Russia’s special services have announced the arrests of two men alleged to have passed state secrets to the West in as many days on charges of high treason, Russian news agency Interfax reported today.

On Wednesday, Vladimir Golubev, a former employee of the Russian Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov, was arrested and charged with high treason in the territory east of Moscow, near the city of Nizhny Novgorod.

The centre is state funded and carries out much of the Russian government’s nuclear research.

Golubev’s lawyer has denied the charges that his client has leaked any state secrets, however he did confirm that Golubev is an expert in nuclear physics as well as explosive substances.

Today, a Moscow district court told press that they had detained one Gennady Nikolaevich Kravtsov under suspicion of selling Russian state secrets to Western states.

According to Yulia Skotnikova, a spokesperson for the court in the Levtorskovo district of Moscow, Kravtsov was detained at some point last year and on the January 21 the court had ruled to extend his detention as investigation into his case continues.

Details about the man, his profession, his family or indeed what kind of secrets he had allegedly been passing has not been revealed as Skotnikova told journalists that was considered ‘highly confidential’ at the moment.

All that was made public by the Levtorskovo district court spokesperson was that Kravtsov “is accused of the transmitting of state secrets to the West, the maximum sentence for which is 20 years”.

Which country or party “the West” signifies has also not been made clear, however currently Kravtsov stands to remain in custody until March 27, as the “top secret” investigation into his dealings continues.

Both cases have captivated the Russian public, with authorities giving very little away on the specific charges on either. There is no official confirmation that the two cases were connected.

According to Russian newspaper Trud, over the last three years at least 16 people have been found guilty of treason in Russia, which carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years.

On Wednesday a mother of two from the Russian town of Smolensk Svetlana Davidova was released from detention after also being charged with treason last month for phoning up the Ukrainian embassy when she noticed troops from a Russian army base near her town were heading towards the Russian-Ukrainian border.

Niger troops and Chadian war planes fought off an attack on Friday on the Niger town of Bosso by Boko Haram militants whose insurgency is spreading from Nigeria to neighboring states, military officials in Niger said.

The fighting took place in the southeastern region of Diffa, part of the border area where Chad has sent hundreds of troops to help Niger take on Boko Haram, the sources said.

"The Boko Haram attack from Malam Fatori (in Nigeria) against the town of Bosso and the bridge at Doutchi in the Diffa region has been repulsed. We have Chadian planes bombarding the locality," said a Niger military source.

A second source said: "There is heavy weapons fire from both sides .... We have at least five injured in our ranks." Later a military source said the attack had failed, calm had returned and there was no hot pursuit operation into Nigeria.

Boko Haram has seized territory in northeastern Nigeria as part of a five-year insurgency for an Islamist state. Around 10,000 people were killed last year and the militants increasingly stage cross border attacks.

The insurgency is the worst threat to Nigeria's security as the nation, Africa's top oil producer and biggest economy, heads to a presidential election on Feb. 14.

The militants are also increasingly threatening neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon, prompting regional leaders to come up with a joint plan to defeat them.

Chad has deployed some 2,500 soldiers to neighboring Cameroon and Niger as part of this effort.Niger's parliament is due to vote on Monday on a proposal by the government to send its troops into Nigeria to fight Boko Haram.

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

Eddie Talaske was 21 when he landed a programming internship at Sirius XM. A college student from a Michigan town so small it has just one stop light, he’d never spent more than a weekend in New York City. The opportunity was alluring, but expensive: The satellite radio broadcasting company, which posted 2013 revenue exceeding $3.5 billion, does not pay its interns, instead offering only college credit for their labors. So Talaske found shared housing on NYCintern.org, then turned to bank bonds, tax returns and months of bake sales to cover the cost (roughly $3,000) of living in the city for the summer. “I was so in awe of where I was at the time,” he says, that it never occurred to him to even think he was being mistreated.

Now a freelance TV production assistant, Talaske doesn’t regret the experience. “I learned a lot in such a high-caliber entertainment hub,” he says. “I figure it's a place where you have to pay your dues.” This month, though, he will have a decision to make. Talaske is among more than 1,000 former Sirius XM interns who recently received a class-action notice from Virginia & Ambinder, LLP, a law firm in New York. The message is fairly simple: Would he like to become a party plaintiff in a suit accusing Sirius of flouting minimum wage laws? The risks are uncertain, but the total payoff—if the plaintiffs prevail—could be enormous.

The situation arose in April, when a former Howard Stern Show intern named Melissa Tierney sued the show’s broadcaster. Working for the shock jock, it seems, isn’t as glamorous as it sounds: Tierney declared in a federal complaint that she spent her four months “running errands, placing orders, obtaining breakfast orders” and performing other menial tasks for Stern’s crew without compensation. Her suit cited the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which the Labor Department clarifies with a six-point test to determine if an internship may legally be unpaid. Such a gig, for instance, “is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment” and doesn’t displace paid employees. The complaint was clear: Sirius “wrongfully classified [Tierney] and others similarly situated” as unpaid interns in order to deny them wages. (Sirius XM spokesman Patrick Reilly declined to comment on this or any of the allegations contained in this piece.)

The suit is one in a recent spate of cases taking media companies to court for allegedly exploitative internship programs. The list of defendants is long, and it reads like the attendance sheet at a media-themed college career fair: Warner Music, the Charlie Rose show, Marvel Entertainment, Condé Nast, Hearst. One by one, disgruntled members of a perpetual intern class point to their coffee-fetching days and demand to get paid. In a landmark case, a judge ruled in 2013 that two former Fox Searchlight interns should have been paid when they ran errands on the set of the 2010 movie Black Swan. In December, a federal judge approved a $5.85 million payout to former Condé Nast interns; even more recently, former NBCUniversal interns received notice about another proposed settlement.

“I'm almost always surprised by how similar these cases are,” says LaDonna Lusher, a partner at the firm taking on Sirius. The case hit a roadblock in December, when Tierney decided to withdraw as the named plaintiff and Justin Vitetta, a musician who spent nine months as a Sirius programming intern, agreed to take her place. (Tierney remains a member of the putative class; both plaintiffs declined to be interviewed for this piece.) In a court declaration, Vitetta said he paid his alma mater $500 a semester to work at the broadcaster; like Talaske, who used student loans to cover the cost of those credits, he was effectively paying to work for free. After Sirius tried to block the plaintiff substitution, Virginia & Ambinder filed a court motion making the request. It was approved at the end of January, and the firm sent out its collective action notice on February 3.

According to Vitetta’s statement, as many as 50 unpaid interns pass through Sirius each semester. They are spread throughout dozens of departments and radio stations at the midtown Manhattan office—each with their own tasks and supervisors. “It's not right to work like that, to be taken advantage of like that, and get nothing in return,” says Farnoosh Zarnighian, who, when she was in her mid-30s, interned for Judith Regan’s radio show in 2010. The work entailed making phone calls, booking guests, keeping them entertained when they came in for the show and sometimes getting coffee for Regan. Zarnighian says she expected the work to lead to an entry-level job. “They led me to believe that that was the direction I was headed to.… I was just shocked when the internship ended, and they didn't want me to come back.”

A former programming intern, who spoke on condition of anonymity, had a similar experience: “I was told a number of times that I would be a job prospect there, that I would be more viable in getting hired.” He says he has a recording of a staffer promising him a job, but he never landed one. Sirius, it seemed, was only interested in his labor when it came without a paycheck.

Accounts of the work environment at Sirius vary widely, and not all interns feel exploited. “I really, really did feel like I was part of a little team family,” says Benjamin Goldsmith, a Queens College senior who interned for the NFL channel last semester. “I don't feel like they owe me any monetary compensation.” Barrett Rosenbaum, who worked in music programming for ’80s on 8 and The Pulse, was grateful that his boss sometimes bought him lunch. A former programming intern, meanwhile, says the work was fairly educational, but grueling and overwhelming. “Most interns usually volunteer to work a couple hours extra just to show that they have a really [strong] work ethic—it's very much encouraged in that environment,” she says, while asking to not be identified for fear of jeopardizing her current media job. Morning show interns, she says, regularly made breakfast runs while the hosts stayed on-air; the environment was stressful, and interns were “worked to the bone.”

“I'm not gonna lie, it did seem like the mentors did take advantage of their interns,” she adds. “Just because you work as much as an employee at the establishment. They're so understaffed that they leave so much for the intern to do. The intern is usually pressured. I know a bunch of interns definitely broke down [emotionally] because of all the work that they had to do.”

Like most unpaid gigs in the New York media world, Sirius’s internship program operates on prestige and cachet in lieu of money. You might not get paid, but you get to amass experience, in the abstract, sought-after sense of the term, and meet famous people and maybe have their names on your résumé. This has been dubbed the “Prestige Economy,” and for employers, at least, it’s worked well for years. Legality aside, as long as unpaid opportunities flourish, the unpaid laborers will show up. For many of those weaned on the internship economy, the attitude is: We’re lucky just to be here.

“I know that it can be frustrating at the time to not get paid money, but the experience you get is worth way more than money,” says Rachel Frank, who interned for The Howard Stern Show in 2005, shortly before the DJ moved to Sirius. “I kind of found it exciting, because I knew that's...putting your foot in the door. You have a job with an opportunity to get coffee for those people, and you work your way up.”

When she returned to college that fall, students shared their internship experiences in one of her classes. “It was really cool getting to tell everyone about my summer working for The Howard Stern Show,” she says. “I probably had one of the best stories.”

The impact that 3-D printing is having on our world is impossible to ignore. It’s not new technology, but its 30-year history has been characterized by deceptively slow growth —until now. 3-D printing has recently emerged as a force poised to disrupt a significant portion of the $10 trillion global manufacturing industry.

Already, the printing of standard consumer products—bowls, plates, smartphone cases, bottle openers, jewelry and purses (made from mesh)—has gone from a hobby to a nascent industry. Dozens of websites now sell goods made with 3-D printers, and retailers are starting to get in on the action.

It is also affecting the aerospace industry. For instance, SpaceX, the space transport company founded by Elon Musk, recently announced it will 3-D-print much of the rocket engine used in the Falcon 9 launch vehicle. Boeing currently 3-D-prints over 200 parts for 10 different aircraft platforms. And Planetary Resources, the world’s first private asteroid mining company, is 3-D-printing much of the spacecraft that will travel to and prospect near-Earth asteroids.

I first met Aaron Kemmer, Michael Chen and Jason Dunn, a trio of bold-minded innovators, during the summer of 2010 at Singularity University (a training center for entrepreneurs, corporate executives and government officials) during the Graduate Studies Program. It was a passion for space that brought them together.

“We were all serial entrepreneurs hunting for a big idea,” says Kemmer. “We wanted to start a company that would help open the space frontier. We were definitely not thinking the way forward was going to be 3-D printing.”

It was the university’s chair of robotics and three-time shuttle astronaut Dan Barry who pointed them in that direction. “We knew a little bit about 3-D printing,” says Chen, “but only because Jason, with his aerospace background, had played with it a little in college. But when we were doing analysis—just looking at all the different exponential technologies and trying to come up with our idea—Dan Barry kept wandering over and telling us he had been to the International Space Station and wow, having a 3-D printer on the ISS would sure be useful.”

Eventually, they decided to figure out how useful.

“It’s a supply chain problem,” explains Dunn. “The ISS is at the back end of the longest, most complicated and most expensive supply chain in existence. Launch costs are roughly $10,000ten thousand dollars a pound. And any object sent into space has to be durable enough to survive the eight minutes of high g-forces it takes to get out of the Earth’s gravity well.”

That means heavier objects—and every extra pound costs more money. And with extra weight, more fuel will be needed to get the spacecraft off the planet—which means even more money.

Plus, when parts aboard the station break, resupply can take months and months. This is why there are over a billion parts manufactured for the ISS that were bought and paid for in advance of their use. And after doing more research, Kemmer, Dunn and Chen realized that 30 percent of these parts were plastic—meaning they should be printable with already available, off-the-shelf 3-D printing technology.

This led to the birth of Made in Space, humankind’s first off-world 3-D printing company. Their first offering, launched to the ISS in the fall of 2014, is fairly simple: a 3-D printer that prints plastic parts. In itself, this will bring on a manufacturing revolution of sorts. “The first 3-D printers on the ISS will be able to build objects that could never be manufactured on Earth,” says Kemmer. “Imagine, for example, building a structure that couldn’t withstand its own weight.”

Made in Space’s next iteration will be able to print with multiple materials, including both plastics and metals, which means that sometime in the next five years, 60 percent of the parts in use on the ISS will be printable. And just behind this version is the real game changer: a 3-D printer capable of printing electronics.

Consider the latest trend in satellite technology: CubeSats. These are tiny satellites weighing only a kilogram and made in the shape of a 10-centimeter cube. They’re so simple to build that almost anyone can pull it off (free instructions are available online), yet they can be deceptively powerful when deployed as a swarm, often taking the place of much bigger satellites. CubeSats themselves are cheap to make, about $5,000 to $8,000. Launching them is the real expense (still tens of thousands of dollars). But that’s today. If we waited a few more years, Made in Space or another company like it could solve this problem for pennies on the dollar.

“Turns out,” says Dunn, “the ISS [is] a perfect platform for launching things into low-Earth orbit. Already our printers can print the cube portion of a CubeSat, and we’ve also printed the electronics in our lab. It’s hard to say for sure, but around 2025 we should be able to print electronics aboard the ISS. This means we’ll be able to email hardware into space for free, rather than paying to have it launched there.”

Made in Space's first 3-D printer (foreground), contracted by NASA, was launched to the International Space Station on September 21, 2014. The ivory objects on top are duplicates of what will soon be some of the first objects ever printed off-Earth. In the background is the Microgravity Science Glovebox that will contain the printer during the 3-D printing in zero gravity experiment. NASA/Emmett Given

Of course, the big dream is to be able to create 3-D printers capable of printing entire space stations in space and, even better, to do it with materials mined from space. Once this becomes possible, the creation of off-world habitats (i.e., space colonies) becomes a viable reality. “Imagine being able to colonize a distant planet by bringing nothing but a 3-D printer and some mining equipment,” says Chen. “It might sound like science fiction, but the first steps toward making it a reality are happening in our lab right now, and aboard the ISS.”

“It’s such a cool capability to have a 3-D printer in space,” says S. Pete Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, where Made in Space is located. “Obviously, you save mass and volume by printing tools and parts on demand, but I’m also really excited for the future of printing spacecraft in space. Soon, you won’t have to design spacecraft to go through an intense few minutes of launch forces [because] you can design and print something more elegant for microgravity, in microgravity.”

In other words, if all goes as planned, Made in Space might end up as the first-mover advantage in the multitrillion-dollar industry that could eventually be off-world living.

Steven Kotler is the best-selling author of Abundance and The Rise of Superman. His latest book, BOLD: How to Go Big, Make Bank, and Better the World, explores the link between the world’s biggest problems and the world’s biggest businesses.

When snow sports instructor Sorin Radu began to snowboard at 7,000 feet elevation down Papusa Mountain in Gorj, Romania, on a clear blue day, things seemed to be going well. But after a few moments of his descent, which he filmed with a GoPro camera, he was swept up in an avalanche. The footage shows the snowpack crumble beneath Radu, before he takes a tumble and the video cuts out. Radu emerged unharmed, according to the Daily Mailand Mashable.

The Obama administration has announced no decision on whether to help Ukraine use U.S.-made weapons to defend against Russian-sponsored attacks. But France and Germany are probing to see whether that threat might help push Russian President Vladimir Putin to halt his intensified war in southeastern Ukraine.

Russian proxy forces, backed by regular Russian troops, have seized new territory in heavy fighting around Donetsk and Lugansk. The heightened war is killing greater numbers of civilians, is uprooting residents from their homes in midwinter and is deepening Ukraine's economic crisis.

Against that backdrop, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande are visiting Moscow for talks. They met on Thursday with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko about ways to implement the September peace agreement that never got off the ground.

“This is their initiative, meaning that it doesn’t seem to have been coordinated or organized with the United States,” said John Herbst, an Atlantic Council analyst and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “My interpretation is that they realize there is a serious debate going on in Washington about providing arms to Ukraine, and they want to see if they can use that,” Herbst said in an interview. “They want to check whether the Kremlin is willing, for the first time, to be serious about implementing a negotiated solution to the conflict.”

Merkel and Hollande might at best obtain a short-term cease-fire, analyst Timothy Ash wrote after a four-day research visit to Kyiv, but any “longer-term resolution might still prove elusive as the two sides remain far apart.” A truce would help Ukraine and its international partners as they try to stabilize the country’s shattered economy, wrote Ash, a senior economist at Standard Bank in London.

Poroshenko’s government and the new parliament are making impressive first steps on critical economic and anti-corruption reforms, and governments led by Europe and the United States are piecing together loans, but “no amount of Western financial support will likely succeed unless the conflict in the east is resolved,” Ash wrote in an emailed analysis.

The White House for months has refused Poroshenko’s request for U.S. weapons—including anti-tank missiles and radar systems to pinpoint artillery batteries—that could make a difference in the war. Since last April, Russia has sponsored the creation of separatist “republics” in Ukraine’s Lugansk and Donetsk provinces in an attempt to force Ukraine to abandon its effort to build closer ties with Europe. The Kremlin has sent troops, tanks, artillery, special forces, intelligence officers and mercenaries to conduct the war—actions that it formally denies.

Russia’s New Year Escalation

Russia has escalated the war since the new year, sending between 1,000 of its own troops according to NATO, or several thousand, according to Ukraine. It also has sent heavy artillery, rocket systems and T-72 and T-80 tanks, according to U.S. and NATO officials, leading This escalation has pushed the Obama administration to reconsider arming Ukraine.

“It’s clear that momentum is building in the United States, in Washington,” for U.S. supplies of at least some defensive weapons, said Herbst, who heads the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. Herbst was one of eight former senior officials who last week published a report urging the administration to help Ukraine with defensive weapons.

“On the basis of our group’s conversations with senior administration officials, it’s clear that they’re reviewing the policy, and conceivably, they could change it,” Herbst said. “The fact that Ashton Carter told the Senate that he would be supportive is a public indication of that.” Carter spoke to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week in a hearing on his nomination by President Obama to become secretary of defense.

“The fact that they’re reconsidering it does not mean that a decision will be taken. I would guess that they probably will do so in some form, although they may not provide all the equipment” that Ukraine would like, Herbst said.

The United States and its European allies are discussing how to sustain or increase pressure on Russia to halt its war against Ukraine. Vice President Joe Biden is in Europe for talks with leaders there as they prepare to meet next week and consider the possibility of additional economic sanctions against Russia.

Regarding a supply of weapons, “where the Europeans are on this plays a role,” said Herbst. “Chancellor Merkel said something negative two or three days ago” about a policy of arming Ukraine, “but not so negative as to expect that her reaction would make us pause. We can’t expect her to endorse this.”

This article first appeared on the Atlantic Council website.

Remember the Cold War domino theory, which held that if one country fell to Communism, its neighbors would follow, one by one?

Well, a similar theory may be taking hold in Washington amid the debate over arming Ukraine against Russian aggression.

As western European leaders huddle with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow this weekend to discuss new proposals to end the Ukraine crisis, the idea of providing Kiev with lethal weapons is gaining traction in Washington. And one of the principal arguments for such a move is the theory that if Russia’s aggression isn’t stopped in Ukraine, Moscow will be emboldened to bring other independent former Soviet republics under its thumb using the pretext of protecting Russian-speaking minorities in those countries.

With U.S. weapons, the thinking goes, Ukrainian forces will be able to draw enough blood from both separatists and the Russian troops backing them to force Moscow to negotiate a peace agreement.

That argument runs through a recent independent report by eight former senior U.S. officials that is receiving serious consideration from administration officials. The report recommends that the United States provide Ukraine with $3 billion in lethal weapons and equipment, including anti-tank missiles, armored Humvees, reconnaissance drones and radars that can quickly pinpoint the origin of enemy artillery fire.  

“Putin and the Kremlin have proclaimed a unique and legally dubious right to ‘protect’ ethnic Russians and Russian speakers, wherever they are located and whatever their citizenship,” the report says, noting that Putin offered this justification for Russia’s occupation and eventual annexation of Crimea. “If not constrained, such Russian policies represent a clear danger to European security, the North Atlantic community, as well as to Russia’s neighbors in Eurasia.”

The report goes on to warn that “if the United States and NATO do not adequately support Ukraine, Moscow may well conclude that the kinds of tactics it has employed over the past year can be applied elsewhere. Of particular concern would be Russian actions to destabilize Estonia or Latvia, each of which has a significant ethnic Russian minority and both of which are NATO members.”

The report adds that the Kremlin already has demonstrated “aggressive intent in the Baltics” by kidnapping an Estonian security official last September at the close of the NATO summit in Wales, where the alliance reaffirmed its pledge to defend members against Russian aggression.

One reason why the report is receiving such serious consideration is the standing of its authors. They include Michele Flornoy, a former senior Pentagon official in the Obama administration and a top contender for defense secretary if Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected president; retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, a former top NATO military commander, and Ivo Daalder, NATO ambassador during Obama’s first term.

Another is the timing of its publication. It comes as Western intelligence officials have accused Russia of supplying separatists with tanks, artillery and mobile rocket launchers for their recent offensive in eastern Ukraine. During that campaign, the separatists, backed by Russian troops, have enlarged their self-declared independent enclave by roughly 200 square miles, NATO officials say.

Putin, who denies any Russian troops are inside Ukraine, has quietly proposed a truce based on the new battle lines,which would make the separatists’ enclave more economically viable. But Kiev has rejected this proposal, insisting on a return to a September truce agreement that called for the withdrawal of foreign forces and arrangements against further violations of the Russia-Ukraine border.

Until now, the United States has provided only non-lethal aid to Ukraine, including such items as body armor, communications equipment and medical kits. But with the separatist offensive inflicting a series of battlefield setbacks on Ukrainian forces, White House officials say President Barack Obama is now reviewing that policy.

For many both in and outside the administration, the president’s review is long overdue. Outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel favors a policy of arming Ukraine, as does his likely successor, Ashton Carter, who said during his confirmation hearing Wednesday, “I’m very much inclined in that direction.” That brought nods of approval on Capitol Hill, where bipartisan support for such a step has been growing since last year.

Russia has warned it will consider the supply of any U.S. weapons to Ukraine a threat to its territory and will act accordingly. Russia has a 700,000-member army, with many armored and infantry brigades and warplanes positioned near the Ukraine border. The Ukrainian army numbers 34,000. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, which means members of the alliance are not required to come to its assistance.

The prospect of deeper U.S. military involvement in the Ukraine civil war has alarmed many observers, as well as European officials.

“America has never had a vital interest in Crimea or the Donbass worth risking a military clash with Russia,” Republican pundit Patrick Buchanan wrote in an online commentary, referring to the region of eastern Ukraine where the fighting is taking place. “And we do not have the military ability to intervene and drive out the Russian army, unless we are prepared for a larger war and the potential devastation of the Ukraine.”

John Pepper, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble who got to know Putin personally when he pioneered the company’s business in Russia in the 1990s, called the idea of providing Ukraine with lethal weapons “folly.”

Noting that Putin was likely to respond to such a move by escalating Russia’s own involvement in the war, he said “the chances of that [policy] not working are high, and the consequences of it not working are enormous.” Pepper spoke Thursday during a conference call on the subject of arming Ukraine arranged by the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, a Washington, D.C., research organization.

Speaking on the same conference call, Michael Kofman, a Russia specialist at the Kennan Institute and a consultant to the Pentagon, warned that Ukraine’s army is so weak and poorly trained that an injection of U.S. weapons is unlikely to reverse its battlefield fortunes. To prove his point, he reminded participants that U.S. weapons did little to prevent the collapse of the the Iraqi Army at the hands of ISIS.

With German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande in Moscow to attempt another negotiated solution to the Ukraine crisis, Peter Wittig, the German ambassador to the U.S., also has weighed in on the debate, appealing to those who support arming Ukraine to give diplomacy a chance.

“Those who advocate for…the delivery of arms, I would ask the question: Where does that lead to? Have you thought it through?” he told reporters Thursday. “Where are we heading with this?”

Kofman attempts to provide an answer. “What the recommendation really is doing is slow-walking the United States into a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine,” he said. “And this fundamentally will prove disastrous for Ukraine, as it proved for Afghanistan, as it proved for every single country that hosted a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”

In the midst of a more than decade-long battle over net neutrality, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Tom Wheeler, submitted a proposal on Wednesday that he called“the strongest open-Internet protections ever proposed by the FCC.”

Internet-freedom advocates were elated. The plan—to reclassify broadband under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934—reflects a bold shift toward treating the Internet like a utility and allowing the FCC to make sure Internet service providers (ISPs) are transmitting web traffic at the same speeds for all.

But the proposal is merely a strategy outline, and key details are missing. In fact, the comprehensive blueprint, an eight-page set of rules, will not be made public until after five FCC commissioners vote on it February 26. This leaves a little over two weeks for companies and the public to comment, mobilize and lobby for last-minute changes before the rules are put to a vote.

Theoretically, anything could be changed during this period; realistically, the proposal’s main points—like the Title II classification—will remain intact. But the many missing details could have dramatic effects when put in practice.

For instance, the proposal makes clear that broadband providers will not be able to cut deals with friends and sell fast-lane services for their content. However, the plan does not address whether “zero rating”—a service mobile providers have been dabbling with that allows consumers to access certain services without affecting their capped data allowance—will be banned.

Like fast lanes, zero rating is a type of discrimination, as it prioritizes content. Some of the biggest companies on the Web, Facebook and Google among them, are zero-rated in many developing countries. While this could benefit consumers who cannot afford or do not have access to data plans, some activist groups, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, call it a “dangerous compromise.”

“Although it may seem like a humane strategy to offer users from developing countries crumbs from the Internet’s table in the form of free access to walled-garden services, such service may thrive at the cost of stifling the development of low-cost, neutral Internet access in those countries for decades to come,” writes the EFF’s Jeremy Malcolm.

Not only are the rules still subject to change, but if they are passed, it will then be up to the FCC to determine how it will interpret and enforce them.

For instance, in a call with reporters on Wednesday, FCC officials indicated they may handle zero-rating services on a case-by-case basis and only ban programs that are determined to be hindering competition. If such a vague rule is implemented, in terms of zero rating or any other matter, the question becomes how a combination of interpretation and enforcement will play out in practice.

Also, it is possible that AT&T, Verizon and the CTIA—the wireless industry’s top lobbying organization—will sue the FCC if the Internet is reclassified. As AT&T’s federal-regulatory vice president Hank Hultquist highlighted in a blog post on Monday, Verizon’s lawsuit last year successfully killed the FCC’s original rules for an open Internet.

The proposed changes are already not sitting well with congressional Republicans, many of whom have begun strategizing the effort’s demise. For instance, an effort was launched earlier this year to write a law undercutting the FCC’s authority.

In an interview with Politico, former Republican FCC chairman Michael Powell, who now heads the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, said that if the FCC is sued, appeals could take years. If the FCC prevails but a Republican wins the 2016 presidential election, a GOP-led FCC could undo Wheeler’s work.

So stay tuned. This fight is far from over. 

Libya’s national army and its allies claim to have seized control of Benghazi’s port area from jihadist group Ansar al-Sharia after heavy fighting was reported in the city on Thursday.

The Libya Herald reported that the army also claims to have taken control of part of the Suq al-Hout district and has engaged in fighting in nearby Sabri and Laithi as it tries to take back those districts from the group. Ansar al-Sharia is an offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Libya and dominated Benghazi last year, but it has been rapidly losing ground.

The army now controls around 90 percent of Benghazi, and late last year it started taking back bases, the national bank, the airport and other key real estate, including neighborhoods, said Wayne White, a scholar with the Middle East Institute and former deputy director of the State Department’s Middle East intelligence office. The port was the only place of value left in the group’s hands, he said.

“It’s clear now that not only do [the army’s forces] hold the vast bulk of the city, but they’re now engaged in what I think they hope will be almost a final offensive to clear it completely of Ansar al-Sharia,” said White. Fighting has been intense and bitter, he added.

With ISIS-affiliated groups circulating throughout Libya, White predicts the army’s next move could be confronting a “nasty” cell of ISIS militants in the port city of Derna, which set up a training camp there in December. Taking back total control of Benghazi, however, is a priority.

Ansar al-Sharia is now clinging to small pockets around the city that have seen intense fighting. Battling alongside the Islamist group is a handful of smaller jihadi militias, known collectively as the Benghazi Revolutionaries’ Shura Council.  

The security situation in Libya continues to deteriorate four years after the ouster of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Two governments and parliaments—the elected, internationally recognized government of Abdullah al-Thani and the self-declared government of Omar al-Hassi—have been battling for power and influence over the country.

In August, al-Thani and the country’s House of Representatives fled nearly 800 miles from the capital, Tripoli, to the city of Tobruk after being driven out by al-Hassi’s rival group of Islamist politicians. Al-Hassi’s group now controls Tripoli, relying on the military strength of the Libya Dawn militia.

Seven soldiers reportedly have been killed and many injured in Thursday’s fighting, according to Reuters. Al-Jazeera said 25 soldiers were wounded. Additionally, four civilians sustained non-life-threatening injuries after a missile landed on a house.

United Nations-mediated peace talks between the rival governments continue.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, which is fighting a violent insurgency in northeast Nigeria, has about 4,000-6,000 "hardcore" fighters, U.S. intelligence officials said on Friday.

In an assessment of the group, whose five-year uprising has included massacres and kidnappings and spread from Nigeria into neighboring states, the officials said they did not believe it posed a major threat to Nigeria's oilfields in the south.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the militants were believed to be still holding about 300 schoolgirls they kidnapped early last year and had dispersed them to multiple locations.

Around 10,000 people were killed in Boko Haram attacks last year. The Sunni Muslim group poses the biggest security threat in Nigeria, Africa's top oil producer and biggest economy.

Concern over the insurgency appears to be and one of the main reasons for what appears to be a surge in political support for opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari in a Feb. 14 election.

Many Nigerians believe Buhari, as a former military ruler, will be able to bolster the army's hapless efforts to counter the insurgency, and that as a Muslim he may even be able to take some of the wind out of Boko Haram's ideological sails.

The officials said the militants had been engaging in both small-scale and larger attacks in recent weeks and they expected this mixed pattern of operations to continue during the election period.

The U.S. intelligence officials said the Nigerian military forces were stretched thin in fighting the insurgents, as well as by their involvement in international peacekeeping forces.

But military forces in neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger, where Boko Haram had spread its attacks, were taking an increasing active role in combating the group.

One official said: "It remains to be seen how much tactical prowess (Boko Haram) have" in fighting regular military forces.

Sources in the region say Chad and Cameroon are deploying thousands of troops and Niger has reinforced its border against the militant group, but they face an uphill battle against a group which has rebuffed offensives by the Nigerian military.

The officials said over the last year Boko Haram had established a "safe haven" in territory it controlled, which included 30 or more towns and villages.

The group, which says it wants to establish an Islamic state, has produced videos praising the Islamic State militants who have taken over parts of Iraq and Syria.

But one of the U.S. officials said there was "no known tactical cooperation or leadership contact between the two groups."

Beirut, 2003: The trap was set. U.S. counterterror operatives were ready to move. The plan called for a Lebaneser CIA asset to lure Imad Mugniyah, the terrorist kingpin of Hezbollah, to a place where he would be captured and flown to a U.S. Navy ship in the Mediterranean. From there he would be flown to a U.S. courtroom, where he would eventually stand trial for the murder of hundreds of Americans in Lebanon two decades earlier. 

But something went wrong. According to a former top U.S. counterterrorism official, the Lebanese go-between was murdered. The wily Mugniyah, variously known as “the fox” and “the father of smoke” (for his ability to disappear like a wisp after one of his spectacular terrorist attacks), had foiled yet another plot to capture him. The U.S. plan, the former counterterrorism official suspected, had leaked.

“We had him!”  the official said, still exasperated years later about the failure to capture Mugniyah. Upon investigating, the official concluded that idle chit-chat by a careless U.S. intelligence official at a small party attended by Americans and Lebanese in Beirut on the eve of the operation had foiled the plot.     

“Some guy was shooting the shit an embassy social event,” he told Newsweek on condition of anonymity “We had the whole network set up. Everything was done, everything was in place. And then this guy runs his mouth.”

In February 2008, however, the CIA, working hand in glove with Israeli intelligence, finally caught up to Mugniyah. The details of how they assassinated Mugniyah with a car bomb, as reported by Newsweek and The Washington Post in independently sourced stories last weekend, remain a deeply held secret at the CIA.

So do the near-misses. No one contacted by Newsweek would discuss them on the record, even years later, for fear of jeopardizing still-secret intelligence assets. What has become clear, however, is that President George W. Bush did not hesitate to authorize the CIA to murder Mugniyah when he was first located in Damascus in 2007, effectively lifting a ban on political assassinations that had been in place for over three decades. Until then, former counterterrorism officials say, the plan had always been to capture Mugniyah and bring him to trial in the U.S., if possible, not kill him.

The problem was finding him. According to Matthew Levitt, author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, Mugniyah evaded capture on a number of occasions as far back the 1980s, after he had engineered or participated in several deadly assaults on American targets in Lebanon, from the bombing of the Marine and French paratrooper barracks at the Beirut airport to the obliteration of the U.S. Embassy, both in 1983. After his 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847 — which resulted in the death of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem — he was indicted in New York on murder charges. 

“The first such evasion came in Paris in November 1985, when officials intercepted a voice frequency sample of Mugniyah, who was tracked to a luxury hotel on Paris's Champs Elysees — just around the corner from the U.S. embassy...” Levitt wrote this week in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newsweekly. He added, “Mugniyah was traveling on a false identity, but the CIA provided French officials with a copy of the passport he was using. Instead of detaining him, French intelligence officials reportedly met Mugniyah several times over a six-day period and allowed him to leave the country in return for the release of a French hostage.”

Arab governments in the Persian Gulf region also let Mugniyah come and go between Iran and Beirut, said a former U.S. military counterterrorism official. “The Gulf countries never acquiesced to U.S. requests that he be detained,” the former official told Newsweek on condition of anonymity. The reasons? “A fear of retaliation” from Iran, he said, “and politics.” Hezbollah was formed to combat Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The Gulf Arabs, although mortal enemies of Iran’s Shiites, were loathe to help U.S. intelligence capture someone who was killing Israelis and their American sponsors.

“There was somewhere less than a handful of times in the mid-nineties when a combined task force takedown team was in place on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf to grab him, in a seaborne operation, on his way back from Iran,” the former military counterterrorism official said. “But due to various reasons mostly related to [poor] intel, it didn’t go down.”

The operations involved “very sensitive intelligence sources,” he added.  

Levitt, who heads the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s counterterrorism program, wrote that one of those missed opportunities came in 1995, when U.S. intelligence learned that “Mugniyah was traveling under an assumed name on a flight from Khartoum, Sudan to Tehran that was scheduled to make a stop in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,” U.S. officials asked the Saudis to hold him and ordered FBI agents to jump on a plane to Jeddah, Levitt wrote . “But Saudi officials denied the FBI plane landing rights, allowing the Fox to slip away once more.”

Another opportunity came in 1996, Levitt wrote in The Hill, after the terrorist bombing of the Khobar Towers military barracks in Saudi Arabia, in which Iran is suspected of having a hand. The U.S. had obtained intelligence indicating that “Mugniyah was aboard the Ibn Tufail, a boat sailing in the Arabian Gulf. Navy ships trailed the Ibn Tufail while a team of Navy SEALs prepared a snatch-and-grab operation to be executed the following day off the coast of Qatar. The operation was called off, however, when senior American decision makers deemed the intelligence insufficient to warrant such a risky operation.”

The goal was always to capture Mugniyah, not kill him, former U.S. intelligence officials say. But in 2008, shortly after Mugniyah’s demise, former CIA officer Robert Baer wrote in Time magazine that he had spent 15 years tracking the terrorist and that “at one point I was offered the opportunity to car bomb a house he was spending the night in.”  He added, “It was illegal for the CIA to conduct assassinations and I, of course, declined.”

In a new book, The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins, however, Baer claims that he considered killing Mugniyah but just never got the chance. There was more to the story, he told The Washington Post last week, but the CIA’s pre-publication “censors” excised passages dealing with Mugniyah’s assassination: “I’ve unfortunately been unable to write about the true set-piece plot against” Mugniyah, he told The Post.

Two former CIA officials deeply involved in Lebanon in the 1980s called Baer’s claims fiction. “We had no authority to go out and shoot anybody,” a former CIA station chief in Beirut told Newsweek on terms of anonymity. The CIA’s focus in Lebanon in the 1980s, he said, was trying to find and rescue American and other Western hostages taken by Mugniyah and his Hezbollah cohorts, not assassinating them. He said the spy agency’s then-deputy director for operations, Clair George, called him in on the eve of his departure for Beirut and emphasized, “Do nothing that you can get killed for”— meaning lethal actions that would invite retaliation from Mugniyah, who had shown he could pick off Americans at will.

Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, who headed the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center at the same time Baer was assigned to Beirut, echoed those views. “I was the last CIA officer prior to 9/11 who was able to take out a contract on anybody,” Clarridge told Newsweek in a telephone interview, referring to the agency’s fatwah on the legendary Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal. (Ramirez was captured in a joint CIA-French operation in 1994 and rendered back to Paris, where he is serving a life sentence.)

“That was the last,” Claridge declared. Mugniyah was “a complicated matter,” he said, suggesting that nobody at the CIA would have worried much about recriminations had the terrorist been killed in a shootout. But “there wasn’t any order out there from anybody to go get him.”

Two decades later, however, the CIA did have a green light from President Bush to kill Mugniyah. Ironically, by that time, Hezbollah had long ago stopped killing Americans. It was concentrating on Israel.

“I wish we had gotten him before,” said the former counterterrorism official who blamed at least one missed chance on loose lips at an embassy party . “We might have saved a lot of lives.”

Jeff Stein is Newsweek’s national security correspondent in Washington, D.C. He can be reached more or less confidentially via encrypted email at spytalk[at]hushmail.com.

Resting on one knee, the hunter poses for the camera, his kill laid out in rows of 20 before him –birds ordered neatly into their respective species. The rarest are placed at the sides; red breasted geese, shelducks and a single sandpiper flanking dozens of coots, teals and white fronted geese.After the camera shutter snaps, the birds are quickly packed into plastic sacks. Before the end of the day, they will be skinned, drawn, packed and frozen in preparation to be smuggled overland to Italy. Within 48 hours, many will have been sold on the black market to Italian restaurants who will offer them up as traditional Italian fare.

Later in the day, I am sitting in a café in a small north Serbian village a few miles south of the slaughter, waiting for Milan Ruznic to get off the phone to the local police. He’s a conservationist with the Serbian Bird Protection Association and he’s furious because the hunter has posted the photo of the dead birds on Facebook. “You can go to jail for shooting these birds, and this man is advertising his own crime on Facebook. Yet the police don’t want to know.”

Before dawn that morning at a small fish farm in north-east Serbia, Ruznic and I had watched as more than 20 Italian hunters encircled the lake and waited for daybreak. As the sun came up, thousands of birds rose with it, ascending from the water like mist and then breaking into the formations particular to each species before heading to the fields for breakfast. But once the shots started, all order was lost. The birds fell into a frenzy, doubling back on themselves again and again, swerving violently from the noise and falling with increasing regularity as the hunters perfected their aims. By 10am, the game keeper began the long trawl for the dead.

Of the five billion birds that fly through Europe each autumn to spend winter in Africa and the warmer countries north of the Mediterranean, up to one billion are killed by humans. Along the Mediterranean coast, recorded birdsong blasts out of speakers, drawing swarms of songbirds into the lines of near invisible nets that hang between trees. Sticks smeared with glue are positioned among the lower branches of trees to provide attractive perches. Poisoned prey is laid out for raptors. Spring loaded nets for water birds. Then there is the army of hunters, tens of thousands of whom descend on the Balkan countries each autumn, positioning themselves along the migratory corridors and setting up camp in the spots where birds come to rest.

With the use of highly effective electronic decoys that mimic the sound of the birds, a single, efficient hunter can kill up to a hundred water birds by lunchtime. In Romania, a hunt manager boasts that the record for songbirds shot by one of his clients is 400 in a day, all felled from the comfort of a fold-out chair in a wheat field shortly after harvest. They kill for fun, a ramped-up version of centuries-old traditions, but also for money: every bird shot or trapped can be sold. Water birds and songbirds go to restaurants; raptors are stuffed and sold over the internet as ornaments.

Birds are usually hunted in the open, near marshes and canals, and deep-frozen until they cross the border to be served to gourmands in Italy.Milan Ruzic

Within the borders of the EU, birds have had special conservation status since the creation of the landmark Birds Directive in 1979, a policy designed to protect the populations of all bird species from hunting and habitat loss. For hunting, the directive is strict on paper but far looser in reality: all but a handful of bird species are illegal to hunt until exemptions are requested by individual member states, when they are invariably granted. As a result, a bird can be served up legally in a restaurant in France, while its killer would be jailed in the UK. This makes life particularly tricky for bird traders – a mistle thrush, for example, can legally be shot in Romania to be sold in Italy, but cannot be transported through any of the countries that lie in-between.  

Song Bird Slaughter

After a few mornings in Serbia, the crackle of gunshot becomes as much a part of the wetland soundscape as the call of birds. But not once do I see a Serbian with a gun. Ruznic has spent the last decade tracking hunters in Serbia and collecting information to try and lure the government into action. “It’s Italians who run the show here,” he explains. “Serbians hunt when hungry. It was a bad time for birds following the war in the 1990s. But only Italians hunt here when things are going well.”

All across south-east Europe but particularly in Romania, Serbia, Albania and Bulgaria, Italian hunters have become public enemy number one for bird lovers and conservationists. Since the collapse of communism 25 years ago, each year sees more and more Italians heading east to shoot birds. Their sport is organised by Italian-owned companies, hundreds of which have sprung up in recent years, often registered in the tax havens of Malta or Cyprus. Hunters often stay in Italian-owned, or Italian-staffed hunting lodges. And almost every bird shot is thought to be illegally smuggled back home where it is sold at a mark-up of up to 3,000% on the black market to supply the unquenchable demand for wild bird recipes such as polenta e osei – polenta with grilled songbirds – sold in restaurants throughout the Italian countryside.

“Many Italians, particularly people from the countryside, think of bird hunting as an unalienable tradition,” says Marco Avanzo, chief of the Italian forestry police. “They argue that it is their way of connecting with nature, the rural way. It has already caused chaos to Italian wildlife, but now with the mix of new hunting technology, economic incentives and open borders through Europe, the problem is growing and spreading. The demand for hunting and wild bird dishes is huge in Italy, and so hunters are following the market to where laws are lax and birds come cheap and plentiful.”

According to a 2008 report published by TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network, the hunting and smuggling of wild birds to Italy “involves highly organised criminal activity in south-east and Central Europe. Hundreds of thousands of songbirds are illegally shot and exported every year. The industry as a whole is estimated to be worth around €10m a year”. But many believe TRAFFIC underestimates the scale of the trade. A few years before the report was released, a single sting by Italian border police found 120,000 songbirds crammed into a single truck coming from Serbia. The trade was organised by two companies which offered hunting tourism to Italians.

In the trial that followed in the Italian Courts, these companies were found to have smuggled over two million birds into Italy from Serbia over a six-year period. Each of these birds would fetch anywhere between €5 and €150 on the black market. The Serbian government was sent a note by CITES, the international body for monitoring the trade of wildlife, pointing out that many animal products were worth more on the black market than cocaine or heroin.

Hunted songbirds are seen in a box, ready for trade. Milan Ruzic

In the years since, little has changed. If anything, the poaching and smuggling problem has increased. A local hunter complains over coffee that the Italians have the police and authorities in their pockets. Under condition of anonymity, he says: “They work outside the law. They get access to the best spots where they shoot as much as they want of anything they want. All payments are in cash, so they are off the record. When the police occasionally turn up because someone has complained of poaching, resolution (for the poachers) is never more than a phone call away. Simply, it is a mafia.”

Mafia Lobbyists

Everyone working in conservation seems to have settled on the term mafia as the best description of the network which runs the trade.Katalin Kecse-Nagy, an officer at TRAFFIC, points to the way birds are transported to Italy. “Mules or couriers store birds, often skinned and beheaded to avoid identification, in special compartments that are built into cars and trucks. Then they make a dash for Italy. These are the tactics of criminal gangs,” he says.

Then there are those running the show, a shifting network of Italian businessmen who own the hunting agencies, organise the transfer of the animals and arrange their drop off in Italy. A source from the environmental arm of the Serbian government explains: “It’s mostly individual Italians with strong contacts in local administrations. They employ local Serbians who know the right spots and the right people, and who know when to look the other way.”

Ruznic has tried fighting the hunters through official channels. “The hunting lobby is closely intertwined with the industrial lobby,” he says. “Many of the hunters here are also investors, and even where they’re not, the Serbian government is keen to keep the Italian community on side. This is the government’s idea of making new friends.” But Ruznic has another plan. Over the last year, he and a team of two volunteers have spent more than 900 hours scanning the Facebook pages of Italians who come to Serbia to hunt. At the end of a day’s shooting, tradition demands that each hunter has his photo taken with his kill laid out in front of him, often regardless of the legality of the quarry.

“They just can’t resist posting what they’re up to on Facebook,” says Ruznic. “It makes it very easy for us to get a good idea of what is being killed, and what is being smuggled out of the country. Last year for example, 45,000 quails were shot officially. Through Facebook, we found another 70,000 or so had been poached. The records show that only a few thousand stayed in the country, so the chances are everything else is going back to Italy. The problem though is what to do with the data when the police and customs aren’t interested.”

The Perfect Ambush

Meanwhile, in a small Croatian town near the Serbian border lives an environmental inspector called Zjelko Vukovic who has shown how quickly the poaching and wildlife smuggling industry can crumble when the authorities give the reigns to the right people. In just over a decade, he has caught so many poachers that Italians now avoid the country almost altogether. On the borders, he launched a training programme for customs inspectors, teaching them to spot and search potential wildlife traffickers and identify the birds they find, even when they are skinless, headless and frozen in cubes of water. As a result, the number of seizures of birds on the Croatian borders has dropped from being almost weekly occurrences at the turn of the century to almost none today.

In recent years, the main illegal hunting hotspots have shifted from Hungary to Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.Milan Ruzic

Before we meet at his bungalow in a quiet cul-de-sac in Djakovo, Croatia, I am warned to tread carefully around him. He is a war veteran who fought with the Special Forces in the Yugoslavian war. His whole family are black belts in various martial arts. After a few years as a police officer, he started working as an environmental guard, tracking and arresting poachers: “I invented the job. Poachers were everywhere. No one was doing anything about it. At first I had to work between 9am and 4pm, like I was an accountant. No one hunts at this time. So I fought with my superiors until I had complete control, the highest ranking you can get in the police force.”

He began to assemble a network of informers around him. “I got birders, environmentalists from NGOs and even hunters on my side. They are my eyes. They tell me when something is going on. When I get the call, I am brutal. I show no mercy. I wait until night time and then, with a team of policemen, we go to the spot where the poachers have been, find a somewhere to hide and wait to ambush. We wear Kevlar vests and carry AK-47s. You know when the poachers are coming because you hear their dogs, but they don’t know you are there until you are on them.”

In 13 years on the case, Vukovic has caught more poachers than he can remember, but says he has only twice come across Croatians shooting birds. “They are normally important, successful people, and almost always they are Italian. I have caught policemen, military personnel, diplomats, businessmen, doctors – I caught Henry Kissinger’s surgeon poaching with a gun worth €25 000.”

The smuggling problem is harder to solve. Vukovic believes that at least 80% of all birds shot in Romania and Serbia find their way back to Italy even if they can not pass through Croatia. “There are other ways to get there. If they can get to the Mediterranean they are just a two hour boat ride away from Italy. And it is easy through countries like Bosnia and Montenegro, which have barely any customs control.”

'A Massacre for Perverts'

When Italian hunters fly to Romania, they pack light. Typically, a single suitcase will hold a pair of binoculars, an outfit of army surplus clothing, a wad of cash in euros, and two or three empty holdalls. On the return flight, the holdalls are checked in through customs, each heavy with hundreds of songbirds. Anomalous to the rest of Europe, in Romania and Italy the law stipulates that for each day a hunter shoots while in Romania, he is entitled to take 100 skylarks back with him to Italy by plane. If someone shoots straight for a full week, he can take home 700 birds.

But when I ask Daniel Raffaelli, co-owner of the hunting company Raffaelli Caccia Romania, how many birds I could take to Italy with me after a proposed three-day hunting trip, he says: “If you are flying, you can take 500, 1000, however many you want. All you have to do is pay the price of the luggage, we do the rest.” What about protected songbirds such as goldfinches or wagtails? “Don’t worry about that. We will arrange the birds for you,” he says.

Millions of birds migrating between Africa and Europe are being illegally hunted and smuggled - an industry worth around €0 million a year.Milan Ruzic

Over 30 days in September and October each year, 10,000 Italians fly into Romania to shoot skylarks as the birds gather for migration over the newly-harvested crop fields that stretch, unbroken by woodland, from the edge of the Carpathian mountains to the coast of the Black Sea. Hunting companies rent out picnic chairs, automatic shotguns and electronic devices that mimic the hyperactive call of the skylark, drawing in huge flocks to within metres of where the hunters sit, blasting indiscriminately at the sky.And yet when I ask the manager of one hunting company if he hosts skylark hunts, he barks at me, outraged: “It is not a sport! It is a massacre for perverts!”

Romania is the only country in Eastern Europe where skylarks can be shot legally, and the Romanian government has been exploiting this niche in the market. This year, the hunting quota for skylarks has been set at nearly 700,000, which, according to EU statistics, is well over a third of the country’s entire skylark population.Tamas Papp at Milvus Group, a Romanian wildlife protection organisation, is part of the team that monitors the skylark population. “I don’t think the government has even looked at the population statistics. The hunters just give the number that they would like to shoot, and the government signs the page. The quota acts like an umbrella to permit the shooting of other protected species as well; if you can kill skylarks, you can get away with killing anything of songbird size. Goldfinches, pipits, linnets, wagtails and others all come under fire.”

Rambo with Birds

At a court in Constanta, a crumbling port town on the Black Sea coast, three Italian hunters and a Romanian currently are standing trial for organising the massacre of thousands of songbirds. The prosecutor working on the case, a burly, hardened man with smiling eyes called Teodor Nita, describes the hunt to me over Skype: “There were 20 hunters involved, each one shooting many hundreds of birds, any and every type of bird they could. They just sat there shooting, piles of empty cartridges around their chairs. Have you seen Rambo? Swap the Vietnamese for little birds and you’ve got the picture.” The Italians, Nita says, will likely get three to five years each in a Romanian jail. The Romanian – a man called Miron Danut – will go down for 12 years for tax evasion and abuse of power. “It’s the Romanians who run the show,” says Nita. “Without corrupt Romanian administrators, the Italians can’t do anything.”

All across the Romanian lowlands, court cases like this are running through the Romanian courts, and it is always the Romanian administrators who fall the hardest. But while the police are closing in on poachers, the Romanian government is making their life easier by loosening hunting laws. This year, quotas for almost all legally huntable birds have gone up, even where populations have been shown to be falling. In the senate, a law is being pushed through to expand the hunting range into protected areas, including the Danube Delta, home to Europe’s most diverse waterbird population. Speaking out against hunting in Romania has become a form of political suicide. Even NGOs watch their step. When I meet a government employee in Bucharest, he makes me promise to grant him complete anonymity then proceeds to speak in a near whisper, shifting edgily in his seat. “Hunters are everywhere in Romanian politics and they are all looking out for their friends in the hunting business. Even though Romanians don’t shoot songbirds, they know there is a lot of money to be made from Italians looking to shoot songbirds so they arrange the laws in their favour. Even the politicians who don’t hunt are keen to keep Italian hunters happy. Italy has invested heavily in Romania over the last few years and government will do everything it can to keep them happy.”

The Emptiness 

On either side of the Carpathian mountains, you can travel hundreds of kilometres and count the trees you pass on your fingers. Vast strips of crops grow in monocultures, patterning the land like a Mondrian canvas, painted in pastels. The Hungarians call these plains the puzta  – which translates directly as “the emptiness”. It was across these plains that Milan Ruznic leads me on my last evening in Serbia, zig-zagging along the edge of fields towards a lone strip of poplar trees, through which the blackened surface of a lake can just be seen. The coarse hum of calling waterbirds grows louder and Ruznic is speaking quickly. “This is the only lake around here where no one hunts, and at night it gets so full with birds that you can hardly hear each other speak over the racket.”

By the time we arrive, the light has almost left the sky but the birds are still coming. The surface of the lake is occupied by common cranes, standing stock-still in the shallows, heavy bodies delicately perched. Thousands more are descending from above, screeching as if under attack. Herons and cormorants hug the edges. Lapwings fly clumsily above. There must be over 30,000 birds in all, crammed into a space of no more than five hectares, the only available refuge from the fire of hunters. After we leave, I tell Ruznic that the lake reminds me of Hitchcock’s horror film The Birds, that there were somehow too many birds, like they were about to turn against us.

“That’s actually pretty normal,” he says. “We often make nature the enemy. We invent excuses to believe that it is somehow unnatural. But what you’ve just seen is what can happens when we let things be.”

Resting on one knee, the hunter poses for the camera, his kill laid out in rows of 20 before him – birds ordered neatly into their respective species. The rarest are placed at the sides; red breasted geese, shelducks and a single sandpiper flanking dozens of coots, teals and white fronted geese.After the camera shutter snaps, the birds are quickly packed into plastic sacks. Before the end of the day, they will be skinned, drawn, packed and frozen in preparation to be smuggled overland to Italy. Within 48 hours, many will have been sold on the black market to Italian restaurants who will offer them up as traditional Italian fare.

Later in the day, I am sitting in a café in a small north Serbian village a few miles south of the slaughter, waiting for Milan Ruzic to get off the phone to the local police. He’s a conservationist with the Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia (BirdLife Serbia) and he’s furious because the hunter has posted the photo of the dead birds on Facebook. “You can go to jail for shooting these birds, and this man is advertising his own crime on Facebook. Yet the police don’t want to know.”

Before dawn that morning at a small fish farm in north-east Serbia, Ruzic and I had watched as more than 20 Italian hunters encircled the lake and waited for daybreak. As the sun came up, thousands of birds rose with it, ascending from the water like mist and then breaking into the formations particular to each species before heading to the fields for breakfast. But once the shots started, all order was lost. The birds fell into a frenzy, doubling back on themselves again and again, swerving violently from the noise and falling with increasing regularity as the hunters perfected their aims. By 10am, the game keeper began the long trawl for the dead.

Of the five billion birds that fly through Europe each autumn to spend winter in Africa and the warmer countries north of the Mediterranean, up to one billion are killed by humans. Along the Mediterranean coast, recorded birdsong blasts out of speakers, drawing swarms of songbirds into the lines of near invisible nets that hang between trees. Sticks smeared with glue are positioned among the lower branches of trees to provide attractive perches. Poisoned prey is laid out for raptors. Spring loaded nets for water birds. Then there is the army of hunters, tens of thousands of whom descend on the Balkan countries each autumn, positioning themselves along the migratory corridors and setting up camp in the spots where birds come to rest.

With the use of highly effective electronic decoys that mimic the sound of the birds, a single, efficient hunter can kill up to a hundred water birds by lunchtime. In Romania, a hunt manager boasts that the record for songbirds shot by one of his clients is 400 in a day, all felled from the comfort of a fold-out chair in a wheat field shortly after harvest. They kill for fun, a ramped-up version of centuries-old traditions, but also for money: every bird shot or trapped can be sold. Water birds and songbirds go to restaurants; raptors are stuffed and sold over the internet as ornaments.

Birds are usually hunted in the open, near marshes and canals, and deep-frozen until they cross the border to be served to gourmands in Italy.Milan Ruzic

Within the borders of the EU, birds have had special conservation status since the creation of the landmark Birds Directive in 1979, a policy designed to protect the populations of all bird species from hunting and habitat loss. For hunting, the directive is strict on paper but far looser in reality: all but a handful of bird species are illegal to hunt until exemptions are requested by individual member states, when they are invariably granted. As a result, a bird can be served up legally in a restaurant in France, while its killer would be jailed in the UK. This makes life particularly tricky for bird traders – a mistle thrush, for example, can legally be shot in Romania to be sold in Italy, but cannot be transported through any of the countries that lie in-between.  

Song Bird Slaughter

After a few mornings in Serbia, the crackle of gunshot becomes as much a part of the wetland soundscape as the call of birds. But not once do I see a Serbian with a gun. Ruzic has spent the last decade tracking hunters in Serbia and collecting information to try and lure the government into action. “It’s Italians who run the show here,” he explains. “Serbians hunt when hungry. It was a bad time for birds following the war in the 1990s. But only Italians hunt here when things are going well.”

All across south-east Europe but particularly in Romania, Serbia, Albania and Bulgaria, Italian hunters have become public enemy number one for bird lovers and conservationists. Since the collapse of communism 25 years ago, each year sees more and more Italians heading east to shoot birds. Their sport is organised by Italian-owned companies, hundreds of which have sprung up in recent years, often registered in the tax havens of Malta or Cyprus. Hunters often stay in Italian-owned, or Italian-staffed hunting lodges. And almost every bird shot is thought to be illegally smuggled back home where it is sold at a mark-up of up to 3,000% on the black market to supply the unquenchable demand for wild bird recipes such as polenta e osei – polenta with grilled songbirds – sold in restaurants throughout the Italian countryside.

“Many Italians, particularly people from the countryside, think of bird hunting as an unalienable tradition,” says Marco Avanzo, chief of the Italian forestry police. “They argue that it is their way of connecting with nature, the rural way. It has already caused chaos to Italian wildlife, but now with the mix of new hunting technology, economic incentives and open borders through Europe, the problem is growing and spreading. The demand for hunting and wild bird dishes is huge in Italy, and so hunters are following the market to where laws are lax and birds come cheap and plentiful.”

According to a 2008 report published by TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network, the hunting and smuggling of wild birds to Italy “involves highly organised criminal activity in south-east and Central Europe. Hundreds of thousands of songbirds are illegally shot and exported every year. The industry as a whole is estimated to be worth around €10m a year”. But many believe TRAFFIC underestimates the scale of the trade. A few years before the report was released, a single sting by Italian border police found 120,000 songbirds crammed into a single truck coming from Serbia. The trade was organised by two companies which offered hunting tourism to Italians.

In the trial that followed in the Italian Courts, these companies were found to have smuggled over two million birds into Italy from Serbia over a six-year period. Each of these birds would fetch anywhere between €5 and €150 on the black market. The Serbian government was sent a note by CITES, the international body for monitoring the trade of wildlife, pointing out that many animal products were worth more on the black market than cocaine or heroin.

Hunted songbirds are seen in a box, ready for trade. Milan Ruzic

In the years since, little has changed. If anything, the poaching and smuggling problem has increased. A local hunter complains over coffee that the Italians have the police and authorities in their pockets. Under condition of anonymity, he says: “They work outside the law. They get access to the best spots where they shoot as much as they want of anything they want. All payments are in cash, so they are off the record. When the police occasionally turn up because someone has complained of poaching, resolution (for the poachers) is never more than a phone call away. Simply, it is a mafia.”

Mafia Lobbyists

Everyone working in conservation seems to have settled on the term mafia as the best description of the network which runs the trade.Katalin Kecse-Nagy, an officer at TRAFFIC, points to the way birds are transported to Italy. “Mules or couriers store birds, often skinned and beheaded to avoid identification, in special compartments that are built into cars and trucks. Then they make a dash for Italy. These are the tactics of criminal gangs,” he says.

Then there are those running the show, a shifting network of Italian businessmen who own the hunting agencies, organise the transfer of the animals and arrange their drop off in Italy. A source from the environmental arm of the Serbian government explains: “It’s mostly individual Italians with strong contacts in local administrations. They employ local Serbians who know the right spots and the right people, and who know when to look the other way.”

Ruzic has tried fighting the hunters through official channels. “The hunting lobby is closely intertwined with the industrial lobby,” he says. “Many of the hunters here are also investors, and even where they’re not, the Serbian government is keen to keep the Italian community on side. This is the government’s idea of making new friends.” But Ruzic has another plan. Over the last year, he and a team of two volunteers have spent more than 900 hours scanning the Facebook pages of Italians who come to Serbia to hunt. At the end of a day’s shooting, tradition demands that each hunter has his photo taken with his kill laid out in front of him, often regardless of the legality of the quarry.

“They just can’t resist posting what they’re up to on Facebook,” says Ruzic. “It makes it very easy for us to get a good idea of what is being killed, and what is being smuggled out of the country. Last year for example, 45,000 quails were shot officially. Through Facebook, we found another 70,000 or so had been poached. The records show that only a few thousand stayed in the country, so the chances are everything else is going back to Italy. The problem though is what to do with the data when the police and customs aren’t interested.”

The Perfect Ambush

Meanwhile, in a small Croatian town near the Serbian border lives an environmental inspector called Zeljko Vukovic who has shown how quickly the poaching and wildlife smuggling industry can crumble when the authorities give the reigns to the right people. In just over a decade, he has caught so many poachers that Italians now avoid the country almost altogether. On the borders, he launched a training programme for customs inspectors, teaching them to spot and search potential wildlife traffickers and identify the birds they find, even when they are skinless, headless and frozen in cubes of water. As a result, the number of seizures of birds on the Croatian borders has dropped from being almost weekly occurrences at the turn of the century to almost none today.

In recent years, the main illegal hunting hotspots have shifted from Hungary to Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.Milan Ruzic

Before we meet at his bungalow in a quiet cul-de-sac in Djakovo, Croatia, I am warned to tread carefully around him. He is a war veteran who fought with the Special Forces in the Yugoslavian war. His whole family are black belts in various martial arts. After a few years as a police officer, he started working as an environmental guard, tracking and arresting poachers: “I invented the job. Poachers were everywhere. No one was doing anything about it. At first I had to work between 9am and 4pm, like I was an accountant. No one hunts at this time. So I fought with my superiors until I had complete control, the highest ranking you can get in the police force.”

He began to assemble a network of informers around him. “I got birders, environmentalists from NGOs and even hunters on my side. They are my eyes. They tell me when something is going on. When I get the call, I am brutal. I show no mercy. I wait until night time and then, with a team of policemen, we go to the spot where the poachers have been, find a somewhere to hide and wait to ambush. We wear Kevlar vests and carry AK-47s. You know when the poachers are coming because you hear their dogs, but they don’t know you are there until you are on them.”

In 13 years on the case, Vukovic has caught more poachers than he can remember, but says he has only twice come across Croatians shooting birds. “They are normally important, successful people, and almost always they are Italian. I have caught policemen, military personnel, diplomats, businessmen, doctors – I caught Henry Kissinger’s surgeon poaching with a gun worth €25 000.”

The smuggling problem is harder to solve. Vukovic believes that at least 80% of all birds shot in Romania and Serbia find their way back to Italy even if they can not pass through Croatia. “There are other ways to get there. If they can get to the Mediterranean they are just a two hour boat ride away from Italy. And it is easy through countries like Bosnia and Montenegro, which have barely any customs control.”

'A Massacre for Perverts'

When Italian hunters fly to Romania, they pack light. Typically, a single suitcase will hold a pair of binoculars, an outfit of army surplus clothing, a wad of cash in euros, and two or three empty holdalls. On the return flight, the holdalls are checked in through customs, each heavy with hundreds of songbirds. Anomalous to the rest of Europe, in Romania and Italy the law stipulates that for each day a hunter shoots while in Romania, he is entitled to take 100 skylarks back with him to Italy by plane. If someone shoots straight for a full week, he can take home 700 birds.

But when I ask Daniel Raffaelli, co-owner of the hunting company Raffaelli Caccia Romania, how many birds I could take to Italy with me after a proposed three-day hunting trip, he says: “If you are flying, you can take 500, 1000, however many you want. All you have to do is pay the price of the luggage, we do the rest.” What about protected songbirds such as goldfinches or wagtails? “Don’t worry about that. We will arrange the birds for you,” he says.

Millions of birds migrating between Africa and Europe are being illegally hunted and smuggled - an industry worth around €0 million a year.Milan Ruzic

Over 30 days in September and October each year, 10,000 Italians fly into Romania to shoot skylarks as the birds gather for migration over the newly-harvested crop fields that stretch, unbroken by woodland, from the edge of the Carpathian mountains to the coast of the Black Sea. Hunting companies rent out picnic chairs, automatic shotguns and electronic devices that mimic the hyperactive call of the skylark, drawing in huge flocks to within metres of where the hunters sit, blasting indiscriminately at the sky.And yet when I ask the manager of one hunting company if he hosts skylark hunts, he barks at me, outraged: “It is not a sport! It is a massacre for perverts!”

Romania is the only country in Eastern Europe where skylarks can be shot legally, and the Romanian government has been exploiting this niche in the market. This year, the hunting quota for skylarks has been set at nearly 700,000, which, according to EU statistics, is well over a third of the country’s entire skylark population.Tamas Papp at Milvus Group, a Romanian wildlife protection organisation, is part of the team that monitors the skylark population. “I don’t think the government has even looked at the population statistics. The hunters just give the number that they would like to shoot, and the government signs the page. The quota acts like an umbrella to permit the shooting of other protected species as well; if you can kill skylarks, you can get away with killing anything of songbird size. Goldfinches, pipits, linnets, wagtails and others all come under fire.”

Rambo with Birds

At a court in Constanta, a crumbling port town on the Black Sea coast, three Italian hunters and a Romanian currently are standing trial for organising the massacre of thousands of songbirds. The prosecutor working on the case, a burly, hardened man with smiling eyes called Teodor Nita, describes the hunt to me over Skype: “There were 20 hunters involved, each one shooting many hundreds of birds, any and every type of bird they could. They just sat there shooting, piles of empty cartridges around their chairs. Have you seen Rambo? Swap the Vietnamese for little birds and you’ve got the picture.” The Italians, Nita says, will likely get three to five years each in a Romanian jail. The Romanian – a man called Miron Danut – will go down for 12 years for tax evasion and abuse of power. “It’s the Romanians who run the show,” says Nita. “Without corrupt Romanian administrators, the Italians can’t do anything.”

All across the Romanian lowlands, court cases like this are running through the Romanian courts, and it is always the Romanian administrators who fall the hardest. But while the police are closing in on poachers, the Romanian government is making their life easier by loosening hunting laws. This year, quotas for almost all legally huntable birds have gone up, even where populations have been shown to be falling. In the senate, a law is being pushed through to expand the hunting range into protected areas, including the Danube Delta, home to Europe’s most diverse waterbird population. Speaking out against hunting in Romania has become a form of political suicide. Even NGOs watch their step. When I meet a government employee in Bucharest, he makes me promise to grant him complete anonymity then proceeds to speak in a near whisper, shifting edgily in his seat. “Hunters are everywhere in Romanian politics and they are all looking out for their friends in the hunting business. Even though Romanians don’t shoot songbirds, they know there is a lot of money to be made from Italians looking to shoot songbirds so they arrange the laws in their favour. Even the politicians who don’t hunt are keen to keep Italian hunters happy. Italy has invested heavily in Romania over the last few years and government will do everything it can to keep them happy.”

The Emptiness 

On either side of the Carpathian mountains, you can travel hundreds of kilometres and count the trees you pass on your fingers. Vast strips of crops grow in monocultures, patterning the land like a Mondrian canvas, painted in pastels. The Hungarians call these plains the puzta  – which translates directly as “the emptiness”. It was across these plains that Milan Ruzic leads me on my last evening in Serbia, zig-zagging along the edge of fields towards a lone strip of poplar trees, through which the blackened surface of a lake can just be seen. The coarse hum of calling waterbirds grows louder and Ruzic is speaking quickly. “This is the only lake around here where no one hunts, and at night it gets so full with birds that you can hardly hear each other speak over the racket.”

By the time we arrive, the light has almost left the sky but the birds are still coming. The surface of the lake is occupied by common cranes, standing stock-still in the shallows, heavy bodies delicately perched. Thousands more are descending from above, screeching as if under attack. Herons and cormorants hug the edges. Lapwings fly clumsily above. There must be over 30,000 birds in all, crammed into a space of no more than five hectares, the only available refuge from the fire of hunters. After we leave, I tell Ruzic that the lake reminds me of Hitchcock’s horror film The Birds, that there were somehow too many birds, like they were about to turn against us.

“That’s actually pretty normal,” he says. “We often make nature the enemy. We invent excuses to believe that it is somehow unnatural. But what you’ve just seen is what can happens when we let things be.”

The explosive crash involving a Metro-North train and an SUV that killed six and injured 15 on Tuesday renewed fears about the nation's second-largest commuter rail system, which also saw six deaths and 126 injuries due to accidents between May 2013 and March 2014.

In the New York region and elsewhere in the U.S., Tuesday's incident has many people wondering whether rail systems are safe. The short answer is yes.

First, let's look at mass transit casualties in the New York City metro area. Dramatically more deaths occur in the subway system than on Metro-North or the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). There were 58 “collision with individual” (CWI) deaths on the city's subway lines last year, according to Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) statistics, and five non-CWI deaths, such as dying on MTA property. Between 2011 and the end of last year, there were 248 subway deaths in total.

For Metro-North, meanwhile, there were 43 total deaths between 2004 and 2013, according to the most recent Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) stats. On the LIRR, a total 84 deaths occurred between 2004 and 2013. Total deaths include everything, such as on-board heart attacks as well as deaths from accidents. (Note: Train safety data aren't compiled by a single agency. An FRA spokesman explained to Newsweek that the agency handles all freight, passenger and commuter rail, not light rail or subways. The FRA doesn’t yet have complete 2014 data.)

Now these numbers don't actually indicate that the subway is hellishly deadly, considering that there are up to 6 million subway riders per day, whereas Metro-North and the LIRR serve only 285,000 and 290,000 riders a week, respectively, MTA data indicate.

“In essence, these numbers have been relatively flat over the past couple of years, which is important to note, considering ridership over the past couple of years has increased,” Kevin Ortiz, an MTA spokesman, tells Newsweek.

An image from a WNBC-TV aerial video shows first responders battling fire on a Metro-North train following the accident near Valhalla, New York, on February 3, 2015.WNBC-TV/Reuters

Between 2004 and 2013, there were four accident-based train deaths on Metro-North. In that period, there were also two railroad crossing deaths, which is how the FRA would classify Tuesday's incident. (The FRA has separate classifications for accident-based deaths and crossing deaths. Accidental employee deaths are not counted in the accidental death category.)

There was one other train-car collision at the site of Tuesday's fatal accident, according to an FRA database. A driver was fatally struck by a Metro-North train at the Commerce Street railroad crossing on October 10, 1984.

On the LIRR, total fatalities increased 225 percent between 2004 and 2013. But again, those are total fatalities. There weren't any train accident deaths during that period, while there were 29 rail-crossing deaths.

Across the country, railroad crossing deaths dropped 38 percent between 2004 and 2013. Some 65 percent of rail fatalities are the result of trespassing in areas other than road crossings, FRA statistics indicate.

"About every three hours, a person or vehicle is hit by a train," an FRA spokesman said in a statement to Newsweek. "Highway-rail grade crossing incidents account for 32 percent of all rail-related fatalities. We urge people to remain vigilant, don’t get distracted, and if they see tracks, they should think that a train is coming.” 

Additional national statistics on rail deaths and injuries are available, but they aren't up to the minute. For example, the National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) most recent figures on transit casualties are from 2013.

The NTSB reports that railroad deaths went up 6 percent in 2013, to 891 from 840 in 2012. According to the NTSB, "The vast majority of these fatalities continue to be trespassers struck by trains."

The NTSB's statement makes clear a very important point: 94 percent of 2013 transportation deaths—32,719—are roadway deaths. (Aviation and marine deaths totaled 443 and 615, respectively.)

National Safety Council (NSC) data also indicate that train passenger deaths are extremely rare.

"Tragedies do occur, unfortunately, but on an average year, railroad travel is extremely safe," Kenneth P. Kolosh, manager of the NSC's statistics department, tells Newsweek.

An estimated 7.5 million Americans show some difficulty in speaking, ranging from light stutters to severe language impairment, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Some can overcome the impediment through speech therapy, but many will live their whole lives with the disorder. But a recent study of birds may offer up a new model for researching and treating these problems.

Scientists at Duke University spent six years studying the brain regions of vocal-learning birds—species such as songbirds and parrots that can learn to produce vocalizations by imitating sounds that they hear—and cross-referencing them with the human brain. They found that the birds exhibit “tens to hundreds” of genes related to vocalization that seem to match those in humans, including 50 genes from one brain region that appear to be responsible for vocal-learning abilities in both humans and birds.
 

The study, published in December 2014 in the journal Science, suggests that songbirds and other vocal-learning animals could be used as potential models for examining the internal circuitry and brain regions associated with speech production and motor skills. “A challenge in the area of both motor and speech disorders is the development of appropriate animal models,” says study co-author Andreas Pfenning, now a postdoctoral associate at MIT who specializes in genomics research. He says no mammals “can do a good job of mimicking—and acting as proper models for studying—vocalizations.” Songbirds could be the solution. It turns out humans are a lot like these birds when it comes to making noises. For example, we both babble when learning vocalization skills at a young age—and both species can develop stuttering disorders.

“The songbird,” says Pfenning, “could be used to work out some of the underlying mechanisms at the level of genes, circuits and how they relate to each other,” and thereby, aid in the search for future treatments for human stutterers.

Nan Bernstein Ratner, a fellow with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association who was not part of the study, says the study “is exciting in a basic science sense, because it will inform what systems may be impaired when we see individuals with certain speech problems.” However, she adds, “treatment is certainly a distant extension of this work and may or may not emerge from this line of work.”

Either way, the study does shine light on our origins as a social species, supporting previous research that links people and vocal-learning birds to a common ancestor from over 310 million years ago. “Vocal learning, and speech, is something that defines us as a species,” says Pfenning. “This project gives us insight into how that ability evolved.” 

Delhi’s annual International Art Fair last weekend provided a classic example of how India produces order out of chaos, but does not quite meet its potential.

Some 80,000 people arrived at the fair in the south of the city by car on chaotically crowded and sometimes gridlocked highways, or squashed into unbelievably crowded metro trains and then stumbled along broken pavements from a nearby station.

On arrival they found the orderly bustle of the fair’s specially erected and air conditioned tents, with works of over 1,100 artists in 90 booths.

Fringe events around Delhi included special exhibitions in many galleries, a vast eve-of festival reception at an art museum run by Kiran Nadar, one of India’s leading collectors, art lecture breakfasts on the Taj Mahal Hotel’s terrace and a throbbing end-of-festival evening at the Meridian Hotel.

Many, but not all, exhibitors reported good sales. The organizers claimed the total was 25 percent above last year’s (undisclosed) value, with the top 2 percent of collectors together spending “over Rs30 crore” (Rs300m / $4.8 million). Among those buyers was Kiran Nadar, whose purchases included Circle Uncircled, a ceramics installation by Rahul Kumar and shown by Gallery Alternatives. Many sales went to new and younger buyers, which, along with tours by schoolchildren, met the fair’s aim of spreading art awareness and building knowledge as well achieving sales.

So far so good, but the fair risks losing its international tag if it does not improve its appeal for leading galleries from the U.S. and Europe.

It would still remain a significant event in the region’s arts calendar, and would probably continue to bring in curious buyers and other visitors from abroad–this year, groups came from museums and galleries in the U.S., Spain, Australia and Tel Aviv. Last year there were collectors from China.

But while the total number of galleries and booths hasn’t changed much from around 90 for the past four years, the number of foreign galleries has dropped from 31 last year to 21. There were even more in 2012 when I reported that half of the total came from 20 other countries and included names such as Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, White Cube and Other Criteria. None of those galleries was present this time, and one well-known survivor, Galleria Continua from Italy, had a bleak stand and no sales. Some were put off by unruly crowds, but that is now less of a problem and the layout is better organized.

Most of the foreign galleries that were there this time continued, as before, to offer more Indian than overseas artists, which points to the basic problem of whether the fair will continue to deserve the international tag. One reason for this is that most Indian buyers are not well enough versed yet to buy foreign art, and those who are can buy on their trips to London, New York and elsewhere.

The other reason, which takes me back to my point about India failing to meet its potential, is the primary problem that tortuous customs regulations and controls over how art can be brought in and delivered to local buyers deters foreign galleries. Neha Kirpal, the festival’s founder director, and others have been urging the government to relax, or at least rationalize, these rules for some years, but nothing has been done. People more used to manipulating such problems can of course manage–one Indian gallery was showing mostly foreign works.

Perhaps the most controversial and certainly one of the most successful displays was an 11,000-square-foot free-standing structure occupied by the Delhi Art Gallery. Situated a few yards away from the main exhibition tents, it was regarded by other exhibitors with a mixture of envy and criticism, which led to speculation about how and why Ashish Anand, the gallery’s director, could and would afford such a display. Some onlookers put the cost at not less than Rs 1 core (Rs10m = over $160,000/£100,000).

Anand’s 700 works traced the history of modern Indian art from early Bengal works to the 2000s. This coincidentally showed how Indian mythology has been a constant inspiration–demonstrated by the works by an unknown late-19th-century Bengali artist and Manjit Bawa, who was a leading painter, in 2000.

With a total of 36,000 works, Anand said that his gallery has the world’s largest collection of modern Indian art, which is partly displayed in a relatively small gallery in Delhi’s Hauz Khas plus one opened last year in Mumbai. A third has just been announced for New York.

But, he told me, he never had a chance before to display so many of the works in one place. He said he’d be happy if he sold 70 works, and it seems that roughly that number have been agreed to or are being negotiated. Beyond that, his aim is to educate the young–2,300 students toured the show and the gallery produced 10 books and 100 short videos.

Finding new buyers in the short as well as the longer term is a constant theme in the Indian art market, which does not yet have a substantial collector base and has yet to recover from a slump four or five years ago after an investment-led boom in the mid-2000s.

Some galleries are finding new business from companies setting up offices in areas such as Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi and are actively marketing works for newly rich customers, sometimes co-operating with architects and designers.

That is excellent for business, but the fair organizers have longer term aims of building awareness among those who might become buyers for their own homes in the years ahead. It would be good if that could happen–and with the fair’s international tag in place.

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

Just across the Hudson River from Manhattan lies Union City, New Jersey. With 68,000 citizens it’s gritty, working class and a beautiful piece of Americana. For decades it had the largest concentration of Cuban-Americans outside of Miami. Some came to the town before the Cuban revolution in 1959 that put Fidel Castro and his Marxist government firmly in power. Others came during different migrations—the flood after Castro clamped down on personal and property rights in the early ’60s, and in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Each brought drive, determination, profoundly anti-communist views and a belief in American power.

Robert Menendez was born in Union City to parents who left Cuba pre-Castro and until recently, when he moved to more suburban Bergen County, he lived there his whole life, winning his first election at 20. So rough were the city’s politics that he testified against the mayor he had worked for. Menendez himself faced a corruption investigation in 2006 by then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie. It fizzled, as did another regarding donors, the seeds of which Menendez allies have speculated might have been planted by the Cubans—which sounds simultaneously crazy and plausible. Despite the city’s anti-communist spirit, Menendez stayed a Democrat on social issues and in party affiliation. His hawkish views were to the right of his party even when he came to the U.S. Senate in 2006.

Now, Menendez famously finds himself at odds with a president with a very different world view. After all, President Barack Obama grew up in multicultural Hawaii where, unlike Jersey, beaches outnumber RICO investigations. It’s a president who came to national office on the anti-war side of his party and expounding the view that dialogue with Iran and Cuba and other enemies would lead to good things, and implicitly suggesting that his work as a bridge-builder in the Illinois state Senate and at the Harvard Law Review made him uniquely qualified to repair the breach between the U.S. and the rest of the post-Bush world.

Those two worldviews are now in clear conflict. As the Obama administration tries to reach a nuclear deal with Iran by next month and as it initiates a dramatic opening to Cuba, it finds itself on the opposite side of Menendez, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The roads to containing Iran, producing a war resolution against the Islamic State, better known as ISIS, arming Ukraine—each of these goes through the committee where the president would understandably prefer a yes man leading the Democrats but instead gets a fighter. In recent days, The New York Times and other news outlets have shone a spotlight on Menendez, the thorn in Obama’s side, which makes sense. The two even had a tiff at a Democratic retreat last month when Obama urged sanctions supporters to put politics aside. Menendez said it was principle. No drinks were thrown, but it wasn’t good.

The biggest issue between the two men now is Iran. Menendez backs stronger sanctions—something the Obama administration has vowed to veto, insisting that such measures would scuttle the sensitive negotiations with Tehran. Menendez and Senator Mark Kirk, a Republican, agreed to back off a vote until March to give the negotiations more time. But the talks have dragged on before and it’s likely that the showdown between Menendez and the president has only been postponed.

So the opposition between Obama, 53, and Menendez, 61, is real, ideological and serious. But it’s more nuanced than the press lets on and more revealing about both the Senate and presidency. “It’s not a simple story,” says one insider.

Obama meets with a bipartisan group of members of Congress to discuss foreign policy in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, July 31, 2014, including Menendez, far left.Larry Downing/ReutersTo understand the tale you have to know that Menendez and Obama arrived in the Senate at about the same time (2005 for Obama, 2006 for Menendez). But while members who arrive at the same time usually bond, the two were never particularly close. Menendez played an inside game and was more interested in moving up the leadership ranks, while Obama had less interest in lining up leadership posts than he did in planning his 2008 presidential bid. (Interestingly, Menendez’s daughter, Alicia, who is a Harvard-educated anchor for Fusion, the English-language Hispanic network, seems more comfortable in public than her father.)

So while Obama cut a national profile, Menendez quietly worked his way up through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a powerful body that has been the forum for some of the most contentious fights in American history. It’s where Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations was challenged by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge and it’s where an Arkansas segregationist Democrat,  J. William Fulbright, became an unlikely opponent of the Vietnam War and held hearings in 1966 that became a veritable teach-in against Lyndon Johnson’s Southeast Asian quagmire.

For most of his presidency Obama’s friend John Kerry ran the committee, and Menendez was little more than a reliable vote for things like health care and the stimulus. But when Obama tapped Kerry to become secretary of state in 2012 to replace Hillary Clinton, Menendez assumed the top role—generally supporting the president, greasing the wheels for various treaties and helping to confirm Obama’s foreign policy team, including Kerry himself. But Menendez, a Hillary Clinton backer in ’08, was also, in the eyes of the White House, at best difficult and, at worst, antediluvian—a throwback who hadn’t gotten the hope-and-change message.

Menendez was an early advocate for arming moderate Syrian rebels, which the Obama administration resisted even as it drew red lines about the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Eventually, Obama came around to Menendez’s thinking and the U.S. is now supporting rebels in Syria. By all accounts, there was no moment when the president called Menendez to say, “You were right.”

And this is the problem with the Obama presidency that’s illuminated by the split with Menendez. Obama has never really had a plan to deal with Democrats who stick it to him whether out of ideological conviction or personal politics, like on coal or gun control. (Let’s leave aside the Republicans who Obama was never really able to manipulate, despite those who think that more dinners with Mitch McConnell would have been a balm for the last six years.)

U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie while U.S. Senator Robert Menendez watches at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, December 15, 2014. Larry Downing/ReutersWithin the Democratic ranks, Obama does have leverage—fund-raising, endorsements, the powers of the office—but he has never exercised it terribly well. In the case of Menendez, the two men don’t speak often on the phone. (When Menendez wants to talk things out he calls Vice President Joe Biden and Kerry, his former Senate colleagues.)

The president’s less than interested in massaging or trying to work through policies where they disagree. For instance, in the case of the president’s Cuba initiative there was no way Obama was going to see eye-to-eye with Menendez, who is congenitally opposed to letting up on the Castros until they dismantle their regime. But Obama barely gave Menendez a heads up of his Cuba announcement, which seems like an unnecessary slight. And while most of what’s been proposed by the White House concerning Cuba is unilateral, there are still opportunities for common ground with Menendez, such as determining which diplomat represents the U.S. in Havana.

The issue isn’t Obama’s unwillingness to compromise on legislation. He certainly did so on health care reform and other signature bills. But when it comes time to deal with a contentious legislator like Menendez, there’s no real plan of action. Bill Clinton would try to flatter his enemies to death, occasionally tempering them as he did the likes of Bob Kerrey. Lyndon Johnson tried to muscle Fulbright, with only limited success.

So far if there’s been any handling of Menendez it’s backfired. When it comes to Iran, Menendez publicly accused the administration of “fear mongering” and went further when he said the administration’s talking points on Iran sanctions sounded like they could have come “straight out of Iran.” The White House didn’t launch a charm offensive or any offensive to rein him in. And when Menendez has played ball—he has never stuck it to Obama on confirmations and is helping line up an Authorization for Use of Military Force against ISIS—there hasn’t been much praise.

Now, with another set of sanctions looming against Iran, the question is whether Obama and Menendez can find a way to work together. So far Menendez has helped stave off some of the more extreme sanctions proposals being pushed by Republicans in the Senate Banking Committee. If multilateral negotiations to tame Iran’s nuclear program fail—and that seems more likely than not—can Obama, the smooth Hawaiian, find a way to work with Menendez, the tough Jersey guy, to compromise? Don’t bet on it.

MUNICH (Reuters) - Germany's Angela Merkel warned on Saturday that sending arms to help Ukraine fight pro-Russian separatists would not solve the crisis there, drawing a sharp rebuke from a leading U.S. senator who accused Berlin of turning its back on an ally in distress.

The heated exchange at a security conference in Munich pointed to the fragility of the transatlantic consensus on how to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin over a deepening conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 5,000.

Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula in March of last year and evidence that it is supporting separatist forces in the east of the country, which the Kremlin denies, have driven Moscow's relations with the West to a post-Cold War low.

A recent rebel offensive has triggered a flurry of shuttle diplomacy, with Merkel and French President Francois Hollande jetting to Moscow on Friday to try to convince Putin to do a peace deal.

But European officials say the Russian leader may have little incentive to negotiate now, preferring to sit back and watch the separatists make territorial gains in Ukraine that have made a mockery of a prior ceasefire agreement clinched last September in Minsk, Belarus.

Ukraine's military said on Saturday that pro-Russian separatists had stepped up shelling of government forces and appeared to be amassing forces for new offensives on the key railway town of Debaltseve and the coastal city of Mariupol.

The German leader conceded in Munich, after returning home from Moscow in the dead of night, that it was uncertain whether a Franco-German peace plan presented to Kiev and Moscow this week would succeed.

But she flatly rejected the idea that sending weapons to Kiev, an idea being considered by U.S. President Barack Obama, would help resolve the conflict.

"I understand the debate but I believe that more weapons will not lead to the progress Ukraine needs. I really doubt that," said the conservative German leader, who has led a Western initiative to resolve the crisis through negotiations.

"The problem is that I can't envision any situation in which a better-equipped Ukraine military would convince President Putin that he could lose militarily," Merkel added.

"BLUE IN THE FACE"

Speaking after Merkel, U.S. Senator Lyndsey Graham, a Republican hawk, praised the chancellor for her engagement in the crisis but said it was time for her to wake up to the reality of what he called Moscow's aggressions.

"At the end of the day, to our European friends, this is not working. You can go to Moscow until you turn blue in the face. Stand up to what is clearly a lie and a danger," Graham said.

He accused Merkel of turning her back on a struggling democracy by rejecting down Kiev's request for arms. "That is exactly what you are doing," he said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, also in Munich, said there were "good grounds for optimism" that the talks between Merkel, Putin and Hollande could yield a deal.

But Lavrov also delivered a diatribe against the West. He accused Europe and the United States of supporting a "coup d'etat" against deposed Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovich, a Moscow ally, a year ago and turning a blind eye to nationalists he said were intent on ethnic cleansing in eastern Ukraine.

"There are growing appeals in the West to support the Kiev policy of militarization, to pump Ukraine full with lethal weapons and to bring it into NATO," Lavrov said. "This position will only exacerbate the tragedy of Ukraine."

Hollande, speaking to reporters in the city of Tulle in central France, cast the talks with Putin as a last-ditch effort to avert full-blown war.

"If we don't manage to find not just a compromise but a lasting peace agreement, we know perfectly well what the scenario will be. It has a name, it's called war," he said.

In a further sign of cracks in the Western approach towards Russia, NATO's top military commander, U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, signaled that he now wants the alliance to consider sending weapons to Ukraine.

"I don't think we should preclude out of hand the possibility of the military option," Breedlove told reporters, adding that he was referring to weapons or capabilities and that there was "no conversation about boots on the ground."

After her speech, Merkel held three-way talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. She is due to fly to Washington on Sunday to meet Obama.

Ron Kline is a plumbing employee in Ohio. A particularly loyal plumbing employee in Ohio: He started working at Mansfield Plumbing on January 30, 1965, and claims he hasn’t missed a single work day in 50 years. After an 18-year run inspecting sanitary-ware products for Mansfield, Kline—a father of 11 and grandfather of 38—now works as a deliveryman for the company and has no plans to retire. (He’s 70.)

Since we work in media, where our peers switch jobs every six weeks and everything is terrifyingly transient, we decided to ask Kline for some career advice. Here’s what he told us.

The worst drought Brazil has faced for more than 80 years has had an unlikely consequence: the submerged city of Igarata is now reappearing after being underwater since 1969.

City buildings like a school and a church, as well as the main street, benches and trees, have started to emerge as the Jaguari River in Sao Paulo dries up to 100 feet or 30 meters below its normal level.

The town has been underwater since it was flooded during the building of a dam on the Jaguari River by the Brazilian government 46 years ago. Former residents held photographs showing the city when it was above water, but said they were conflicted over the sunken city's re-emergence.

"It brings me happiness in some ways, but it's also very sad. Happiness because the things that were around when I was a child are re-emerging from the water, but sadness because of the lack of water," former resident Irene De Almeida told ITN.

Igarata lies about 56 miles northwest of São Paulo where, in a bid to save water, the water pressure has been lowered in some areas for several hours a day.

Irene De Almeida, a former resident of the re-emerging old city of the Igarata, Sao Paulo State, sits on the main street in front of Jaguari resevoir and holds a photograph of the city before it was submerged in 1969, Feb. 4, 2015. Nacho Doce/Reuters

Stairs of the re-emerging old city of Igarata are seen in front of Jaguari reservoir.Nacho Doce/Reuters

A boat rests near cracked ground and the evidence of drought in the Jaguari reservoir in Igarata.Nacho Doce/Reuters

Igarata's church is seen in a photograph held up by a former resident of the re-emerging old city.Nacho Doce/Reuters

The walls of the old school of the re-emerging old city of Igarata are seen on Jaguari reservoir.Nacho Doce/Reuters

Trees rise out of the Jaguari reservoir, next to the re-emerging old city of Igarata. Nacho Doce/Reuters

Piche, 62, a holds a brick from the old city of Igarata while standing on the main street in front of Jaguari reservoir.Nacho Doce/Reuters