Glenn Greenwald might be the single most polarizing figure in American journalism.

In the 12 months between May 2013 and May 2014, the self-made blogger, civil libertarian and investigative journalist was called "treasonous" by Republican Representative Peter King of New York, given a prestigious Polk Award for national security reporting, accused of "paranoid libertarianism" by The New Republic and awarded a Pulitzer Prize for public service.

Along the way, the itinerant one-man shop left his job at The Guardian, wrote a book titled No Place to Hide and helped launch an intriguing if vaguely defined new digital magazine called The Intercept, backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and featuring fellow left-of-center muckrakers Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras.

Greenwald, 47, is the man most responsible for bringing to light the surveillance revelations of National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden, in an ongoing series of articles buttressed by additional investigative corroboration. Snowden initiated the contact with Greenwald after reading his staunch, criticize-all-sides civil liberties blogging at outlets such as Salon.

To admirers, the two share an adherence to constitutional liberties so strong that they're willing to take on their own ideological bunkmates and live in exile from their homeland. (Greenwald resides in Brazil.) To detractors, they are part of a transnational movement to sabotage U.S. hegemony.

Central to Greenwald's ethos is his status as an outsider. A civil rights litigator by training, Greenwald switched careers to political commentary in the mid-'00s. He started a self-published blog called Unclaimed Territory, which leveled an acerbic critique at the Bush administration's civil liberties record and the Washington press corps that enabled it.

In 2006 he wrote a book, published by the activist phone company Working Assets, called How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok. Improbably, it made the New York Times best-seller list and shot to No. 1 on Amazon.

In November, the Senate narrowly defeated the Snowden-inspired USA Freedom Act, which would have provided the first check in generations on the NSA's power to collect blanket information about American citizens. While criticized by some civil libertarians for not going far enough, the bill demonstrated that a few dedicated outsiders can influence the culture enough to at least make Washington sweat.

For his unique contribution to American media and discourse, the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason magazine, in November awarded Greenwald its second annual Lanny Friedlander Prize, which honors an individual or group that has created a publication, medium, distribution platform or way of doing media that vastly expands human freedom by increasing people's ability to express themselves and engage in debate.

In September, Greenwald sat down with Reason TV producer Todd Krainin in Montreal to talk about surveillance, privacy, journalism and the emerging left-right coalition on civil liberties.

Reason:No Place to Hide reads in many ways like an All the President's Men for the 21st century, with you and Laura Poitras playing the role of Woodward and Bern­stein. Where they differ is what really interests me. Even though it's a timeless tale, at the end of All the President's Men you have a president who resigns, you have people who go to jail, you have some measure of accountability.

I don't quite know if we're at the end game with [your] scenario, but do you see that ever happening? Do you see some measure of accountability? Or today have things changed to such a degree that the government just acts with impunity?

Greenwald: I do. Even in Watergate, that took a relatively long time from the original disclosures to the point where Washington, the political class, took it seriously enough so that there was accountability.

In fact, if you look at the first year and a half to two years of Watergate reporting, overwhelmingly the polling broke down on partisan lines, where Republicans were rather dismissive of the seriousness of what was being reported and Democrats were trying to exploit it for political gain. It was only once it reached a tipping point and prominent Republicans came out and said, "This is really wrong," and then the battle for the tapes—it all sort of unfolded the way we now remember it.

But it took a good while. The nature of politically powerful people is that they have a lot of defenses and a lot of strength, by definition, and you don't deflate them or bring them down or hold them accountable easily. It's always a battle.

I do think there have been some very significant changes as a result of [our] reporting. There hasn't been a lot of legislation passed. But I never thought that the place to look for restrictions on the power of the U.S. government would be the U.S. government itself, because human beings generally don't walk around thinking about ways to restrict their own power.

I think the much more significant changes are the changes in consciousness that people have, not just about surveillance but about privacy, the role of government, their relationship to it, the dangers of exercising power in the dark and the role of journalism as well.

There are all kinds of ways that surveillance is now being curbed, from other governments acting in coalition to impede U.S. hegemony over the Internet to technology companies like Facebook, Yahoo and Google knowing that, unless they make a real commitment to protecting their users' privacy, they're going to lose a generation of users to other countries' companies.

Most important of all is the awareness of individuals about the need to protect their own privacy by using things like encryption and other tools of anonymity. I think these things are a really important form of change and accountability that will come from the reporting.

Reason: Is time also a factor? [As you] mention in the book, initially there's a fear of surveillance, there's a shock. And then over time, you get used to the cameras being on you.

I know this just as a photojournalist: In the beginning, you put a camera on someone and they're nervous, they're worried about their appearance, and after an hour it's, like, it's not even there anymore. Does that dilute the urgency in any way?

Greenwald: There is definitely an extent to which you can normalize almost every form of abusive behavior on the part of the state. You can pretty much accustom a population to almost anything.

There are studies that show that at the end of the Stasi, when the [Berlin] Wall and East Germany fell—and even once East Germans became integrated into the West or at least into reunified Germany—that, behaviorally, it took a long time for East Germans to change from the population under this repressive, tyrannical microscope of surveillance to one that was free. Because they had become acculturated to simply accepting the world with those kinds of limitations.

But I also think that there is an instinctive drive that human beings have for privacy, for having a place where we can go and think and communicate and act without the judgmental eyes of other people being cast upon us. Because we understand reflexively how important that is, to be able to dissent and explore who we are. So I don't ever see a time when people will be satisfied with having no privacy in the digital age.

Reason: [Is the] NSA's blanket surveillance now legally permissible under any possible interpretation of the law, in your opinion?

Greenwald: What's important to understand when we talk about what's legal is the extent to which our institutions that determine legality have been completely co-opted, either by the other branches of government or just by the kind of post-9/11 fearmongering hysteria that has subsumed federal judges as much as they have everybody else, if not more so.

Take the Patriot Act, for example. Section 215 of the Patriot Act is the provision that the Justice Department cited to convince the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA] court to allow the NSA to collect all telephone records from Verizon and Sprint and every other major carrier, the metadata of every person with whom every other American is communicating.

If you go back and look at the debate that took place over the Patriot Act—and there was a debate over the Patriot Act, even in the wake of 9/11—there were lots of people standing up and saying, This is really alarming, this is going to vest extremist surveillance power in the government.

Nobody thought—neither the proponents of the Patriot Act who wrote it, like Jim Sensenbrenner, who were devoted to extremist power in the wake of 9/11, nor the critics of the Patriot Act, who were motivated to depict as extreme a picture of the legislation as they could—nobody remotely dreamed that that law could ever be cited to justify mass indiscriminate surveillance on Americans.

All it did was lower the standards so that you no longer needed probable cause but a much lower level of proof of reasonable suspicion to target somebody for surveillance. Yet a FISA court in secret ended up accepting this rendition of the Patriot Act that nobody thinks it plausibly permits.

That's really become the problem: The law almost is irrelevant, and it gets twisted and distorted by the very institutions that are supposed to safeguard [it], to justify almost anything the government wants to do.

Reason: It sounds like a very similar situation to how torture and waterboarding were permitted, right?

Greenwald: Right. I mean, the law in its most idealized form is this consistent, objective, concrete, identifiable set of rules and principles that constrict people's behavior. But in reality, the law, like everything else, is an instrument that those who wield the greatest power can use to maximize their power and to shield themselves from challenge and protection.

You're exactly right: Nobody thought waterboarding and these other techniques were anything but illegal, criminal torture. In fact, the U.S. government has prosecuted people for using them exactly on that theory. But legal memos got written. Courts have, if not accepted them, accepted the fact that their existence justified the decisions.

So they just become legal by sort of fiat power. That's why, although I began writing about politics as a journalist [by focusing] a lot on legal questions, I almost never focus on them now, because they're really not relevant to the struggle for power or popular opinion.

Reason: Can you explain what The Intercept is and what it is going to provide to the public that isn't already out there in this diverse world of media in which we live?

Greenwald: It's a little difficult to describe what The Intercept is because it's still very much a work in progress.

The idea behind it when we began was that there's been fundamental flaws in American journalism that we wanted to set out—I wouldn't say "to rectify," because that's too much of an ambitious aspiration—but to at least start to work to produce other models.

There are two central flaws we wanted to rectify. One was the fact that most well-funded institutional media outlets have become, for a variety of reasons, far too close to and deferential to those who wield the greatest political and economic power, as opposed to adversarial to it, and therefore have kind of gutted the purpose of journalism, which is to serve as a check on those who wield power and not as an uncritical servant or amplifier of their message.

And then the second flaw that we wanted to rectify was the lack of vibrancy and independence in how journalists are allowed to report and opine and talk about the world. There's kind of become this very soul-draining, soulless voice that journalists are expected to adopt. It's one of contrived neutrality or objectivity that prevents them from really having any passion or spirit behind their journalism.

We really wanted to reanimate the idea of what journalism was supposed to be, which is not this cloistered profession that follows all these archaic, unwritten rules but instead was about crusading for some kind of outcome or against a particular injustice. That means letting journalists be free to pursue their own voice and not trying to homogenize them or neuter them.

I think it's much more honest to simply be candid about the subjective assumptions that you're embracing, rather than to pretend that you're something that you're not.

But more to the point, I think that that kind of pseudo-objective journalism neuters it. It means that you can't really ever be perceived as taking a strong position because that somehow compromises your objectivity. It means that you're basically toothless, that you no longer have the ability to check those who are in power or to call out their lies when they're lying or to be aggressive in telling the truth. That's a big part of why journalism has been failing.

Reason: In some ways, the story of Snowden is really just a springboard for some larger philosophical issues that you really get into in your book, about who gets to be considered an insider in the establishment and who's an outsider.

Greenwald: I think that this dynamic is—I wouldn't necessarily say universal, because that's probably too great of a claim—but it's extremely common across cultures and eras. The idea that orthodoxies are maintained by imposing punishment for those who defy them.

I think it's always the case, or most often the case, that the path of least resistance is to embrace and act in accordance with societal convention, and [that] there are generally punishments for deviating from that convention. So a big part of it is just simply that normal human dynamic, that people who wield power have an interest in having the status quo, or the prevailing order, maintained.

One important way of doing that is to ensure that there are penalties for those who challenge it. And one important penalty that gets imposed on those who challenge it is the idea of societal scorn or shame. You'll be depicted as crazy or unstable.

You can find Soviet or Chinese dissidents who were put into mental hospitals rather than prisons, on the grounds that they were crazy for challenging the prevailing order. Scientists like Galileo and Copernicus, and Socrates in philosophy, were regarded similarly.

So I think there is a very important component of it there, and one of the reasons why journalists who are very amply rewarded become such reliable servants of power is because they too have an interest in preserving the status quo.

It's important to remember that even the most popular opinions, or the things that are done by those who seem like they are the guardians of convention, can also be really crazy. Like the idea of being able to target an American citizen for execution by drone without due process.

That is actually a really radical, and one could say crazy, idea. And if it were being proposed by some fringe ideologue, rather than being done by a popular American president, it would be regarded as self-evidently crazy.

Reason: You make the point that it is absolutely crucial that journalists be outsiders.

Greenwald: My role, as a journalist, is not to give comfort. I'm not a therapist, or a nurse, or a pastor. I think one of the most crucial parts of journalism is to constantly poke and prod at convention and orthodoxy and to challenge assumptions that people are just implicitly accepting. Not just even if it makes people uncomfortable, but especially then.

I think you need, always, to have every kind of human belief being challenged and scrutinized and put under a microscope. That's an important part of what journalism is about.

Reason: But do you romanticize that aspect of the journalistic viewpoint a little bit? For example, yes, you've come under fire from a lot of journalists, and people [have called] for your imprisonment in some cases. But isn't that just part of what you're actually promoting, which is adversarial journalism?

Some people are going to look at you in a really negative light. They're going to ask you the same kind of hard questions that you would ask of the NSA, for example.

Greenwald: Absolutely. And journalists tend to be really thin-skinned, especially in the Internet age, where it's really the first time journalists had to be confronted with criticism. Ten years ago, if you wrote a column for The New York Times, if you were Maureen Dowd or Tom Friedman, the only criticisms you ever heard were people who wrote letters to the editor and got published, and none of them ever cared at all about that.

Now, everywhere they go, Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd hear constant criticism, and sometimes the criticism is vicious, and it's vitriolic, and it's personal, and unproductive, and whatever. But I would rather have those people—and I would include myself in that—subjected to excessive criticism and attack than insufficient criticism and attack.

Reason: A lot of the revelations that you came across from Snowden have in many ways proven to be more outrageous than even the most creative of conspiracy theorists could have ever imagined. You even write about how shocked you were personally.

I'm wondering, Did that have an impact on how, or even whether, you view our government, in general, as a force for good? Did it make you more skeptical about it?

Greenwald: Definitely. I don't see how it cannot do that.

I've been writing about the dangers of state surveillance, U.S. surveillance, for a lot of years. And we've gotten little snippets of the magnitude of this surveillance, just how unaccountable and out of control it is. But to see the sheer breadth of it—the fact that their explicit institutional ambition is to collect all communications on the Internet, literally all—is something that is difficult to explain in terms of how you react.

It does feel like you're confronted with this almost caricature of tyranny, which is a hard word to use when you're talking about your own government, because we are so inculcated to think that tyranny is something that happens elsewhere, in bad countries. But to watch the U.S. government, in its own documents, not just trying but coming very close to converting the Internet into a realm of unlimited, indiscriminate surveillance—which is another way of saying eliminating privacy in the digital age—is really stunning.

But the more jarring part of it is how secretive it all was. You watch your government, that claims to be a democracy and claims to be accountable to its citizenry through the ballot box, engaging in this indescribably consequential behavior, and purposefully keeping not just the details but the broad strokes of what they're doing completely secret from the people who are supposed to be deciding whether they want their government to be doing that.

It's a real subversion of not just privacy but of democracy itself. And yeah, to watch it in action, essentially, with definitive proof of what they are doing, definitely heightened my skepticism over the reliability of the U.S. government's claims, the role they play in the world and its motives as well.

Reason: Have you been surprised or disappointed in any way with the weak reaction against the NSA by a lot of the people on the left?

Greenwald: No, I haven't been surprised, in part because there were so many other policies that progressives—or liberals, or Democrats, whatever you want to describe them as being—pretended not just to oppose but to vehemently condemn and be offended by when they were done by George Bush, and when Barack Obama was condemning them. And then they just stood by quietly, meekly acquiescing if not outright endorsing Obama once he was in power [and] embracing these same theories, in some cases even expanding them.

So this kind of radical, grotesque form of progressive hypocrisy was something that I had become extremely accustomed to, had written about and had just expected as a fact of life.

At the same time, the reaction to the NSA reporting on the conservative side was actually quite mixed. It is true that there were a lot of conservatives who were consistent, meaning they defended eavesdropping in the Bush regime and they defended it when done under Obama, and were hostile to the reporting.

But a huge amount of the support for Edward Snowden and the reporting that we were doing came from the right as well as the left. A lot of that was just as hypocritical as the hypocrisy on the left, because a lot of those conservatives were perfectly fine with the NSA scandal under George Bush and suddenly got worried about individual privacy when a Democrat was in control.

But a lot of it was this kind of small-government, pro-individual privacy strain on the right that was offended by the idea of this level of government spying. It was really interesting because it didn't break down at all along partisan or ideological lines.

In fact, if you look at the first NSA vote to defund the bulk metadata program, the two sponsors were John Conyers [D-Michigan] and Justin Amash [R-Michigan]. You can't find more disparate members of Congress than those two, and the people that lined up behind them to do that were across the range of the political spectrum.

Ultimately, the big breakdown was along demographic lines, where young people tend to support Snowden and to be really offended and alarmed by this kind of surveillance, while older people were more tolerant of it.

But the behavior of Democrats was completely predictable. They pretended to be hideously bothered by a much smaller-scale amount of eavesdropping revealed under George Bush and then were completely supportive of what was done under President Obama.

I think that the much more relevant split, politically, is no longer left versus right or Democrat versus Republican but insider versus outsider. You saw this most prominently in the last year with that NSA vote, where the people who saved the bulk metadata program were the White House, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner—this kind of unholy trinity of establishment insiders—who whipped all their establishment members of Congress in defense of the NSA.

And you had the kind of Tea Party outsiders with the outsiders on the left joining together to try to defund it. This coalition has actually become more apparent in lots of different areas, including drug policy and penal reform and intervention and war questions.

Even if you look at the two outside agitation movements of the last five years, which were Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movement, perceived as polar opposites, they were both actually born out of anger over the bailout. So I think objections to crony capitalism, and the kind of inherent corruption of how the public and private sectors are interacting, are also commonalities among the left and the right, and those are some extremely significant issues.

You can [add] social issues to that as well, whether it be choice or marriage equality, where you find advocates of those positions on both the right and the left. There is a lot more common ground than people typically recognize.

Todd Krainin is a video producer for Reason TV. This interview first appeared in the February issue of Reason magazine.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Twenty-two people were killed outside an Egyptian soccer match on Sunday when security forces barred fans from entering the stadium, the public prosecutor's office said.

Most of the dead were suffocated when the crowd stampeded after police used teargas to clear the fans trying to force their way into a league match between two Cairo clubs, Zamalek and Enppi, doctors and witnesses said.

Soccer matches are often a flashpoint for violence in Egypt, where 72 fans were killed at a match in Port Said in February 2012. Since then Egypt has curbed the number of people allowed to attend, and supporter groups have often tried to storm stadiums they are banned from entering.

Outside a Cairo hospital treating the injured, scores of youths wearing Zamalek T-shirts looked dazed with shock as families arrived to see if their relatives were safe.

One mother cried and shouted when she found the name of her son on a list of the dead posted by hospital staff.

"I'd told him: Leave soccer matches," she said.

Relations between security forces and fan groups, known as Ultras, have been tense since the 2011 popular uprising that ended the rule of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, in which the Ultras played a key role.

"Huge numbers of Zamalek club fans came to Air Defense Stadium to attend the match...and tried to storm the stadium gates by force, which prompted the troops to prevent them from continuing the assault," the interior ministry said.

The public prosecution ordered the arrest of the leaders of the Zamalek supporters group, Ultras White Knights, after Sunday's incident, official media reported.

On their Facebook page, the Ultras White Knights described the 22 dead as "martyrs" and accused security forces of a "massacre."

Despite the violence, the match went ahead and ended with a 1-1 draw. Some media speculated that the government could cancel the national league championship in light of Sunday's violence.

On Thursday night,  broadcast media enthusiasts, students and journalists sheltered from the bone-chilling February winds by gathering at the New School’s Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall for an enlightening conversation between some of new media’s brightest minds and innovators.

“Serial and the Podcast Explosion,” the first public programming event under the school’s revamped Journalism + Design program, sought to unpack the phenomenon of podcasting. Although voiceover storytelling is nothing new, the fervor surrounding some podcasts, particularly the criminal investigation program Serial, indicates this is one of the new avenues to engage people. But as media and technology continue to intersect in unprecedented ways, what does it mean for public radio, storytelling and journalism?

Moderated by David Carr, the Lack Professor of Media Studies at Boston University and a columnist and media critic for The New York Times, the panel included Sarah Koenig, producer and host of Serial; Alix Spiegel, founding producer of This American Life and co-host of the popular new series Invisibilia; Alex Blumberg, founder of NPR’s Planet Money, the mind behind the podcast StartUp, and former producer of This American Life, and Benjamen Walker, host of the podcast Theory of Everything and one of the founding members of Radiotopia.

All five made scintillating points about the role of podcasting in the contemporary media sphere, but one idea that kept coming up was the free-form nature of podcasting, and the opportunities it afforded for creativity. So, in the spirit of this creativity, Newsweek decided to do hold its own roundtable discussion about the event with three people who were in attendance: Lauren Walker, our resident tech and security reporter, Shaminder Dulai, our photo director and Paula Mejia, arts and culture reporter. 

Mejia: The first question Carr posed to the panel was: Is podcasting the best or worst thing to happen to public radio? What did you think before, and did your opinion change after the conversation?

Walker: I think I have a unique perspective because I am a devout This American Life listener and I will never stop (unless it stops). But one thing that I did notice is that I am spending more time listening to other podcasts, and I imagine people that are less loyal to This American Life might start replacing it. So Invisibilia is fabulous, and I would imagine someone might replace it.

Dulai: I don’t think they are both mutually exclusive from each other; I think they’re two tracks of the same idea, right? So public radio has a stylized approach already, but podcasting is like the Wild West, as the [panelists] were saying. You’re making up rules as you go, the audience is more focused...it’s very niche now. It’s happening to all media, really. So I think that idea that something has to be destroyed is kind of silly. Cable T.V. is still around even though people keep whining about it. This stuff will still be around, but there are still a lot of niche things, like Netflix, that you can focus down on.

Walker: But you do have X number of hours of radio. And so you’re going to spend it somewhere. If you have an hour of radio a day in your life, it’s either going to be one show or another. So with the proliferation of podcasts, I just am guessing people are going to opt for the not public radio option.

Right. By and large, too, that radio time is devoted to commuting, the way the majority of people listen to public radio in their cars.

Dulai: Everything can co-exist with each other; I don’t think one has to die for the other to exist. I can speak from my own experience that I don’t listen to public radio anymore because I don’t have a car. I’m on the subway and I don’t get the radio down there, so that’s why I listen to podcasts; that’s my time to listen to something. If I was in my car, I’d be doing the same thing with public radio.

There was an audience question that seemed to momentarily stump all the panelists: Do you find podcasts to be alienating, given their limited geographic and socioeconomic span?

Dulai: I never really listened to podcasts until I got a smartphone, so I’m discovering a lot of this stuff for the first time. There’s a wall you have to get past. If you’re not inside that wall, then you’re not exposed to that world. And maybe that’s a difficulty: How do you close that digital divide? But you have to solve other problems first, such as how does everyone get access to the Internet so that you can access all the podcasts out there.

Walker: Yeah I don’t think the solution is to discourage people from being creative and seeking out methods of being creative and seeking out communities through podcasts.

Carr brought up a good point about the lack of searchability within podcasts; besides a description, you’re all in. Interesting given that contemporary trends in media are capitalizing on shorter attention spans. So I wonder why people are drawn to podcasts?

Dulai: Technically, yes, you can search with podcasts using programs; but the experience is part of it. Because when you’re dialed in, you’re dialed in. A lot of us listen to them through headphones; we don’t get distracted by people when we’re listening to podcasts.

Walker: Something Sarah Koenig said [during the event] that I completely agreed with was that someone will suggest something to you [on a podcast] and you trust that person. Once you get through an episode that you like, the intimate nature of podcasts is such that you feel as though you have a relationship with them and you trust that they will bring you another good episode. After that, they’re a trusted brand.

Dulai: At the very root, podcasts are about a good story; that’s why you’re there, right? It’s not about having a brand; you know when you listen to This American Life, they are going to surprise you with something, you’re going to want to tell your friend about it. You’re going to get something out of it. That’s all we do as humans is re-tell stories, and tell jokes.

What was your biggest takeaway from the event?

Dulai: I love David Carr still. I hope I’m half as cool as that man one day.

Walker: I found it fascinating listening to them break down what makes for a good story on the radio. I’ve worked in television and print [journalism] and I feel like I have a good sense of what makes a good story on those mediums, but I haven’t thought about why they pick what they pick for the radio. I really appreciated that.

It was refreshing that the panelists —for all their experience—themselves acknowledged that they still didn’t really know what to do with the medium of podcasting. Since it’s so new, there’s still so much ground to be covered there.

Walker: When [Alix Spiegel] said that, I instantly thought about friends who are so creative and would love to listen to what they could do with such an open medium.

Dulai: I kind of found myself thinking: It’s fun and all, until it becomes a job. It would take all the fun out of it.

Walker: I don’t think so. The podcast Call Your Girlfriend, for instance, two friends are literally just having a conversation with each other. And they’re talking about things they would normally talk about, they’re giving themselves topics. I can’t imagine sitting down with, say, Paula for half an hour, having three things to talk about and dreading it.

Well, thanks. Shaminder, I know what you mean though. I can’t imagine the kind of stress Sarah Koenig must feel for the upcoming second season of Serial.

Dulai: I think she’s going to go in the complete opposite direction. It’s going to be like, how to raise a puppy or something. She needs it, she needs a stress relief.

Walker: I’m going to go with fraud, I think she’ll do something with that. Probably something non-violent. 

You can watch the entirety of the 'Serial and the Podcast Explosion' panel here. 

The 57th annual Grammy Awards was opened Sunday with a set by rock band AC/DC and featured a mix of performances by iconic artists Jeff Lynne, Tom Jones, and Madonna as well as newcomers like Ed Sheeran and Hozier.

Taylor Swift presented Sam Smith with the award for Best New Artist, while Beyoncé thanked her "bey-hive" fans and husband Jay-Z after winning for Best R&B Performance for "Drunk in Love."

See photos of the attention-grabbing outfits and performances of the night.

English singer Sam Smith and indie chameleon Beck proved to be the major winners at the 57th Grammy Awards. The former star snagged four awards total, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year (both for "Stay With Me"), while Beck took home both Album of the Year and Best Rock Album for the decidedly un-rocking Morning Phase. (Beck beat out U2's controversial iPhone giveaway album Songs of Innocence in this category.) The Album of the Year win was partly interrupted by Kanye West approaching the stage in support of Beyoncé.

Smith's lucky night emerged early: Within an hour of the ceremony's start, the English star had already won two Grammys: one for Best Pop Vocal Album (for 2014's In The Lonely Hour) and one for Best New Artist. Taylor Swift presented the latter award, cheekily reminding the audience that she lost that award in 2008. (Read about why some artists might not want to be the recipient of Best New Artist.)

Photos: Glitz, Glamour and Music at the Grammy Awards

Musicians and celebrities tread the red carpet and celebrate tunes at the 57th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. slideshow

Other big winners include Beyoncé, who thanked her "bey-hive" after taking home the Best R&B Performance Grammy for "Drunk in Love," and virtuoso Kendrick Lamar, who snagged Best Rap Performance for "I."

Meanwhile, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga won Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album for Cheek to Cheek; Miranda Lambert won Best Country Album for Platinum; and Pharrell Williams won both Best Music Video and Best Pop Solo Performance for 2013 mega-hit "Happy," which the artist performed in a choir arrangement, as well as Best Urban Contemporary Album for G I R L.

You can see the full list of winners here, via Stereogum. The most memorable performances of the evening included Madonna's bizzare matador-themed "Living for Love", Kanye West's intimate rendering of "Only One," and a performance of Selma anthem "Glory" featuring John Legend, Common and Beyoncé. 

Kanye West's first Grammy Awards performance in six years wasn't what his casual fans were expecting. The rapper turned on the autotune and took the opportunity to perform his new single "Only One," a song referencing his mother Donda West, who died in late 2007.

West's solo appearance was an intimate and low-key break from the typical Grammy performance. 

Released online at the beginning of 2015, "Only One" is one of a series of collaborations with Paul McCartney, though the Beatle sat the performance out in the audience. (He was later spotted clapping along to the beat during Ed Sheeran and Jeff Lynne's performance of "Evil Woman.") 

West's second Grammy performance later in the evening was a full-band affair: He returned to the stage to perform brand new single "FourFiveSeconds" with collaborators McCartney and Rihanna.

Here's Kanye West's dramatic "Only One" performance:

In his second win of the night, Beck won the Grammy for Album of the Year—and kept his cool as Kanye West unexpectedly approached the stage, motioned as if to interrupt, then turned around and aborted the mission.

The move shocked Grammy viewers and instantly called to mind Kanye West's interruption at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when he took to the stage to inform Taylor Swift that Beyoncé had "one of the best videos of all time." Sunday night's moment also took place after Beyoncé lost a major award, and was presumably in her honor. Here's a Vine:

KANYE THA GOD. https://t.co/8x42pDTmWT

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) February 9, 2015

"I'm sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best *albums* of all time!"pic.twitter.com/Lvv4e83jIy

— HYPEBEAST (@HYPEBEAST) February 9, 2015

And here's Jay Z's cartoonishly shocked reaction:

Priceless. | Jay is straight up horrified while Kanye is walking to the stage https://t.co/P7Oh9xAewt

— J Herskowitz (@jherskowitz) February 9, 2015

Beck's award was for Morning Phase, for which he also won Best Rock Album. The album is an acclaimed, pastoral throwback to 2002's Sea Change. After receiving the award from Prince, Beck jokingly motioned for West to "come back" and thanked his children, who he says were kept awake while he was making the album.

UPDATE: In an E! interview after the show, Kanye West explained his half-stagebomb move. "I am here to fight for creativity," he explained, saying that Beck should have given the award to Beyoncé. "That’s why I didn’t say anything tonight, but you all knew what it meant when ‘Ye stepped on that stage.” Here's the full text of his lengthy explanation:

“I don’t even know what [Beck] said. I just know that, the Grammys, if they want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us. We aren’t going to play with them no more. ‘Flawless.’ Beyoncé’s video. And Beck needs to respect artistry, he should have given his award to Beyoncé. At this point, we tired of it. What happens is, when you keep on diminishing art, and not respecting the craft, and smacking people in the face after they deliver monumental feats of music, you’re disrespectful to inspiration. We, as musicians, have to inspire people who go to work every day, and they listen to that Beyoncé album, and they feel like it takes them to a different place. And then they do this promotional event, and they’ll run the music over somebody’s speech, the artist, because they want commercial advertising. We aren’t playing with them anymore. And by the way, I got my wife, my daughter, and I got my clothing line, so I’m not going to do nothing that would put my daughter at risk, but I am here to fight for creativity. That’s why I didn’t say anything tonight, but you all knew what it meant when ‘Ye stepped on that stage.”

Grammy viewers were not expecting a surprise appearance from President Obama on Sunday evening, but they received one in the form of a PSA about "It's On Us," the White House's sexual violence awareness campaign.

"Together we can change our culture for the better by ending violence against women and girls," Obama said in the spot, which aired roughly midway through the show. He went on to state that roughly one in five American women has been a victim of rape or attempted rape. He then implored musical acts to join the campaign. "Artists have a unique power to change minds and attitudes, and get us thinking and talking about what matters," he said.

After Obama's filmed address, suvivor Brooke Axtell delivered a speech about her own experiences with domestic violence and said, "If you are in a relationship with someone who does not honor and respect you, I want you to know that you are worthy of love. Please reach out for help."

On Twitter, observers were quick to point out that the Grammys have contradicted this message by honoring alleged abusers R. Kelly and Chris Brown:

But Chris Brown and R Kelly. Are both nominated tonight....

— roxane gay (@rgay) February 9, 2015

Yeah, good job standing up to rape and domestic violence, Grammys, R. Kelly and Chris Brown noms really showed where it’s at.

— Jessica Hopper (@jesshopp) February 9, 2015

I think it's interesting that Chris Brown and R Kelly were nominated despite the domestic violence outcry. #JustSayin

— Tyce Green (@tyce) February 9, 2015

Watch President Obama's filmed statement below:

In this seaside city once ruled by the Greeks and Phoenicians but now largely populated by Russians, the talk in the caviar-stocked delis and jewelry stores is of upcoming elections and Israel's powerful Russian vote.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, more than one million Russian speakers moved to Israel, many of them settling on the Mediterranean coast in cities like Ashkelon and Netanya, where Russian remains in daily use and Cyrillic script is as common on menus as vodka and smoked meats.

Given that Soviet migrants make up 20 percent of Israel's Jewish population, their conservative, working-class vote has become significant in politics, a fact that remains the case ahead of closely fought parliamentary elections on March 17.

In the past, much of the "Russian vote" - which includes those of Ukrainian, Moldovan, Georgian and Belarussian heritage, among others - has gone to Yisrael Beitenu, a right-wing party led by Moldovan-born Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

But officials in Lieberman's party are under investigation over allegations of corruption and opinion polls show its support falling - from a peak of 15 seats in the 120-seat Israeli parliament a few years ago, they now have 13 and are expected to win just six in next month's vote.

As a result, the hunt is on to secure defectors, with not only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party in the chase, but that of ultra-nationalist Economy Minister Naftali Bennett too, not to mention the center-left opposition.

"We're seeing considerable movement from Lieberman's party to my party," Bennett, whose religious-nationalist Jewish Home party is expected to win up to 15 seats in the Knesset, told Reuters as he campaigned in Ashkelon.

"They are looking for a party of strength, standing strong on our values, our Jewish values, and also on security."

Moscow on the Mend

At Marina Polliack's jewelry stand, Bennett was making in-roads. The Belarus-born businesswoman, 45, moved to Israel in 1997 and has warmed to his policies, which include opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

"The Jews have only one state. The Arabs have many and history is repeating itself around the world, with anti-Semitism rising," she said, pledging her support to Bennett.

Nearby at Gastronom Khoroso, a Russian deli where the shelves are piled high with caviar and Christmas chocolates, owner Genadi Sirotnikov, 59, leans towards Netanyahu.

"There aren't many alternatives," said the former Russian soldier, who moved to Israel in 1990. "Netanyahu is relatively strong, even if he doesn't always give people what they want."

Sirotnikov says younger Russians do not share the older generation's political values, however.

"We have a common basis of fear," he said of his generation, which was fixated on escaping communism. "The generation that grew up here doesn't have that. They are more free-thinking."

Changing Allegiance?

Marik Stern moved to Israel from Moscow when he was just two. His late father ran in Lieberman's party in the 1990s, but the 36-year-old son supports the Labour party, which has formed the Zionist Union with the centrist Hatnua party.

"A lot of us have developed a political identity different to our parents," said Stern. "They came here with a great antagonism to socialism and anything that has even a whiff of Soviet to it. They are very capitalist."

Yet while there are signs of the political identity shifting away from its conservative-religious roots towards centrists, it does not appear to have major momentum yet.

Alex Tenzer, a prominent publicist born in Kiev who immigrated to Israel in 1976, believes the Zionist Union has missed the boat this time around by not focusing its campaign on issues such as the high cost of housing and the low level of pensions, two issues close to Russian hearts.

Two decades ago, the Labour party promised new Russian migrants increased benefits, a pledge that helped secure Yitzhak Rabin the prime ministership. With budgets and finances now tight, no such similar promises are forthcoming.

"The Zionist Union is out of touch with the (Russian) sector," said Tenzer. "Because of Russian immigration, there is a great chance that Netanyahu will be prime minister again."

Abraham Diskin, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, also believes it is too early to expect a fundamental shift in the Russian community's allegiances.

"The Likud will be the main one to profit," he said, referring to Netanyahu's right-wing party, which is expected to win around 24 seats in the Knesset, neck-and-neck with the center-left alliance, known as the Zionist Union.

Urgent action is needed to tackle a "disturbing" rise in anti-Semitism in Britain including measures to deal with growing "cyber hate" on social media, a group of senior lawmakers said on Monday.

Last week, the body which advises Britain's estimated 260,000 Jews on security reported that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain had risen to a record level last year.

Many of those incidents were sparked by the 50-day conflict in Gaza that ended in August. Israel launched its Gaza offensive with the declared aim of halting rocket attacks by Hamas. More than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed, along with 73 mostly Israeli soldiers.

The rise in incidents prompted a parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism.

"Whilst the Jewish community is diverse and multi-faceted there is a palpable concern, insecurity, loneliness and fear following the summer's rise in incidents and subsequent world events," the report by the cross-party group of lawmakers said.

"A more sophisticated understanding of anti-Semitism is needed, together with better defined boundaries of acceptable discourse."

Across Europe, Jews have warned of a growing under-current of anti-Semitism, fueled by anger at Israeli policy in the Middle East and social tensions over immigration and increasing economic hardship under austerity policies that have helped far-right movements gain popularity.

Those fears have been exacerbated after an Islamist militant gunman killed four people in a Jewish supermarket in Paris last month.

The British lawmakers said the government, police and prosecutors needed to take action "to ensure Jewish communities have the necessary protection from the continuous terrorist threat they face".

Amongst their 34 recommendations was a call for a governmental fund to pay for security at synagogues and an independent council to be created to monitor trends in anti-Semitism.

They also said prosecutors should review possible action to prevent the spreading of hate online, noting that "Hitler" and the "Holocaust" were amongst the top 35 key words used on Twitter during the summer months of 2014.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday's report was "hugely important".

"No disagreements over foreign policy or politics can ever be allowed to justify anti-Semitism or any other form of racism, prejudice or extremism," he said.

According to a survey last month, a quarter of Jews have considered leaving Britain in the last two years and well over half feel they have no long term future in Europe.

"The threat against the Jewish community is real and anxiety remains high," said Britain's Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis.

Following the Paris attack, the police said it had stepped up patrols at synagogues and other Jewish venues.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott survived a challenge to his leadership on Monday after his ruling Liberal Party voted down a motion to unseat him after weeks of infighting, but the attempted revolt appears likely to weaken his grip on power.

In a secret party room ballot, a vote to declare the positions of party leader and deputy leader vacant was defeated by 61 votes to 39, a party official told reporters.

In a short televised statement following the vote, Abbott insisted the turmoil was over and called for unity within the conservative party and the country.

"The Liberal Party has dealt with the spill motion and now this matter is behind us," Abbott said.

"We think that when you elect a government, when you elect a prime minister, you deserve to keep that government and that prime minister until you have a chance to change your mind."

Still, a consensus appeared to be forming that the large number of votes against Abbott indicated a lack of support so damaging as to potentially render him a lame duck.

"It does suggest to me continuing instability, because 40 percent of your party has just expressed no confidence in you," Rod Tiffen, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Sydney, told Reuters.

"I think that it means leadership speculation will be on the agenda in Australian politics until it's resolved by Abbott's exit, really."

Following the vote, online gambling site Sportingbet.com.au had Communications MinisterMalcolm Turnbull as the favorite to be prime minister at the next election, with a A$1 bet paying out at A$1.60. Abbott was at odds of A$2.75, while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was A$6.50, an indication of the damage done.

Knighthood Furor

The motion was brought on Friday by an MP from Western Australia after mounting criticism of Abbott's leadership, culminating in his awarding of an Australian knighthood to Queen Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip.

No member of the government had indicated a direct challenge to Abbott, although most attention had focused on Turnbull, a former party leader toppled by Abbott.

The prime minister has faced a torrent of criticism in recent weeks over policy decisions ranging from his handling of the economy to the knighthood.

Abbott, who had described the call for a leadership vote as a "very chastening experience", vowed ahead of the poll to be more consultative in his approach after several of his so-called "captain's calls" backfired on his administration.

If Abbott had been ousted, Australia would have had its sixth prime minister in eight years.

Opinion polls have consistently shown voters prefer Turnbull to lead the party but his support for a carbon trading scheme, gay marriage and an Australian republic have made him unpopular with the right wing of his party.

Bishop, also deputy leader of Abbott's party, had been touted as either a potential successor to Abbott or party deputy under Turnbull.

Seen as one of the best-performing ministers in Abbott's cabinet, Bishop had said she would vote against the motion but had not ruled out standing if the positions had been declared vacant.

Removing Abbott would have required more than 51 of the 101 members of the federal Liberal Party at the party-room vote.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spanish, Moorish and Italian legions captured Republican-held capital of Catalonia, Barcelona, on 26 January 1939, marking a convincing victory for the nationalists in a civil war that had been raging for three years.

Newsweek marvelled at the speed and power of Franco’s advance on the city, recording that, “Gen. Jose Yague’s Moors wore their rope-soled shoes to shreds marching 20 miles a day” towards the city. The magazine reported the minute details of the final surrender: “Early on the crucial day, a white flag was hoisted atop the gray stone fortress of Montjuich, on a 600-foot hill near the harbor. Next, Franco’s air scouts saw a rash of white flags, sheets and tablecloths break out all over the city.”

“At noon, the Generalissimo finally gave the signal to march. Bands started blaring. Infantrymen broke into a run, shouting and singing.” 

Her blue eyes match the silk of her dress. She has flung her shawl on her chair and turned to gaze at the viewer. You can’t help but stare right back at her. The Countess of Haussonville, the great French beauty of her day, has arrived. Nearly 200 years after she was painted by the French artist, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Louise-Albertine, Princess of Broglie and Countess of Haussonville, has come back to Europe. She is just one of 36 objects being lent to The Hague by The Frick Collection in New York, its largest ever loan. As the exhibition opened on 5 February at the Mauritshuis, the queues snaked around the block.

These artworks are the legacy of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, whose collection occupies his former home in a Beaux-arts mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A place of pilgrimage for art lovers, it’s famous not only for the quality of its holdings but also because it never lends. Under the terms of the bequest, nothing acquired in the founder’s lifetime has ever left New York. So the only way to appreciate Holbein’s portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell is to part with $20 and enter the hall where these two sworn enemies glower at each other from either side of the fireplace.

Luckily for us, that restriction does not apply to art acquired after his death in 1919. That caveat is what makes this blockbuster, The Frick Collection – Art Treasures from New York, possible. While individual works have made the odd guest appearance around the world, this is the largest number ever despatched. And we should count ourselves fortunate to see the Countess. “She is our top poster girl,” says Dr Xavier Salomon, chief curator at the Frick. “She is the most sought-after painting in the entire collection. We get so many requests for her and sadly we have to turn many down.”

The exhibition is the result of an unique collaboration between two world-class museums. When the Mauritshuis closed two years ago for a £25m renovation, its collection found a temporary resting place at the Frick. The resulting exhibition, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting, opened to huge acclaim in 2013 attracting 235,000 visitors, more than any other exhibition in the Frick’s history. Two years on, it’s payback time – a cultural tit-for-tat. “The trigger for this exhibition is our partnership,” adds Salomon. “We think of ourselves as sister institutions with paintings displayed in houses not galleries. And our collections are similar sizes.” Both the Frick and Mauritshuis are often referred to as townhouse museums, “jewel-like” in their perfection. The director of the Mauritshuis, Dr Emilie Gordenker, agrees it’s a marriage made in commercial heaven. “I think that the Frick comes closest to us as an institution,” she says. “We both occupy buildings that were built to be lived in. It’s an intimate and human scale. And this exhibition was always a quid pro quo.”

The Mauritshuis in the Hague already boasts 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' among its famous exhibits.Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, C. 1665, Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery

Both museums may see themselves as sisters, but there are significant differences. The Mauritshuis offers a largely royal collection in a 17th-century former nobleman’s house; the Frick displays the taste of a self-made millionaire from Pittsburgh. Along with Andrew Carnegie, J P Morgan, and later Andrew Mellon, Frick was one of the most powerful industrialists in the United States. Often derided as the “robber barons”, many built their fortunes in oil, coal and steel. Accumulating beautiful houses and art, they exemplify New York’s Gilded Age as described by writers such as Edith Wharton and Henry James. So eager were they to ship treasures from Europe across the Atlantic, that many in the art world regarded them as robber barons, too. As one German critic wrote in 1902: “Whenever an art collection is put up for sale nowadays, one may assume it will be acquired by an American; if a fight breaks out at an auction or an art dealer’s about a valuable work of art, you can be sure that an American will make off with the spoils.”

What spoils they are. The Frick treasures, including Cimabue, Rubens, Boucher, Gainsborough and Constable, will be the first exhibition to occupy the new wing of the Mauritshuis. As captivating as she is, however, the Ingres portrait is facing strong competition from a home-grown beauty: the Mauritshuis has its very own poster girl in Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring, often referred to as the “Mona Lisa of the North”. “People are crazy for Vermeer,” says Gordenker, who has seen visitors double since the refurbishment. “In the spring they come for tulips and Vermeer.”

Indeed the Mauritshuis can boast not one but two paintings which have become wildly famous. It owns The Goldfinch, painted by Fabritius in 1654, the subject of a 2013 Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Donna Tartt. Meanwhile the popularity of the Vermeer portrait has soared since Tracy Chevalier’s novel of 1999, Girl With a Pearl Earring, became a successful film in 2003 starring Colin Firth as the painter and Scarlett Johansson as the eponymous heroine. Still, neither poster girl will have to fight it out: serving girl and Countess will hang in separate rooms. Unlike the Ingres, almost nothing is known about the Vermeer. Thought to date from c. 1665, it was bought at auction in 1881 for two guilders (under £40 at today’s prices) by a collector with a hunch. He had the picture cleaned . . . and the rest is art history.

The Countess, however, is a different story. Painted by Ingres in 1845, Louise-Albertine came from a grand political family, renowned for her beauty and intellect. As befits the granddaughter of the novelist Madame de Stael, she wrote memoirs, novels and biographies, including a study of Byron. She is said to have known Chopin. Famous for portraying the elite of French society, Ingres nonetheless found portraiture a devilish business. “It can’t be done,’’ he once told one of his pupils. “It’s enough to make one weep.’’ Yet no one could guess his struggle from his skillful rendition. You can almost hear the silk rustle. He made more 60 preparatory sketches for the Countess before casting the portrait aside. Her travels and fourth pregnancy delayed further sittings. Only three years later, when she was 27 and he was 65, did he finish. As a friend confided to her, “Monsieur Ingres must be in love with you to have painted you this way.’’ Perhaps he was.

The Frick Collection – Art Treasures From New Yorkruns until May 10. www.mauritshuis.nl 

There’s taking a stand. Then there’s taking a stand in quicksand. And that’s where the Republican Party finds itself.

After almost six years of gloom-and-dooming, every intellectually honest Republican has to admit Obamacare is making life better not only for individual Americans but for the country. It is saving tax dollars, beefing up American’s monthly budget and setting the country on a path of ever-lowering deficits. Some experts are even claiming the law has improved the care in hospitals.

There were plenty of reasons to suspect Obamacare might have been a colossal failure—although none of them had to do with death panels, huge lines for treatment, a government takeover of health care, etc. But there were real economic issues that could have killed Obamacare, such as insurance companies refusing to participate, individuals not signing up or too many sick people seeking insurance while the generally healthy sat on the sidelines.

None of that came to be. And while there are some flaws around the edges of Obamacare, the law is doing what it was intended to do and doing it well.

Despite that, those who see no difference between governance and politics are still trying to abolish Obamacare. That’s what happens when someone lives in an information bubble of conservatives talking to one another on Fox News, Breitbart.com and The Rush Limbaugh Show.

The Republicans have one last shot at taking down Obamacare, and if they succeed (against all logic, reason and honesty), ugly, countrywide damage will be inflicted on the United States, and on the Republican Party. Like Napoleon’s rash attempt to conquer Russia in 1812, the GOP is lulling itself into believing that overrunning this enemy will lead to supreme victory, when in fact it is the path to self-destruction.

To understand why, start with one fact everyone can agree upon: Obamacare is now fully intertwined with the entire health care system. Pricing for insurance policies, costs of hospital care, utilization standards—all of these are already being strongly influenced by Obamacare. Extracting it out of the insurance and health care systems will be like trying to pull chocolate out of a marble cake: It will be messy and will pretty much destroy your dessert.

Here is how the Obamacare cake looks right now. The number of Americans without health insurance is plunging. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, innumerable pollsters and the Urban Institute show that, between September 2013 and September 2014, the number of uninsured adults fell by 30.1 percent. That brought the uninsured rate near or at historic lows (the most recent figure, as of this month, is 12.9 percent, compared with a record high of 16.7 percent the year Obamacare became law). And the numbers could have been even better if not for Republican governors who refused to accept federal money to expand Medicaid in their states. Those states, unsurprisingly, showed a lower decline in the rates of the uninsured than those that expanded Medicaid: The expansion states saw uninsured rates drop 36.3 percent, while the non-expansion states showed declines of only 23.9 percent.

Now here is where we have to state an obvious and unavoidable fact: Uninsured people don’t just slink off into a corner and die. They seek treatment, but usually when it is an emergency, and this will be the most expensive kind of care available.

If you had no insurance, and felt a slight pain in your chest, would you go to the hospital? Probably not. Would you head to a doctor’s office? Never, since the doctor wouldn’t see you without insurance. But when you finally have that massive heart attack caused by the very treatable high blood pressure you weren’t treating, you’d go straight to the only (and most expensive) option available: the emergency room. And if your baby had a fever, you’d do the same thing. And because you’re uninsured, there would be none of the discounts negotiated with insurance companies. No, you’d be billed full charges for an emergency room visit, and there is no way—except in conservative fantasyland—that someone unable to afford insurance would ever be able to pay the $200,000 medical bill for a heart attack.

So who pays? The insured, through higher rates and hospital-price inflation, and the taxpayer, through local, state and federal taxes for something called “disproportionate share”—a federal program that spreads the cost of treating indigents in hospitals. Now before anyone demands an end to disproportionate share, know this: Without it, lots of rural and urban hospitals would die because they wouldn’t have the money to keep the lights on. And because Obamacare is available to provide insurance to the uninsured, disproportionate share is supposed to be cut way, way back.

But that hasn’t happened yet. Why? Because too many red state governors won’t expand Medicaid. And by refusing to have their residents pay federal taxes that go toward picking up the cost of care for the uninsured, Republican governors are forcing their residents to pay taxes that go toward paying the more-expensive cost for uncompensated care. When rural hospitals in red states started shutting down in anticipation of disproportionate share ending without an expansion of Medicaid, GOPers fought to delay that so their constituents didn’t suddenly find themselves without a hospital. Obama caved and extended disproportionate share, helping the Republicans avoid forcing their constituents to face a scary reality. But that won’t last forever.

President Obama leaves after speaking at a rally celebrating the passage and signing into law of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on March 23, 2010. Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty

This brings us to the second major accomplishment of Obamacare: Health care costs, which for decades were subject to near-crippling inflation, are growing at the slowest rate since 1960. Between March 2011 and April 2014, the Congressional budget Office's projections for health care spending by the federal government through 2021 dropped by $900 billion. The decline is larger than any deficit reduction package advanced by Republicans in Congress.

When it came to dire warnings about Obamacare, the Republicans were the kings of “swing and a miss.” People would flee the health care industry to avoid Obamacare? Nope—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, health care gained about 1 million new jobs in preparation for increased demand. Obamacare is socialism? Nope—as insurance companies vie to sell new policies, competition within private industry is growing rapidly, with the number of participating insurers growing by 26 percent between 2014 and 2015, and the number of products they offer growing by 66 percent.

Premiums would skyrocket? Nope—as any smart conservative knows, increased competition means more competitive pricing, which is why the McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform found that the median increase is just 4 percent, a rate of growth so small it’s almost unheard-of. Quality of care will decline? Nope—hospital readmissions, a standard measure of the quality of care (low is good, high is bad), have dropped in Medicare by nearly 10 percent, according to the Commonwealth Fund.

All this means that Republicans are left with deception and bumper sticker slogans to keep opposition to Obamacare going. That’s why Senator Mitch McConnell had to lie to his constituents when running for reelection in Kentucky last fall by telling them he loved Kynect—the state’s wildly popular health insurance exchange—but hated Obamacare. Apparently, McConnell deceived plenty of Kentucky constituents who didn’t realize that Kynect is Obamacare.

And therein lies the problem for the Republicans: If they kill Obamacare, tens of millions of people will either lose their private insurance, lose Medicaid coverage, get tossed off of their parents’ policies or be refused insurance because of preexisting conditions, and we will all see health care inflation zoom up and watch the insurance industry, which has built Obamacare into every element of its business, fall into chaos.

The threat to Obamacare is coming from one of the dumbest legal assaults ever filed. At its essence, in a series of related cases known commonly by the name of one, King v. Burwell, Obamacare opponents argue that what everyone knows to be true really isn’t. The intent of Obamacare is clear: The program allows for insurance subsidies on state-run insurance exchanges as well as the federal exchange.

But wha-ho! Conservatives found the legislative equivalent of a typo in Obamacare. The law, as written, says that premium subsidies could be provided to those people who enrolled in an exchange established under Section 1311, when it should have said Section 1321. Yah, that’s it—a 1 should have been a 2. The difference, though, is that 1311 refers to state exchanges and 1321 refers to both state exchanges and the federal exchanges. Without premium subsidies on the federal exchanges, plenty of people wouldn’t be able to afford their insurance. (And for those who can’t tell the players without a scorecard, yes, that means that Republicans are fighting to make sure that the residents in red states that didn’t set up exchanges don’t get subsidies. They are fighting to take away insurance from their own constituents.)

Without the subsidies, insurance becomes unaffordable for those people, the analysis used by the insurance companies no longer works, premiums can fly up, more people can’t afford it, more people lose their insurance, and the Republicans have more graves to dance on. Obamacare would no longer work.

Most legislation has some sloppy errors in its language, something that in normal times leads to the two parties getting together to fix it up. But because the GOP refused to cooperatein any way on Obamacare, that typical cleanup never took place. As a result, there was some language that, even though congressional intent was clear, could be interpreted to mean the opposite of what everyone accepted as its meaning. The Internal Revenue Service, relying on the obvious intent, applied the subsidies to both federal and state exchanges. For complicated economic reasons, without those subsidies in both exchanges, Obamacare will be hobbled (and it’s kind of obvious that the congressional intent of legislators who approved a law was for it to work). But the Obamacare opponents are saying the IRS can’t do that because, these conservatives lie, Congress didn’t intend for that to happen.

Then, the political clown car filled with those Senators for Life—the Supreme Court—came rolling in. Let’s not even bother debating who will side up where: Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito (the worst justice in decades) and Clarence Thomas will vote to strike down the federal subsidies, regardless of the arguments. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan will line up in support. That means Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy will be deciding if the American health care system is plunged into bedlam and the Republican Party is destroyed for decades to come.

Wait—it’s worse. If the opponents win, it will show that government can be subverted by a party that controls only the House or the Senate. All that chamber has to do is refuse to fix language problems that become evident in legislation—as they invariably do—and then use the precedent in this case to twist laws into meaningless drivel that bear no resemblance to congressional intent.

Millions uninsured, health care costs climbing, the insurance industry in shambles, wrecking the GOP, destroying democracy...seriously, you conservatives out there, is it really worth all of that devastation just to avoid admitting you were wrong about Obamacare?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is set to argue in Washington on Monday against arming Ukraine in its conflict against Russian-backed rebels, while in Brussels EU ministers held off tightening sanctions to give peace talks a chance.

Merkel's message that sending Western weapons to Kiev risks escalating the conflict is likely to get a sympathetic hearing when she meets President Barack Obama later in the day.

But critics of Obama's cautious foreign policy approach are already demanding decisive U.S. action to help Kiev fight the separatists in eastern Ukraine, even if this deepens a standoff with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Nine Ukrainian troops have been killed in the past 24 hours and seven civilians also died, Kiev said on Monday, with fighting particularly intense around the town of Debaltseve, a major rail and road junction northeast of the city of Donetsk.

At a security conference in Munich over the weekend, Merkel said it was uncertain whether further negotiations would lead to a deal with Putin but argued that all opportunities for a diplomatic solution should be pursued.

Merkel, who with French President Francois Hollande is due to meet Putin on Wednesday in Belarus, has come under fire from U.S. foreign policy hawks in the Republican-controlled Congress who want defensive weapons sent to the Ukraine army.

"The Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we're sending them blankets and meals," Sen. John McCain said at the Munich conference. "Blankets don't do well against Russian tanks."

But Merkel made clear her opposition to arming Kiev. "I understand the debate but I believe that more weapons will not lead to the progress Ukraine needs. I really doubt that," she said.

KREMLIN REJECTS ULTIMATUM TALK

A Russian speaker who grew up in East Germany, she has taken the lead in pursuing a diplomatic solution, speaking with Putin by phone dozens of times over the past year and meeting him in Russia, Australia and Italy in recent months.

Last week, Merkel and Hollande met Putin in Moscow and followed this up with a conference call on Sunday also including Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The four are due to meet in Minsk on Wednesday, but so far no breakthrough has emerged in the nearly year-long conflict that has claimed over 5,000 lives.

On Monday, European Union foreign ministers approved visa bans and asset freezes on more Ukrainian separatists and Russians. But they will wait at least until Feb. 16 before imposing the measures to give peace efforts more time, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.

"The principle of these sanctions remains but the implementation will depend on results on the ground," he said. "We will see by Monday and see how the meeting in Minsk went."

Sanctions imposed in stages by the EU and United States since Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine last March have badly hurt the Russian economy, adding to problems created by plunging prices of oil, the country's main export.

Moscow warned on Monday that Putin will not be spoken to in the language of ultimatums. Asked about media speculation Merkel had issued him an ultimatum at talks on arranging a summit on Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Govorit Moskva radio: "Nobody has ever talked to the president in the tone of an ultimatum - and could not do so even if they wanted to."

OBAMA'S OPTIONS

Obama has to decide whether to supply weapons, impose tougher sanctions on Russia in the hope of forcing Putin to compromise, or throw his full weight behind the revised German-French peace initiative, even though U.S. officials accuse Putin of shredding a prior cease-fire agreement signed in September.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say he will weigh his options carefully and will not be rushed into a decision. "The timetable is fluid. This is too important to make a snap decision," one official said.

Officials say Obama has recommendations on his desk outlining the pros and cons of supplying Ukraine with lethal arms, such as anti-tank weapons, small arms and ammunition.

Some of his top advisers, including Ashton Carter, his choice for new defence secretary, increasingly favour such an approach. National security adviser Susan Rice said arms supplies were under consideration but signalled caution, and stressed the need to maintain unity with European allies.

Such a step would be taken only "in close consultation and in coordination with our partners, whose unity on this issue with us thus far has been a core element of our strength in responding to Russia’s aggression", she said.

In Kiev, military spokesman Vyacheslav Seleznyov said government forces had come under attack from the rebels on about 100 separate occasions in the past 24 hours. As well as the nine dead, 26 troops had been wounded.

In eastern Ukraine, regional police chief Vyacheslav Abroskin said seven civilians had been killed by shelling in Debaltseve and another frontline town of Avdiivka on Sunday.

This is the story of two Syrians who vanished.

Both are human rights lawyers. Both worked at times inside Douma, a “liberated” city of 300,000 people north of Damascus, outside government control. Both were dedicated to documenting abuse on each side of the 4-year-old Syrian conflict. Both have families and are admired and respected. They knew each other and sometimes collaborated.

Both were seized by armed men, but their captors are on opposing sides.

Mazen Darwish, 41, is one of Syria’s most prominent political activists and a free speech advocate. Three years ago this week, he was taken from his office at the Violations Documentation Center (VDC) in Damascus. His captors were thought to be officers of the intelligence arm of the Syrian Air Force, one of the most powerful and brutal divisions in President Bashar Assad’s security forces.

Darwish was thrown into prison and accused of “publishing terrorism acts” and other related charges. According to his wife, Yara Badr, he said he was brutally tortured during the first nine months of his detention. At one point last year, Reuters reported Darwish might face the death penalty. He was held in a Damascus prison near the airport that is renowned for horrific conditions and torture until January 31, 2015, when, without explanation, he was moved to Hama Central Prison.

Neither Badr, who was arrested with him but later released, nor Bassam al-Ahmad, a colleague now in Istanbul, know the reason why Darwish was moved.

“I think the move signifies a lot,” says Badr, now in Beirut. “It means there is no release soon and that it will be difficult to get Mazen back to Damascus where the court is. Also, it is hard for his family and lawyer to see him because the road to Hama is so dangerous.”

In contrast, Razan Zaitouneh, 37, is believed by friends to have been taken not by Syrian government officials but by a faction of rebels fighting Assad. Her colleagues and various human rights groups are not certain who took her, but they point the finger at the Army of Islam, a component of another organization called the Islamic Front, much less radical than ISIS.

Zaitouneh’s friends have come to the conclusion it is the Army of Islam because it operates in the area close to her office. To reach her meant crossing five checkpoints—difficult, but not impossible for Assad regime forces to have done.

Zaitouneh has been missing since December 2013, when she was dragged from her office along with three colleagues—Samira Khalil, Wael Hamada (Zaitouneh’s husband) and Nazem Hamadi. The group is now known to activists as the Douma4. On the day they disappeared, the brother of one of the victims was on a Skype call and heard the armed men enter the office and shout out, “We are here to get you!” and that the people in the office were enemies of Islam. Then the screen went dark.

Zaitouneh had come to Douma, a free zone that was the scene of heavy battles, to hide from Syrian regime authorities, who had accused her of being a “foreign agent.”

She was a high-profile activist who had become one of the faces of Syria’s opposition. She had been awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom, the Anna Politkovskaya Award (named after the murdered Russian journalist and human rights activist) and the International Women in Courage Award.

Since the day they were taken, there has been no word of the Douma4. There have been no offers of prisoner exchange or hostage negotiations.

In Darwish’s case, his family does have some information. “I try to see Mazen once a month,” says Badr. She says for the first several months of his disappearance, she had no news on whether her husband was alive. “The [first] prison Mazen was in—in Damascus—was hard to reach. It is in an area that gets heavily shelled. Families visiting their relatives who are inside have actually been killed while they were simply visiting.”

She says she will continue to try to see him in Hama.

“When they took us, they took away our wedding bands,” says Badr. “That hurt the most. Now they are holding Mazen under terrorist charges—terrorist! He was a human rights lawyer.”

After last week’s release of a video of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh being burned to death, there is even more concern about those held by ISIS and similar groups.

At the time of her kidnapping, Zaitouneh was working not only as a lawyer and activist, but also for the Local Coordination Committees, which operate throughout Syria and are responsible for planning and organizing opposition events. Zaitouneh also had a third role working for an organization providing civil services called Local Development and Small Projects Support.

“This was important work. You forget, even during war, people get married, people die and have children,” explains Fadi Dayoub, a Syrian activist. “You need civil registers. You need people to look after sewers, roads and the fields where people plant food. Razan did things that were hugely important in helping civilians,” he says, adding: “The people who took her did not like that.”

Dayoub says that before Zaitouneh was abducted, she had been threatened: “They killed her cat and dumped it on the door of her office,” he says. “This was a message to the public: There is no need for civil and municipal services unless you are part of their [jihadist] faction.”

Forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad take position inside Aleppo's historic citadel as they monitor the movements of rebel fighters who are positioned near the citadel October 1, 2014. George Ourfalian/Reuters

It is difficult to calculate the number of missing and detained in Syria after four years of conflict. But Bassam al-Ahmad from the VDC says: “Those we can document by name, we believe to be 36,000 held by regime, and around 1,200 by ISIS. But if we are talking about estimated figures, we are sure that the numbers are bigger.” The Syrian Organization for Human Rights gives a higher figure.

The president of the International Federation of Human Rights, Karim Lahidj, says conditions for detainees are terrible. “In the jails of the regime…torture and abuse are the norm. The overwhelming majority are arbitrarily detained.”

The war in Syria has left 220,000 dead, nearly 4 million refugees and an estimated 9 million internally displaced people, according to the latest United Nation figures.

Staffan de Mistura, the U.N.’s special envoy to Syria, issued a passionate plea in January that the conflict must end. He called the Syrian war the “largest humanitarian tragedy since World War II” and described the suffering and fear of the civilians facing barrel bombs, mortars, kidnappings and detention as a “disgrace…it is a true tragedy.”

A U.N. plan for local cease-fires, or “freezings,” would have a bottom-up diplomatic approach and would be started in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, now under heavy bombardment. The freezing plan has been met with a tepid reaction, especially from the Assad regime.

The Swedish-Italian de Mistura, whose two predecessors--Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi--quit in frustration, is known for his creative approach to negotiations. In Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, he famously negotiated to get smugglers to use donkeys to bring blankets to the freezing and starving population. He is clearly disappointed, but not thwarted by the political gridlock and stalled peace process. He formerly headed U.N. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been meeting with fighters on the ground, as well as with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Geneva in January and Russian and other power brokers engaged in ending the conflict. He has met Assad twice, most recently in November.

Russian-initiated talks in Moscow in late January concluded with no tangible results. The main Syrian political opposition, the Western-backed National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, shunned the meeting, saying it would only take part in talks that lead to Assad leaving power. The regime—and those close to it, such as the Iranians, Hezbollah and the Russians—insists Assad will remain in power. The talks ended with a promise to meet again next month.

The National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, founded in 2012, has experienced prolonged and bitter internal fighting and is criticized for not representing the people inside Syria. The fruitless Geneva II talks in January 2014 were so fractured that some rival rebel groups could not stay in the same hotel together.

The election of a new leader for the coalition, Khaled Khoja, a 49-year-old doctor from Damascus, could offer a glimmer of hope. Khoja has promised to forge a “real connection with local activists” and provide local services. He recently returned from Latakia and is planning a series of meetings inside Syria over the next few weeks.

Khoja is also pushing for the international community to recognize secure buffer zones, putting pressure on neighbors like Lebanon and Turkey but also the big powers—France, the United States and Britain. But that would involve more military presence to operate a no-fly zone.

“Really, he is taking on this mission thinking of working more inside Syria, bridging a gap between ordinary Syrians and trying to bring more services inside the country,” says Khalid Saleh, the opposition’s chief spokesman in Istanbul. “In the past, there was a huge gap between the coalition and the people.”

“It’s true: We need to do two things better—provide services and play politics,” he admits.

While they are playing at politics, thousands like Darwish and Zaitouneh are missing—held inside cells, basements, caves and underground facilities. Many of them will never be accounted for. Many will never see the end of the war.

John Cantlie, a British reporter held hostage by the Islamic State (ISIS), appears in a new video released by the terrorist organization on Monday. In the propaganda video titled "From Inside Halab," Cantlie is shown walking through Aleppo, Syria, which he refers to by the ancient name of Halab.

Cantlie has become a de facto "host" for the terrorist organization, having been forced to participate in the videos since he was taken hostage by ISIS. He previously worked as a journalist for a number of British publications. 

In the newest video, Cantlie is seen interviewing a member of the mujahideen, touring a school for children and running from a building that purportedly had just been hit by an airstrike. He also shows an ISIS newsstand in Aleppo--"the idea is that it counters the news that comes out from the West"--that is little more than a hut on a sidewalk passing out propaganda pamphlets. 

The exact date the video was filmed is unknown; it was likely after the holiday season, as Cantlie refers to a Christmas message delivered by Prime Minister David Cameron. 

Some of the ISIS videos Cantlie has appeared in are part of a series called "Lend Me Your Ears." In earlier videos, he was dressed in an orange robe--similar to the robes ISIS forces all hostages to wear before they are killed--and filmed indoors. In later videos, Cantlie is seen walking through cities, such as Kobani and Mosul. 

Cantlie refers to the latest video as "the last film in this series." He does not discuss his fate as a hostage, though he has previously commented on threats to his life. The videos he is forced to make are well liked in the jihadist community, considering that a number of accounts on social media have advocated for ISIS to keep Cantlie alive so he could continue creating the propaganda films. 

A sentence tucked into Samsung’s privacy policy for its voice-recognizing Smart TV has sent the Internet into a frenzy. It reads: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.”

Some online observers, including Parker Higgins of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, likened the policy to something from 1984, the dystopian novel written by George Orwell.

Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV Right: 1984 pic.twitter.com/osywjYKV3W

— Parker Higgins (@xor) February 8, 2015

Samsung insists, however, that it is protecting customer privacy.

“In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers’ personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use,” a Samsung representative’s statement read.

So, a defense is in place against hackers, but what about Samsung-sanctioned snoopers?

“Samsung does not retain voice data or sell it to third parties,” the statement continued. “If a consumer consents and uses the voice-recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search. At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV.”

Newsweek inquired further of a Samsung representative as to which third party the company was sharing this information, and for what purposes. The representative declined to comment.

In what may have been an attempt to quell customers’ fears, however, the Samsung  representative said the voice-recognition feature could easily be turned off, as indicated by the disappearance of a microphone icon from the television screen. And if “consumers enable the voice-recognition capability, the voice data used consists of TV commands, or search sentences and does not contain personal identifiers,” the representative wrote.

While the Samsung revelation is the latest to spark an Internet fire, the company is not alone. According to multipleinvestigations over the years, various Smart TVs from companies including LC and Panasonic to Philips and Sony track everything from customers’ viewing habits to their television’s locations.

Last week, President Obama revealed his proposed “reforms” to the intelligence community’s electronic surveillance practices. Ignoring the pleas of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and privacy and civil liberties groups to end the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records, the president has chosen to keep the program in a lightly modified form.

It is a tribute to the power of the national security state that Edward Snowden’s revelations of NSA abuse have not resulted in any real reduction in NSA’s powers and that no consequences have befallen those responsible for the abuses.

Those responsible for authorizing and running these programs—including two presidents, their respective NSA directors, attorneys general and a slew of other lower-ranking officials—have successfully constructed a system of mass surveillance that operates in an accountability-free zone politically and is manifestly ineffective. But the true threat these programs pose is to the very experiment that is America—a country created in response to the very kinds of warrantless searches embodied in these and other post-9/11 government activities.

Today, through surveillance collection programs like Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the federal government has stored data showing if you’ve ever visited a website offering ammunition for sale, whether you’ve ever called a gun shop or shooting range, and whether any of the people in your calling circles have done so. The same situation exists with respect to any calls you’ve made to a psychologist or psychiatrist, or to a family planning organization, or to an overseas chapter of an international human rights organization you support. The list is endless, and the federal government has no business having any of that data.

Of course, these assaults on the Bill of Rights would not have been possible without the active participation of Congress. The original sin was the passage, just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, of the Patriot Act.

Having worked in the House of Representatives for over a decade and participated in multiple political campaigns, I understand well the intense pressure House and Senate members faced to “do something” in the wake of the attacks. But the Patriot Act was offered up and passed based on a false premise—that the attacks that cost the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans happened because federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies lacked enough information to uncover and prevent the attacks.

That assumption was thoroughly refuted by the Congressional Joint Inquiry report and the 9/11 Commission report, but only long after the Patriot Act had become law and the damage to the Constitution done. Neither report managed to derail the “collect it all” mindset during multiple reauthorization opportunities over the past decade. Emotion and propaganda triumphed over hard facts—a situation that persists to this day, in spite of all that Edward Snowden has revealed to us.

When an earlier generation of NSA abuses came to light in 1975, roughly three years elapsed before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reform legislation became law. Back then, there was broad consensus on the Church Committee that real intelligence reform was needed. No such consensus exists on Congress’s Intelligence or Judiciary committees today, though at least on the Judiciary Committees there are many who do recognize the need and have worked for change.

And while last year’s vote on the NSA surveillance amendment introduced by Representative Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, and Zoe Lofgren, D-California, showed that getting a reform measure through at least one house of Congress is possible when a truly open legislative floor process prevails, the ultimate denouement on that legislation demonstrated the continued power of national security state allies in the congressional leadership to derail even modest reform efforts through backdoor measures. Indeed, in the wake of a bumbling “plot” to attack the U.S. Capitol, House Speaker John Boehner again invoked the need to keep the soon-to-expire Section 215 Patriot Act provisions in place, in spite of its demonstrated ineffectiveness and questionable constitutionality.

If we are to end our post-9/11 national security state, the congressional leadership must come to believe that blocking efforts to restore the Bill of Rights will result in real political consequences. If, however, they continue to see no political consequences, Americans’ rights to privacy and due process will continue to diminish into artifacts of a bygone era.

Patrick G. Eddington is a policy analyst in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute.

The Islamic State’s (ISIS) brand, sealed by the creation of its self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria, is spawning a number of affiliate radical jihadist groups outside the territory it currently controls, projecting the terror group’s power across the Middle East and beyond.

Within the last month, an ISIS branch in Tripoli has launched an assault against foreign nationals at the Corinthia hotel in the Libyan capital; former Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants have announced the creation of a province in the historical region of Khorasan along the Afghan-Pakistani border; and at least 30 people were killed in the northern Sinai Peninsula in a car bomb and mortar attack carried out by the renamed IS-affiliated group ‘Sinai Province’.

In addition to these attacks, ISIS affiliates have sprung up in North Africa and South Asia. Soldiers of the Caliphate in Algeria, Sons of the Call for Tawhid and Jihad in Jordan and Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines have all pledged allegiance to the terror group while IS-linked terror cells have been foiled in Belgium, Morocco, Israel and the occupied West Bank.

It is also believed that an ISIS network, known as ‘Islamic State in Gaza’ is forming in the blockaded enclave, funnelling radicalised Palestinians onto the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, although Hamas denies any ISIS presence in the territory.

Last week, giving testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, the director of the Defense Intelligence Committee, Lt Gen Vincent Stewart warned of the group’s growing “footprint” in a number of power vacuums in North Africa.

"With affiliates in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, the group is beginning to assemble a growing international footprint that includes ungoverned and under governed areas," he said.

In order to join these jihadist affiliates and align with ISIS, many fighters are defecting from rival organisations - such as al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. Al-Qaeda is so concerned by the expansion of ISIS’s influence across the Middle East that its leader Ayman al-Zawahiri created a new branch in the Indian Subcontinent, targeting the almost half a billion Muslims who reside in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

However, many of the ISIS affiliate groups are small-scale ‘startups’ that wish to boost their standing by piggybacking on ISIS’s brand name, says Judith Jacob, terrorism analyst at geopolitical risk consultancy the Risk Advisory Group.

“They are fairly small, less well-established organisations, although they may comprise fighters that have belonged to bigger groups before,” she says.

“On a much bigger level, if you’re a new organisation and you say that you’re affiliated with ISIS, you also get the brand name. It’s a massive draw that you are part of something much bigger and far more intimidating than anything you yourself could probably do.”

While some affiliates - such as IS Tripoli in Libya - have heeded ISIS’s call for attacks on Western interests, others appear to be using the ISIS name but not deviating from their original aims or ideologies. For example, the spokesman of the Filipino group Bangsmoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) announced that the group had formed an alliance with ISIS but would not seek to impose the group’s interpretation of Islam in the country.

Also, in the Sinai Peninsula, Sinai Province’s “targeting patterns have not changed” since they pledged allegiance to ISIS, says Jacob, but rather they continue to target domestic symbols of authority, such as the Egyptian security forces, as opposed to foreign interests.

A vehicle belonging to security forces is pictured near Corinthia hotel (rear) in Tripoli January 27, 2015Ismail Zitouny/ REUTERS

Last summer, the group swept across northern Syria and northern and western Iraq, capitalising on the instability of the four-year-long Syrian Civil War and the disenfranchisement of Iraqi-Sunnis to capture large swathes of territory, including Iraq’s second-city of Mosul and the Syrian city of Raqqa, now the caliphate’s de-facto capital.

But the group and its offshoots have also made important moves outside of the caliphate. IS Barqa in Libya seized the coastal town of Derna, which is situated just 200 miles from Europe’s southern shores last November; an ISIS ‘emir’ has been appointed in Lebanon with the aim of beginning military operations in the country; and evidence that former Taliban commanders are recruiting fighters for the group in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province has surfaced.

Experts believe it is this consolidation of territory that has fostered ISIS’s magnetic brand, enticing radicalised Muslims to join their ranks and not those of rival jihadist organisations.

“Bin Laden once said ‘people always flock to the strongest horse’, I definitely think that’s true among jihadists,” says Max Abrahms, professor of political science at Northwestern University and a member at the Council on Foreign Relations. “At first, al-Qaeda was the big brand and everyone wanted to be part of that and then ISIS grew relative to that.”

“The real reason that the Islamic State has been so successful at attracting members has been its success on the battlefield,” he concludes.

Yet, Hassan Hassan, analyst at the Abu Dhabi-based Delma Institute and co-author of a new book on ISIS’s rise, claims it is predominantly ideological reasons - specifically the idea of a universal caliphate - which attracts would-be jihadists to further the group’s cause in other areas of the Muslim world.

“There is the caliphate, as an idea,” Hassan says when asked why these affiliates are forming. “ISIS can penetrate this because it can present a project that has actually achieved the nexus of the caliphate [by its capture of territory]. So people who believe in the caliphate and are electrified by the idea can say ‘this is a project and I can go and contribute to this project’.”

“For these groups in different areas across the Muslim world, they think that ISIS is the way to get there [to the caliphate],” he adds.

What the jihadists flocking to affiliate themselves with ISIS outside of the caliphate do not realise is that the situation on the ground is very different to how it is portrayed on the group’s media channels, according to Hassan.

“People outside the region are detached from the reality on the ground, so they tend to hear what ISIS says and hear what ISIS does and are more susceptible to their propaganda,” he adds. “Social media comes in handy, especially for people outside Syria and Iraq. They are not corrupted by facts on the ground.”

The social media factor in ISIS’s rise is often trumpeted but analysts dispute the significance of this in comparison with the group’s progress on the battlefield. The production and circulation of their gruesome hostage videos, the latest being the burning of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh, have certainly gained the group notoriety in the Western world. In this respect, the group have outclassed their jihadist rivals, presenting themselves as current as opposed to a group such as al-Qaeda, who are viewed by younger radicals as outdated.

Nonetheless, while ISIS’s social media operation will likely continue unabated, Abrahms predicts that the number of the group’s fighters “will plummet” because the “real driver of members is the outcome of battles”.

ISIS has experienced rapid success on the battlefield but, in the last month alone, it has lost a 300-mile tract of territory to Kurdish peshmerga forces - backed by U.S.-led coalition air strikes - in northern Iraq and been ousted from the Syrian city of Kobane, a defeat which punctured their aura of invincibility.

Despite these setbacks in Iraq and Syria, the group’s expansionist slogan baqiyya wa tatamaddad (“remaining and expanding”) appears to ring true for the time being as brand ISIS - forged by the creation of the Iraqi-Syrian caliphate - reaches beyond the frontiers of its territory, attracting fighters and, as in the case of the attack on the Corinthia hotel in Tripoli in which nine people were killed including one American and one French citizen, cost lives.