“Today’s the day I’m going to kill myself,” said David Durston. “You wake up and think, yeah, I’ll kill myself today. It’s today.” He sat in front of cheerful primary-coloured walls describing the darkness of his worst mornings. The Solace Centre for adults with mental illness, a low-slung bungalow in Ealing, west London, is a sanctuary for those with troubled minds – troubled in the mind-filling, heart-emptying way that can lead people like David, a softly spoken 55-year-old, to wake up feeling that this day could be his last.

He isn’t alone in the struggle. Across Europe, men are around four times more likely to die by suicide than women. More men in the UK have died by suicide in the past year than all British soldiers fighting in all wars since 1945. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, what they categorise somewhat obliquely as “intentional self harm or events of undetermined intent” account for over 1% of all deaths, killing three times more people than road accidents, more than leukaemia, more than all infectious and parasitic diseases combined. More than 6,000 people in the UK died by suicide in 2013; 78% of them were men.

These numbers are the aggregate of thousands upon thousands of unique untold stories, of men who didn’t make it. David, who works at a local garage but lives alone, is one of the many thousands more who struggle not to join them. “One day I’m great, I’m terrific,” he told me, left hand rummaging in the palm of his right. “The next, I’m low, I’m thinking of suicide, about the ways that I can die.”

To fully understand suicide would require the impossible – to know what the dead were thinking. It is an act that precludes the testimony of the only witness who really matters. Notes are only left in around a quarter of cases, but sometimes there are clues to be found in the online detritus of young lives ended too early. In most of his YouTube videos, Brett Robertshaw has headphones on, head bobbing rhythmically, fingers flashing up and down the fretboard of his bass guitar. His talent had gained him a following; some of these videos attracted 40,000 views. One is different. In it he sits in front of the camera – a red-haired, matter-of-fact boy. He’s shy and serious, quietly answering questions from his online following.

On his Ask.fm page, while Brett’s written responses to questions about his life from other users are generally funny, sharp and acerbic, a few give pause.

Question: “What was the last lie you told?”

Brett: “I’m OK.”

Question: “Your (sic) in your own movie are you the good guy or the bad guy? and why?”

Brett: “I’m the extra, because fuck that shit.”

Brett wrote over 7,500 tweets in less than three years. Most are digital snippets quite typical of a young male life, but there were also infrequent, intense bursts of sadness and resignation. Struggles to sleep. Anger and isolation. Alcohol as a coping mechanism. On 14 May 2014, unbeknown to family and friends, Brett began to draft a long and eloquent message for his personal website. It began: “The truth is, if this post is live, then chances are, I’m probably not here any more.”

He described a life “void of all emotions except sadness and worry”, fixated on worst-case scenarios and low on self-esteem. He wrote of “friendships” with inverted commas. His guitar playing was, he wrote, “just something that passed the time a bit”. Compliments only made him feel worse. When he finally sought treatment, worry about the appointments prevented him sleeping, while antidepressants made him feel nauseous. His conclusion was heartbreaking in its self-condemnation. “It’s entirely my own fault, and only my own lack of willpower and strength of mind is to blame.” On 5 July, the summer day when he ended his life at his home in Blackpool, Brett Robertshaw was still only 21 years old. One week later the explanatory message he had drafted over the previous months automatically posted to his website.

The Suicide Gene

Is it ever possible to pinpoint before it’s too late those, like Brett, at risk of suicide? Dr Zachary Kaminsky, assistant professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is at the forefront of efforts to identify what has colloquially been termed a “suicide gene”. “Stress is like driving,” Kaminsky says. “You can drive really fast, and that can be useful, but you have to be able to slow down.” His team compared brains of those who died by suicide and those who didn’t. They had an inkling that for those who died by suicide, a gene called SKA2 might be, in effect, acting as a faulty brake pad, failing to control stress.

By looking at just this single gene, Kaminsky’s team was able to predict with 80-90% accuracy whether an individual in their research group had thoughts of suicide or had made an attempt. More research is needed, but signs are positive that in the future a simple blood test may provide at least some indication of suicide risk. Whether SKA2 could also shed light on gender differences in suicide is not yet clear. “It is linked with the cortisol system and this system does interact with the oestrogen system,” mused Kaminsky, “so I suppose it’s possible”.

Lithuania has the highest suicide rate in Europe.Infographics: Daniel Biddulph

Others, such as professor Rory O’Connor, a psychologist at Glasgow University, who was recently elected President of the International Academy of Suicide Research, are extremely wary of the idea that there is some magic “suicide gene” to find. “It’s just a vulnerability factor, a test will never tell us why, he said. “It’s more important we identify the social and environmental factors.”

In Glasgow, where O’Connor is based, those from the poorest areas are 10 times more at risk than those from the richest. Research published in the British Medical Journal in 2013 showed that during the 2008 recession, English regions with the largest rise in unemployment had the largest increase in suicides. However, as O’Connor tells me, “the conundrum is that most people who die from suicide are in work”. Similarly, while mental illness is a very significant risk factor – as many as 90% of suicides occur in the context of mental illness – in O’Connor’s view, “it’s not ultimately the reason people kill themselves”.

Most academics think the answer to this complex “why” question is a combination of numerous different risk factors and negative life events that can push vulnerable people over the edge. Muddling the question further is a puzzle that has intrigued researchers for generations: it is true that men are much more likely than women to die by suicide, by a factor as high as six in countries with the highest overall rates. However, it is equally true that women are around three times more likely to make an attempt. This difference is normally attributed to method; men are more likely than women to choose high-lethality means, such as hanging. This begs a sensitive question: when is a suicide attempt not, in fact, an attempt to die?

An  Honourable Death 

Clinical psychologist Dr Martin Seager, a consultant for the Central London branch of the Samaritans whose work focuses on male psychology, traces the paradox back to gender. “Women are, in general, more prepared to seek help and show their distress. A female attempt is often closer to a cry for help, hoping for a response.” Typically, the male is seeking a different outcome. According to Seager, “when he makes a suicide attempt, he doesn’t want anyone to hear it, he wants to succeed”. He compares the action to a soldier “seeking an honourable death”.

Suicide jumped up the political agenda in early 2015 when the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg called for an overhaul of how the UK’s National Health Service tackles suicide. He proposed the widespread adoption of a “zero suicides” approach, following a campaign by The Henry Ford Health System, a healthcare provider based in Detroit, Michigan, which decreased the rate of suicide in its patient population by 75% in its first four years. The strategy, which has already inspired a similar approach in Merseyside, includes training all staff in suicide prevention, developing a system for staff to check in with patients by phone, and assigning patients different levels of risk and accompanying protocols. In the past two years, not a single suicide has been recorded at the Henry Ford Health System.

However, a whole country and a seemingly endless list of possible risk factors is more difficult to deal with. “It can feel overwhelming, like you are trying to chase the world,” Alana Atkinson, project manager for Scotland’s Anti-Suicide Initiative says. Yet Scotland, a country that has historically suffered higher rates of suicide than the rest of the UK, shows that a strategic, comprehensive approach can have some effect.

In 2002, following the release of a report, The Sadness of Young Men, detailing Scotland’s disproportionately high male suicide rate, the Scottish government announced its intention to reduce suicide by 20% in the space of 10 years. When 2013 came around, rates were down by 19%. The country’s Choose Life strategy focused on local coordination. A suicide prevention coordinator was nominated in each area, while funding to all local authorities for suicide prevention was protected. Improving the frontline response, raising awareness and tackling stigma, so that people felt more able broach the issue of suicide with their own families, was vital in reducing the rate.

The most important breakthrough was to make suicide part of the national conversation, but talking about problems often seems more difficult for men. The motley old crew at The Shed, in a community centre at the bottom of a housing estate in London’s Camden, were children of the post-war years. “You have a more domestically-oriented quiet masculinity,” Kings College historian Lucy Delap told me of that period. “Nazi masculinity was extreme and violent, whereas to be a British man was to be a quiet, restrained, self–controlled man emotionally.”

The Baby Boomers

The denizens of the Camden Shed are more comfortable working shoulder to shoulder than talking face to face, with The Shed recreating the habit and environment of their former, all-male workplaces. They break at lunchtime, have a brief chat. But then it’s back to work. Any therapeutic element is hidden under a heavy layer of sawdust, glue, sweat, and the sound of machines.

The idea behind the The Shed, a movement that started in Australia, is that older men, who slip quietly into loneliness, need a place to go to be with other men. Suicide rates among men over 55 have risen by 12% in the last decade in the UK. A 2012 Samaritans report identified isolation, unemployment, and lack of communication as particularly relevant risk factors for this age group. Men suffer more from social isolation in old age, and it’s predicted that the percentage of older men living alone will increase by 65% over the next 15 years as more men begin to outlive their partners. “Nobody comes to The Shed for the declared reason,” said Chris, a rakish 72-year-old jobbing actor in jeans and suede slip-ons. “It’s set up to address solitariness, but you won’t find people saying they are coming for that reason.” It’s therapy that dare not speak its name.

Kenneth padded over in an apron, a cerebral white-bearded former ceramic artist in baggy moss-green pantaloons. For him, a sense of changing masculinity is linked with war. “Think historically about the division of labour, the type of society, what you needed men to do. You can’t nurture a sensitive man if you need a war weapon.”

An infographic indicates that more men committed suicide in the UK that women in 2013. Infographics: Daniel Biddulph

There’s a lot of gruff compassion in the strong, silent collective at The Shed. Raymond is a former dentist who lost his short-term memory after being struck by lightning on the golf course. Mick, a twinkle-eyed former carpenter, reached over to remove a large wood splinter from close to his friend’s eye. “You see, that’s right in your fucking eye you idiot. You’ve got to take care.” These men are retired and in many ways inured from the pressures of social change. Statistics suggest it is the next generation down, those in middle age, for whom we should worry the most.

The suicide rate for men aged 45-59 has increased by around 40% in a decade, but there’s more to it than that. If you log the age-disaggregated number of male suicides in England and Wales over the last 30 years into a table, something extraordinary becomes clear. In 1987, those aged 20-24 had the highest number of suicides. Five years on, in 1992, it was that same group, now aged 25-29. The pattern continues through 1997, 2002, 2007 then into 2012, when reaching the 45-49 bracket this cohort once again accounted for the highest number of suicides. This suggests that these late baby-boomers born between 1963-1967 have carried the highest risk of suicide with them from their teens all the way to middle age. The question is why?

The Samaritans’s 2012 report Men, Suicide and Society suggests that men in middle age should be considered part of a “buffer generation” caught between two competing ideas of masculinity. Like those older men at The Shed, like their own fathers, this generation is still wrapped up in the male ideal as stoical, independent breadwinner. However, the shifting standards of the modern world often make meeting these expectations impossible.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show the average age a man divorces in the UK is now 45. This buffer generation was setting up home in a brave new era for the institution of marriage. Increasing numbers of women in the workplace, and corresponding individual pension funds, meant that increasing numbers of women had the option to leave. Many did; the divorce rate exploded from the late 1970s onwards, and only began to drop off again in the mid-2000s.

The effect of relationship breakdown can be catastrophic, with most research indicating that men are affected far worse than women. The Samaritans report found that “men in mid-life are dependent primarily on female partners for emotional support”. While women maintain their independent relationships, male friendships tend to drop away after the age of 30. Suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts were three times higher among divorced men, and two times higher among separated men compared to married.

Generation Bro

What of the younger generation? Last year, Vice.com published an article on “the young British douchebag” (YBD), which followed a spate of American articles on the existence of the US rough equivalent, the so-called “bro”. Despite increased engagement with consumption and demonstrating a more metrosexual concern for his appearance that would have been unacceptable during earlier generations of masculinity, writer John Saward described the YBD thus: “He is a walking scorched-earth policy. He takes what he wants to satisfy some hedonistic impulse, and then he leaves her sobbing in a hallway with her friend on the other line. He wrings every moment of every drop of novelty. He is doing shots and never with a chaser, because moderation and restraint are for women and faggots and children. The only way to be a real man is to be a real man as ferociously as humanly possible. He goes all-in . . . ”

A response to this article defended the YBD as “a neutered generation lacking in role models, limping from the shadows of predecessors, who defined themselves by the wars they fought, the things they made and the fields they tilled”. It seems the fact that a man moisturises, or shaves his chest, or even wears eye-shadow, does not mean he will be any better at discussing or dealing with difficult emotions. Core masculine values endure. Suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged 20-34, accounting for more than a quarter of all deaths in this age group.

Suicides of men aged 45-59 have risen by 40% in a decade, and account for a quarter of all suicides in the UK. Infographics: Daniel Biddulph

Surveying the research on male experience of mental health seems to support the view that masculinity is costing lives. Men access GP surgeries less than women. They are more reluctant to seek professional help for mental health issues, generally doing so only when crisis has already hit. Furthermore, according to a 2013 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, lower rates of depression diagnosis among men may be because symptoms of depression that accord with notions of masculinity are not recognised as such. As one psychologist told me, “with men, we don’t even diagnose it as depression, we call it aggression or bad behaviour. Often getting drunk, or even violent . . . it’s just another symptom”.

The Talking Cure 

Stephen Hoddell of the Bristol branch of the Samaritans, who in his 40 years as a volunteer has perhaps conducted more conversations with struggling men than anyone else, suggested to me that help “is just not a language men are comfortable using”. However, the Samaritans phone-lines that he mans are almost 50% taken up with male callers. Those of the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), an organisation set up specifically for men, cannot keep up with demand. “Men will talk, do talk, want to talk,” said CALM Director Jane Powell, “but they do find it hard to talk to mates and wives about stuff, because the cultural pressures are very rigid”.

Dr Martin Seager at the central London Samaritans sees a danger in approaches to help men that, in essence, tell them to act more like women. For Seager, the core of the problem with that approach is that it goes against evolutionary biology. “The way I look at it, if men have evolved as fathers, protectors and survivors, they are going to feel life is worth living to the extent they can provide and protect.” In his view, the problem comes when the world changes and men are no longer able to fulfil this traditional role.

With this subtle change of emphasis, the whole question of how best to address male suicide is subsumed by a deeper ideological battle – one that strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a man. Mike Buchanan, 58, is founder of the world’s first political party for men’s human rights, Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them). He is also a prolific self-publishing author of volumes including David and Goliatha and Feminism: The Ugly Truth. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with traditional masculinity, absolutely zero wrong with it,” he said. “I think that idea is batshit insane.”

Buchanan and others prominent in the online “manosphere”, where he has developed a following, are generally “essentialists”, believing male and female behaviour is predominantly biologically determined, rather than the product of social influences. From this point of view, the problem lies not with stoicism or other elements of traditional masculinity, but with their dilution in what Buchanan believes is a “gynocentric world . . . run to pander to the wants and needs of women all along the way”. This perspective is blunt: the rise of women has triggered the fall of men.

Most feminists reject the idea that increasing gender equality needs to be such a zero-sum game, but many do concede that increased equality for the sexes has presented certain difficulties for men. “Feminism has brought up a lot of challenges for men in terms of reflecting on position,” said

Dr Victoria Robinson, director of the Centre of Gender Research at the University of Sheffield. “However, we don’t often hear from men or listen to men’s voices, and that is absolutely vital.

If feminism is viewed as only for women, then we’re responsible for that.”

Members of the Solace Centre did not take news of their possible closure lying down but the service may still face termination. Alex Zalewska for Newsweek

Whatever the theories, those suffering with mental health problems, vulnerable men and women alike, often struggle to make their voices heard. In November, David and the other members of the Solace Centre in Ealing received bad news. Ealing council, struggling to slice over £90m pounds from its budget, was considering this facility, with its four staff and £150,000 of annual running costs, for closure. Scared of losing a centre they consider their lifeline, the members started a campaign. A website was quickly built, piles of signs were constructed. They lobbied councillors and pounded the local streets, gathering over 1,600 petition signatures.

Then, in early January, with the council’s final decision still in the balance, one of the male members stepped under a train at nearby Ealing Broadway station. It felt like a defeat for everyone. “I was surprised to hear, very surprised, because when I last talked to him, he was happy,” said David. “But somebody told me it’s like that sometimes. They feel better because they know they are going to die.”

The Samaritans’ 24-hour helpline is 08457 909090.

An in-depth ebook by Finlay Young, The Descent of Man, is available now from Newsweek Insights.

In one of the last photographs my family took of my grandmother, she looks as if she’s been in a fistfight. Jean Bass Tinsley is lying in a hospital bed in Athens, Georgia, wearing a turquoise button-up shirt and staring blankly at the camera. A bandage obscures her fractured skull, along with the bridge of her bloodied nose. She is 91 years old.

My grandmother essentially did this to herself. In June 2013, she fell out of her wheelchair headfirst, after ignoring her caregivers’ warnings not to get out of bed without help. Earlier that year, she’d broken both of her hips, in separate falls. Before that, her pelvis—all while trying to do what for most of her life she’d managed just fine on her own: walk.

In her last year, dementia crept into my grandmother’s mind. The staff at her long-term-care facility plotted ways to protect her from herself. It’s against the law in Georgia to restrain patients in such facilities, so they lowered her bed to the floor and put a pad down next to it. They even installed an alarm that went off if she left her mattress. My grandmother disabled the alarm, moved the pad and freed herself, repeatedly. In the end, she was both too weak and too strong.

Four months before Grandma died, my mother moved to Georgia to be with her. To prevent her from getting out of bed, nurses at my grandmother’s facility began medicating her so heavily that she barely seemed alive. My mom insisted they stop drugging her, at which point Grandma’s resolve (and penchant for injury) returned. Several times a week, Mom would call me, bawling, with the latest in my grandmother’s saga. At one point, Grandma told my Aunt Cindy that she didn’t want to “do this” anymore. That she was ready to die.

From across the country, I listened to these stories and wondered aloud if perhaps my grandmother had lived too long. Doctor-assisted suicide is illegal in Georgia, and even in my home state of Oregon, no physician would have helped her; she was no longer consistently lucid. My point was moot, but Grandma clearly wasn’t going to recover. All that was left of her life was pain, confusion and suffering.

Detail view of a needle used in euthanasiaScience Museum/SSPL/Getty

Give Me Liberty, Give Me Death

Last month, while traveling through Europe, I met a 65-year-old woman in Amsterdam determined never to wind up like my grandmother. Jannie Willemsen is in near-perfect health, but as we sat down at a small café, she showed me papers that laid out the circumstances under which she no longer wants to live: if she’s severely and permanently lame; if she can no longer leave the house on her own; if she’s dependent on others to eat, drink, shower and put on her clothes; if she goes blind or deaf or is suffering from dementia—most of what my grandmother experienced in her final months. “I’m an autonomous person,” Willemsen says. “For me, it seems a disaster not to be able to go out and visit friends, to a concert, to the theater.”

A kind and lively woman, Willemsen is now retired from her career as a biologist. She and her husband signed their power of attorney papers in 1997, just after doctors diagnosed him with intestinal cancer. Neither had any interest in living longer than what felt natural; they wanted to decide for themselves when they would go. Willemsen’s husband died in 2004, not from cancer but a heart problem. He was “lucky,” she says, because he didn’t suffer for long. After his second operation to remove intestinal tumors, his heart stopped. Willemsen had to produce his papers, she says, to convince the doctors not to resuscitate him. “They said, ‘Our first concern is keeping him alive,’” she recalls. But that’s not what he wanted. It’s not what she wants, either.

What she wants, if the circumstances merit it, is doctor-assisted euthanasia, which is booming in the Netherlands. In 2013, according to the latest data, 4,829 people across the country chose to have a doctor end their lives. That’s one in every 28 deaths in the Netherlands, and triple the number of people who died this way in 2002. The Dutch don’t require proof of a terminal illness to allow doctors to “help” patients die. Here, people can choose euthanasia if they can convince two physicians they endure “unbearable” suffering, a definition that expands each year. Residents here can now choose euthanasia if they’re tired of living with Lou Gehrig’s disease, multiple sclerosis, depression or loneliness. The Dutch can now choose death if they’re tired of living.

That act is technically illegal in the Netherlands. Those who aid in euthanasia can face up to four and a half years in prison. But since the early 1970s, the Dutch government has treated assisted suicide much the same way it handles cannabis users: by looking the other way, honoring the public’s overwhelming view that people in the Netherlands should have the right to die. Since 2002, euthanasia has officially been decriminalized here, so long as certain criteria are met.

Other countries are now edging closer to the Dutch model. On February 6, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down a ban on physician-assisted suicide, joining Luxembourg, Belgium and Switzerland on the list of Western countries where euthanasia is fully legal. Switzerland has allowed assisted suicide since 1942, so long as patients “participate” in the administration of life-ending drugs (by ingesting them). The law doesn’t require that a patient be a Swiss national, which has encouraged “suicide tourists” from other countries to book one-way tickets there.

In France, lawmakers are debating a bill that would give doctors the right to place patients into a deep, painless and permanent sleep. In the U.K., legislators are now considering an “assisted dying bill” that would legalize euthanasia for the first time. “I think in 10 or 15 years, a lot of Western European countries are going to have a law, one way or another,” says Fione Zonneveld, communications director for Right to Die-Netherlands, an Amsterdam-based organization that lobbies for the expansion of euthanasia laws. “It’s a snowball.”

The Levenseindekliniek, an 'end-of-life clinic' opened in 2012 in Amsterdam, offering services to patients whose doctors refuse to cooperate with requests for euthanasia or assisted suicide. The suitcase with necessities the GP of the End-of-life clinic' uses when the life of a patient is terminated.Jean Pierre JANS/REA/Redux

Assisted suicide has long been taboo in the U.S., thanks in large part to Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan euthanasia activist who claimed to have assisted in the suicides of at least 130 people. Today, more than 15 years after Kevorkian’s conviction on charges of second-degree murder, Americans are taking a second look. Assisted suicide is legal in Oregon, Washington and Vermont; in New Mexico and Montana, doctors are permitted to prescribe medication to end patients’ lives. Last year, a 29-year-old California woman with terminal brain cancer moved to Oregon so she could legally end her life. A newlywed, Brittany Maynard wrote articles and appeared on television to discuss her decision. Some lauded her as brave; others condemned what they called her cowardice. Since Maynard died on November 1, lawmakers in six states have proposed right-to-die laws, and politicians have promised to do so in eight others. A Gallup poll conducted last May showed that nearly seven in 10 Americans believe physicians should be able to “legally end a patient’s life by some painless means.” The figure has bounced between 65 and 75 percent since 1996, after a steady climb from 36 percent in 1950.

The march toward euthanasia mirrors a trend spanning continents today: a growing number of countries are placing more value on individual freedom. This worries religious leaders, ethicists and disability advocates. Assisted suicide may ease suffering, they say, but it threatens our most vulnerable citizens—the elderly and the disabled, who already struggle to justify their lives. “I like autonomy very much,” says Theo Boer, a professor of ethics at the Theological University Kampen in the Netherlands. “But it seems to have overruled other values, like solidarity, patience, making the best of things. The risk now is that people no longer search for a way to endure their suffering. Killing yourself is the end of autonomy.”

91-one-year old Nel Bolten shows her tattoo on her chest that says: 'Do not reanimate, I am 91+' on Nov. 15, 2014 in The Hague, The Netherlands.Michel Porro/Getty

The Wrong Way to Die

Last year, within the span of a few weeks, both of my parents sent me a story in The Atlantic by American oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel. The headline was “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” My mother added in a note: “I think 80 is my number.”

It wasn’t the first time my parents dropped a morbid little bomb on me. In 2011, my mom emailed me with the subject line “I want to go on record,” and the body read, “If I die at the hand of another, I don’t want anyone taking a life to avenge my death.” My dad used to tell me he wanted to be pushed out on an ice block when it was time for him to go. (I get it, OK? You guys are both going to die someday. Can I go back to watching Breaking Bad now?) They want to be sure I understand that they won’t cling to life when there’s nothing in it worth clinging to.

On suicide, however, they disagree. My father is convinced he’ll find a way to die peacefully, even if by his own hand. “I’ll take some aspirin, drink some fine whiskey and it’ll be done,” he told me recently. My mother insists she will never commit suicide. Her father shot himself in the head when she was 29 so he wouldn’t have to undergo surgery to repair a ruptured vein in his esophagus. “It’s a selfish act,” she told me between tears. “It denies your loved ones the ability to be with you and take care of you.”

Around the world, there are many who don’t see it that way, and they’ve found plenty of like-minded physicians to guide them toward death. But it’s not exactly a comfortable practice. Most doctors find euthanasia counterintuitive to the Hippocratic oath and terrifying. It’s irreversible.

For Bert Keizer, that fear has subsided with time. He’s a Dutch physician who has, in 33 years of practicing medicine, assisted the deaths of dozens of patients—mostly without regret. His first few cases were difficult, he told me in a phone interview, because they made him afraid. Not of prosecution but because of the finality of the act. “The fear is of doing something to a person you know can never be rescinded,” Keizer says. “I never had an easy [death].” But over time, he says, that angst subsided. Keizer has grown increasingly at ease with injecting patients with a lethal dose of sodium thiopental and then a muscle relaxant, knowing he is bringing suffering to an end.

A Dutch cartoon depicts "Right To Die." The cartoon states: "Doctor Sigmund, I consider my life as complete and longing for death." "Oops! Er ... I mean a quiet death."Peter de Wit

When Keizer agrees to help someone, he says it’s usually obvious it’s the right thing to do. The last patient he euthanized was an American expatriate who had lived in the Netherlands for 15 years. The man was 78 and had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage; he was unable to walk and barely able to speak. His wife had died a year earlier, which is why the first time the man asked Keizer for help, the doctor refused. “You have to come to terms with the fact you’re mourning your wife,” he told his patient. Eight months later, the man changed Keizer’s mind. He could no longer wash himself, was incontinent and his condition was unlikely to improve. In summer 2013, Keizer agreed to help the man die. He’s confident that was the right thing to do.

It’s common for a physician to say no to a first request, Keizer says, in part because people sometimes change their minds. “I know we planned on it just before Christmas, but I’d like to hang on until February,” he’s had patients tell him. “If someone says that, as a doctor, you think, Oh my God, what am I doing? And I have to say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but this is the end of the line for me. I’m no longer willing to talk to you about euthanasia.’”

Every doctor who assists a suicide is likely to have at least one case he wishes he could take back. For Keizer, it was a 55-year-old man with lung cancer. The man had already undergone chemotherapy and radiation; oncologists “put him through the paces,” Keizer says, “and at the end of the line he was still going to die. He was furious with his doctors, that they had led him astray all these years.” When the man asked for Keizer’s help 25 years ago, it was out of “an anger against life. I helped him, supplied him with an overdose, but years later I realized it wasn’t right. It was a revengeful act. He died not with a smile on his face but with this bitter expression. That’s not the way you should die.”

Ten thousands protesters demonstrate outside Dutch government buildings as the Upper House of Parliament debates the legalization of euthanasia at The Hague, Netherlands,on April 10, 2001.Serge Ligtenberg/AP

Death Is Contagious

In the Netherlands, there are hundreds of people dying for reasons never anticipated when the law was passed. To understand why, I went to see Zonneveld at Right to Die-Netherlands. Her organization also helps members draft living wills and power of attorney papers, like the ones Willemsen showed me. Taped to the dry erase board in her newly refurbished office is a Dutch comic strip. “I consider my life completed, and want to die,” a patient says. A doctor responds “OK” and produces a pistol. “Oh, no, I meant a soft death,” the patient says. “Ah,” the doctor says, and attaches a silencer to the gun.

Beneath that comic is a chart that shows a huge spike in the group’s membership, from about 120,000 in 2010 to 160,000 today. On average, between 30 and 50 Dutch citizens sign up daily. Members pay 17 euros a year in exchange for end-of-life counseling and help with their documents. Last year, Right to Die-Netherlands used its funding surplus to open a mobile clinic. Twenty-three nurse-doctor teams now stand ready to be dispatched to people’s homes—to dispatch those people.

In the first few years after the Netherlands decriminalized euthanasia in 2002, the number of cases declined. Then, in 2007, the statistics began a steady climb, an average jump of 15 percent a year. Keizer admits he “didn’t see it [this growth] coming.” The situation has put him and other doctors in the country in an ethical quandary. “It’s a feeling of not being quite certain about where you’re going,” he says, though he adds, “We’re talking about 5,000 people out of 140,000. That’s not an epidemic.”

He figures Dutch autonomy has the most to do with the steady increase in assisted suicide. More than 90 percent of Dutch citizens polled say they support the law, though only 20 percent say they would choose to die that way. But euthanasia has in some form been passively allowed here for decades. There had to be other reasons for the surge.

Boer, the ethicist, has some theories. Once a supporter of euthanasia, he’s now one of its most vocal critics. Among the reasons for the euthanasia boom, Boer suggests, is propaganda. Over the past decade, he says, Dutch journalist Gerbert van Loenen has been tracking a series of documentary films that depict euthanasia in a wholly positive light. “They do ask certain questions,” Boer says. “But they systematically ignore most critical questions, so that the general public is presented with an opinion that is completely good, and has no risks. This is contagious.”

Another key factor: It’s getting easier each year to qualify for euthanasia. In the beginning, most of those eligible were terminally ill. Now doctors are helping people die if they no longer want to bear depression, autism, blindness or even being dependent on the care of others. “There are increasing numbers of double euthanasia—one of the partners is terminal and the other partner is care-dependent, they don’t want to live alone,” says Boer. One in 10 of the past 500 dossiers he has read contains some reference to “loneliness,” he adds. “Those are the cases where I have become increasingly uneasy.”

The numbers support Boer. In 2012, 13 patients were euthanized after convincing a doctor they were suffering unbearably from mental illnesses ranging from depression to schizophrenia. The following year, the figure more than tripled, to 44. The number of patients with dementia who killed themselves grew from 43 in 2012 to 97 in 2013. “I’m afraid,” Boer says, “the situation in the Netherlands is out of control.”

In 2005, lawmakers decriminalized another form of euthanasia—for babies. In recent years, the number of cases of newborn euthanasia has declined—because parents are acting sooner. The country introduced a new system of prenatal screening that allows parents to terminate pregnancy if ultrasound results reveal severe congenital malformations within 20 weeks of conception.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian is handcuffed by Oakland County Sheriff deputies after being sentenced in his murder trial in Pontiac, April 13, 1999. Judge Jessica Cooper sentenced Kevorkian to 10-25 years in prison for the second-degree murder conviction for fatally injecting terminally-ill Thomas Youk. Kevorkian has admitted to assisting in 130 suicides.Reuters

The Dutch didn’t stop at babies. Minors in the Netherlands are now allowed to choose euthanasia, too. Children ages 12 to 15 may ask to die if they can get parents’ permission. After age 16, young people can make the decision with only “parental involvement.”

Pediatrician Eduard Verhagen helped establish the Dutch euthanasia guidelines for infants. He says the law should go further. “If we say the cutoff line is age 12, there might be children of 11 years and nine months who are very well capable of determining their own fate and making their own decisions, but they’re not allowed to ask for euthanasia.”

It is hard to imagine an American pediatrician making that argument. But no one envisioned euthanasia in the Netherlands would expand the way it has in the past 13 years. Perhaps the U.S. isn’t far behind.

The Dutch Ministers of Justice Benk Korthals, standing far left, and of Health Els Borst, sitting next to him, defend a new law on euthanasia in the upper house of Parliament in The Hague, April 10, 2001.Serge Ligtenberg/AP

Doubts and Double Suicides

The euthanasia debate is often reduced to horrifying anecdotes. A doctor in Switzerland is under investigation for helping French twins with schizophrenia kill themselves. In Belgium, where assisted suicide cases rose in 2013 by 27 percent to 1,816, a Brussels man arranged the “double euthanasia” of his parents so they no longer had to be alone. My grandmother’s last days, on the other hand, are seemingly easy fodder for assisted suicide supporters. The reason France is discussing euthanasia is partly because of two cases from 2013: both double suicides, both couples in their 80s. One of the couples ended their lives in a luxury hotel in Paris, ordering room service and then asphyxiating themselves by putting plastic bags over their heads. Hotel staff discovered them holding hands, with a note next to them that claimed “the right to die with dignity.” The other couple died in a hospital: The 84-year-old man shot his terminally ill wife in her bed, then turned the gun on himself.

But it’s dangerous, euthanasia opponents say, to view the issue solely from the perspective of a few individuals determined to end their lives. There are great risks associated with allowing doctors to help people check out early, they say. Paramount among them, says Wesley J. Smith, a California lawyer and consultant for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, is that people have forgotten the meaning of suffering. “There is a new view of suffering, that it’s the worst of all possible experiences,” Smith told me in a phone interview, “and that the role of society is to prevent it, as opposed to mitigating it.”

Financial considerations could also creep into discussions that should never involve money. In the Netherlands, as in many developed countries, the number of elderly citizens is expected to increase by 30 to 40 percent in the coming two decades. Euthanasia, critics say, adds a dangerous option in this context: a way for societies to nudge the elderly to quicker deaths.

In the U.S., euthanasia opponents contend the profit-driven health care system and its slow takeover by cost-cutting managed-care companies pose major ethical risks. “There’s a lot of pressure in the system already,” says Diane Coleman, the president and CEO of Not Dead Yet, a disability rights group that lobbies against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia. “We see people denied the care they need for economic reasons. Assisted suicide is the cheapest kind of treatment that could be offered by the system. These pressures are a reason for concern.”

An unidentified man suffering from Alzheimer's disease and who refused to eat sleeps peacefully the day before passing away in a nursing home in the Netherlands.Michael Kooren/Reuters

In 2008, Oregon Medicaid officials sent a letter to Barbara Wagner and Randy Stroup after the couple sought treatment for her lung cancer and his prostate cancer. The state denied their (costly) treatment, but on a list of alternative options, it offered to pay for assisted suicide. The couple went public and the state changed its mind, but Smith contends that the more we embrace euthanasia, the more government officials will back away from paying to treat its weakest members.

Accountability is a huge problem with assisted suicide, critics say. In the Netherlands, a doctor must report the cause of such deaths to the coroner. The case is then reviewed by one of five regional Euthanasia Committees, consisting of a doctor, a lawyer and an ethicist. But that review happens after the patient is dead, and it’s only to determine whether a doctor might be charged with a crime. The review committees have deemed about five cases per year to be illegal since 2002, but no physicians have been prosecuted. “The doctors always promised not to make the same mistake again,” Boer says.

In light of the Dutch experiment, critics say there is no way to legalize assisted suicide without accepting the risk that vulnerable people will be pushed to their deaths—by the health care system, by their own guilt or by abusive family members or caregivers. “We don’t think any set of safeguards is sufficient,” Coleman says. “We need to respond to the desire to die with the message, ‘No, how can we help you? How can we be with you?’ That’s the real compassion people deserve.”

As the euthanasia movement grows, critics in America and beyond are calling for a better approach to the way we end our lives. In November, the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande published Being Mortal, a groundbreaking book that argues for wholesale change in the philosophy of health care, a departure from the American fixation on survival to a focus instead on enabling “well-being.”

As for euthanasia, Gawande is torn. He acknowledges that people “want to end their stories on their own terms,” and that “we inflict deep gouges at the end of people’s lives and then stand oblivious to the harm done.” He also points out that American doctors rightly allow people to refuse food, water, medication and treatments (and therefore end their lives). But the Dutch model is “a measure of failure,” he writes, because it forgets that the ultimate goal should be “not a good death but a good life to the very end. The Dutch have been slower than others to develop palliative care programs that might provide for it. One reason, perhaps, is that their system of assisted death may have reinforced beliefs that reducing suffering and improving lives through other means is not feasible when one becomes debilitated or seriously ill.”

Instead of suicide assistance, Coleman argues, doctors should offer better suicide prevention. When asked why they want to end their lives, people invariably check the same boxes: They’ve lost autonomy, or don’t want to be a burden on friends and family. But allowing physicians to help patients commit suicide is a cheap out, she says. What they should do instead is to help people make their lives livable, even if that’s just for the last few weeks.

“The majority of Jack Kevorkian’s victims were people with disabilities who were not terminal,” Coleman says. “I saw him on TV once say, ‘Well, they need it more, because they’re going to suffer long.’”

Coleman has herself confronted this so-called need. After a lifelong battle with congenital myopathy, a neuromuscular disorder, she was hospitalized in 2012 with acute respiratory failure after a bout with viral pneumonia. On her way to the hospital, one of the EMTs asked her husband if she had a do-not-resuscitate order. “Something about the way they asked the question led him to not only say ‘No’ but also to explain to them that I have a full-time job,” she wrote later. “He felt that this changed their tone.” A month later, Coleman was again hospitalized with chest congestion, and one of her doctors questioned whether she wanted it treated. “He looked at me in my wheelchair with what I’m sure he viewed as sympathy for my condition and a genuine concern to be sure that he knew what I wanted. But I also felt sure that he wouldn’t have spoken that way to a nondisabled woman at age 58.” Again, Coleman said, “I have a full-time job,” and “he backed off, stopped talking and left.”

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, right, speaks to colleagues near his office in Washington on April 6, 2009. Emanuel who was President Obama's special health care adviser opposes legalized euthanasia.Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Redux

Who’s Ready to Die?

The day we met, Jannie Willemsen was on her way to visit an old friend who lives about 40 miles outside of Amsterdam. Each of these gatherings may as well be the first, she tells me. Willemsen’s friend is 87 and suffering from dementia. She remembers nothing of their past encounters, nothing of their four decades of friendship, not even Willemsen’s name. “It’s so nice that you come to visit me,” her friend said when she got there, as she ate in the restaurant of her nursing home and nibbled on chocolates. “She’s still very kind. But she doesn’t recognize me.”

Willemsen dutifully visits anyway, but less often now. If she derives something from these encounters, it’s a reminder that she is determined never to be swallowed by such a haze, never to spend even a day bumbling around a nursing home. “I’m happy there is an end of life,” she says. “Some people believe God has given us life, and that he should be the one to take it. I think when you get older and older, there comes a time when you don’t feel at home in this world, where you don’t understand it any longer, where you can’t explain it.”

My grandma reached that point, but it’s not how I remember her. Once, on a sticky summer day in 1998, I surprised her, sneaking over to her century-old Craftsman house in Calhoun, Georgia. I was 21 and hadn’t seen her in a decade. How funny would it be, I thought, for me to walk up her driveway unannounced? I was halfway through my first internship at a small newspaper in Alabama, only a few hours’ drive to her place, so one Saturday I printed out a set of MapQuest directions, journeyed across the border, parked down the block and sauntered toward the screen door to the back porch, full of mirth and mischief, anticipating the stunned look on Grandma’s face. Would she even recognize me? As I went to knock, she emerged, shot me half a glance and said, “I have to run to the store. I’ll see you in a bit.” She walked right past me, got in her car and drove off.

This is how I will always remember my grandmother, as a tough woman to rattle. I wasn’t there when she died and didn’t participate in the decisions my family had to make about her final days. It was easy for me to judge from afar that Grandma had lived too long. My mom didn’t see it that way.

An unidentified man suffering from Alzheimer's disease and who refused to eat sleeps peacefully the day before passing away in a nursing home in the Netherlands.Michael Kooren/Reuters

“It made me so angry at the time, when people suggested that she was ready to die and I should just give up on her,” she recently told me. “Those last days were brutally hard, but rich with meaning. I taught her to knit again, to try and keep her busy and take her mind off the boredom and discomfort of being confined to a wheelchair. One afternoon we went through her old photo albums, and she told me about her high school days, remembering the names of people and events. It was amazing, and I’ll never forget it.”

My mother says she would never have chosen euthanasia; not for her mom, not for herself. But she had to make difficult decisions throughout my grandmother’s final months. After Grandma stopped eating on her own, my mom and her siblings decided against feeding her intravenously, but they didn’t reject fluids. ”I’m not going to let my mom die of dehydration,” she told a doctor.

Someday I may be faced with the same impossible choices about my own parents. Both recently turned 70. 

The former president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, has warned that incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan may be “going for broke” to hold on to the presidency in what would amount to a “coup”, after publicly endorsing opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari for the first time.

Nigerian critics of People’s Democratic Party (PDP) leader Jonathan have accused the security forces of a “coup against the constitution” by delaying the presidential election - originally scheduled for 14 February to 28 March. The vote was postponed by the electoral commission

who argued that there was an inadequate security presence available for the election.

The decision was made in light of an announcement by the country’s security services that it would begin a six-week operation against radical Islamist group Boko Haram on the same day that the election was to begin.

Last year, Obasanjo, former leader of the PDP, wrote a damning letter accusing Jonathan of failing to tackle a number of Nigeria’s most prominent problems, such as corruption, oil theft and kidnapping, but he has now expressed concern that the Nigerian leader will do whatever it takes to hold on to power.

“I sincerely hope that the president is not going for broke and saying ‘Look dammit, it’s either I have it or nobody has it’. I hope that we will not have a coup... I hope we can avoid it,” Obasanjo said in an interview with the Financial Times in Nairobi this week.

“It is a question of leadership - political and military. I think you need to ask Jonathan how he let the army go to this extent. Many things went wrong: recruitment went wrong; morale went down; motivation was not there; corruption was deeply ingrained; and welfare was bad.”

Obasanjo was the leader of the PDP from 1999 to 2007 after acting as a military leader for the country between 1976 and 1979. However, relations with his fellow party member have frayed since Jonathan assumed office in 2010 as the two men clashed over how to handle a number of issues.

Obasanjo’s dissatisfaction with Jonathan has seemingly led the former Nigerian ruler to endorse the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, according to an NGO worker familiar with the situation on the ground in Nigeria, who didn’t want to be named.

“The fact that Obasanjo has endorsed Buhari suggests that the decision to postpone the election may have pushed him over the edge and pushed him into the Buhari camp,” they said.

In reaction to Obasanjo’s endorsement across party lines, Buhari told CNN that it would boost support for his party ahead of elections. ‘’It will certainly bring more supporters to us, and for those sitting on the fence, because Gen. Obasanjo is highly respected personality in Nigeria, and as far as Nigerian nation, there is no serious issue that can be discussed without people seeking his opinion and listening to it.”

Buhari also condemned the Jonathan administration and the military’s failure to tackle the Boko Haram insurgency, blaming a “misappropriation of funds” for the operation to defeat. “Corruption will kill Nigeria”, he added.

The APC leader, like Obasanjo, is himself a former military ruler of Nigeria and this may have provided the basis for the endorsement, says John Campbell, former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and editor of the Nigeria Security Tracker - a tool which monitors violence in the west African country. He adds that Obasanjo’s criticism of Jonathan was to be expected but his talk of a potential coup is not a view that’s been expressed by the elite before.

“Relations between the two [Obasanjo and Jonathan] have gotten progressively worse. Obasanjo has gone public twice urging Jonathan not to run in 2015. His endorsement of Buhari is unsurprising,” said Campbell. “What is surprising is Obasanjo talking openly about the potential for a coup, that is something. Why would you say it [if you did not think it]?”

The PDP party has won every election since Nigeria transitioned from successive military rulers to a democratic voting system in 1999 and is the favourite heading into the 28 March election.

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

Labour is endangering its chance of election victory by disowning the party’s 13 years in power under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, warns the man seen by many supporters as the main opposition party’s lost leader. Ahead in most polls, but narrowly, and often within a margin of error, tensions inside the party are breaking out on to the front pages: should Labour be crusading to reform capitalism or reassuring business? Is it in favour of austerity or against spending cuts? Should it sound a radical note to tempt back voters splintering off to the left or appear a sensible government-in-waiting? And is Ed Miliband, party leader, up the job?

As recently as November, grandees were sounding out Alan Johnson, the former postman and trade union leader who held five cabinet posts during the New Labour era, to take over. He said no. Unlike his party, Johnson has successfully reinvented himself in opposition, as an author. This Boy, a memoir of the shocking poverty of his childhood in the slums of West London, has been on the bestseller lists for much of the last two years, and was awarded the political book prize named after his early literary hero George Orwell. But he remains the man some Labour MPs would rather see lead than Miliband. Polling company YouGov found that Johnson at the helm would have a modest positive approval rating with voters in an era where all three main party leaders have negative ratings in double figures.

Rushing in from the icy air of Southam Street, where he was brought up, Johnson, currently the darling of literary festivals and Labour’s frantic last-minute fundraising dinners, grins at the transformation of his old neighbourhood.The pub in which we meet was once the corner boozer where, Johnson recalls, he and the other kids milling about outside would yell in through a side door: “Dad, Mum says come, your dinner’s ready!” A bricks and mortar embodiment of London’s relentless gentrification, it has become an expensively-refurbished grill, open for less than a week.

Condemned as unfit for human habitation even when the Johnson family was living in it, the terraced housing is long gone. But traces of his childhood remain. On the pub wall outside, a blue plaque commemorates a notorious racially-motivated attack, witnessed by Johnson’s terrified mother Lily in 1959, that ended in murder.

The young Alan’s first political lessons came from his mother’s outrage at fascist leader Oswald Mosley, preaching division on these streets in that year’s general election (he lost, badly). Now he sees a broader message in the determination of her generation to battle its way out of squalor and deprivation. “They’re not ostensibly political books,” he muses of the two (soon to be three) volumes of his life story. “But if they say anything, it’s that in that dreadful postwar period, people like my mother who had been through her whole life with war or the threat of war, they were determined to build a fairer society. So the welfare state, the NHS, all arose out of that, and a real consensus politically that that was a good thing.”

Johnson warns that the inequalities so obvious today in Notting Hill, where millionaire ex-pats rub shoulders with market stall holders, as well as a public culture of winners and losers have undermined some of the hard-won social progress of the late 20th century. “Everyone can feel that it’s going backwards, that there’s an elite up at the top. And this is what Ed put his finger on.” The huge multiples of ordinary workers’ salaries top executives award themselves are, he adds, “obscene” and must be curbed.

Alan Johnson, the health secretary speaks during the Labour Party spring conference in 2008.Darren Staples/Reuters

Careful loyalty is maintained at all times – frustratingly so, say his would-be backers. Johnson argues Miliband has identified the key modern challenge the public wants addressed: fairness. “We really are at a watershed election. And Ed can say, look, there’s a better way, there’s a decent way, there’s a more equitable way, and we have to get back to people sharing the country’s wealth, and give some hope.” But then a lament: “He has stopped articulating it . . . His big fear is that we get clobbered as deficit deniers.”

This is the difficult trick Johnson says Labour’s leadership must pull off: to rescue a reputation for economic competence by contesting the Tory version of recent history, in which Gordon Brown, as chancellor of the exchequer and then prime minister, is portrayed as a wrecker. But they must also present an alternative vision to the relentless public service cuts promised by the current Conservative-led administration. “It’s the holy grail of every opposition,” observes professor Tim Bale of Queen Mary University of London, author of a new book on the Labour party. “On the one hand, to show that you are going to deliver the radical change people are crying out for at the same time as convincing them you can run the show.”

With fewer than 90 days until polling day on 7 May, Miliband has little time to benefit from Johnson’s advice – and he may be unlikely to listen. This, after all, is the leader who narrowly gained control in a 2010 contest where every candidate was straining to show they would distance the party – “move on” was the chosen phrase – from the Blair-Brown years.

New Labour, the reinvented party that swept to power in 1997 with a huge governing majority and a halo of hope hovering over its leader Tony Blair’s head, is now seen as a liability as well as an asset. By the end of that era, and in spite of three election victories, the Iraq invasion had contaminated Blair’s legacy. Moreover, the 2010 election, which delivered a parliament where no party had a majority, turned out to have only one clear result: Gordon Brown’s premiership had been rejected by the voters.

Immaculate in the sharp suit and tie that mark out his lasting adherence to the “Mod” dress code of his teenage years, the 64-year-old “AJ”, as he is known around Westminster, comes to meet me straight from watching the verbal jousting at PMQs between the Labour leader and Conservative prime minister David Cameron.

“Did you see it?” he asks, picking over the merits of Cameron’s recurring jokes about Labour profligacy and Labour’s coordinated attempts to portray the PM as the defender of hedge fund plutocrats and tax exiles. He clearly enjoys the combat, and the gossip that lubricates the political world, but anxiety constantly resurfaces about achieving Labour’s twin tasks – to lay out a radical, reforming programme while reminding the public that it can be a responsible party of government. “If the public is to trust us again, we’ve got to defend our record”. Professor Bale thinks it is too late, after four and a half years spent disavowing the last Labour government, and allowing the Conservatives to portray them as wreckers of the economy: “They’ve sold the pass on that,” he warns.

The leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, speaks at the party conference in Manchester, September 23, 2014.Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

But in the last weeks before the official election campaign begins, Johnson is touring constituencies Labour hopes to hold or take, delivering the speech he says Miliband should give at least once before the 7 May polling day – a celebration of what was achieved during the Blair-Brown era for an audience of campaigners who, he says, often can’t remember what Labour did with power. “Who can blame them?” he shrugs. “I go around the country and make this speech and it’s my little riff: here’s what we did. Here’s what we did on pensioner poverty, on child poverty, here’s what we did on workers’ rights, minimum wage, the right to paid holidays. And it gets a great reaction.”

Tacking left in response to the rise of the SNP and the Green party (“all that hippy commune stuff”) or the success of insurgent socialists elsewhere in Europe – Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, has to be resisted, according to Johnson. Stephan Shakespeare, YouGov’s chief executive believes his research shows left wing voters would be more attracted to Labour, and could decide the outcome in crucial seats if the party did try to sound more like the continental parties of the left: anti-austerity, anti-war and anti-big business. “Britain is not Greece,” Shakespeare admits. “But large parts of Britain feel let down by the establishment. Miliband is offering neither New Labour nor traditional Red Labour. He’s surely not capable of the first, but he does at least have a genuine feeling for the second.” Johnson disagrees, arguing that UK Labour must commit to centre-left solutions and clearly signal the end of any instinct to splurge on spending: “Make it clear we recognise we’re not in those times any more . . . Be very clear about being able to do things that are not just throwing money at it.”

Exposed to the Trotskyite machinations and accusations of “false consciousness” employed by Communists in the trade union movement during the 1960s and 70s, Johnson, although he admired some of the individuals and found himself “pulled one way and another”, concluded early on that the far left were against freedom and “away with the fairies”. Now, he sees disengagement and revolutionary Left romanticism as the enemy of a fairer society. “The young are taking a kicking not because of how they vote but because they don’t vote”. And he believes the rise of protest parties calls for a defence of parliamentary democracy. He recently described politics as “a noble profession”.

Johnson’s background is unusual in the current House of Commons – largely self-educated, he dropped out of school at the age of 15 to stack shelves in a supermarket and perform with this band – so this defence of an out-of-favour system sounds less like special pleading by the chosen few. Against preserving the unelected House of Lords, and in favour of changing the voting system – “I think First Past The Post is crap” – Johnson is as unstuffy as they come and a touchstone for Labour supporters: “He’s the real thing,” a party member tells me later. And the oblivious local hero attracts many discreet admiring looks on our chilly walk back from pub to the tube station. But he refuses to express regret at never going for the top job. In the past he has described the idea he could have replaced Gordon Brown before the last election as “a shitty thing to do”.

While promoting his book two years ago, however, he let slip that if Labour and the Lib Dems had managed to thrash out a coalition deal during the frantic five days of three-way negotiations after the 2010 election, he had decided to put himself forward as a temporary prime minister. So this coming May, in the event of the hung parliament predicted by both the psephologists and the bookmakers, could a new pact succeed? He’s cagey. “Difficult, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”

This Boy is remarkable for its lack of bitterness or self-pity. And pondering the premiership that might have been, there is no wistfulness. “We could have made it work instead of opting for the easy life of opposition.” With Labour grappling with the obstacles that still lie in the way of taking power, opposition, for all that it has given Johnson in his new life as a writer, does not look easy at all.

Britain’s Labour party must refuse to take the blame for the 2008 financial crisis and defend the party’s record in government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to avoid having the Conservatives steal the forthcoming general election from under the party’s nose, former home secretary Alan Johnson has said.

In a wide-ranging interview with Newsweek Europe’s political editor Miranda Green, the former postman who has held five cabinet posts praises Labour leader Ed Miliband’s focus on equality and fairness, but laments how the party has renounced its history.

Johnson is critical of the fact that Miliband and Balls have not effectively dispelled the idea that Labour, and more specifically Gordon Brown, are responsible for the 2008 recession and following economic crisis. “It was a global financial meltdown, not a recession made in the UK by the Labour party,” he says. “That is one thing the two Eds are not getting across, they are letting it right past. This big lie about where the recession came from, you can’t ignore it. So they have to try and counter that, because the election will be about the economy.”

He also acknowledges that Miliband has increasingly fallen silent about the need to push for economic equality in Britain: “We really are at a watershed election. And Ed can say... we have to get back to people sharing the country’s wealth, and give some hope. [But] he has stopped articulating it… His big fear is that we get clobbered as deficit deniers.”

The general election, to be held on May 7, is the closest in modern history with Labour and the Conservatives almost neck-and-neck in the polls and a number of smaller parties such as the UK Independence Party (Ukip), the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Green Party playing havoc with the first-past-the-post electoral system famous for delivering strong majority governments.

Johnson believes that victory in the election is within Labour’s reach, but says it must offer realistic centre-left solutions to inequality and avoid being dragged off to the left to fight the challenge from the SNP [Scottish National Party] and the Greens, both of whom are splitting the left-wing vote and possibly enabling a Conservative win.

However, Johnson sees it as a balancing act where Labour’s recent record of 13 years in government from 1997 to 2010 has to be reclaimed and celebrated: if the plan works, Labour under Ed Miliband could manage to spend only one term in opposition. “He needs a radical programme that doesn’t divorce us from being a party of government”, he says.

Tony Blair has already warned, while promising to use his own efforts where he can to see Ed Miliband elected, that if Labour decides to pursue traditional Labour themes as its election strategy, without reaching out beyond its core vote, then it can expect ‘a traditional result’ – a Conservative win.

But pressure has grown to see off parties to the left, principally the buoyant Scottish nationalists but also a newly confident Greens, by tailoring the main campaign messages and policy platforms to tempt their voters back to Labour.

The full interview with Alan Johnson can be found in the most recent edition of Newsweek. 

British prime minister David Cameron is either “lying or stupid” to say that he didn’t know about allegations that Stephen Green’s HSBC subsidiary was involved in advising its wealthy clientele on how best to avoid tax when he was appointed as trade minister to the coalition government in January 2011, according to an influential tax expert.

A cache of files, originally leaked by systems engineer Hervé Falciani in 2007, revealed that HSBC’s Swiss private bank - which Green oversaw - had assisted clients with the withdrawal of large amounts of foreign currency and the concealment of ‘black’ accounts from domestic tax authorities, among other practices. The files were handed to Britain’s tax authority, Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) in May 2010, eight months before Green was appointed to a government position by Cameron.

Richard Murphy, the director of Tax Research UK who campaigns against tax avoidance and for financial reform, launched the scathing attack on Cameron following the Conservative leader’s denial that he had knowledge of the allegations when he was confronted by leader of the opposition Labour party Ed Miliband during Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday.

Murphy, who in 2013 was ranked seventh in the International Tax Review’s Global Tax 50, a list which details the “who’s who of the tax world”, published a blog post yesterday in which he said that all involved in the HSBC scandal were either “lying or stupid”. When asked if this extends to Cameron, he said: “I think he is both. The answer is that he is both. He is lying and did know and he is stupid enough to believe that we think he didn’t know. We’re not.”

“Do I think he [Cameron] knew about [the allegations]? Yes. Do I think Stephen Green should have disclosed it to him? Yes. Do I think that he did disclose it to him? Yes. Do I think in the circumstances that they therefore decided to ignore it? Yes. How could it not have been discussed? It’s impossible to think it wasn’t discussed.”

On Tuesday, a government spokesman for Cameron told reporters: “No government minister had any knowledge that HSBC may have been involved in wrongdoing in regard to its Swiss banking arm prior to the reports of the last couple of days.”

However, Murphy finds it is “staggering” that the government can claim that no minister had any knowledge of HSBC’s potential involvement in wrongdoing as the accusations against Green were readily available on the internet which a simple background check, before he was appointmented minister, would surely have flagged to the prime minister or his team.

“It was perfectly easy for me to find out. So any proper vetting process for Stephen Green should have identified this information and drawn it to their attention. You only had to do a Google search at the time to find this out,” he adds.

The tax expert’s comments come as prominent Tory donor Lord Fink is embroiled in a row with Miliband over his tax affairs. Fink had accused the opposition leader of making “defamatory” statements regarding his tax arrangement but has dropped his threat to sue Miliband after telling the Evening Standard that the definition of tax avoidance is so extensive that “everyone does it”.

Lord Green was HSBC’s chief executive before becoming the chairman of the bank from May 2006 to December 2010.

HSBC has defended itself against the accusations that it helped its clients evade tax, saying that even though it was “accountable for past control failures”, it had now “fundamentally changed”.

Lord Green was not available for comment.

Astronomical sales of a tiny figurine of the Protestant reformation figure Martin Luther, have confounded its maker, Playmobil, by becoming the fastest-selling Playmobil figure of all time.

The German toy manufacturer announced this week that the first edition of 34,000 pieces sold out in less than 72 hours, forcing the company to urgently request its factory in Malta to produce more of the so-called “little Luthers”. Fans have been warned that the next batch will not be available until the end of April.

The plastic toy, complete with a quill, German-language bible and cheery grin, was produced for the German and Nuremberg tourist boards and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria, as Germany gears up to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant reformation in 2017.

The tourist board says they have sold 95% of the toy within Germany, although there has been interest overseas, including prospective buyers from Spain, Italy and Sweden.

Luther was the founding father of the Protestant reformation in Germany - he challenged the authority of the Catholic pope and translated the Bible from Latin into German for the first time.

The intense demand for the toy has confounded Playmobil, with a spokesperson describing the success as “a big mystery [and] a huge surprise.”

The only other German figure which matches Luther’s strong sales is the German painter and artist Albrecht Düreranother, whose toy sold 80,000 pieces over three years.

Astid Mühlmann, director of the governmental office preparing for the 500th anniversary of the start of the reformation, thinks that education might be behind the toy’s popularity. “There’s quite an interest in looking back to our history. Parents want to make sure their children grow up knowing who he is because he had such an impact on how society evolved in Europe.

“I’m very happy with the news”, she continued, “because it shows people are interested in history. On the one hand, Martin Luther was a totally normal person in the 16th century who believed in demons and witches and was afraid of them. He shared the belief of the majority of the people of the time.

“On the other hand he had very modern ideas. He believed every person had the right to an education, including women and girls. In this aspect, he was a very 21st century man.”

The Russian armed forces sent 50 tanks, along with a succession of artillery and military supplies to territories held by pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, while the leaders of the two countries were debating a ceasefire for the region last night, a Ukrainian defence and security spokesman has said.

While Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko and Russia’s Vladimir Putin met with French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Minsk, the capital of neighbouring Belarus, to discuss bringing an end to the violence in Ukraine’s east which has killed over 5,000 people since last Spring, the Russian armed forces sent reinforcements to rebels in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine's 'anti-terror' operation against the separatists in the east told Ukrainian daily newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda.

“Regardless of Russian officials’ claims that there are no Russian military … or servicemen in Ukraine, in the early hours of 12 February, in the area near the border town of Izvaryne, some 50 tanks crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border,” Lysenko said.

According to Lysenko the tanks were followed by a delivery of 40 Russian multiple rocket launcher systems of at least three different kinds - Grad, Uragan and Smerch - as well as around 40 armoured personnel carriers (APCs).

The delivery was allegedly made from the Russian side of the border into a rebel-held sector of Ukraine’s Luhansk region near the city of Krasnodon, while Poroshenko and Putin were in the midst of last night’s 16 hour-long ceasefire talks - the longest talks of Putin’s presidency according to Russian news agency Itar-Tass.

Meanwhile a spokesman for Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Ukrainian TV channel 112 Kiev is concerned the separatists may use the ceasefire to regroup and redistribute their forces.

The leaders of Russia and Ukraine agreed a ceasefire that is to take come into effect this Sunday.

A spokesperson for the president of Ukraine declined to comment on Lysenko’s statement, but told Newsweek the president was due to discuss the state of the ceasefire in a briefing in Brussels “in the nearest future”. Plans for the meeting were pushed back due to the unprecedented length of last night’s discussions in Minsk.

However, some cast doubt on the claims. Petr Topychkanov, associate of the Carnegie Endowment for world peace, highlighted that “reports about these deliveries are still to be confirmed” and said that such a delivery would likely have proved a sticking point during the talks.

There have been reports of Russian military support for the separatists in Eastern Ukraine since the summer, despite the Kremlin’s claims that its presence in the region is only humanitarian and any Russian soldiers are there on a voluntary basis. Most recently Jens Stoltenberg, secretary general of NATO, asked Russia to cease its support for the militants in eastern Ukraine last month.

The Russian armed forces were unavailable to respond to allegations they were reinforcing the separatists during the Minsk meeting.

A spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel told press the Minsk negotiations had provided “hope” of ceasing the violence in eastern Ukraine, while Putin told journalists that he and his counterparts had “managed to agree on the main issues”.

When Mitt Romney announced last week that he would not embark on a third run for the White House, it was virtually impossible to miss. Above-the-fold headlines, breaking news alerts and countless online sources carried the news. After the announcement, political junkies could satisfy their appetites well into the weekend, feasting on delicious broadcast, cable and social media commentary about the causes and consequences of Romney’s decision.

For the most part, these circumstances characterize how national politics gets covered today. They also stand in stark contrast to an important shift in the media landscape happening at the local level. While the number of outlets covering national politics has expanded dramatically, local news organizations have struggled to stay afloat. Newspapers across the country have folded, reporting resources have been slashed and most online sites specializing in local news have failed to gain traction.

Given that local newspapers are virtually the only venue where local politics—such as House races—receive meaningful attention, the impoverishment of local news carries profound implications. Most notably, as we demonstrate in a forthcoming Journal of Politics article, it drives down citizens’ political knowledge and participation. Our findings also suggest that polarization, by leaving so few House contests competitive, may make it more difficult for citizens to hold their local officials accountable.

How do we arrive at these conclusions? We identified the largest-circulating newspaper within each of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. Then, we conducted an in-depth content analysis of U.S. House campaign coverage in the month leading up to the 2010 general election. Finally, we merged our newspaper data with survey data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

Based on our analysis of more than 6,000 news stories and a national survey of nearly 50,000 citizens, we found—even after accounting for campaign spending, education, partisanship and other factors that contribute to a voter’s ability to make judgments about politicians—that reductions in news meant declines in engagement. Voters in districts with less campaign coverage were less able to evaluate their House incumbent and not as capable of identifying the candidates vying for office as liberal or conservative. They were also less likely to report that they planned to vote in the House election.

If citizen knowledge and participation depend on the media environment, then how can the news be enriched? Numerous scholars and observers have suggested various remedies: overhauling journalistic practices, boosting reporting resources by establishing partnerships with foundations and nonprofits and finding innovative benefactors with deep pockets. These efforts could not hurt, and they might even help improve political journalism.

But our data indicate that the biggest driver of the decline in local news is the competitiveness of elections. Competitive races saw approximately three times as many stories (about one every day) as landslide contests did. When elections are uncompetitive, the media ignore them because they simply aren’t newsworthy. When contests are nail-biters, they generate more coverage. Thus, the most effective route to reinvigorating local campaign coverage—and improving citizen engagement—is likely a renaissance in the competitiveness of House elections.

Such a renaissance seems unlikely any time soon because the decline in competitiveness is principally a product of party polarization. By the 2014 midterms, only about 4 percent of House races were considered toss-ups. In nearly all cases, the composition of a district allows us to predict quite accurately how a race will end before the campaign even begins.

We’ve known for quite some time that polarization hinders Congress’ ability to pass legislation, and that it can generate ill will between partisans in the public. Now it is also clear that, by often producing uncompetitive elections that impoverish the political information environment, polarization chips away at the foundation of democracy by making it more difficult for citizens to gain the information that would help them hold their local elected officials accountable. This is all the more problematic in an era in which there are fewer and fewer local news sources to serve as the public’s watchdog.

Jennifer L. Lawless is Nonresident Senior Fellow, Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. This article first appeared on the Brookings Institution website. Danny Hayes is Associate Professor of Political Science, The George Washington University.

The Italian mafia are “back in business” and silencing the country’s journalists with a vigor last seen in the 1990s, according to Antoine Héry, the head of the World Press Freedom Index, part of the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders (RWB).

A total of 43 cases of physical aggression and seven cases of arson attacks on journalists’ homes and cars were reported during the first 10 months of 2014 according to figures provided by Ossigeno per l’Informazione, an Italian NGO that monitors freedom of information.

Héry believes that Italy’s problem with the mafia is “increasing in intensity,” particularly in the north and south of the country where he says the growing number of attacks could be a sign of the mafia “starting to threaten journalists again as they did in the 90s, a time in which it was very violent to stand against them”.

The country ranked 73rd in the 180 country index on global freedom of expression in 2014 conducted by Reporters Without Borders, falling 24 places from 49th in 2013. The index cited an increase in mafia activity as well as defamation lawsuits as the reasons for the drop.   

The RWB website catalogs many of the attacks and threats made towards media. One story describes how in December 2014  investigative journalist Guiseppe ‘Pino’ Maniaci found his two dogs hanged, just days after his car was torched - allegedly by the Sicilian mafia. Maniaci runs an anti-mafia TV station Telejato and is described as an “information hero” by RWB.

Another example is that of Federica Angeli, a journalist who works at the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica. Angeli was put under police protection in 2013 after receiving death threats for investigating the organized crime families of Ostia, Rome. In November 2014 Angeli’s children were sent death threats via their mother’s Facebook page.

The index indicated that as well as the increase in mafia violence, defamation lawsuits are also to blame for the lack of journalistic freedom in Italy. “When a journalist knows that they could face a lawsuit between  €5,000 and €60,000, they may have more of a tendency to self-censor,” Héry says. He added that although defamation lawsuits are brought against the media in other EU countries, the increasing number of those carried out in Italy means that the problem for journalists in the country is much worse.

“Certainly the press is not as free in Italy as it is in England. You’re really worried about what you write,”  Nick Farrell, a journalist living in Italy says. However, he argues that both the mafia and defamation laws have been causing problems for journalists in the country for a long time, rather than being new issues.

The number of defamation lawsuits rose drastically in 2014 - from 84 in 2013 to 129 in 2014, most of which Héry says were filed by elected public figures like Pasquale Scavone, the mayor of the city of Tito who sued the website Basilicata24 in April after it posted a video about the dangers of the city’s drinking water. “The urgency is now critical”, Héry warns.

“We are all waiting for the legal reform, but for now the problem remains,” he said, adding that the solution regarding abuse lies with the state. “Justice should be done, and there should be a proper investigation led by the police each time a journalist is threatened.”

Italy’s ranking was the lowest is has been since being included on the index in 2002, falling below Hati (53rd) and Georgia (69th) and Senegal (71st). 

Short shelf lives, fickle consumers and increasingly savvy investors have contributed to falling share prices in online social gaming companies like Zynga and King, making them unattractive ventures, according to industry analysts.

Zynga, the company behind farming simulation social network game Farmville, has seen a steep decline in its share prices and a steady fall in its daily average users from 2012 to 2014.

Zynga’s share prices in March peaked at $5.79 a share, but by January 2015 they had fallen to $2.32. These figures correspond with a drop of 46 million in their daily average users from 2012 to 2014.

Similarly, creators of Candy Crush Saga, King Digital Entertainment PLC, who went public on the stock market in March 2014, saw their share prices peak in July at $22.53, before plummeting to $11.25 by October. They currently sit at around $14 a share.

Paul Jackson, practice leader in digital media at independent analyst and consultancy firm Ovum, said he believes investors are becoming wiser to the level of unpredictability and uncertainty in the market.

“You can build a social game and you can put it out there and enjoy success. But once it’s listed and has significant investments on board, suddenly you’re not making any money from that key game that may have made money in the quarter before, and that becomes an issue.

“What people fail to do is build a second and a third game. Zynga, King and even Rovio sold themselves on the back of their hit games, Farmville, Candy Crush, Angry Birds, but the problem comes a year later when no one’s playing that game anymore, or their two or three follow-up games.

“In the medium to long term it is extremely off-putting to investors. The field changes so quickly that success a year or 18 months ago was in a different marketplace to what we’re in now.”

He went on to compare the commodity to investments in the movie studio portfolio: “The level of uncertainty is in same ballpark, but it’s greater in social gaming, as even if you’re an independent movie studio or TV station, you’ll probably make some money back as you put things in cinema or on Amazon.

“With social games you can put it out there and it can make literally nothing, or not even enough to pay off development costs. It’s an all or nothing type gamble. Investors are now asking firms for their portfolio of games in the pipeline over the next couple of years and asking them how many of those do they think will be successful and have good return.”

Michael Bilbe, a trader at State Street Corporation, an international financial services holding company, said he believes the trouble with these companies from an investment point of view is that they are subject to consumer ‘fads’.

“The app market is very fickle, and games like Candy Crush are easily replaced by the next popular game,” he said.

“If you compare these social online gaming companies to more established online companies like Google, who have from the outset established themselves as an integral part of how people use the internet, they have a considerably more sustainable business model.

“That is not to say that they will not continue to innovate and develop demand, but with any social-based corporation the market can change very quickly.”

King’s Candy Crush Saga remains the third highest grossing app, drawing in an estimated $978,065 in daily revenue. Sitting at fourth is Candy Crush Soda Saga, King’s follow-up to the successful predecessor. Along with Supercell, creators of the game Clash of Clans, the company has dominated the app charts over the past two years.

However, according to Jack Kent, mobile director at global information firm IHS, the quarterly revenue generated by King has declined. It peaked during Q3 of 2014 at $621 million, but has dropped year on year to $514 million in Q3 of 2014. In turn, the quarterly revenue generated by Candy Crush has dropped from over 75% to 51% - a probable reason for its declining share value.

"When titles naturally wean and lose popularity they face a real challenge keeping users engaged and being able to bring users with them onto a new game," said Mr Kent.

“We haven’t seen many companies be able to replicate that success and build a catalogue of hit games.”

However, Dr Nicholas Hirschey, an assistant professor of finance at London Business School, sees a brighter future for social gaming investment.

“Social gaming is not inherently unattractive to investors who see it as part of the mobile space, which is a new industry with huge opportunities," he said.

“While social gaming firms have struggled transitioning to a repeatable business model, their relatively large market caps indicate investors think there’s a lot of potential.”

He observed that, despite the fact King’s stock is down by around 25% since its Initial Public Offering (IPO), this is not that unusual.

“There’s a lot of research showing firms underperform within the broader market following the IPO,” he said.

Wouldn’t it be great if the U.S. had a heat map of the entire financial system that could alert it to vulnerabilities and approaching calamities before a global crisis struck?

While members of Congress squabble over a move in the House to erode provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a 64-year-old Wall Street veteran and MIT-trained economist named Richard Bookstaber is quietly working on an ambitious project that aims to do just that. “Most people in government don’t even know this is going on right now,” Bookstaber tellsNewsweek of his work at the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research (OFR).

Using what are called “agent-based models,” Bookstaber’s project focuses on how the actions of individual agents—such as banks or traders on Wall Street—create chain reactions that cascade through a much wider ecosystem in ways that can threaten the global economy. “One of the earlier and simpler inspirations for agent-based modeling was looking at the migrating of birds,” Bookstaber says. “It’s not like they decide, ‘Hey guys, let’s make this V-shaped pattern.’ The birds are acting relative to the bird next to them. They’re in these patterns that can change in a second, and they just shift in a different direction. If you have a bird acting based on what the other birds are doing, you get this very complex, group-based behavior.”

In the wake of the financial crisis, agent-based models, or ABMs, were highlighted for their potential to help stave off the next disaster by the National Science Foundation and MIT, where Bookstaber earned his doctorate. However, their pecuniary applications remained in embryonic stages until recently. After more than three years of tweaking his prototype, Bookstaber says he’s hoping to start running live data by the end of this year: “This is a project we believe could have huge value not just for the U.S. financial system but, as we collect more data and test and improve our models, the global financial system as a whole.”

Often compared to a storm-warning system for the financial markets, the OFR was created by Dodd-Frank to be Washington’s brain trust for independent and rigorously researched financial data. Crucially, the OFR has subpoena power to seek out whatever information it needs, public or private—including that from banks and hedge funds—to build its models so it can alert the nation’s economic policymakers to impending threats.

Of course, models have been used before—and failed. Many financial models on Wall Street were treated as sacrosanct until the collapse of monster banks like Bear Stearns in 2008. But agent-based modeling has been effective in everything from tracking the spread of infectious diseases like SARS to forecasting the traffic patterns of automobiles and airplanes. And unlike the financial modeling that caused U.S. policymakers to miss the warning signs several years ago, agent-based models are designed to capture turbulent market features like bubbles and price crashes with built-in feedback mechanisms that can magnify even minor events when herd mentality takes over.

“Remember, some people initially saw the financial crisis as controllable and happening in hinterland markets,” Bookstaber says. “It was the storm in the Caribbean, with people saying, ‘What do we care? It’s so far away.’ And that is really the key lesson we learned from 2008. It wasn’t one thing, it was many things.… Mapping the feedback and how it worked its way through the system—this is why we need these dynamic agent-based models.”

Agent-based models are the antithesis of the models on which Wall Street, the U.S. government and central banks relied in the run-up to the financial crisis, which took for granted—wrongly—that markets are efficient and tend toward equilibrium, even after a panic. A House of Representatives hearing in 2010 found that a dependency on the models used by the Federal Reserve, called “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium” models, might not have been very shrewd.

So how do agent-based models work? Bookstaber’s simulation model uses parallel processing to map out possible scenarios in what he calls “crisis dynamics.” The model assigns “decision rules” to all the key players that reflect their priorities, financial positions and real-life behavior patterns, taking into account their interdependent relationships, the wide range of actions they might take under various circumstances, and the probable results of those actions. He says, “We’re looking to develop a kind of weather service, pre-shock, that asks, ‘Will this turn into a bigger storm and who is on that path? Is it a major funding system like a bank (a big deal) or an oil market (not as big a deal)?’”

Feeding live data into simulation models, researchers at the OFR can pose questions as broad as “What happens when interest rates go up?” or as narrow as “What is the exposure of Citigroup right now?” Bookstaber says he runs the model thousands of times under different scenarios, to get a full range of outcomes. “We do it again and again and come up with a general distribution of what might happen,” he says. “At a certain point, the distribution model is clear and you’re like, ‘OK, I get it.’”

Bookstaber says this modeling has yet to be fully embraced by Wall Street and academia, as people are accustomed to mathematical models rather than models based on the real-life behaviors of diverse individuals, groups and institutions whose actions might touch off “herding,” “second-order effects” and “non-linear dynamics” among market participants. “This is more about engineering and physics than mathematics,” Bookstaber tells Newsweek. “When a bank does something, it cascades across the system, but that’s also very difficult to look at mathematically.”

With agent-based models, no top-down assumptions (for instance, that markets are efficient and tend to move toward equilibrium determined by pricing) are imposed on the American economy. Instead, they follow the motivations of multiple agents, such as banks, hedge funds and investors, based on bottom-up rules of behavior that take into account how the players operate and how their behaviors may suddenly change based on abrupt shifts in the markets, as well as how they react to each other. Once Bookstaber begins to use live data, he can refine the models to make them increasingly true to life.

“Because I have had a long career on Wall Street, I can set up rules that are accurate and realistic,” he says. “With the economy, system issues grow slowly, and they tend to be obvious if you know where to look. The idea is to keep going and make it better and better. In the beginning, weather models were terrible, and now you get these 10-day forecasts.”

Before Bookstaber joined the OFR, he ran risk management at Moore Capital Management, a $12 billion hedge fund run by the famously curmudgeonly Louis Bacon. The complexity and opacity of the market and its innovations, even before the financial crisis, were of particular concern to Bookstaber. In 2007, he authored the book A Demon of Our Own Design, which laid out the urgent case for what might happen—and did happen—later that year. “The market is inhabited by people, heterogeneous and context-sensitive, who do not live up to the lofty assumptions of mathematical optimization and Aristotelian logic that underlie these approaches,” he wrote in Demon. “The nature of complexity also is different in the economic realm from that in physical systems because it can stem from people gaming, from changing the rules and assumptions of the system.”

Bookstaber joined the Securities and Exchange Commission as a senior policy adviser in 2009, working on the Volcker Rule, a part of Dodd-Frank that seeks to limit banks’ risk-taking so that taxpayers don’t get stuck paying the tab again. In 2012, he began working full time on agent-based models at the Treasury. “If I didn’t get involved, I would feel stupid about it for the rest of my life,” he says.

While the OFR already tracks and reports systemic risks to the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), Bookstaber’s models, combined with the OFR’s ability to subpoena data from Wall Street, would be a significant addition to what OFR Director Richard Berner likes to call the agency’s “prudential tool kit.”

Says Bookstaber, “By modeling this out, government can justify asking for specific information,” as opposed to going on what Wall Street has objected to in the past as fishing expeditions.

Berner is a nonvoting member of the FSOC and the OFR does not set policy. But it does advise Washington’s top economic policymakers, including FSOC chief and Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, along with more than a dozen other council members, such as Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White and Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Launching a live-data model like Bookstaber’s won’t translate into results that can be acted upon by policymakers overnight, as agent-based models can take a few years to calibrate and perfect. But it could quickly begin providing insights into the nation’s economic health that chief economic policymakers can use in the near term.

The OFR and the FSOC have already begun using agent-based models to gauge how large-asset liquidations can affect the market and to evaluate the stability of financial networks, says OFR spokesman William Ruberry.

Some observers are doubtful. “I am very, very skeptical that the FSOC will be able to identify systemic risk,” says Paul Schultz, a professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business who specializes in financial regulation. “This is the same group that missed the crisis last time around, and I think it’s hubristic to think that by just talking more they won’t miss it next time around.”

The OFR’s Berner and the FSOC’s Lew declined to comment, but a source close to the project told Newsweek both agencies consider agent-based models a powerful tool that could be a game changer. However, the source cautioned, data collected and analyzed are expected to be proprietary and conclusions are not likely to be made public.

That may be the way Wall Street wants it. “If OFR does start collecting live data, the most important thing will be making sure it’s secure and that they protect the proprietary nature of that data,” says Ken Bentsen, a former member of Congress and now chief executive of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association in Washington.

Bookstaber says he will continue to publish his findings through the Treasury as he improves the models. “We have a critical unmet need to develop risk-management methods in this country,” he says. “If I can add 1 percent to the probability that a single mother is not going to lose her job, that is a huge value to society. This work comes from a place of very much wanting to help the world.”

Last week, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of New York gave the Obama administration until Wednesday at noon to decide whether it would comply with his ruling or appeal in the decade-long battle with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over the disclosure of around 2,100 pictures depicting U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hellerstein’s ruling required the U.S. government to review“each and every photograph, individually and in relation to the others,” and demonstrate why the release of each would endanger American lives.

Instead, the administration submitted a letter to the court on Wednesday afternoon calling the judge’s ruling “unclear” and requesting “further clarification.” While the government insisted it is acting in “good faith,” the ACLU is not convinced.

“The government says it’s confused about what the judge has ordered, but the judge’s ruling couldn’t be much clearer,” says Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the ACLU. “The government’s letter is just another delaying tactic.”

The Paris City Council agreed to move ahead with a lawsuit against Fox News on Wednesday, French newspaper Le Figaroreports.

The defamation lawsuit follows a complaint by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo over comments broadcast on Fox News in January claiming Paris has eight “no-go zones” where Shariah law applies and non-Muslims are not allowed to enter. The inaccurate comments were made in the aftermath of the deadly attacks on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a kosher supermarket in the city. Twenty people were killed in the attacks, including 10 journalists and the three gunmen.

A law firm representing Fox News told the Associated Press it will “invoke every protection” under the law to fight its case.

“The decision by the city of Paris to bring legal proceedings against a United States news organization is antithetical to free speech,” Dori Ann Hanswirth, a lawyer with the Hogan Lovells law firm, said in a statement.

A guest on Fox News also incorrectly said parts of London have “no-go” zones and that Birmingham, England, is “totally Muslim.” Steve Emerson made the inflammatory remarks as a guest on the Fox News show of Jeanine Pirro and has since apologized. He also said he’d make a donation to Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

Another apology came from Fox News anchor Julie Banderas, who said sorry for “some regrettable errors on air regarding the Muslim population in France.”

Last month, Hidalgo told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour she would work to sue the American broadcaster as, “The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced.” Fox News responded by saying Hidalgo’s comments were “misplaced.”

Earlier this month, Paris moved to ban action films being shot in the city over fears that terrorists could target actors dressed as police officers.

The European Central Bank raised the pressure on Greece to extend an international bailout deal on Thursday, as new leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told EU leaders austerity was killing his economy and an alternative had to be found.

After euro zone finance ministers failed to agree a joint statement about a way forward on Greece's debt crisis, the ECB's Governing Council held a short-notice teleconference to discuss how long it could continue to keep Greek banks afloat.

The ECB agreed to increase Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) from the Greek central bank by about 5 billion euros to 65 billion euros and to review the policy again on Feb. 18, Greek central bank and government officials told Reuters. The timing of the review right after euro zone finance ministers meet again keeps Athens on a short leash.

The ECB authorized the temporary expedient last week when it stopped accepting Greek government bonds in return for funding.

Arriving for his first European Union summit, Tsipras told reporters: "I'm very confident that together we can find a mutually viable solution in order to heal the wounds of austerity, to tackle the humanitarian crisis across the EU and bring Europe back to the road of growth and social cohesion."

Chancellor Angela Merkel, vilified by the Greek left as Europe's "austerity queen", said Germany was prepared for a compromise and finance ministers had a few more days to consider Greece's proposals before they meet next Monday.

"Europe always aims to find a compromise, and that is the success of Europe," she said on arrival in Brussels. "Germany is ready for that. However, it must also be said that Europe's credibility naturally depends on us respecting rules and being reliable with each other."

The two leaders came face-to-face for the first time in the EU Council chamber. According to Greek aides, a smiling Merkel congratulated Tsipras on his election and said: "I hope we will have good cooperation despite the difficulties." Tsipras smiled back and replied: "I hope so."

Greek officials said no private meeting was planned between the two during the one-day EU summit.

EU diplomats said the leaders would receive a briefing from the chairman of euro zone finance ministers, Jeroen Dijssebloem, on Wednesday's inconclusive talks and Tsipras would have a chance to address them over dinner but there would be no extended discussion on Greece.

Other leaders said it was up to Greece to respect budget discipline and economic reform commitments made by previous governments if it wanted continued aid.

ECB executive board member Peter Praet said the ECB would apply its existing ELA rules to Greece. "It is key that the banks benefiting from emergency liquidity assistance remain solvent," he told the Financial Times.

His comments appeared to signal that the central bank could cut the cash lifeline if Greece failed to reach a deal with its creditors before the 240 billion euro bailout expires at the end of this month.

That would expose Greek banks to a risk of capital flight and collapse, which analysts say could in turn trigger a Greek exit from the euro zone, sparking wider financial turmoil.

Highlighting the precariousness of Greece's position, tax revenues fell about 1 billion euros short of the budget target in January as Greeks held off payments before the Jan. 25 election, anticipating that the new leftist government would scrap an unpopular property levy.

Short Shrift

Euro zone finance ministers in the Eurogroup will try again on Monday to bridge their differences, but at Greek insistence, there will be no preparatory talks between officials from Athens and the European Commission, the IMF and the ECB. Tsipras has vowed no longer to cooperate with the "troika" of lenders.

A Greek official said the hard left Syriza party leader, elected on a tide of public anger against austerity last month, was determined to put the Greek crisis at the center of the Brussels summit. However other EU officials said it would be largely devoted to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Merkel and French President Francois Hollande flew in from Minsk after brokering an uncertain ceasefire in Ukraine in overnight talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Petro Poroshenko.

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis refused to sign up to a joint statement at Wednesday's Eurogroup meeting because it referred to the bailout and its continuation, he said.

"Hung Up On Wording"

The Greek official sought to depict the difference as largely semantic, saying: "We will try to reach an agreement and explain that we shouldn't get hung up on wording."

Playing down the threat to the banking system if creditors cut off funding after Feb. 28, the official said: "If we have a conclusion that says there is a program in place, or if we are close to an agreement, no liquidity problems will exist."

The euro zone, the ECB and IMF are insisting on firm conditions for any "bridge" financing. Other governments, including Ireland, Portugal and Spain, which have had to seek help under tough conditions, are also keen their own voters do not see Tsipras winning a better deal than they did.

EU officials play down the risk of Greece being forced out of the euro zone, something Tsipras and most Greeks do not want and which could send destabilizing ripples across the bloc as it faces a confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.

However, the politics of the Greek debate are difficult.

"The real risk in Athens seems to be that Tsipras has raised expectations to such an extent that he could find it extremely difficult to back down from his rhetoric and strike a deal which the rest of the Eurozone could accept," Berenberg Bank economists wrote in a note on Thursday.

The Islamic world is rife with political diversity, from ultra-conservative monarchies to new democracies. But two places reflect the escalating rivalry over an ideal Islamic state in the 21st century: The Islamic Republic of Iran, predominantly Shiite, was born of a revolution against centuries of monarchical rule; the Islamic State, purely Sunni, was born out of war in the modern nations of Iraq and Syria.

On the surface, the two have the same goal—a pure, idealized government based on Shariah law. Both have global visions. Yet the two Islamic systems differ in political systems, economic life, culture and, most of all, the role of religion. They are also now enemies that basically want to destroy each other. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, regards Shiites as apostates who should be killed to pave the way for a purer form of Islam. Iran views ISIS as a terrorist group and has taken a leading role in confronting the Islamic State.

Politics: The ISIS "caliphate," declared in July 2014, practices a rigid Salafi interpretation of Shariah. It has no constitution. No country recognizes its borders, which include about one third of both Syria and Iraq. It has vowed to fight any state or group that does not share its rigid worldview. It is a member of no international organizations. It persecutes all other faiths and forces conversion. Its economy relies on smuggling oil, extortion, kidnapping and financial aid from Salafi supporters in the Arab world.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, which celebrates its 36th anniversary this week, is predominantly Shiite. It has a republican constitution, which blends Napoleonic laws from France and Belgium with Islamic law, although its human rights violations, economic corruption and social discrimination are well documented by international watchdogs. It has recognized borders. It is a member of the United Nations and several international organizations. It recognizes most (but not all) other faiths and provides proportionate representation in parliament. The economy relies heavily on energy and international trade.

Laws and Courts: ISIS has no rule of law or due process by international standards. It carries out the most severe forms of punishment allowed under Islamic law, known ashudud. Common practices include flogging, stoning and amputation. It carries out executions, sometimes in public, by beheading, crucifixion and even burying or burning prisoners alive. It has engaged in mass executions, some broadcast on social media. It takes foreign hostages, particularly aid workers and foreign journalists.

Iran has a constitution that lays out legal rights for its citizens and a sophisticated court system for criminal and civil trials. But additional courts for anti-Islamic behavior allow for prosecution and imprisonment on vague charges. Iran allows lengthy detention without charges or access to lawyers; some detainees have died in jail. It has detained foreigners too; it held 52 American diplomats 444 days shortly after the revolution. The penal code practices hudud, including stoning. Executions tend to be hangings, sometimes in public. More than 600 people were reportedly executed in Iran in 2014, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate.

Global goals: Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi has vowed that Muslims around the world should be united“under a single flag and goal.” ISIS is aggressively trying to conquer territory. It has called on Muslims worldwide to either immigrate to the Islamic State or pledge allegiance to it. Militant groups in more than 10 countries, including Libya, Egypt and Algeria, have publicly declared support for the Islamic State.

In the revolution’s early days, Iran ambitiously sought to export its revolutionary ideology among both Shiites and Sunnis. It particularly condemned monarchies. "We shall export our revolution to the whole world," Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pledged. "Until the cry 'There is no god but God' resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle."

But Iran’s only territorial dispute is with the United Arab Emirates over three small islands in the Gulf. It instead cultivates spheres of influence in Shiite communities, notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, although its goal has not been to gain territory. It has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into groups with common causes, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian Authority.

Women: The Islamic State has forced females back behind the veil and actively discouraged them from education, work and even appearing in public. It actively recruits women to move to the territories of Iraq and Syria it now controls. Ten percent of its Western recruits are reportedly female. Jihadist social media portray the Islamic State as an idyllic Islamic society and an alternative to life in the West. But media accounts and testimony of women who have escaped indicate women experience violence, rape, forced marriage, and general repression.

In Iran, women have opportunities in higher education, most professions and high-ranking political positions. They hold seats in parliament, run their own businesses, attend universities and participate in (segregated) sports. They are mandated to wear modest Islamic dress, although styles are not as restrictive, and women do not need a male escort to leave their homes. According to the constitution, “the government must ensure the rights of women in all respects, in conformity with Islamic criteria.” But women face serious discrimination in areas such as divorce, inheritance, and child custody. A woman, regardless of her age, needs her male guardian’s consent for marriage. Women also require permission to obtain a passport and travel abroad.

Minorities: The Islamic State has little tolerance for religious minorities. It has tried to cleanse its territory of people it deems unbelievers, including Shiites and non-Muslims. It has reportedly killed hundreds of Shiites and Yazidis, among others. The militants have also destroyed property belonging to minority groups, including ancient holy sites. In late 2014, ISIS distributed a pamphlet attempting to justify the kidnapping, enslavement, and rape of non-Muslim women and children.

Iran has not attempted to wholesale convert, expel or kill its religious minorities. The constitution provides for representation of Armenians, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. Some minorities are considered “People of the Book” and are thus entitled to protection and some autonomy in religious practices. But Baha’is are not protected under the law, are not allowed to practice their faith, and have faced persistent persecution.

Prognosis: ISIS has been hit hard since a U.S.-led international coalition launched airstrikes in August 2014 to back up local militias in Iraq and Syria. The United States claims more than 6,000 ISIS fighters have been killed, although ISIS has also recruited more than 20,000 foreign fighters to supplement its local forces. Short-term, ISIS appears capable of holding large swaths of territory, with support from Sunnis who feel marginalized by the governments in Baghdad and Damascus. However, its long-term viability is uncertain.

Iran has had tense relations with the Sunni countries, notably Saudi Arabia, and the West since the 1979 revolution. But since October 2013, Iran has engaged in intense diplomacy with six major powers—the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia– on its controversial nuclear program. Despite international sanctions and frequent diplomatic showdowns over the years, Western nations no longer consider supporting regime change in Tehran.

Cameron Glenn writes for The Islamists Are Coming, hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. Garrett Nada is assistant editor of the Iran Primer hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace. Follow him on Twitter @GarrettNada.

An elderly woman is stopping the Austrian government from buying the building in which the dictator Adolf Hitler was born, as they try to prevent it from falling into disuse or into the wrong hands.

The vacant building in the town of Braunau am Inn is privately owned but has been rented by the Austrian government since 1972, to prevent the pale yellow building from being transformed into a shrine for neo-Nazis. Since then, it has been sub-leased, and served as both a school and a library. But the last occupants, an organisation for disabled people, moved out in 2011 and since then the building has been empty.

Now the government desperately wants to attract new tenants to the notorious site, but the owner’s reluctance to make crucial renovations to the old building is making a difficult sell an almost impossible one. The owner is Gerlinde Pommer, a woman thought to be in her mid-60s who reportedly receives almost €5,000 (£3,925) a month in rent from the government. This money ultimately comes out of Austrian taxpayers’ wallets.

A spokesperson for the minister of the interior says Pommer is expected to make a decision about whether she will sell the building in the next few weeks. She has so far expressed her opposition to this prospect and also to any renovations being carried out on the property, although her reasons are unclear.

The government is now also exploring legal options with the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Finance and the federal chancellor to dispossess the owner, and take full control of the building.

“It’s a problem,” said the spokesman. “We can’t find an agreement with a new organisation to use the building so it is necessary to make some adjustments so it can have more modern standards, because it’s an old building. But we need the agreement of the private owner.”

Local historian and founder of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service, Andreas Maisling, said “Of course the government is worried, because they are spending taxpayers’ money for nothing. And if the house is empty, it is dangerous. It doesn’t look good, it doesn’t make a good impression.”

Locals have expressed frustration at the unwillingness of Pommer to allow the government to take over the building and make better use of it, as they are keen to challenge the negative reputation of their hometown. Maisling said he has heard accounts of the town’s residents being greeted with a ‘Heil Hitler’ Nazi salute after they’ve handed over their passports at airports.

However, he doesn’t think the house should be pulled down: “The house is not guilty, it’s just a house”, he explained, saying that he’d prefer the building to be turning into a ‘House of Responsibility’ where young people could come to learn about history.”

Another local historian, Florian Kotanko, went to kindergarten with Pommer and has lived in the town since 1949. While he believes that taking her property by legal force would probably be an unpopular move in the town, he criticised Pommer for her seeming lack of social awareness, and says he “can’t imagine any just cause” for why she won’t allow renovations of the building to attract new tenants.

“She has a social responsibility as a citizen of Austria.” he says. “It’s a problem for Braunau and annoying for the whole country to be paying this money to a woman for nothing, for no good, social purpose.”

Kotanko explains that Pommer is a private figure and doesn’t believe she has a husband or children. He says his letters to her have gone unanswered, and that friends have warned him not to bring up the topic of the building with her. The building was passed down to her by her mother in 1977 and been in the family since 1912.

However, Kotanko believes the matter could be resolved this year, with Pommer still collecting rent but forced to accept certain government conditions.

In 1989, a memorial stone was erected in front of the house which read: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. Millions of dead remind us,” and every year a memorial service organised by the town, is held in front of the house to commemorate the victims of the Nazis.

In a press statement, the mayor of Braunau Johannes Waidbacher of Braunau said he is “ensuring that private individuals do not misuse it in a way which would be contrary to the interests of the republic...This building should never become a place of pilgrimage for those stuck in the past.”

The IMF today agreed a $17.5 (€15.5) billion loan to Ukraine as part of an economic reform deal, designed to cut state spending, bureaucracy and corruption, and boost the Ukrainian economy in the medium term.

Ukraine was reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy, with the war against pro-Russian separatists costing around $8 million per day, according to the Kiev government.

Political analysts however say the deal comes with a “heavy political cost” for the Ukrainian government, as proposed reforms to the energy sector could lead to increased prices for consumers in Ukraine.  

Dr David Cadier, a fellow in international strategy and diplomacy at the London School of Economics says that the deal is similar to one passed over the by the previous Ukrainian regime before the revolution in January 2014.

“Former President Yanukovych had to choose between two packages of money – a deal with Russia with loose conditions, or the IMF money for serious reforms. He thought ‘if I opt for the IMF, I’ll have to pass reform which would mean Ukrainian citizens would see prices rise’. It could have cost him re-election so he went for the Russian package.”

He added: “The lasting problem has been the issue of the energy sector. Reforming this sector will mean higher gas prices for Ukrainian citizens so it will be costly to the Ukrainian government. For [current President] Poroshenko, will the reform be carried out? If you have war raging in the east it will be difficult to reform your state.”

The deal was struck on the same morning that a ceasefire was agreed in an attempt to bring an end to the violence that has been raging in the east of the country between Ukrainian troops and Russian separatists.

The head of the IMF Christine Legarde said the deal was “not without risk” but that it is a realistic programme, which replaces a previous IMF loan of which $4.5 (€4) billion was distributed, taking the total IMF financing to $22 (€19.3) billion.

Dr Cadier said the two deals are “both glimpses of hope for restoring the economy of Ukraine which is in a terrible state” but also that “the package is coming with a heavy political cost for current government.”

Upon the signing of the deal Nikolay Gueorguiev, the IMF’s mission chief for Ukraine, said in a statement: “Structural reforms will aim at improving business climate, attracting investment and enhancing Ukraine’s growth potential. To this end, the authorities are advancing efforts toward deregulation and judicial reform and implementation of the anti-corruption measures. They will also proceed with state-owned enterprise reforms, to minimize fiscal risks and improve corporate governance structures and de-monopolization.”

Andrew Wilson, author of Ukraine Crisis: What the West Needs to Learn described the negotiations surrounding the deal as “a gigantic game of chicken with the new government in Kiev to do the minimum to get the money”, adding that the Ukrainian government spend 5-7% of GDP on subsidising the energy sector.

“In terms of cutbacks to other areas, the key pressure point could be health,” Wilson adds. “The government’s priorities are national security and dealing with corruption but if you look at public opinion health comes first and it is already pretty threadbare. Paradoxically Ukraine has to cut its public services but also needs to rejuvenate its health care system.”

According to a diary of another militant bride, ISIS wives were never allowed to travel alone.

The City of Light’s tourist, leisure and catering industries have taken a hit in the month since deadly attacks.