van Maarsen, who became best friends with Anne during their time at the Jewish Lyceum between 1941 and 1942, and who is referred to in the diary by the pseudonym “Jopie”.

After he returned to Amsterdam as a survivor from Auschwitz at the end of the Second World War, Otto Frank immediately looked up van Maarsen and went to see her. “He didn’t know at that point that Anne hadn’t survived. A few weeks later he came to tell me she had died. He was crying and it was awful, and he wanted to talk to me about Anne all the time. He was not complaining, but he wanted to know about her, and I tried to tell him as much as I could. I think it was because he knew that in my mind she was still alive – and we remained friends until he died.”

Since then, van Maarsen has had decades to get used to the idea that the Anne she knew as a close teenage friend had become an international icon, symbolising many things to many people – some of which are far removed from the reality of Anne’s personality and her situation.

“I talked about this with another classmate of hers and we agreed that Anne would have been surprised to have had so many friends she never even knew!” says van Maarsen.

“Not so long ago I met a girl who was in the same class as us, and we were both asked, ‘What was Anne like?’ – and she immediately said, ‘Anne was a very sweet girl’,” van Maarsen laughs. “And I was so surprised, because it’s the last thing you would say about Anne, and especially this woman – because Anne wrote in her diary that they hated each other! She knew that very well, but she had to say something, and she said, ‘Anne was a very sweet girl’.”

Anne, of course, was bright and lively, difficult and demanding – a young diva who made friends and enemies with equal ease. She overshadowed her older sister Margot, described by friends and relatives as nice but “quiet” and bookish, whose own life, and death at Bergen-Belsen, were eclipsed by those of her sister.

“Anne was not really sweet, she could be awful to people she didn’t like, and you can read in her diary how she was to her mother – she could be awful. To me she was very sweet. She was very lively and I liked her a lot. We had very different characters but we were kindred souls. I’ve never met anybody who enjoyed life as much as she did,” says van Maarsen, who went on to write several books for young people on the subject of racism and discrimination, which featured her friendship with Anne.

Critics of the diary’s success, and its representation, claim that the same themes of universal humanity that have touched readers around the world have also removed Anne from her family, religious and historical contexts – rendering her legacy devoid of its true meaning.

In an article for The New Yorker in 1997, the critic Cynthia Ozick wrote that the diary’s “reputation for uplift is nonsense”. She added that “the diary has been bowdlerised, distorted, transmuted, reduced; it has been infantilised, Americanised, sentimentalised, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly denied . . . ”

It is a view with which Yves Kugelmann, a board member of the Anne Frank Foundation, has some sympathy. He claims that until the foundation urged the Anne Frank House (a separate and independent organisation) to better acknowledge historical context, many visitors passed through the building on Prinsengracht without realising that Anne was Jewish.

Jaqueline van Maarsen, a Dutch writer and the former best friend of Anne Frank.Drew Farrell/Photoshot/Getty

In a recent interview with Buddy Elias in Amsterdam, a well-known Dutch journalist insisted that Anne was Dutch – not German. Kugelmann dislikes the term “icon” and evocatively describes Anne as a young girl who perished, only for her legacy to be picked over by a series of scavengers who have plucked relevant nuggets and reused them for the purposes of their own beliefs and causes.

The fight over the true meaning of Anne Frank has been ongoing for as long as the diary has been part of public discourse – embroiling Anne’s father, Otto Frank, in years of legal battles that  arguably drove him to a nervous breakdown and eventually into leaving Amsterdam and starting a new life in Switzerland.

Although Anne’s story touched an immediate chord, its publication in America brought Otto Frank into contact with a man who would engage him in a lifelong dispute – the writer Meyer Levin. Levin was a fan of the diary, and at first a great friend of Otto Frank, but the idea of adapting it into a play brought Levin into conflict with powerful Broadway and Hollywood figures who beat him to the rights to produce their own version of the story. The result was a hit play in 1956, and an Oscar-winning film three years later, though  many believed that while they emphasised the book’s universal themes, they downplayed the Franks’ Jewish heritage and the unique nature of the Holocaust. Unable to let the matter go, Levin pursued Otto Frank in a series of bitter court battles for the right to adapt the diary – drawing in figures including Eleanor Roosevelt – until both of them were left, to some extent, broken men.

Sadly, the ugly dispute with Meyer Levin was only one of Otto’s problems. In the 1960s, The Diary of Anne Frank was reaching a new audience of young Germans. People in packed theatres watched a German adaptation of the play, speechless, while Otto often visited the country to speak to schoolchildren. Still, he worried that German parents and teachers were doing little to teach the next generation about the Holocaust – a belief cemented by a series of court cases brought about by Holocaust deniers who claimed the diary was a fake written by Otto himself. The task of disproving such claims stretched across the decades, reaching Germany’s constitutional court and consuming Otto’s emotional energy. Otto and the diary were at the heart of the storm over Holocaust denial and the establishment of the truth of the Nazi regime.

Following his death, the emergence of the “five missing pages” of Anne’s diary in the 1980s raised further controversy about the authenticity of the work and the legitimacy of Otto’s original edit, which removed, in particular, anti-German references. In 1995, an unexpurgated version of the diary was published, prompting another round of debate about its authorship.

Surprisingly, perhaps, a strong strand of opposition had always originated from within the Jewish community itself. In Amsterdam, the influential Rabbi Hammerlberg called Otto “sentimental and weak”, and said all “thinking Jews in the Netherlands” should oppose the “commercial hullabaloo” of the diary and the Anne Frank House – reflecting a widespread unease in the Dutch-Jewish community over  Anne Frank’s legacy.

An image taken at the Anne Frank Museum. Cris Toala Olivares/Anne Frank Museum

Jacqueline van Maarsen says that, to this day, most of her Jewish friends are not interested in discussing Anne Frank with her. There was a widespread feeling of resentment over the attention received by one girl, when almost every Jewish family had lost members in the Holocaust. “There were so many Anne Franks,” van Maarsen says, “only they did not write diaries”.

Indeed Anne’s story did not reflect the situation for the vast majority of Dutch Jews, who often had neither the wherewithal nor the money to go into hiding. Those who did manage to hide were often split up from other members of their families and frequently changed hiding places, sometimes every night. The remainder were deported first to transit camps in the Netherlands, and then on to concentration camps and death camps like Auschwitz and Sobibór. By the end of the war, the Netherlands had lost the same percentage of its Jewish population as had Poland – the highest figure in Europe. Jacqueline van Maarsen was saved, along with her parents and sister, from deportation as her mother was not Jewish – but the rest of her extended family was killed.

“Anne Frank was never my preferred story to tell, because it’s not a good example for the Holocaust,” says Yves Kugelmann. “It’s the wrong example for a very important topic, and partly what I’ve learned in the foundation is that people like to take the wrong example of the Holocaust because it’s easier to deal with it.”

Although the spectre of her fate looms over every reading of the diary, the Holocaust does not feature in The Diary of Anne Frank, which ends before the family’s betrayal and capture with Anne’s hopeful wishes for the future and thoughts about the fundamentally good nature of mankind. It is an omission that the new play seeks to correct with a moving final scene set in Bergen-Belsen, when all of the girlish fantasies and dreams that have sustained Anne throughout the play are stripped away, and we see her in the snow with her sister Margot. Regardless of the mixed feelings of the Jewish community towards her legacy, and the unease of the Dutch themselves in coming to terms with their widespread collaboration with the Nazis, it is a conclusion greeted with loud sobbing from the audience.

Reinterpreting the diary also illuminates a more complex relationship between the Frank family and Amsterdam. While the Anne Frank House remains the first port of call for visitors to the city, it has been embroiled in a protracted battle with the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, culminating in a legal dispute in 2011 over a portion of the archives which were on long-term loan to the house, but which the foundation wanted to relocate to the Family Frank Centre in Frankfurt.

In June 2013, an Amsterdam court ruled that the archives should be returned to the foundation by January 2014 – much to the dismay of the Anne Frank House and its supporters. It is hard to see why the two organisations, one a hugely popular and moving memorial and museum to Anne Frank and her family and the other, the foundation (which holds the copyright to the diary and funds charitable projects with Unicef), cannot get along.

Although they worked in partnership for many years, the recent legal dispute led to harsh words, with Yves Kugelmann accusing the house of acting like Nazis in refusing to return the archive. In return, opponents of the foundation claim that it is unaccountable, and that Buddy Elias and his wife have struck up strange friendships, including one with a middle-aged Scandinavian woman who claims to embody the diarist. “She regards herself as a reincarnation of Anne Frank,” Buddy Elias says. “We know her very well. There’s nothing I can say to [her assertion]. It’s her story.” Elias adds that he cannot personally accept the claim, but that “there are things in life that we do not know. It could be, it could not be, I don’t know”.

Much of the broader debate concerns the wishes of Otto Frank, whose thoughts and allegiances changed over the years and whose intentions each party claims the other has misinterpreted. Anne Frank biographer Melissa Mueller told The New York Times, “Both organisations want to own Anne Frank . . . Both want to impose a way for the world to see Anne Frank.”

Elias calls the dispute between the house and the foundation “a shame”, and says that he hopes to resolve the difficulties with the management of the Anne Frank House and resume good relations soon.

The new Family Frank Centre in Frankfurt. Family Frank Centre

Sitting beneath a giant black-and-white photo of Anne in his office, Ronald Leopold, director of the Anne Frank House, says he is also saddened by recent events, but that he is convinced of the unique nature of the museum he oversees. “The main feature of this house is its emptiness. And I think it’s the feature that makes this place stand out amidst all those hundreds or maybe even thousands of places in Europe that reminds us of the Holocaust and the Second World War, because I think it’s probably one of the few places where you connect to that history in a very emotional, personal way.”

As Otto Frank insisted, the house and the secret annexe remain unfurnished, with only a few photos of film stars, and postcards of a young Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, stuck to Anne’s bedroom walls. History did not stand still in 1945, Leopold says, but you can find, amid the canals and beautiful buildings of Amsterdam, one house that is still empty. “It’s the emptiness, of those 60,000 people who were deported and murdered from this city between 1941 and 1945. It’s the emptiness in Otto Frank’s soul having lost his whole family. It’s an emptiness that symbolises and represents the absence of Anne Frank.”

Buddy Elias and Ronald Leopold agree that soon there will be no one living who remembers Anne Frank. For Elias and the Anne Frank Foundation, the hope is that a new generation of projects, like the play, Anne, and the Family Frank Centre, will put Anne and her legacy in their proper context.

For Ronald Leopold, the challenge is to educate a constant stream of teenagers who visit the house with no knowledge of the Holocaust. Invariably they identify with Anne and her teenage struggles – but Leopold’s task it to shape that identification into something meaningful. Fittingly for an argument that has often revolved around Jewish identity, the ultimate meaning of Anne Frank will live on not through museums, houses or foundations – but in the written word. Ronald Leopold says: “It’s just her diary that is here as the silent messenger when she’s not there any more.” 

From the passenger seat of the red Camaro convertible hurtling away from Southampton Road, Janet watched the scenery change from one-story houses to tobacco fields and apple orchards. She had come to Charlotte, North Carolina, to work on a farm, but she wasn’t going to be picking—she and the three other women in the car were wearing high heels and see-through miniskirts, and they felt alone and afraid.

The thought of the violence to come terrified them. It was midday, and after about an hour on the road, the man behind the wheel, whom the women knew as Ricardo, a common fake name traffickers use, turned down a dirt path and stopped at a cluster of cheap cabins that had floors lined with mattresses. These beat-down shacks were home for more than 100 farm workers. In the main farm house nearby, the workers—mostly from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala—were on their lunch break, eating chicken and rice.

The four women climbed out of the Camaro and went over to sheds near the cabins, where the workers kept their tools. The cement floors inside had crumbled through, exposing big dirt holes. While the women laid down rags, the men, filthy and reeking of sweat after spending all morning in the fields, quickly finished eating and formed lines outside the sheds, with as many as 50 men waiting for a woman. Ricardo stayed by the car, keeping lookout for police or anyone who might try to rob him and the women.

One by one, the men paid $30 to rape Janet and the other women. Most of them, having gone a long time without sex, lasted only a few minutes with Janet. Some were so violent she was sure they would have seriously hurt or even killed her if it weren’t for Ricardo, watching over the operation. She remembers seeing that happen once, to a woman who came without a driver or a pimp; she says the farm workers threw the body in a dump.

Mexican migrant workers pick organic spinach during the fall harvest at Grant Family Farms on Oct. 11, 2011 in Wellington, Colo.John Moore/Getty

At the end of the day, as the sun was setting, the women handed all the money they’d collected to Ricardo, and they made the drive back to Charlotte. In the car, all Janet wanted to do was rest, but she knew she had to call her pimp, hundreds of miles away, and report how many customers she had had and how much money she made. As soon as she arrived in Charlotte, Janet knew there would be johns waiting for her at the brothel. The next day would be the same routine, and that thought made her hate herself. She felt inhuman, like a machine.

Janet was forced into prostitution in Mexico by a boyfriend named Antonio in 1999; coyotes brought them across the border the following year, and they went to live with Antonio’s family in the borough of Queens in New York City, where she was put to work in brothels. Every couple of weeks, a van would take her and other women and girls—some as young as 12—to Charlotte, where she would spend a week or more, forced to have sex with strangers at a brothel by night and at farm labor camps by day.

Sex trafficking flourishes in areas of male-dominated industries, such as fracking and oil boomtowns, military bases and, as a slew of recent court cases and victim accounts show, farm labor camps. The U.S. Department of State estimates that traffickers bring some 14,500 to 17,500 people into the United States each year.  

“These organizations that victimize these women…transport them to where the business is,” says James T. Hayes Jr., special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New York. Traffickers set up shop in metropolitan areas—they often choose Queens for its central location along the Eastern corridor to cities north and south, plus its big clientele base in New York City—and send women to farms near and far, ranging from Vermont to Florida. Officials don’t know how many women are trapped in this city-to-farm sex pipeline, but experts say the number is growing every year. Keith V. Bletzer, an adjunct faculty member at Arizona State University who has studied prostitution in agricultural areas, says that until recent years, women went to farm labor camps on their own to sell sex out of financial necessity. Now, however, there is an organized crime element, with “other people recognizing that this might be a viable” source of income, he says. Rather than women selling sex to make a living, it’s traffickers bringing them to farms as part of larger international operations.

In some cases, pimps posing as boyfriends lure victims and shuttle them from brothel to brothel. In other instances, coyotes smuggle women across the border and then force or coerce them into selling sex to pay off smuggling fees. The United Nations says criminals who once trafficked weapons and drugs have made women their latest commodity. “It’s hugely profitable,” says Lori Cohen, director of the anti-trafficking initiative at Sanctuary for Families. Smuggled drugs are quickly sold, but with a woman, “you bring her across the border once and you just keep using her body over and over again until she breaks down,” she explains.

For Janet, who requested that Newsweek refer to her by the name she used most when she was a prostitute, that breakdown took more than a decade. “Your body is being sold,” she says in Spanish through a Sanctuary for Families advocate. “It’s almost like your body is no longer yours.”

Farm workers harvest asparagus in a field near Firebaugh in California's Central Valley.Matt Black

Her First Time

Widely considered the sex trafficking capital of the world, Tenancingo, Mexico, is two hours southeast of Mexico City. Many of the town’s 10,000 residents are involved in prostitution; for young men, becoming a pimp means joining the family business. “It’s a sex-trafficking city,” says Human Trafficking Intervention Court Judge Toko Serita, “where generations of families and men are engaged in the business.” Men there “recruit” women from elsewhere in Mexico, often by pretending to fall in love with them, and then bring them to Tenancingo, where the forced prostitution begins. From there, many pimps take their victims to work in Mexico City; some later go to the U.S., where there is more money to be made.

Janet grew up with her grandmother in Puebla, a half-hour drive from Tenancingo. “My childhood was very poor, but I have memories that make me laugh,” she says. One day in 1998, when Janet was 23, she was walking home from her factory job when a car pulled up beside her. “Hi, my name is Ricardo,” the man inside the car said. “Can I accompany you?”

“No,” Janet said. “I don’t know you.”

The man persisted and asked if they could be friends. When they reached Janet’s home, she finally said OK, they could be friends. Having recently split from the abusive father of her young daughter, Janet wasn’t eager to bring someone new into her life. But the man from the car kept showing up. “He was very respectful of me. In Puebla, when a woman gets into a car with a man, the first thing the man does is he starts grabbing her. He wants to take you immediately to bed,” she says. This man, however, “behaved very nicely.”

Lori L. Cohen, Director, Anti-trafficking Initiative for Sanctuary for Families speaks with a client.Shaminder Dulai for Newsweek

In July 1999, after knowing Ricardo for a little more than year, Janet agreed to move in with his family in Tenancingo, leaving her daughter in the care of her grandmother. But when she arrived, she learned that his name was Antonio, not Ricardo, and that he was a pimp. His family lived in squalor, even worse than where Janet had grown up. Antonio’s family slept in one room, and the animals they owned slept in another. Water poured in through the ceiling when it rained, and children ran around barefoot and played with soiled diapers. After six months, Janet decided to leave Antonio, but discovered she was pregnant and stayed.

That’s when the abuse began. First, Antonio forced Janet to take pills so she would have a miscarriage. She did. Weeks later, he told her she had to become a prostitute. At first she protested, saying she had worked a good job in a factory and could find work like that again. But he insisted, and eventually she gave in. Her first time selling sex was on the streets of Mexico City. During that time, she recalls, “[the sex] was day and night and I felt terrible.” After a year, Antonio told her that if they went to the U.S., family there could help them find legitimate work. Reluctantly, Janet agreed, and in June 2000 they made their way across the border and to Queens.

In Tenancingo, Tlaxcala, a little town of 10,000 that has become world famous as the center of the country's international sex trafficking trade, families of pimps are known for their large, gaudy homes.Corey Sipkin/New York Daily News/Getty

‘Set Up to Be Invisible’

The vast majority of the country’s estimated 3 million farmworkers were born outside the U.S. Like Janet, most of them came to America in search of opportunity and, also like Janet, are being steadily ground down by a system working against them. Few suburban supermarket shoppers know that federal labor laws exclude farmworkers from certain rights most Americans take for granted, such as overtime pay, days off and collective bargaining. State by state, advocates have tried to change that, but Big Agriculture usually manages to thwart the efforts.

Seasonal crop farm laborers typically live in barracks for a few months at a time. At year-round livestock farms, workers live in cheap houses or trailers. “The average citizen wouldn’t see them,” Renan Salgado of the Worker Justice Center of New York says about where the workers live. “They are set up to be invisible.” Because of their undocumented status, workers rarely leave the farms, relying instead on supervisors and middlemen to deliver everything from groceries to medical aid to women.

The scene is a volatile mix, ripe for violence. “People are just bored, and they’re lonely,” says Gonzalo Martinez de Vedia, also of the Worker Justice Center. “You have an entire population that is sitting at home for an entire season. Single men. There’s a lot of drinking, substance abuse.”

Workers tend to take out that frustration on female visitors. What happens on the farms, says Cohen, is rape. “I think there’s a perception that when…you pay to have sex with someone, that means that you pay for the right to do whatever you want with that woman,” she says. “The violence that our clients have experienced at the hands of their buyers is really shocking.”

Tenancingo is at the center of the issue of human trafficking. Most people in the town of approximately 10,000 people will either deny or ignore any knowledge of the sequestering young girls from other towns in Tenancingo's giant mansions.Peggy Peattie/U-T San Diego/ZUMA

Hold the Children Hostage

Antonio had promised a better life for Janet north of the border, but their living conditions in Queens were horrific. “People were sleeping one on top of another, and all the women worked in prostitution,” she says. Antonio’s cousins were pimps, she learned, operating a family ring. Janet still had to sell sex, and a routine developed: Antonio would spend his days playing soccer and billiards, while Janet had to work at brothels in Queens and Boston. Once Antonio learned about the opportunity to sell sex to farmworkers, he began sending Janet to Charlotte. There, a white, one-story, three-bedroom house near the end of a winding road served as a brothel, offering johns a constant rotation of out-of-state women. Janet and the other victims would see men there from 7 at night to 3 in the morning, sleep until 11 a.m. and then be driven out to the farms.

“I felt like an animal,” Janet says. “The men were very aggressive. They would grab me. They were pushing me. They would grab me by the neck. They would penetrate me really hard. So when they finished, it was like my salvation.” Many men appeared to be on drugs; some refused to pay. She tried to make them wear condoms, but sometimes the condoms would break or the men would take them off. Janet says she had so many abortions—always done with Cytotec pills, widely used in the trafficking world—that she lost track of how many. She lived in constant fear. “I didn’t even like to look at them,” she says of her buyers.

Antonio still promised they would get married, and he told Janet he was sending the money she earned back to Mexico, where someone was building them a house. Antonio’s cousins told their victims similar lies to keep them hoping and in line. “The traffickers are canny. They’ve figured out the sort of sweet spot that needs to be exploited,” Cohen says. “It’s almost like a script.” The traffickers would also threaten that if a woman ran away or went to the police, they would harm her family back in Mexico. For one ring that serviced farmworkers, prosecutors learned the pimps went so far as to impregnate their victims just so they could hold the children hostage.

“The fear that the trafficking organizations place into their victims makes it sometimes difficult if not impossible to get a victim to actually admit that they’re a victim,” says James Hayes Jr. from Homeland Security Investigations. Sadly, some victims go to great lengths to protect their traffickers or return to their pimps, despite the help of law enforcement and advocates.

Around 2009, one of the pimps in Antonio’s ring was arrested for domestic abuse, and Antonio fled to Mexico. However, he stayed in contact with Janet by phone and expected her to continue working and wiring him money. Meanwhile, Janet was in touch with her daughter, who was still in Mexico and had medical expenses stemming from an accident. To cover those expenses, Janet asked Antonio if she could use some of the money she made, but he refused. So she went to the Mexican Consulate in New York City for advice, and after she described her predicament, consulate staff contacted Sanctuary for Families.

That visit to the consulate set in motion an investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, beginning in 2010. Investigators conducted surveillance and pored over phone, travel and financial records, in order to identify and locate key members of the ring. With Janet’s help, officials rescued 25 victims, arrested the pimps and found Antonio hiding in Mexico. In 2012, officials extradited him, and he was sentenced in June 2014. He and three cousins all pleaded guilty and are now serving sentences ranging from 15 to 22 years.

The path that led Antonio to trafficking became clear in court materials. He was an orphan at the age of 6, after his mother abandoned him and his father died of alcoholism; an uncle in Tenancingo took him in but routinely beat him with a whip and starved him; he grew up without schooling, friends or affection. Coming of age in Tenancingo, his lawyer wrote in a memorandum, Antonio saw “a culture that not only tolerated sex trafficking, but flaunted it with the showy extravagances of its participants.” Antonio told his lawyer, “I wanted to be somebody.”

The judge sentenced Antonio to 15 years behind bars, plus five years of supervised release. He must register as a sex offender and pay Janet $1.2 million in restitution, which will come from the money he made as a pimp and whatever he makes in prison job programs. While in prison, he will pay at least $20 per month, serving as a constant reminder of what he did.

On the day of the sentencing, appearing in a Brooklyn courtroom as Jane Doe No. 1, Janet finally confronted the man who had enslaved her for 11 years. “He did not treat me like a human being. He treated me like a sexual robot,” she said in court. “For years I cried in silence. I carried the scars of Antonio’s abuse every day, but I can no longer be silent. I am here today so Antonio and his family will no longer be able to force another woman into prostitution.”

Prostitutes wait for clients at a street in the Merced neighborhood in Mexico City, March 19, 2005.Marco Ugarte/AP

‘The Fresh Meat Is Here’

The details from Janet’s account are consistent with those another victim and multiple farmworkers provided to Newsweek. In New York, one former dairy farmworker in Lewis County says that once a week, a man would go to the farm with women and knock on workers’ doors, saying, “Llego la carne fresca” (“The fresh meat is here”) and “Tu vas a pasar" (“You are up”). Someone who provides services to farmworker camps in upstate New York says that his weekly farm visits coincide with those of the indentured women, and that the workers always tell him to hurry and serve them food before it’s their “turn” for sex. Rates with the women range from $25 to $60.

“They’re essentially prisoners, and they don’t have free time, so it’s easier for them when they’re offered that opportunity, it’s just right there,” a former farmworker, Arturo Vasquez, who worked in upstate New York, said in Spanish through an advocate affiliated with the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. He said he’d seen Latin American women on farms, as well as Chinese and Russian women.

A victim who asked that Newsweek refer to her as Katarin, the name she used as a prostitute, says she endured years of forced prostitution at farm labor camps. She was only 13 in 2010 when her future pimp approached the park bench where she was sitting in a village near Puebla after finishing her work shift at an ice cream shop. The boy, 16, introduced himself. She thought he was handsome, and after a week they were romantically involved. Three weeks after they met, she went to live with his family in Tenancingo. Five months later, they crossed the border by foot with smugglers into Arizona. Then they took a van to Queens, and three days later, he forced her into prostitution.

Katarin remembers drivers taking her to farms on Long Island, as well as in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She would see 30 to 40 men a day in bunks ridden with bedbugs; many of the men were violently drunk, and some would use knives or scissors to break open their condoms. “Sometimes they couldn’t come because they were drinking so much, and they would get really mad because the time would be up and they hadn’t finished,” Katarin says in Spanish through Sanctuary for Families. By 2014, she had developed a vaginal infection that left her in unbearable pain, and when her pimp said she had to continue working, she decided to escape. She went to the police, who helped get her to a hospital and a safe house.

Her pimp ran away and remains at large.

A 2010 State Department report identifies identifies the town of Tenancingo, Tlaxcala, as the area of high sex trafficking between Mexico and the United States.El Universal/ZUMA

Mr. All That

The man responsible for bringing down Antonio’s ring is James Hayes Jr., who oversees the New York office for Homeland Security Investigations. Immigration work runs in Hayes’s family; his grandfather was a customs inspector, and his father worked for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In the mid-1990s, interested in a career in law enforcement, Hayes, now 41 and a Brooklyn native, chose border patrol over the New York Police Department. From there, he moved to Los Angeles to take down gangs, and he entered his current role in 2009. Since then, he says, his office has rescued more than 250 trafficking victims and made at least 150 trafficking-related arrests.

The case involving Janet’s trafficker was one in a handful involving farmworker camps to go to court in recent years. In May 2014, following another bust by Hayes, a judge found two Mexican brothers guilty of running a ring that operated four brothels and trafficked women to farms in New Jersey. The brothers got life in prison, believed to be New York state’s first life sentences for sex trafficking. Fifteen other members of the ring faced charges, including one man whose job was to sweep cars for tracking devices. “We saw with both [rings] very sophisticated levels of organization and very sophisticated delineations of responsibilities,” Hayes says. Prosecutors believe the brothers’ ring started as far back as 1999 and involved hundreds, and possibly thousands, of women.

In 2011, Hayes’s Homeland Security Investigations counterpart down South, Brock Nicholson, helped bust the brothel in Charlotte where Janet had been shipped. In 2013, the Georgia attorney general announced an anti-trafficking campaign that singled out “rural communities where young girls are trucked in to be abused by farmworkers.” And last February, Nicholson’s five-year investigation into a Savannah-based ring, dubbed Operation Dark Night, concluded with the conviction of 23 defendants. At least two of the dozen victims Nicholson rescued had been forced to have sex with migrant laborers in sweet potato fields in Georgia and the Carolinas.  

The problem exists in the Midwest too. In October, Michigan officials in Lenawee County, a rural area outside of Toledo, Ohio, accused a local man of trafficking two American women in their 20s to farmworkers there. “We’ve been investigating [sex trafficking to] migrant farms for years,” says R. Burke Castleberry Jr., the county prosecuting attorney.

Two separate cases, prosecuted between 2011 and 2013, involved transporting women from Queens to farms in Vermont for sex. In one, which involved at least five women, the liaison between the pimp and farmworkers was a caseworker at the Vermont Department for Children and Families. He had taken advantage of the fact that workers depended on him for goods and services, and supplied them with not only clothing, for which he marked up the prices, but also women. His business cards said, “Don Chingon," which roughly translates to “Mr. All That." (There may be an added pun, since the verb chingar can mean “to have sex.”) Prosecutors in both Vermont cases failed to prove that the women were trafficking victims, and so the men faced charges related only to interstate prostitution.

Hayes says his office is pursuing dozens of human trafficking cases. “Whether they’re being taken to farms or nightclubs or apartments,” he says, “we’re focused on putting an end to it.”

A woman talks on a phone outside the Chila City Escape nightclub on Roosevelt Avenue in the Queens borough of New York, Sept. 15, 2012.Victor J. Blue/The New York Times/Redux

“I Wanted Love”

It’s been several months since Janet confronted Antonio in court. She sits in a conference room on the 28th floor of a building in midtown Manhattan wearing a black jacket and purple shirt, her hair pushed back with a headband. There are panoramic views, but she focuses on the table in front of her, using a pencil to sketch her childhood home in Puebla. That was where she was happiest and felt safest, a time of blue quinceanera dresses and Christmas turkey dinners. Growing up there, she learned from her grandmother the importance of loving relationships. “I wanted to have a real marriage with love,” she says. “It’s something permanent.”

Seeing Antonio locked up has brought some closure to Janet, now 38, though she continues to struggle with her past. “I lost the best moments of my life, when I could have been with my family,” she said in court. Living in the U.S. on a special visa for trafficking victims, she has reunited with her daughter, now a teenager. These days, Janet attends counseling and has the support of a boyfriend, though she doesn’t tell her friends her full story. She’s escaped the clutches of slavery, but knows there are millions of people who are still in chains.

Through the use of death squads, many apartheid defenders in South Africa conducted a dirty war against those whom they perceived as threatening the regime. Victims were of all races and included Chris Hani, who was seen by some as a possible alternative to Nelson Mandela as the first president of a post-apartheid South Africa.

But only three white South Africans have been tried and convicted for their apartheid crimes: Eugene de Kock, Clive Derby-Lewis and Ferdi Barnard. On January 30, Minister of Justice Michael Masutha approved De Kock’s parole “in the interest of nation building and reconciliation.” He denied an application from Derby-Lewis, who reportedly suffers from cancer, on the grounds that he did not meet the medical requirements, and continued to hold Barnard’s application under advisement.

De Kock, nicknamed “Prime Evil,” was a colonel in the counterinsurgency unit of the South African police. In effect, he ran a death squad and was directly involved in torture. He confessed his crimes before the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, during which (and subsequently) he claimed that the upper reaches of the Nationalist (apartheid) government had been complicit in his unit’s operations. Among those accused was F.W. de Klerk, the state president at the time and one of the negotiators of the transition to a nonracist democracy.

De Kock was prosecuted for crimes against humanity and sentenced to 212 years in prison. (South Africa abolished the death penalty at the time of the transition.) He regularly expressed remorse and, according to the South African media, assisted in the location of the remains of some of his victims so that they could receive traditional burials. He was paroled because of good behavior after serving 20 years of his sentence. To date, he is the only police officer to have ever been punished for apartheid-era crimes.

By contrast, Derby-Lewis has not expressed remorse, at least to the same extent. He was a political figure, a founder of the right-wing Conservative Party during the last days of apartheid and a notorious racist. He was convicted of organizing the assassination of Hani, a liberation icon who was the head of the Communist Party. Derby-Lewis was sentenced to life imprisonment. Following the rejection of his application for parole, he said that he would “sue” the minister of justice.

Barnard has been described by the South African media as a hoodlum who was involved in drug trafficking and participated in the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a death squad that reported to the apartheid-era South African Defence Force. He was convicted of the murder of David Webster, a professor of anthropology and anti-apartheid activist, and of the attempted murder of Dullah Omar, then an anti-apartheid lawyer and later a minister in the Mandela and Thabo Mbeki governments. Barnard was sentenced to two life terms plus 63 years.

Why have only three death squad operatives been tried and convicted? Part of the answer is that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established as part of the transition, instituted a procedure by which the confession of crimes could result in amnesty. However, few senior officials in the apartheid government took advantage of it.

Perhaps more generally, the answer is related to the fact that South Africa’s move to a nonracist democracy in 1994 was a transition rather than a capitulation. Further, it is well known that the liberation movements were also guilty of numerous human rights abuses. It would seem that an unstated consensus may have emerged not to inquire too closely into the past.

John Campbell is the Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations website.

Dr. Carl Djerassi, who died last week at age 91, was known across the world for his pioneering work on birth control. But family and friends also remember the scientist as a forward-thinking teacher who combined his passions for writing and science to inspire his students.

Djerassi “made enormous contributions to society, connecting basic chemistry to things of cultural consequence,” says Paul Wender, a professor Djerassi helped recruit to Stanford’s chemistry department. “He never lost, I think, the inspiration that comes from that kind of association.”

Born in Vienna in 1923, Djerassi moved to the United States in 1939. He earned his bachelor’s degree by the age of 19 and his doctorate in chemistry at 22. In 1951, Djerassi and his research team became the first to synthesize the oral contraceptive norethisterone, which led to the creation of the birth control pill.

Though he is best known as the “Father of the Pill” for his work in contraceptives, his research contributions in chemistry extended beyond reproductive health. Later in life, he also wrote plays and novels that mostly dealt with science through art. And throughout his career—more than five decades of which he spent at Stanford—he taught undergraduates and graduate students in courses that explored the implications of sciences on society.

To his most recent students, he’s remembered as the professor who on Monday nights hosted them for dinner and chipped chocolate off a big block he brought from Austria.

“His life and career included remarkable productivity and achievement in science, academia and the arts, as well as personal tragedy in his expulsion from his childhood home following the Nazi Anschluss in 1938 and the death of his daughter in 1978,” his family said.  

Lynette Cegelski, an assistant professor at Stanford’s department of chemistry, says Djerassi was always interested in promoting young scientists and faculty members. Even as a retired emeritus professor, he would reach out to new hires.

“He was always encouraging a woman in science” and thinking of “all of these ways in which you can empower women to have successful careers and lives,” Cegelski says.

Wender says Djerassi was “way ahead of his time with respect to his awareness of diversity in hiring practices,” certainly with regard to hiring women but also with all underrepresented groups in science.

“As I later learned, it was an incredible thing to take women into his lab,” says Diane Kanne, who worked in Djerassi’s lab as an undergraduate chemistry major in the 1970s. “It was just the beginning of the women’s movement.” When she later went to work in industry, she was one of only 25 women out of 500 engineers at her company.

Kanne remembers “Papa Carl,” as some called him, as a warm, caring man whose eyes “were dark and intense. You knew when you looked at him that there was so much going on in the background. I imagined them to be what the eyes of a genius would look like,” Kanne says. 

In addition to his passion for science, Djerassi was a deep “appreciator of the arts,” according to his son, Dale Djerassi. After Djerassi’s daughter, an artist, took her life at the age of 28, he started an artist residency program in her memory on the family’s ranch west of Stanford’s campus.

Djerassi began writing later in life. He produced primarily novels and plays that he called “science-in-fiction” and “science-in-theater.” Through this work, he tried to make connections between science and society, to address ethics and politics, and to “smuggle science to the masses,” Cegelski says.

“He was extremely proud of the fact that in his 60s he really shifted from being primarily a scientist to being primarily a writer,” says Dale Djerassi, a filmmaker, rancher and private investor. In more recent years, Djerassi focused his teaching around his new literary pursuits, though the connection to science remained.

Wender remembers inviting Djerassi to speak to undergraduates during an introductory organic chemistry lecture. Djerassi, along with a postdoctoral fellow, read excerpts from NO, a book he wrote dealing with reproductive health research. The presentation ended with the white-haired professor performing a rap.

“Here’s a person who’s behind the earliest contraceptive research,” standing up in front of a roomful of undergraduates and rapping, Wender says, laughing. The students were awestruck.

“He used his writing to draw people into the area of science,” Wender explains, and allowed them to think “about science in a way that they could understand it without having any kind of technical introduction to the field.”

Wender says Djerassi was “connecting the dots from basic science to its ramifications, societal and economic consequences,” as he had with his course on the biosocial aspects of birth control.

As a professor emeritus, Djerassi offered an annual seminar for sophomores called Science-in-Theater: A New Genre?, which explored the relationship between science and the theater and illustrated“why more intellectually challenging ‘science-in-theatre’ plays have appeared in recent times where scientific behavior and scientists are presented accurately rather than just as Frankensteins, Strangeloves or nerds.”

“I was always really impressed by how he was able to integrate technical concepts with what Stanford students would call ‘fuzzy stuff,’” says Rayna Smith, a Stanford undergraduate double-majoring in French and math, who took Science-in-Theater last winter. Smith says Djerassi’s course helped her bridge the divide between her two fields of study. “I feel very lucky to be one of the last students he taught,” she says.

On Monday evenings, a small group of students would make their way north from Stanford’s campus to Djerassi’s apartment on Russian Hill in San Francisco, where they were greeted by Paul Klee paintings, dinner and chocolate.

The students read plays that fell into the “science-in-theater” category, including some of Djerassi’s, and every week two students would write alternate endings for the play being discussed. When Caroline Schwanzer, a fellow Austrian, wrote an alternate ending to Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen in 2009, Djerassi surprised her by sending it to the playwright himself to tell him he should have ended his play this way.

Djerassi remained her mentor even after the class ended, as he did with many students. They would meet occasionally, and Djerassi always asked about her life and about women in the workplace. “He was so invested in the changes that are happening with women in our society today,” she says.

An illustration presented to Carl Djerassi by one of his recent Science-in-Theater classes.Caroline Schwanzer

Djerassi was originally scheduled to teach Science-in-Theater again during the winter quarter that began last month, his son says. His most recent book, an autobiography titled In Retrospect: From the Pill to the Pen that focused on his transition from hard science to writing, was published in November 2014, just a few months before his death.

“Now that I’m 90...I’ve never been busier,” Schwanzer recalls him telling her about a year ago while he was in Vienna to give a TEDx talk. When they went to visit the Art History Museum in Vienna during the same trip, she remembers, he commented on every patriarchal Austrian emperor. “He was very funny,” she says.

Last Wednesday, Djerassi was still up, sitting at his computer and talking, his son says. Two days later, “he took his last breath,” Dale says. “He died in bed at home with the light streaming through the window and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge,” he says, after “a large life fully lived.”