Around this time last year, 300,000 residents in Charleston, West Virginia couldn’t drink or bathe in their tap water. Last January, roughly 10,000 gallons of a largely unknown chemical called "crude-MCHM" had spilled into the water supply from an old, crumbling storage tank.

Freedom Industries, the company behind the spill, was fined a paltry $11,000. But the event prompted West Virginia lawmakers to quickly pass new standards for above-ground chemical storage.

Now, West Virginia lawmakers are considering a bill to gut those new standards, along with other bills that would remove the most rigorous pollution protections for streams across the state, and protect the coal industry from being sued for violating certain water quality standards, the Charleston Gazette reported Monday.

West Virginia House Bill 2574, introduced last week, seeks to remove much of the text from Senate Bill 373, the above-ground tank regulation, particularly those parts that pertain to what steps a company must take to ensure that a spill like Freedom Industries’ never happens again.

“I could remind you that despite its strength, Senate Bill 373 is nevertheless a compromise and concessions to industry were made along the way and I could point out that 1,100 tanks have already been designated not fit for service and that Senate Bill 373 is already working,” activist Karan Ireland said at a press conference Monday, according to West Virginia Public Broadcasting. “Instead, I like to speak directly to the sponsors of these bills. What you are doing is wrong.”

According to Paul Ziemkiewicz, the director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute, West Virginia’s lax regulation of above-ground tanks was the main culprit behind the spill last year.  “If these tanks had been properly maintained and inspected, and if the secondary containment system had been as well, then [the chemical] would never have gotten off this site. That’s where the attention has to be paid,” Ziemkiewicz said around the time of the spill, emphasizing that the state badly needed rigorous tank requirements to prevent another spill disaster.

Another proposal currently being considered by the GOP-controlled legislature would amend the state Department of Environmental Protection's proposed rules on drinking water protection to weaken its overall ability to regulate water quality. The amendment would stop the DEP from enforcing it's "Category A" drinking water standards that include 56 water quality parameters that affect human health, the Gazette reports.

Yet another proposed bill seeks to keep the coal industry from being sued for contaminating water. (Crude-MCHM, the chemical spilled by Freedom Industries, is widely used by the coal industry.) Senate Bill 357 would prevent lawsuits from being filed against mining companies for Clean Water Act violations if the standards being violated were not specifically written into state Department of Environmental Protection permits, the Charleston Gazette reports. At the same time, it would bar the DEP from applying those standards to future coal permits. The bill also includes a change that the coal industry has been seeking for years: to relax its limits on the amount of aluminum allowed in West Virginia’s streams.

The United Mine Workers union opposes SB 357, because it would also weaken safety standards for coal miners, the union says. “As long as miners continue to die in West Virginia’s mines, we need to be looking for ways to strengthen health and safety protections, not gut them,” UMW President Cecil Roberts said Friday, according to the Gazette.

Even as advocates for marriage equality predict victory at the U.S. Supreme Court this spring, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore is instructing state judges to defy a federal court’s order to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, sparking what one law professor calls a “constitutional crisis.”

Moore, who gained notoriety after being kicked off the bench in 2003 for defying a federal court order to remove a 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument from his courthouse, has said for weeks that he would continue to recognize the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Local media reported that, even before the order, at least five Alabama judges planned to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples when the federal court order went into effect this week.

These officials are essentially arguing that the Constitution does not apply in their state. In addition, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee recently advised state officials to ignore any ruling in favor of same-sex couples.

The calls for judicial defiance come in an era when conservative state lawmakers are trying to thwart the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and President Barack Obama’s executive actions. These conservatives are essentially arguing for “nullification,” a ridiculous theory that says states can ignore federal law even though the Constitution says otherwise. Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress described nullification as“nothing less than a plan to remove the word United from the United States of America.”

If the U.S. Supreme Court does in fact rule that same-sex couples have a right to marry, history suggests that fringe legislators and judges will continue to deny the federal constitutional rights of committed couples.

Some Alabama judges initially refused to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling that struck down bans on interracial marriages, denying a license to a black woman and a white soldier stationed in Alabama. The U.S. attorney general filed a lawsuit on the couple’s behalf, and a federal judge again struck down the Alabama law, in 1970.

And yet the state did not remove the clause prohibiting interracial marriage from its constitution until 2000, only after interracial couples reported to a legislator that they were still encountering judges who denied them marriage licenses. In Louisiana, one judge resigned in 2009 after denying a marriage certificate to an interracial couple, claiming their child would suffer social isolation.

Defiance of federal court rulings have extended far beyond the right to marry. For instance, the Florida Supreme Court in 1957 defied a U.S. Supreme Court order to enroll a black student in a state law school. And Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights notes that Georgia judges resisted providing public defenders to all criminal defendants for decades after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 ruling that the right to counsel applied to everyone charged with a crime.

Even when state judges comply with federal marriage-equality rulings, some may face obstacles created by their own legislatures. In Texas, Oklahoma and South Carolina, state lawmakers are considering bills that would punish judges who recognize federal courts’ marriage rulings. The Oklahoma statute would dock the pay of judges who comply with federal rulings for marriage equality or even remove them from office. This type of obstructionism is similar to recent bills that seek to punish state officials’ compliance with the Affordable Care Act, federal gun laws and other valid statutes.

In North Carolina, legislators are floating a bill that would allow magistrates and clerks to continue discriminating against gay couples in the name of “religious freedom,” effectively giving judges a license to discriminate against couples that have been denied their right to marry for too long. A 2014 Center for American Progress report noted that anti-LGBT businesses are turning to religious freedom statutes to avoid civil rights statutes “and deny services to those who they believe are at odds with their religion.”

One Alabama probate judge cited his state constitutional right to religious freedom in refusing marriage licenses to everyone, rather than comply with the federal court order. Inspired by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision, conservatives are turning to the familiar argument that their religious beliefs trump the constitutional rights of same-sex couples.

The Constitution states that federal law is “the supreme law of the land,” trumping state constitutions when they conflict with the federal constitution. Federal courts will not allow state officials to defy their rulings—even if, as with desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education, it takes decades of judicial supervision.

Marriage equality advocates suggested they would take legal action against the judges who follow Moore’s instructions and violate the Constitution. The unfortunately reality, though, is that although anti-LGBT officials can’t stop progress, they certainly will attempt to slow it, disrupting the lives and rights of committed same-sex couples in the meantime.

Billy Corriher is the director of research for legal progress at the Center for American Progress.

An editorial in North Korea’s primary newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, recently tried to cast a positive light on a dark satellite image, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

In February last year, NASA released a photo (dated January 30) taken by astronauts on Expedition 38 at the International Space Station as they flew over East Asia. It showed a nighttime view of the Korean Peninsula, with the area south of the DMZ awash in a web of light (none so blinding as around Seoul).

To the north however, the image was dark, with one speck visible around the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and a few scattered pinpricks elsewhere. North Korea appeared as a black expanse caught between the shining swaths of South Korean and Chinese lights.

Titled “Right in Front of Our Eyes,” the Rodong Sinmun editorial played down the significance of the image and touted a positive interpretation.

“They [North Korea’s detractors] clap their hands and get loud over a satellite picture of our city with not much light, but the essence of society is not on flashy lights,” the editorial says, according to a translation by the Journal.

To viewers outside of North Korea, the image gave insight into the isolated Communist country which has a population of roughly 25 million and where electricity has been scarce since the Soviet Union’s fall in the 1990s limited its fuel supply. Though there was a time in the early 1980s when North Korea’s per capita power consumption exceeded that of South Korea, population roughly 50 million, the World Bank’s most recent data show that in 2011, North Korea’s per capita consumption was 739 kilowatt hours compared with South Korea’s 10,162.

More recently, NASA astronaut Terry Virts posted aerial views of Seoul and Pyongyang one after the other on Twitter and Instagram that showed a similarly striking contrast.

A beautiful night pass tonight over Seoul, South Korea pic.twitter.com/hsKZ7izTK3

— Terry W. Virts (@AstroTerry) January 20, 2015

And here is Pyongyang, North Korea. pic.twitter.com/iewBFc4zYc

— Terry W. Virts (@AstroTerry) January 20, 2015

North Korea’s secluded position within the international community means it’s difficult to gather accurate information about the country’s living conditions. Much of what’s known is gleaned from defector accounts, articles and books by journalists who have visited there and spent time with defectors (such as Barbara Demick’sNothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea) and media reports by state-run outlets.

The Journal reports that the editorial “[exhorts] citizens to follow the dictates of the leadership to build a great nation,” as is characteristic of North Korean messages. It tries to shift the focus from North Korea’s domestic troubles like lack of electricity to the supposed fate of the United States.

The U.S. and North Korea have been involved in a spat over a cyberattack on Sony Entertainment Pictures by hackers claiming retaliation  for the film The Interview, which depicts the assassination of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un. Two months ago, President Barack Obama blamed the attack on North Korea. Though the country denied involvement, it called the movie an “act of war,” and an article from the state news agency KCNA said, "the hacking into Sony Pictures might be a righteous deed of the supporters and sympathizers with the DPRK in response to its appeal."

The editorial on the satellite photo suggests, as North Korean propaganda typically does of the country’s Western enemies, that the U.S. is the one whose economy and society are truly ailing.

“An old superpower that is meeting its sunset may put up a face of arrogance but it can’t avoid its dark fate,” the editorial says.

Today, the family of Islamic State (ISIS) hostage Kayla Mueller confirmed her death. Mueller's family did not publicly comment on the details of the confirmation. National Security Council Spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said the family received "a private message from Kayla's [ISIS] captors containing additional information." The information was later reviewed by United States intelligence.

While the government has not formally commented on the form of information the family received, anonymous government officials told the Daily Beast a photograph of Mueller was reviewed, in which her face and shoulders are visible. ISIS first claimed Mueller had died last Friday as the result of a Jordanian airstrike. The terrorist organization distributed photographs of a building they said held Mueller. In the photos, the building is in rubble, however, the photograph of Mueller reportedly seen by government officials did not picture any rubble. The cause of her death remains unknown.

Mueller spent over a year in captivity; she was captured in Aleppo, Syria in 2013. During that time, her family received a video of her, forcibly filmed by her captors, as proof of life. They also received a letter, made public today after the announcement of her death, a transcribed version is reprinted below. 

A transcription of a letter from Meuller that was received by her familyFor Kayla Organization

The letter was carried out of captivity by a fellow hostage who was released on or after November 11, 2014. She asks the family not to negotiate on her behalf, "If there is any other option take it, even if it takes more time," she writes. Mueller also urges her family to contact "these women" and "seek their advice," their names were redacted. Based on the context of the letter, they may have been fellow captives. 

In the message, she offers a rare glimpse into life as a female captive with ISIS. She said she was not mistreated and had "put on weight in fact."In an interview, Didier François, a French reporter who was held hostage by ISIS in the same building as Mueller, said women were given slightly more room to move around in. However, "being a woman doesn't make it easier," he said of ISIS captivity. 

NBC has decided to suspend its star anchor, Brian Williams, without pay for a period of 6 months, the network says. Williams's job has been in question after reports that he exaggerated a story from his time covering the invasion of Iraq.

"I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,"Williams said on the broadcast Wednesday night, after a crew member questioned the account Williams had repeated a few days prior. He said he’d misremembered the event and made an unintentional mistake.  

"I want to apologize. I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire; I was instead in a following aircraft. We all landed after the ground fire incident and spent two harrowing nights in a sandstorm in the Iraq desert."

On Friday, NBC launched an internal investigation about Williams helicopter story, headed by Richard Esposito, executive producer of NBC's investigative unit. Williams said Saturday that he would take himself off the air while NBC looked into his misstatements, but that he would return to "continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us."

Esposito has reportedly been meeting frequently with executives at NBC News as well as at Comcast Corp., of which NBC is a unit. Williams, too, met with top executives at Comcast to discuss his situation.

Here’s a pop quiz: What kind of sane person forgoes a sweet hibernation and willingly ventures to Midtown Manhattan—the heart of the American nightmare—after 2 o’clock in the morning on a frigid February night? The answer is unclear, but there were hundreds of them hoping to catch a last glimpse of the sprawling Henri Matisse “Cut Outs” exhibition before it shutters on Tuesday, February 10 at the Museum of Modern Art.

The MoMA doesn’t have this late-night option often. So why this exhibit? In the 1940s, Matisse went through his “cut outs” period, in which he subverted form by working with jagged pieces of paper. Matisse was in a low place then: In his 70s the artist had survived cancer, fled Nice at the height of World War II and separated from his wife of over 40 years. He was spent, sick, near end of his life.

Yet Matisse the workhorse trudged on, and he began a new phase of his career in which he traded the paintbrush for scissors, which he used to “cut into vivid color.” The large-scale paper collages, which he completed with the help of assistants, were an ambitious jump for the painter and sculptor. But then again, this is the same fellow who once lovingly described creating art as “slitting an abscess with a penknife.”

Hence why hundreds of narcoleptics and insomniacs gathered late at night to see what that wound looked like.

I am one of these, and so is Jameson, the friend who accompanied me to MoMA that night. We arrived at around 2 in the morning. As we entered the lobby I forgot, for a second, how late it was: The museum teemed with bodies, slurred laughter, lilting conversation. The ticket lines snaked around columns. A woman standing in front of us, apropos of nothing, turns around and said, “You know when your phone dies right at a crucial love moment?” She then bemoaned how she was currently being stood up by a lover who’s chased her across the globe—and then, as though on cue, the fellow she’d been speaking about ducked under the black ropes and grinned at her knowingly. I overheard another trio of friends, one of whom was insisting that “museums are capitalist institutions.”

A few primitive observations: everyone appeared to be attached by the arm to another person (the new date night, or a perhaps nod to that one Sex and the City episode from eons ago?). The hour was not a deterrent for people of all ages, colors and creeds to converge here. Most seemed bewildered, as though thinking: “What have we got ourselves into?” I began to regret that last cup of coffee as the nagging pangs of dehydration—the kind that sneaks up on you after walking briskly, breathlessly in the winter—beckoned. The next available public showing is at 3:30 a.m.

When we were escorted upstairs, it was immediately apparent that this wasn’t merely an exhibition. It was a last dance, and people came here to tango in black lace and leather, their edgiest Sunday best. A displaced L.A.-type, donning a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses indoors, asked a group beside him: “There’s Champagne being passed around, right?” Like many people there, I couldn’t tell if he was being serious. I spotted an industrious man very intently studying the hundred-odd cutouts alone, noise-cancelling headphones upon his head, or an audio guide in tow. Clever.

Most people seemed less interested in the art and more into the idea of being here this late on a Saturday night. A woman named Angelina, who was wearing what appeared to be a red velvet tea cosy on her head, said the artwork is “a bit bright for me,” but added that “it’s amazing we can do this,” meaning have this conversation, here, at 2:30 a.m.

Amazing, too, is the depth this exhibit manages to harness despite the surface simplicity of its subject matter. When Matisse drifted from painting, he gravitated toward what would become his “cut-outs,” pieces that allowed him to toy with dimensions outside the constraints of a canvas. As New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz put it, “The Cut-Outs are Matisse’s long goodbye to painting—but not a bitter one.” It is playful and pained, the forms not quite human, more rooted in their basic elements: squiggly shapes posed across each other, poised in a sort of mitosis mating dance. Blue forms join hands, dancing to music only Matisse can hear.

Jameson and I separated, and I drifted in and out of rooms, alternating between observing the cutouts and the (many) people posing for sneaky selfies beside them. It soon becomes impossible to distinguish the paintings from the people in this colorful palette. People sauntered around in evening gowns and tuxedos, as though they had just arrived from another event. A child ran through the exhibit and no one batted an eye.

I sat down on a bench, in a room surrounded by the more gargantuan works, and tried to catch some people as they paused to take a breath. A woman sat down beside me, and—in a single breath—waxed on about her son’s wedding, the Korean orchestra she had been to earlier that night and her pet parrot. As for why she’s here, she said she found Matisse’s scissor-happy phase interesting, as “it’s easier to maneuver than paint.” Also, she said she lived across the street. She got up (but not before telling me all about her daytime television show, fulfilling the #networking portion of the night). Immediately, another woman—wearing pentagram earrings—took her place. She side-eyed me, put her face in her hands and started silently crying. Next to her, a lady told her friend how strange it was that one of her deceased Facebook friends recently liked one of her statuses.

I ask a cagey older couple, who told me they were art dealers who spend part of the year in Nice, what they felt about this experience. They blinked at me and started gingerly tiptoeing into the next room. I understand the aversion; art is generally an introspective experience. But having the museum open this late, as a free-for-all, in a way subverts museum-going into an event that’s shared, the air kisses flying.

I’m not sure what to draw from this experience, besides the fact that a series of pieces can bring together the masses at unexpected hours, a kind of cross-section cut-out of New York. And that these places might be verifiable black holes of time and space: At one point, I ask a low-key seeming youth, the only person I see wearing plaid, for the time. I’m appalled to learn it is 3:30 in the morning. But I’ve only been in three rooms? He echoed my bewilderment and told me how “surreal” it felt to come here straight from Williamsburg, where roughly an hour ago he was busting a move on the dance floor at a club. “I came to see what the fuss was about, and I don’t get it!” I am almost too exhausted to appreciate his good-natured sarcasm.

I found Jameson on a bench, sketching several of the cutout figurines. “What a safari,” she murmured. We looked at each other, and I knew it was time to head home. As we descended the stairs, the museum suddenly looked more like what I was expecting: alien, more dead than alive, as the last stragglers waded into the Technicolor dreamscape Matisse had created with scissors.

In December 2013, after a Metro-North train jumped the rails in the Bronx, killing four and injuring 75, a union leader described the train engineer as “totally traumatized.” The New York accident made national headlines, but other than the union quote, little attention was given to that trauma he faced.

A similar description of an engineer’s well-being came up at a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) briefing last week, two days after a Metro-North crash in Valhalla, New York, on February 4, which left six people dead. “I think it goes without saying that he’s very traumatized,” a board representative said.

While the conversation after deadly transit accidents tends to focus on the passengers, transit workers often deal with unique forms of trauma. John Tolman, vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, says railroad operators will likely face three potentially traumatic incidents in their careers. And underground, many subway operators deal with as many as three “12-9” situations in a career, code for when a passenger is under the train.

“The hardest part,” Tolman says, “is that you’re usually the last person to see that particular individual alive.”

For transit workers, accidents can lead to significant psychological difficulties and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The National Center for Intermodal Transportation surveyed 363 commuter railroad operating employees for a 2011 report and found that 43.6 percent of them had been involved in at least one critical incident—accidents, near misses, collisions, personal injuries or contact with people or equipment on the tracks. Of those employees, 12.1 percent reported symptoms consistent with PTSD after the incidents. Employees involved in those incidents also reported higher levels of intrusive thoughts, trouble sleeping and working, and depression.

Researchers around the world have studied the effects of accidents on operators and have produced findings similar to those in the 2011 report. One journal article from 1989 compared “the mental distress of the train drivers” to that of Vietnam War veterans.

Over the past three decades, thousands of transit workers have turned to a psychologist named Howard Rombom for help after traumatic incidents. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York and workers’ unions often send Rombom up to four referrals per week, and it was Rombom who met with individuals involved in the 2013 derailment.

Long Island, New York-based psychologist Howard Rombom has treated thousands of transit workers over three decades.Howard Rombom

“The patients, I thought, were underserved,” Rombom, 63, says of transit workers, from his Long Island, New York, office that overlooks Manhasset Bay. “Really a forgotten piece of the population.” His patients also include 9/11 rescue workers—some of whom continue to see him, all these years later—and passengers who have experienced transit incidents.

Rombom’s treatment of transit workers differs from his approach toward other patients. “Their injuries tend to be somewhat unique,” Rombom says of the workers. For train operators who unintentionally help people die by suicide, for example, they must deal with a phenomenon “that pretty much doesn’t happen anywhere else,” he says. His leading diagnosis for transit workers is PTSD, and depression, anxiety and adjustment disorders are also common.

“Most of them can’t go back to work. They develop avoidance behaviors. They find it difficult to go back on the subways and the buses,” he says. The workers reexperience the trauma in their minds, spend less time around other people and have difficulty sleeping and concentrating. Some transit workers also develop high blood pressure, heart palpitations and excessive sweating, which Rombom says are “physical manifestations of their anxiety.”

To help, Rombom and the other psychologists in his practice work to “desensitize” patients from the incidents and “reintegrate the trauma into their psychological framework,” he says, adding that treatment varies from individual to individual. “We have no package, no recipe.”

Though Rombom has been working with such patients for years, mandated mental health services for transit workers have been a long time coming. Tolman, the union vice president, recalls finding little support available after his first fatal accident as a railroad operator, in the 1980s. Now many major railroads provide psychological resources through employee assistance programs, such as Metro-North and Amtrak.

In March 2014, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) announced a rule that American railroads must each put in place a “critical incident stress plan” to address the mental health needs of employees after accidents. That mandate came out of the 2008 Rail Safety Improvement Act. A spokesman for the FRA tells Newsweek that the railroads have until June 2015 to submit their proposals for the stress plans, and that not all have done so yet.

“At the very least, there should be an offer of treatment, an offer of consultation and an offer of time off,” says Patrick Sherry, executive director of the National Center for Intermodal Transportation and author of the 2011 report.

Sherry says transportation authorities still have a ways to go in providing adequate mental health care. While there are “lots of brochures and pamphlets and things like that out there,” he says, more preemptive training should be done for dealing with trauma and recognizing the behavioral health warning signs. “I’m not aware of any standard training approach for operating personnel,” he says.

After the 2013 Metro-North train derailment, a union leader described engineer William Rockefeller as “totally traumatized.”Eric Thayer/REUTERS

Union leaders have been in touch with William Rockefeller, the engineer from the 2013 derailment, in recent days. Last October, the NTSB announced it had determined that Rockefeller’s undiagnosed sleep apnea, which led him to fall asleep at the controls, was the probable main cause of the derailment. Anthony Bottalico of the Association of Commuter Rail Employees tells Newsweek that Rockefeller has not yet returned to work at the railroad.

Rockefeller’s union also represents the engineer, conductor and other workers involved in the February 4 crash. “The last 19 months have been the most difficult years in the history of this railroad and for our members,” Bottalico wrote in an email to union members in the early hours of February 5. He urged members to use their employee assistance programs if needed and to support one another.

As Newsweekreported last week, there were 891 rail fatalities in 2013, according to the NTSB. The FRA counted 11,564 train accidents and incidents for that year. The New York City subway had 145 “collision with individual” incidents in 2014. Fifty-eight of those people died.

Rombom published a study in 2006 that described treating 70 subway and bus workers who had experienced “12-9” incidents. The workers typically returned to their jobs after two to three months; all returned within a year.

Despite treatment, transportation industry leaders say, it’s hard to overcome the trauma. “You can revisit it in slow motion,” Tolman says. “You just never forget.”

Peter Liang, the New York rookie police officer who fatally shot 28-year-old Akai Gurley in the stairwell of a public housing building in Brooklyn in November last year, has been indicted, The Associated Press reported Tuesday.

BREAKING: Lawyer: New York City police officer indicted in fatal shooting in stairway of housing project.

— The Associated Press (@AP) February 10, 2015

Liang, 27, a NYPD officer since July 2013, killed Gurley during a so-called “vertical patrol,” a policing practice common in New York City housing developments, in which officers patrol a building from roof to ground floor. Liang was indicted on charges including second-degree manslaughter, according to the New York Daily News, which first broke the news of Gurley’s death.

Liang and his partner, officer Shaun Landau, encountered Gurley and his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, in an unlit stairwell in the Pink Houses development in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, where Butler lived. Gurley and Butler entered the stairwell one flight below the officers. Liang, whose gun was drawn, fired one shot, which either hit Gurley directly or ricocheted into his chest, killing him, according to police. The NYPD maintains Gurley’s death was accidental.

The New York Daily News later reported that it is believed both Liang and Landau texted their union representatives about the shooting before they called for help for the dying Gurley.

Gurley’s death became another flashpoint in the ongoing protests over the deaths of black men at the hands of white police officers, which began last summer after a white officer shot and killed 18-year-old Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and a NYPD officer put 43-year-old Eric Garner in a fatal choke-hold on Staten Island. Fresh protests erupted after grand juries chose not to indict the police officers in both cases.

The incident also amplified a debate over how well public housing developments in New York City are maintained. The stairwell where the shooting occurred was unlit because the lights were out and had not been replaced, a frequent occurrence in such developments.

New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton, who called the shooting “an unfortunate incident,” said Gurley was “a total innocent” and promised a full investigation. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office announced in December a grand jury would be called to consider charges against Liang. Gurley’s family called for an indictment.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office told Newsweek it has no comment at this time. The grand jury’s deliberations remain sealed as a matter of law, a representative told Newsweek. WNYC reports that they will be unsealed at Liang’s arraignment Wednesday.

If found guilty, Liang will likely face time in prison and will almost certainly be ousted from the NYPD.

Tucked away in a few rooms within the Alexandria Life Science and Translational Research Center in Rockville, Maryland, is a 48-member biotechnology company pursuing a singular obsession to eradicate one of the greatest global health challenges in history, malaria. “We’re swinging for the knockout,” says Dr. Stephen Hoffman, who founded Sanaria in 2003. “This is not to take anything away from the incredibly successful work others are doing to distribute bed nets, create educational programs to increase malaria literacy or discover better methods to deliver existing antimalarials. Those efforts are vitally important. But we’re searching for the one blow that will finally end humanity’s fight against this ancient disease: a vaccine.”

Malaria has plagued humankind for more than 4,000 years, causing every second human death since the Middle Ages. There has never been an effective vaccine against malaria or any other human parasite, mostly because they tend to be very complex, single-celled organisms (malaria, sleeping sickness, Leishmania) or complex multicellular organisms, like the worms that cause lymphatic filariasis and schistosomiasis.

Moreover, according to the Entomological Society of America, malaria has been exercising its evolutionary flexibility in various vertebrates (likely including the dinosaurs) for over 100 million years. This means malaria is uniquely adept at survival, including becoming resistant to all of the methods we use to combat it. Resistance has been reported against quinine, chloroquine, mefloquine, pyrimethamine-sulfadoxine and ACTs (artemisinin-based combination therapies, the current front-line malaria treatment). Mosquitoes carrying malaria have even circumvented the bed nets by feeding earlier in the evening, catching people before they retire for the night.

The illness is rampant: The World Health Organization reported that there were 198 million cases of malaria in 2013. Luckily, only about one in every 330 of these cases leads to death. In large part, this is due to the fact that many of those who live in the most malaria-stricken parts of the world—sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia—have developed a natural immunity.

But naturally acquired malaria immunity comes at a great cost. “Kids in high-malaria-transmission areas get infected almost every day, yet it takes three years for them to become partially immune,” says Dr. Arjen Dondorp, deputy director and head of malaria research at the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok. Many of these children die and all will become sick—even after developing immunity.

The silver bullet would provide this same type of immunity but without all the illnesses along the way. To date, that solution has been incredibly elusive, and excitement over a potential malaria vaccine is hard-won. When I asked Nick Day, a professor of tropical medicine at Oxford University, if more money spent on combating malaria should go toward vaccine development, he told me, “Billions have been spent in malaria vaccine research over the years, with very little to show for it.”

That’s the main reason Sanaria has been called “crazy,” can’t get support from other researchers in the field and hasn’t been able to secure as much funding as its rivals have. Nonetheless, on August 8, 2013, Hoffman and his team announced a vaccine that, in early trials, proved 100 percent effective in preventing malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum—by far the most deadly of the five malaria-causing parasites and responsible for almost all of the estimated 600,000 deaths per year. In these early trials, it’s proving to be the safest and most effective malaria vaccine candidate to date.

The PfSPZ vaccine—Pf for P. falciparum and SPZ for sporozoite, one of the life stages of the parasite—contains sporozoites that have been weakened so they cannot fully develop but still cause the body to generate an immune response strong enough to protect itself against the deadliest form of malaria. After initial trial results were published, the vaccine immediately earned industry accolades, including the 2014 Vaccine Industry Excellence Award for “Best Prophylactic Vaccine,” and generated support from research organizations in the United States, Europe and Africa, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

But despite its success, Sanaria has struggled to generate the attention it needs in order to push its work forward. From November 2 to 6, 2014, at the 63rd annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, I often sat surrounded by empty chairs as Sanaria researchers spoke publicly about their work. Here was perhaps the biggest gathering of malaria researchers in the U.S., and yet only a fraction of them cared to listen as the Sanaria researchers unveiled some of their new research.

Yonta, six, rests with her sister Montra, three, and brother Leakhena, four months under a mosquito bed net keeping dry from the monsoon rain July 18, 2010 in Prey Mong kol village in Pailin province. Part of the great success of controlling the malaria is due to the distribution by National Malaria center (CNM) and WHO of the long lasting mosquito nets that also contain the insecticide embedded into the net causing the insect to die upon contact.Paula Bronstein/Getty

Media coverage has been sporadic. Both NPR and the BBC ran stories about the PfSPZ news on August 8, 2013. But nothing before or after. The New York Times, Forbes, Scientific American, The Washington Post, CNN and The Wall Street Journal have all mentioned or had articles about Sanaria’s work. On the other hand, The Guardian has never mentioned Sanaria or the PfSPZ vaccine—while publishing 20 articles since 2004 that either mentioned or were explicitly about GlaxoSmithKline’s far less effective malaria vaccine, RTS,S.

There are also many international organizations that seemingly refuse to take the PfSPZ vaccine seriously. For example, there was no mention of Sanaria or PfSPZ in the comprehensive 2012-2014 report from the renowned Malaria Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. For over a decade, this report has been considered an industry standard for being “the authoritative academic voice on malaria research.” By contrast, the report mentioned RTS,S five times.

And on January 12 of this year, at an event called Countdown to Zero: Defeating Disease in the 21st Century, I sat in anticipation as Jane Carlton, director of the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University, began mentioning advances in malaria vaccine development. Surely she’ll at least make a passing mention of the most effective malaria vaccine to date, I thought to myself. She did not, although she did bring up RTS,S.

Perhaps this all has something to do with how nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. Or money. When Sanaria started 11 years ago, it did so in an 800-square-foot facility and with a $550,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Since then, the company has received over $100 million in funding from various sources, including the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative using funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But even so, it is a pip-squeak relative to industry giants Sanofi Pasteur (the largest company in the world devoted to vaccine development, with over 13,000 employees), GlaxoSmithKline (99,000 employers and 2013 revenue of $38.8 billion) and Novartis (ranked No. 1 in pharmaceutical sales, bringing in $57.9 billion in 2013).

Sanaria’s lean team means its great news often doesn’t create waves. Or even ripples. When it has good news to share, the whole team pitches in to try to help with social media, or to try to get major media outlets to see what the company has been able to do. Compare this with the massive marketing machine that is Big Pharma: In 2013, GlaxoSmithKline spent $1.2 billion on advertising alone.

Meanwhile, Sanaria can’t get more money. Funding in all fields, even in the arts, is a delicate game that balances calculated risk assessment with sheer potential. But funding in the field of malaria vaccine development seems to have a particular bent toward safety—in the face of probable failure, how articulately can a funder answer the question Why in the world did you fund that?

And it’s far easier to answer the "why" question if you can point to many others that made the same decision. Likewise, there’s the fact that malaria research money is typically funneled toward important short-term drugs rather than “swinging for the knockout” vaccines. With so many human lives on the line, it certainly makes sense to focus efforts on immediately protecting those most vulnerable. This generally means investing in what can make a difference now.

But when it comes to the pressing global health issues of our time, complacency kills. The old ways can work only until they no longer do. Take what’s happening right now at the border of Thailand and Myanmar. When artemisinin arrived on the scene in 1994, François Nosten and his team at the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit thought they had a “wonder drug.” In many ways, they did. Artemisinin was able to wipe out P. falciparum in a single day. But by the mid-2000s, the parasite had become resistant, and today the disease is yet again rampant—and now more difficult than ever to treat.

In his book Maxims for Revolutionists, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote that “the reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” And being unreasonable is a badge Hoffman is used to wearing.

Sanaria’s methodologies do not fit any previous pattern of vaccine development. It has pursued cryopreserving whole P. falciparum sporozoites, which has competitors and even fellow researchers balking because malaria is a tropical disease that affects humid areas. In other words, for this vaccine to be successful, Sanaria would need to transport frozen vaccines to some of the most humid places on Earth.

The company has also pursued and struck unlikely collaborations with, for example, Marathon Oil—for clinical trials in Equatorial Guinea—and with Harvard’s Biorobotics Laboratory, where it has created SporoBot, a robot whose sole purpose is to dissect mosquitoes. Sanaria doesn’t view collaboration as simply connecting the dots, seeing it instead as a way to discover new dots worth connecting.

When I visited Sanaria’s offices in October 2014, the researchers were all rushing around as though some major deadline was looming. They were packing up their duffel bags and walking through the halls with the energy of athletes before a competition. “What’s going on?” I asked Pete Billingsley, Sanaria’s vice president of international projects. “Oh, we’ve all been doing P90X together after work. It’s great. You up for joining us?”

Still, even with such a tight-knit, innovative group, Hoffman knows he’s an underdog. There’s a look in his eyes that reveals a man at once tired of the climb and confident that the peak is near. “The critics...” he trails off and smiles. There’s no frustration, and plenty of fire in his eyes. “They told us we couldn’t make this vaccine aseptically. We did. They told us we couldn’t purify it. We did. They told us our method of cryopreservation wouldn’t work. It does. We’re too small a team to brush off criticism. We take it all in, and we work hard day in and day out to overcome challenges one by one until we succeed. We do not let ourselves get interrupted by others who say this cannot be done.”

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has suffered the biggest defeat of his political career with his Bharatiya Janata Party being routed in elections for the Delhi state-level assembly. The Aam Aadmi or common man party has swept the polls winning 67 of the 70 seats, driving the BJP down to just three and the Congress Party to zero.

Eight months ago, Modi was swept to power in a landslide BJP general election victory because voters wanted a new style of government leadership that would meet their aspirations for a better life, more efficient and less corrupt government, and stronger economic growth.

Today, the people of Delhi have shunned Modi and turned to Arvind Kejriwal, the AAP’s founder and leader, to drive change in the capital city’s deeply corrupt and ineffective state-level government.

There are many reasons for this result. One is that the BJP—along with most observers—assumed that it would win Delhi easily and that the AAP was finished. It also overestimated Modi’s charismatic vote-winning ability and underestimated a growing feeling that his national government has not become the promised agent of change during the eight months it has been in power.

BJP Panic

When it began to emerge last month that the AAP had been quietly rebuilding its reputation among voters, especially the poor, the BJP seems to have panicked and ran a negative campaign that tried to undermine the AAP’s, and especially Kejriwal’s, appeal. It poured top politicians and and other MPs into the campaign, even deploying several senior cabinet ministers so that it looked as if it had abandoned governing the country in order to win Delhi.

It then made a ludicrous decision, just two weeks before the February 7 election day, when it sidelined its Delhi political leadership and made Kiran Bedi, a 65-year-old former controversial police chief and social rights campaigner with no political experience and little charisma, its chief ministerial candidate.

It thought she would counter Kejriwal’s appeal, but she quickly foundered while electioneering, and has even failed to win her own seat.

This raises questions about how such experienced politicians as Modi and his chief lieutenants, Amit Shah, the tough party president, and Arun Jaitley, the finance minister, could have made such a blunder. (There is some sympathy for Shah because his son is getting married today and the celebrations have been blighted!)

Significantly the AAP has gained a bigger popular mandate in Delhi, winning about 54 percent of the votes cast, than Modi and the BJP achieved nationally in the general election with 31 percent.

Even more remarkable, this has happened in the city that Kejriwal and his band of well-meaning volunteers failed disastrously to govern effectively when they led a minority government (with 28 seats—the BJP had 32) after December 2013 polls. They spent more energy on street-level protests than trying to run the city, and resigned after 49 days in February 2014. Since then Delhi has been run by bureaucrats under the city’s lieutenant governor.

It has also happened after the AAP failed to win any of Delhi’s parliamentary seats in the general election when its candidates were elected in only four constituencies (in Punjab), despite fielding candidates across the country. The party then seemed to have been marginalized in both national and Delhi politics. But it has rebuilt itself and has replaced its former image of rebellion and protest with a constructive approach.

AAP Decimates Congress

The BJP has however managed to hold on to its basic vote bank in Delhi, winning around 33 percent of the votes, which is roughly the same as in 2013. This indicates that the aspirational vote that brought Modi to power nationally last year has switched in Delhi to the AAP, deserting Congress.

These aspirational voters are not just the young, but include all strata of society, especially the poorer sections who suffer the most from corrupt bullying officialdom. These people feel that, despite the apparent lack of direction during the AAP’s 49 days in power, they suffered less from brutal police and other officials than they had in the past.

Both Modi and Rahul Gandhi, the leader (along with his mother Sonia) of the Congress Party, have lessons to learn from the result.

Today marks the end of Modi’s political honeymoon, of being a national icon who could wreak almost magical change in the way that India is run. He needs therefore to curb his egotistical style and to focus more on changing the way the government works and produce evidence of results, not just slogans.

Many observers are looking to the budget on February 28 for significant policy initiatives. Modi also needs to be more tolerant of fellow ministers, and less autocratic to the BJP’s MPs. Opposition parties will be encouraged by the result to challenge the government’s pending measures in parliament.

The Gandhis and other Congress leaders now have the humiliation of their party winning no seats, compared with eight in 2013 when they lost power after running Delhi for 15 years. Voters, including the Muslim minority, have deserted Congress and gone to the AAP, underlining the dramatic decline of India’s once grand old party. Rahul Gandhi played a significant role in the Congress electioneering and, repeating what has happened in other campaigns, failed as a vote winner.

AAP Task “Scary”

Kejriwal is a former tax official who first attracted national attention during mass anti-corruption protests in 2011. He now has a huge job to try to run the Delhi government. This would be difficult enough if the government was totally in charge of the city, but it is not because the central government covers law and order and urban development, and there are inefficient separately elected municipal corporations (currently run by the BJP) which are notoriously corrupt.

Kejriwal said today that the overwhelming result is “scary” and “frightening.” That could apply not just to the job of governing Delhi, but also to the opportunity that now looms of maybe gradually becoming a national center-left party, replacing Congress.

Modi reacted sensibly by congratulating Kejriwal and inviting him to have a cup of tea. Both men would gain from working together.

For Modi, it is a test case of his ability to build partnerships with states where the BJP is not in power, and of becoming a prime minister who can lead the country.

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

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian counterterrorism police said on Wednesday they had thwarted an imminent attack linked to the Islamic State militant group after arresting two men in Sydney on Tuesday.

"When we did the search of the premises, a number of items were located, including a machete, a hunting knife, a home-made flag representing the prescribed terrorist organisation IS, and also a video which depicted a man talking about carrying out an attack," New South Wales Deputy Police Commissioner Catherine Burn told reporters.

"We will allege that both of these men were preparing to do this act yesterday."

(Reuters) - Comedian Jon Stewart will leave as the host of Comedy Central’s satirical newscast “The Daily Show” later this year, the Viacom Inc-owned (VIAB.O) network said on Tuesday.

”Through his unique voice and vision, ‘The Daily Show’ has become a cultural touchstone for millions of fans and an unparalleled platform for political comedy that will endure for years to come,” Comedy Central President Michele Ganeless said in a statement.

Stewart, 52, has led “The Daily Show” since 1999. A replacement has not yet been named.

In December, Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert left the popular “Colbert Report” news satire program to be David Letterman’s replacement on CBS’s “Late Show.”

Stewart’s lampooning of public figures and politicians earned him a loyal following across age groups. His show has often been cited as the top news source for young people. “The Daily Show” reaches slightly more than 1 million viewers on average.

Stewart, who began his career in stand-up comedy in New York, took his satirical humor to MTV in 1993, where he hosted “The Jon Stewart Show.”

He made his directorial debut with the feature film, “Rosewater,” released last year.

”The Daily Show” has also been a career launching pad for several comedians, including Colbert, Steve Carell and John Oliver.

Should you happen to find yourself in the Swedish archipelago and spot something unusual in the water, it may be wise to make yourself known to Ewa Skoog Haslum. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of her: few people outside the rarefied world of naval combat have. But as the recently appointed commander of Sweden’s 4th Naval Warfare Flotilla, this feisty stalwart of the Swedish Navy is Western Europe’s ears and eyes in the cat and mouse contest with Vladimir Putin. That’s because 4th Naval Warfare Flotilla, Sweden’s naval rapid-response unit, keeps a strict eye along Sweden’s long coast, a hugely sensitive and strategic part of the world not just to Sweden but to Nato and Russia as well.

Last October, when a suspected Russian submarine was spotted in the Stockholm archipelago, Skoog Haslum’s ships sailed into action, joined by helicopters and specialist soldiers from other regiments. “Looking for submarines is a case of looking for a needle in a haystack, almost impossible if you’re only acting on a reported sighting,” Skoog Haslam says. “You have to be present all the time. We’re doing what we can with our resources, but we need more money. What I’m doing now is focusing on training. We’re a good force, I think, but there are not many of us.”

The Swedish armed forces are tight-lipped about how many Russian submarines have paid unwelcome visits to the Swedish coast in recent years, but according to Joakim von Braun, a well-connected Swedish intelligence analyst and co-author of a new book about Russian special forces, there have been sightings off Gothenburg and the northern city of Sundsvall as well as the strategic island of Gotland. Submarine traces have also been identified on the Swedish seabed.

The difficulty of the task doesn’t deter Skoog Haslum, who has previously commanded a United Nations naval mission catching terrorists and smugglers off the coast of Lebanon. Indeed, the 46-year-old married mother of two young boys, who entered officer training after completing voluntary military service, is a tough commander who dismisses notions of female solidarity. “Ewa is robust, stable and knows what she wants,” says retired navy captain Göran Frisk, Sweden’s top submarine hunter during the final decade of the Cold War. “She’s a knowledgeable and versatile naval officer, and was an excellent ship commander. She’s also very compassionate towards her crew and subordinate officer, and is a good leader at sea.”

In the past, Skoog Haslum has said that commanding a ship is the best career she could ever imagine. She told the Swedish daily, Svenska Dagbladet, that she “doesn’t have a need for female companionship”, neither on the ship nor in civilian life, adding that she is “not interested in the female networks [in the [armed forces].’’

During her six-month terrorist-hunting posting in Lebanon, Skoog Haslum only had one break at home, otherwise contending herself with phone calls to her family.

Russia denies having military vessels off the Swedish coast, but the unexplained sighting of Professor Logachev – which specialises in seabed reconnaissance and features a compartment for underwater vehicles – in October raised eyebrows. More witnesses to the October incident have come forward, with one having spotted a radio antenna that, according to the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter is used for communications with individuals on shore.

Unlike Vladimir Putin, who is secretive about his personal life to the extent that the identities of his two daughters remain a mystery, Skoog Haslum happily posts family pictures on Facebook. She’s reported to be well-liked by her fellow officers and sailors alike.

Northern Fleet: Vladimir Putin rides in a submersible vessel in the Baltic Sea as Russia announces the resumption of its presence in the Arctic, a project that had been abandoned by the military after the fall of the USSR. Sasha Mordovets/Getty

During the Cold War, Sweden’s submarine-hunters went after intruders with corvettes, minesweepers, patrol crafts, depth charges, anti-submarine warfare (ASW) helicopters, grenades, subsurface sensors and strings of mines placed around naval bases and major ports, thus making their mission harder.

Today the Swedish Navy features impressive combat ships but only has nine of them, down from 34 during the Cold War, and its fleet of 12 attack submarines has been reduced to five. And, like many other countries, Sweden no longer owns any ASW helicopters, the most useful vehicle in submarine hunts. Meanwhile, between 1998 and 2013 Russia more than quadrupled its defence spending.

Indeed, Russian activities in the Baltic Sea region serve to intimidate its neighbours. “The Russians are showing the rest of the world what they’re able to do and that they’re willing to do it,” says rear admiral Nils Wang, commandant of the Royal Danish Defence College.

“That’s what they did during the Cold War as well. But now, with Nato right outside their door, they’re highly sensitive to Nato activities.” But major Carl Bergquist, Sweden’s leading military blogger, says “the Russians don’t send subs to the Stockholm archipelago for intimidation purposes” because there is only one way in and out and “it would be a disaster if they were caught and bombed there”. The October submarine, then, is likely to have been spying.

Norway, a Nato member, has also reported submarine sightings, and Finland is thought to have been visited. In recent months, suspected Russian submarines have also been spotted near Britain’s Faslane nuclear submarine base on the Scottish coast. The October incident amounted to a wakeup call for Swedish politicians, who have promised increased defence spending. Previously ordered helicopters will arrive in 2018, but new equipment orders can take up to ten years to be delivered.

For now, Skoog Haslum will most likely increase crucial training and even staff her ships in double shifts. And push for more equipment.

“Yes we have sensors and weapons, but of course I feel that we need more. The waters are so shallow along our coast, from three metres to around 450 metres, and so depth charges, which we have, don’t work very well when you’re hunting for submarines. Another important thing we need is helicopters.”

Thus prepared, and aided by citizen’s observations captured by mobile phone cameras, Skoog Haslum has a good chance of sinking intruding U-boats or at least foiling their missions. Whether she can sink Putin is another matter – but the chances are that her work will at least result in the Swedish navy strengthening its capabilities to control its 2,400km coastline. 

The Scottish National Party would require a future British government to end austerity and allow public spending to rise in return for its support following a general election on May 7, the party leader said on Wednesday.

The SNP, which opinion polls show is set to take dozens of seats from the Labour Party in Scotland to possibly emerge as Britain's third biggest party, has bounced back after losing an independence referendum last September.

It hopes to hold the balance of power in Britain after May and has spoken of the possibility it might prop up a minority Labour government since both parties, though fierce rivals in Scotland, are left-wing. Labour has said it wants to win outright and is not seeking such a deal.

"I would certainly hope that if there was a Labour government and if it was dependant on SNP support...then we could persuade and influence a Labour government to take a more moderate approach to deficit reduction," SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon told BBC radio.

"I am not going to support governments that plow ahead with austerity that damages the poorest in society," she added, saying austerity pushed by the current Conservative-led government had failed economically and was too painful.

Labour, which is battling to shake off charges from rivals it is anti-business, has proposed balancing the country's books at a slower pace than the Conservatives using tax rises to mitigate the need for spending cuts.

The SNP has portrayed itself as more left-wing than Labour, accusing it of abandoning its core values and connections with working people, an effort to poach Labour's voters and advance its desire to secure independence for Scotland.

China's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday it had no knowledge of any offer by Beijing for aid to Greece after Greece's deputy foreign minister said China had offered economic support even though Athens had not requested it.

Nikos Chountis, who also holds the European Affairs portfolio, told Greek radio that Russia had also offered Greece help, while Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos said that if Athens failed to get a new debt agreement with the euro zone, it could always look elsewhere for help, including possibly China.

"There have been proposals, offers I would say, from Russia, recently after the election, for economic support as well as from China, regarding help, investment possibilities," Chountis said, adding: "We have not asked for it."

China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she had seen the reports but had "no knowledge" of the matter.

"We are willing to keep deepening cooperation and exchanges in all areas with the new Greek government on the basis of the principle of mutual respect and win-win to push the continued development of Sino-Greek ties," she told a daily news briefing.

"As for the detailed situation you mentioned, I know nothing about it."

China said last month it was closely monitoring the new Greek government's policies after Athens said it would stop the sale of a majority stake in Greece's biggest port.

The Greek government last year had short-listed China's Cosco Group [COSCO.UL] as a potential buyer of a 67 percent stake in Piraeus Port Authority.

Kammenos is the leader of Independent Greeks, a nationalist anti-bailout party that is the junior coalition partner of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' radical-left Syriza party.

Greece is seeking a new debt agreement with the euro zone that will allow it to shake off much of the austerity that has been imposed by a European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout since 2010.

China sees Greece's strategic location as a portal into both Europe and Africa for the distribution of Chinese products.

The euro zone, particularly Germany, has shown no willingness to ease its requirement that Greece make deep budget cuts and economic reforms.

A group of Islamist fighters in Yemen renounced their loyalty to al Qaeda's leader and pledged allegiance to the head of the Islamic State, according to a Twitter message retrieved by U.S.-based monitoring group SITE.

The monitoring group could not immediately verify the statement distributed on Twitter purportedly from supporters of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) based in central Yemen.

AQAP is considered the most powerful branch of the global militant network headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and has previously rejected the authority of Islamic State which has declared a caliphate, or Islamic theocracy, in swathes of Iraq and Syria.

State authority in Yemen has unraveled since a Shi'ite Muslim militia formally seized power last week and the Sunni AQAP has sworn to destroy it, stoking fears of sectarian civil war.

"We announce the formation of armed brigades specialized in pounding the apostates in Sanaa and Dhamar," the purported former AQAP supporters wrote, referring to two central provinces.

"We announce breaking the pledge of allegiance to the sheikh, the holy warrior and scholar Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri ... We pledge to the caliph of the believers Ibrahim bin Awad al-Baghdadi to listen and obey," they said.

Militants in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Libya have also joined Islamic State, signaling a competition for loyalty among armed Islamists battling states in the Mideast and North Africa.

“We have to take a selfie! We have to take a selfie!” says Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, cosmologist and perhaps the only living scientist with cult-like celebrity status. On a Tuesday evening in January he is standing under the giant sphere of the Hayden Planetarium, where he serves as director, urging some friends to join him. Behind him are cameras on dollies and the simple set of Star Talk, his new late-night TV show for National Geographic’s channel: Three chairs and three microphones, one each for him and two guests: a scientist and a comedian. That’s it. No stage, no desk, no backdrop. Any accoutrements would look shabby next to the hulking planetarium dome and the multiple astrophysics PhDs anyhow.

Tyson beckons with both arms to award-winning New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye, who is in the audience for the taping tonight, and Janna Levin, a cosmologist and Barnard College professor, who is his “scientist” guest for this episode. She’s wearing a dress covered in stars. Tyson’s tie is painted with galaxies and nebulas. It’s made by “a woman named Beverly who makes them in her garage in Westchester,” he tells the audience, adding that he tried to order more, but she’d gone out of business.

Tyson, at 6’2’’, is by far the tallest of the three, so he extends his iPhone for the selfie. They all press together for a moment, taking several shots, Tyson giggling a little. Yes, Tyson giggles. He chuckles too. Often. Several times over the course of the evening, in the midst of taping, he leans forward and lets out full-throated, gasping bouts of laughter in response to clever remarks from his guests.

There is something unsettling yet charming about watching the most famous astrophysicist in the world laugh that hard. When was the last time you saw a scientist having fun?

And that’s the point.

With his hit Fox show Cosmos, he dusted off our underused senses of wonder by zooming around in a CGI spaceship and explaining the origins of the universe. With Star Talk, he wants to remind us that scientists are just regular folk, and that the work they do is not an arcane scholarly exercise, but very much our business too. He’s taking science out of the “science” box and spreading it all over everything.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson poses at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, Nov. 2013, where he serves as the Frederick P. Rose Director in New York City.Miller Mobley/Redux

Star Talk will be the first U.S. TV talk show about science. The idea that science can fit within the format of a lively on-air conversation, as opposed to a lecture or demonstration, is a not-small revolution for the genre. Talk shows are about the pleasure of watching unscripted banter between larger-than-life personalities, but can one banter about black holes? Can one argue on-air about the space-time continuum without giving 10 million people headaches? At some point during the taping, Levin, the cosmologist, referred to the film Interstellar as an “orgy of relativity,” and I thought, Yes, yes you can.

Tyson feels pretty sure we’ve been ready for science in primetime for quite a while. “Imagine 10 years ago, walking up to a studio and pitching a show where you have five scientists talking about geeky things to each other. You’d get laughed out the room. But now it’s the most popular show on TV: The Big Bang Theory.”

Tyson wants to make science as relevant to the TV-watching masses as the latest movements of Kim Kardashian. “Movies like Interstellar and Gravity got people talking about the universe, about space, about science–and about scientists, as people, and as people you might like to be,” he says. “It’s about putting science in the dialogue, science in the culture.” He begins each episode of his new show by looking dead-on into the camera, twisting his face into a comically serious expression, and reciting, in his baritone, “Star Talk. Where science and pop culture collide.” The episodes taped that evening include deep dives into the science behind Interstellar, and an exploration of race on the series Star Trek, complete with a guest appearance from George Takei, a regular on that show.

This seems to be a good time to stage a tastemaking assault. The full pop cultural spectrum already appears to be glutting itself on science. The Facebook page “I Fucking Love Science,” which condenses the latest scientific discoveries into highly shareable bite-sized posts, has nearly 20 million “likes.” Astronauts like NASA’s Reid Wiseman and Germany’s Alexander Gerst send updates from life in space to their hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Tyson has three million Twitter followers. Tumblr, meanwhile, is awash in pretty pictures of purpled nebulas and vintage anatomy diagrams. A Tumblr page called Startorialist, maintained by a pair of PhD astronomers, posts links to collections of galaxy dresses and NASA-themed jackets under the ever-expanding genre of space fashion. Dressing like a geek has gone from droll to camp to couture.

Tyson is not a purist. If a photo of a nebula or a galaxy dress makes people feel closer to science, it has value. Tyson’s office in the American Museum of Natural History is full of examples of the cosmos in high kitsch. A six pack of Mars beer, a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce with a space shuttle on its label, and dozens of space-themed ties are on display next to a flat-brim hat embroidered with “Bronx”  (his home borough) and Russian nesting dolls with space vehicles for faces.  “Loving” science, no matter how seemingly superficial that love is, is still revolutionary. He sees it all as a sign that people–all kinds of people–are finally becoming fascinated with how our world works.

“There are chapters in recent American history–perhaps the 1960s, maybe during the early Industrial Revolution–when people embraced science and technology at high levels. But it didn’t necessarily infiltrate pop culture. People just knew it was there, and that it was important. We now live in a time where I think people are coming to learn the importance of science,” Tyson says. “People are recognizing that science is important, and they’re recognizing that science can be fun. They’re recognizing that science is all around us. It’s not just something you can step around, or say, ‘That’s for scientists but I’m into something else.’ Whether or not you’re into one thing or another, the science is into you. I don’t think it’s just anecdotal that there’s a previously unserved appetite for science, and especially for the universe. Cosmos fed into that, Star Talk is feeding into that, the Big Bang Theory is feeding into that.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson greets students during a press tour for "The Cosmos: A spacetie Odyssey" at the National University of Singapore, Feb. 14, 2014.FOX

But we’re not just in the studio audience for the raw scientific material. We’re here for a show. Tyson’s entertainment value comes in part from the fact that he can barely contain his enthusiasm. His eyebrows bounce up and down his forehead while he talks, and his face contorts into expressions that alternate between surprise, disbelief and deep interest. Once, during tonight’s taping, he broke into song. Even when the cameras stop rolling between segments, Tyson chats energetically with the studio audience. When a handler comes over and starts lint-rolling Tyson’s jacket, he purrs with delight. “Oh! It’s like a masseuse,” he says, grinning down at the lint roller, then up at the handler. “You should charge for that.”

Tyson works hard at making gregarious showmanship look this easy. He studies comedians for their timing, the way they move onstage. When he gives public talks, he refuses to use anything but a hand-held mic. He likes the way he can calibrate the tone and volume of his voice by moving it farther or nearer his mouth. He takes cues from Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Tim Allen, Jeff Foxworthy; Wildly different comedians who all pry observations on human nature from their daily lives. Tyson likes that way of thinking. He calls it “cosmic perspective,” looking beyond oneself to some bigger truth. He also likes comedy because it gets in your head. “That's the guaranteed recipe for getting someone to not only learn the first thing you told them, but for them to come back to learn even more,” he says. “I'm fundamentally an educator, and I happen to think that the universe is a hilarious place. So to the extent that I can take a pass at the information, knowledge, wisdom in a way that will make you smile, that's the path I'm going to take, because you'll remember it more.”

Renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts "Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey."FOX

In Space, No One Can Hear You Get Flamed

On Twitter, Tyson’s comedic practice is painstakingly premeditated. He tweets crumbs of science wisdom and musings about humanity to his three million followers, tailored to the news of the day, and peppered with  humor. “If Gridirons were timelines, w/ BigBang at one goal, then Cavemen to now spans thickness of single turf-blade at other goal,” he tweeted during the Super Bowl earlier this month. It sounds breezy, a scientific brain casually overflowing. Not quite. There’s a method. He keeps it funny, to make it memorable. He confines himself to 125 characters, rather than the allowed 140, both to “hold myself to a higher standard,” and also so a follower has space to manually retweet him, twitter handle and “RT” included, without changing his tweet. And he never, ever abbreviates. “It’s a crutch,” he says. “Look, you bought into the fact that you're limited in characters. If I have to start using letters to abbreviate words then I haven't properly formulated the idea to fit the medium.”

When Tyson tweets facts about the phase of the moon or other elements in the night sky, he’ll only do it in rhyme. “I don't want people to accuse me of destroying the romance of a moment by layering too much science on it.”

Tyson has known he’s wanted to be a scientist since he was nine, when his parents took him to the Hayden Planetarium and he saw a starry sky, albeit simulated, for the first time. But in another life, he says, he’d be writing the libretto to Broadway musicals. He likes the clever turns of phrase in Broadway songs that evoke emotion in few words. “It is this in me that operates on my tweets when I compose them. It’s, What is the choice of word? And what word precedes which so that it is more mellifluous in your ear? When to alliterate and when not? Do I end on the noun or do I end on the verb? These kinds of things matter to me.”

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth Reiss as Pluto are interviewed by Seth Meyers, March 14, 2014.Peter Kramer/NBC/Getty

The Internet has a way of setting fires wherever there’s tinder, and being a prominent scientist anywhere near a religious holiday is like being a dead tree in a drought. On Christmas, Tyson tweeted, “On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642.” It racked up 18,000 re-tweets and all the outrage the conservative cauldrons of the Internet could muster. He was accused via blog post of “trolling Christians,” and his feed was clogged with fury for days. “Will you be making the same kind of asinine comment on the next major muslim holiday, coward?” tweeted one. The backlash still baffles him. He’d tweeted about Santa and the physics of having a red-nosed reindeer minutes after, and no one got mad.

“I'm just conveying truthful information and then to see people demanding that it be taken down and it was like, whoa. Whoa! What is going on the head of a person who wants this to be taken down? Let's say you're an atheist and you want to troll Christians. What would you tweet? You would tweet things like, ‘There’s research that shows Jesus might not have existed.’ You wouldn't be offering Isaac Newton's birthday, is what I'm thinking.”

But for every person flustered by Tyson’s tweet, there seems to be a legion of mega-fans. This summer, @dogboner, a Twitter account of mostly weird Internet humor maintained by Michael Hale, tweeted a photo of Tyson on the New York City subway. “Some guy using his laptop on the train like a Dumbass nerd lol,” the tweet read. It quickly went viral. Hale knew who Tyson was, he wrote in a post on Gawker the next day. It was a joke. But few noticed, and instead turned out on Twitter and Facebook by the thousands to implore Hale to “fall into an ocean of A.I.D.S.,” among other less printable things.

Tyson once ran into actor Charlie Sheen roaming the halls of the museum with his family. Tyson and Sheen sat down in his office for a chat. Sheen, who is mostly only in the news for drug abuse and general scene-causing these days, turns out to have a side the public has never seen.

"He was asking me, like, 'Okay but then, if the star is born, and a star is made from gas, and I see these gas clouds in hubble photos, does that mean…' and so on. Twenty minutes! A 20-minute conversation about this! And I said, nobody knows this about him. Why would they, because anybody who interviews him wants to know how crazy he is, or how many drugs he does, or how many hookers he goes with. And I thought, if I could get him back here, we could do, ‘Charlie Sheen Asks an Astrophysicist.’ He would get to spread his love of the geekosphere. The way I would conduct that interview is, how did you come to ask these questions? What triggers that? And so then we get inside his head about what triggers his interest.”

“If you’re going to print this, tell Charlie Sheen that I’m coming for him. Tell him I have people in the universe who will find him and bring him as a guest on to Star Talk.”

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson poses at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, Nov. 2013, where he serves as the Frederick P. Rose Director in New York City.Miller Mobley/Redux

Caution: Scientist Breaking Off a Rhyme

Back on set, the cameras begin to roll again, and Tyson, Levin and comedian Eugene Mirman, who plays “Gene” on Bob’s Burgers, fall deep into a conversation about wormholes, black holes and relativity. Tyson decides he wants to recite a poem he wrote 20 years ago about what would happen if one were to somehow fall into a black hole. “Actually, it’s a rhyme,” he says. “Poets compose poems. Regular people rhyme stuff.” He asks the audience to lay down a beat. We’re all grinning, sloppily snapping our fingers, trying to establish some kind of tempo. Tyson begins.

In a feet-first dive

to this cosmic abyss

You will not survive

Because you will not miss

The tidal forces of gravity

Will create quite a calamity

when you’re stretched head to toe

are you sure you want to go?

Your body’s atoms, you’ll see them

Will enter one by one

The singularity will eat em

...and you won’t be having fun.

We clap wildly. It’s cheesy, but it’s fun. And now we know that a “singularity” refers to the center of a black hole. The whole night is peppered with the sort of facts that inspire awe based on the sheer scale they deal in. I learn that a neutron star can have a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than the magnetic field of the earth. I learn that GPS satellites are so far from the earth that their experience of time is noticeably faster than ours, and they have to correct for the time-speed difference before beaming information into our devices. “That’s general relativity manifest,” Levin, the cosmologist, says.

Between segments, Tyson gives us his official prediction: “Sometime in the next decade we will know if there is life elsewhere in our solar system.” The grandeur of the thought has the audience members turning to each other, eyebrows up. Aliens in 10 years? Cool.

The man sitting to my left, Devon James, is a 24-year-old environmental chemistry graduate student at Queens College. He has a copy of The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism in his lap. He’s been a fan of Tyson’s for years. “As an inner-city kid I can relate to him. He said he didn’t see stars for the first time until he was nine, because of the light pollution in NYC. That’s how he became fascinated with space. I saw my first big dipper in upstate New York, when I went to college in Ithaca,” James says. “Plus he’s brown, and a scientist. A brown scientist. I can dig that.”

Long before Cosmos, and before Tyson skyrocketed to mainstream fame, his work was in astrophysical research. He has published 10 books, and several papers, with titles like, “Radial Velocity Distribution and Line Strengths of 33 Carbon Stars in the Galactic Bulge” and"On the possibility of Gas-Rich Dwarf Galaxies in the Lyman-alpha Forest.” Tyson says he plans to return to that line of work soon. He jokes that he won’t be able to “claim science” as his field  for much longer unless he sits down and does some hard science. “However delusional I am in even thinking this way, I have it in mind to bring my research profile back up to steam over the next year or so,” he says. “I have some people who are eager to collaborate and other projects that were put on hold, so I can step right in practically on a moments notice.”

For now, though, the agenda is full media saturation. During the next commercial break, Tyson is thinking beyond his show. If pop culture is finally embracing astrophysics, why can’t it give some love to earth systems science? “I’d love to believe, however delusionally, that producers and gatekeepers of media will say, ‘Hey, if that works for astronomy, maybe it will work for biology, or chemistry, or geology.’ And then you can slip in pop culturally-relevant issues in that dialogue. You could look at fracking, or alternative energy. You could make those themes of a show. Look at the number of people who attend Comic Con. Hundreds of thousands of people. And it’s all stripes of people. There are men, women, old people, young people, children. Regular people, beautiful people. All there. … We all have some measure of an inner geek within us. And when you express that inner geek, it’s not about judgements, it’s about celebrating life, and about celebrating our understanding of the methods and tools and understanding of nature.”

But this isn’t just about unleashing our inner geeks. Tyson is jarringly resolute when he  shoots down a question about whether he’d like to start a kids show. He absolutely doesn’t. He says humanity doesn’t have time for that, with millions of science-illiterate adults walking around making decisions. “It's the scientifically illiterate adult that wields resources and opportunities, and if they don't have that literacy there's no hope for the country,” he says. “I don't have the patience to train middle-schoolers to become scientifically literate and wait 40 years for them to become President.”

An estimated 300 people probably died this week after attempting to reach Italy from Libya in stormy weather, the U.N. refugee agency said on Wednesday after speaking to a handful of survivors.

An Italian tug boat rescued 9 people who had been on two different boats on Monday and brought them to the Italian island of Lampedusa on Wednesday morning.

They are the only known survivors from their two boats, leaving more than 200 unaccounted for, they told representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The survivors said there had been a third large dinghy that had also left Libya on Saturday and was missing, Barbara Molinario, a spokeswoman for the UNHCR, told Reuters.

In an incident apparently related to yet another boat full of migrants, the Italian coast guard picked up 105 people on Sunday in extremely dangerous sea conditions near to Libya and with the temperature hovering just a few degrees above zero.

Twenty-nine from that dinghy died of hypothermia in the 18 hours it took the coast guard to ferry them to Italy.

The recent deaths at sea have reignited criticism of Italy's decision last year to end a full-scale search-and-rescue mission, known as Mare Nostrum, due to concerns over costs.

Pope Francis on Wednesday told pilgrims in St. Peter's Square that he was "following with concern the news out of Lampedusa", saying he would pray for the victims and "again encourage solidarity so that those in need are rescued".

A leading Liberal Democrat has called for an absolute cap on the amount an individual can donate to a political party in the UK following an extravagant ball held by the Conservatives to raise money from wealthy donors ahead of the general election on May 7th.

The Conservative party’s Black and White Election Fundraiser ball, held on Monday at the five-star Grosvenor House hotel in London's Mayfair, was expected to raise £3 million for the party’s election warchest.

It saw a strong turnout from the Tory cabinet and supporters, with donors paying up to£15,000 for a premium table - around £1,800 more than the yearly UK minimum wage for a person working a 40-hour week.

The event has led to calls from rival parties to reform the funding system of party politics in the UK.

Leader of the Liberal Democrat London Assembly Group, Caroline Pidgeon, said: “It is highly regrettable that agreement has not been reached amongst the political parties to reform the funding of political parties.  

“Our democracy would be far healthier if there were absolute limits on the amount of money that any one individual can give to a political party.”

Labour leader Ed Miliband also attempted to score political points at prime minister’s questions today, accusing the Conservatives of accepting money from donors who were revealed to have Swiss bank accounts with a subsidiary of HSBC that is currently embroiled in a Europe-wide scandal over tax evasion. According to the Guardian, Conservative donors with such accounts have donated £5 million to the party.

The Conservatives have in recent years tried to shake off a reputation as the 'party of the rich', an effort which isn’t helped by events such as the ball. The most expensive lot - a bronze maquette of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher - was auctioned off for more than £200,000.

Other prizes included a shoe-shopping trip with home secretary Theresa May, a 10k ‘Iron Man’ run with secretary of state for work and pensions Iain Duncan Smith, and a home-cooked dinner with the party’s chief whip Michael Gove.

Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, said: “The Green Party believes that we need state funding for political parties, using an allocation system that reflects public support and voting.

“This would help to restore trust in politics. With that in place, we would eliminate the dominance of vested interests currently so powerful in our politics.”

The Green Party predominantly relies on funding derived from membership fees and individual donations but do not receive large corporate handouts. During this election campaign they have appealed directly to their supporters via Crowdfunder to boost funds and harness online support for the party.

Last week the Labour party revealed almost 50% of Tory donors are hedge fund managers, with 27 featuring in the Sunday Times 'rich list'. During this election cycle, these wealthy donors have pledged more than £19 million to the cause.

However, the Labour Party often faces criticism for its reliance on funding from the unions, who also have one third of the vote in party leadership elections, and helped elect current leader Ed Miliband in 2010.

The UK Independence Party (Ukip) is particularly unhappy that union members don’t have a say over where the money goes, saying that many of them are switching allegiances to their party.

A spokesman for Ukip said: “The Labour party and the trade unions have questions to answer as there is a large percentage of union members who do not support the Labour party and are actually in support of Ukip, but the union levies do not allow members to support parties other than Labour.”

Ukip's donor base has been topped up by Conservative defectors switching allegiance. Ex-Tory donor Arron Banks handed £1 million to Nigel Farage's party - a steep increase from the £25,000 he previously offered up for the Conservative cause. Ukip outspent Labour and the Lib Dems in their European election campaign and is now the biggest British party in the European parliament.

The Ukip representative said: “There isn’t a democratic deficit in this country. What there is is a certain lack of transparency. We would like to see a much clearer view of where donations come from.”

He added that Ukip are opposed to the general public funding political parties: "Taxpayers funding political parties is explicitly out of date. Why should the taxpayer have to pick up the tab for our mistakes?"

Figures from 2014 reveal the Conservative party received £6,842,574 in private donations, compared to Labour’s £3,358,160. Lagging further behind were the Lib Dems (£2,762,538), the Greens (£104,288) and Ukip (£98,387).

Neither the Labour nor Conservative party responded to a request for comment.