reason: Complications in Syria are a new problem that we face and now the US has started to get much more involved.
As Syria Devolves Further, Allies Criticize American Policy
ISTANBUL — Allies of the United States sharply criticized the Obama administration’s Syria policy on Wednesday, when the outgoing foreign minister of France called it “ambiguous” and the president of Turkey said American inaction had allowed the region to descend into a blood bath.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey called into question the American commitment to fighting terrorist groups in Syria and cited the Washington’s failure to recognize a Syrian Kurdish rebel group as a terrorist organization.
“Are you on our side or the side of the terrorist P.Y.D. and P.K.K. organizations?” Mr. Erdogan said in an address to provincial officials in the Turkish capital, Ankara, referring to American support for members of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or P.Y.D., in their fight against the Islamic State in Syria.
Tensions between Turkey and the United States, NATO allies, have been escalating over their differing positions on the Kurds. Turkey considers the Kurdish Democratic Union Party to be a terrorist organization through its affiliation with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or P.K.K., which has carried out a three-decade-long insurgency against Turkey.
“Hey, America. Because you never recognized them as a terrorist group, the region has turned into a sea of blood,” Mr. Erdogan said.
The harsh words came a day after the State Department spokesman, John Kirby, reiterated American support for Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. “Even the best of friends aren’t going to agree on everything,” Mr. Kirby said. “Kurdish fighters have been some of the most successful in going after Daesh inside Syria.”
The Turkish government summoned the United States ambassador, John R. Bass, late Tuesday to express its unease over the “supportive” remarks for the Kurdish group in Syria, according to Turkish officials.
In his speech Thursday, Mr. Erdogan said there was no difference between the Kurdish groups fighting in Syria and the insurgents battling the Turkish government.
“We have written proof!” he said. “We tell the Americans, ‘It’s a terror group.’ But the Americans stand up and say, ‘No, we don’t see them as terror groups.’ ”
Criticism of American policy in Syria continued Wednesday in Paris, where Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister reiterated his longstanding disapproval.
While announcing his decision to step down after nearly four years as foreign minister, Mr. Fabius said the American plan for Syria was “ambiguous” and denounced an absence of “very strong commitment,” according to Reuters.
The Obama administration has said for months that its plan for confronting the chaos inside Syria was to try to forge a political transition away from President Bashar al-Assad through talks mediated by the United Nations. But as those negotiations collapsed last week amid heavy bombings by the Syrian government backed by Russian forces.
The bombing campaign has worsened the already dire situation in Syria in recent weeks, with at least 60,000 more people fleeing to the Turkish border this week.
The Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said on Wednesday that the relentless bombing around the city of Aleppo, in northern Syria, by government and Russian forces amounted to a campaign of “ethnic cleansing.”
“One of the aims of the latest attacks is to conduct ethnic cleansing,” Mr. Davutoglu said at a news conference in The Hague, Netherlands. “Ethnic cleansing in Syria and Aleppo aimed at only leaving regime supporters behind is being conducted by the Syrian regime and Russia in a very deliberate way.”
“Every refugee that we accept helps their ethnic cleansing policy, but we will continue to accept refugees,” he said.
Mr. Davutoglu added that the United Nations Security Council and the international community were being “two-faced” for demanding that Turkey open its borders, but not moving “a finger to solve the Syrian crisis” or to stop the Russian bombings, according to The Associated Press.
The Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly I. Churkin, on Wednesday defended his country’s actions in Syria. “We are not about to be apologetic about what we are doing,” he said after a closed-door meeting of the Security Council.
Mr. Churkin would not commit to halting Russia’s airstrikes so that humanitarian aid could be delivered without risk to civilians in and around besieged cities in Syria, but he did say that Moscow “will be prepared to consider all reasonable proposals.”
At his news conference in The Hague, Mr. Davutoglu, the Turkish prime minister, accused the P.Y.D., the Kurdish militia in Syria, of collaborating with Russian forces and attacking civilians.
Turkey fears that support from Russia and the United States for the P.Y.D. could create an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria that would spur the separatist ambitions of Kurdish militants in Turkey.
The Turkish military started a major counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish militants in the predominately Kurdish southeast region last year, imposing round-the-clock curfews in many towns and cities. Hundreds of militants and civilians have died in the operations.
Proximity – the nearness of a given event to your place of publication.
reason: this epidemic is in Texas.
US Zika Case Sparks Questions About Sex and Mosquito Germs
NEW YORK — A sexually transmitted case of Zika in Texas has scientists scrambling to understand how much of a risk infection through sex is for the usually mosquito-spread illness.
Experts still stress that mosquitoes are the main culprit in the Zika epidemic menacing Latin America and looming over the United States.
"Mosquitoes would be the great river of transmission, while sexual transmission is going to be akin to a mountain stream," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University.
But the Texas case has spurred more discussion about additional ways in which Zika and other illnesses, commonly thought to be carried only by mosquitoes, might be spread.
Other types of transmission can be hard to spot in the midst of outbreaks in which many mosquito-borne infections are occurring, noted Dr. Ali Khan, a former disease investigator for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"It's very hard to parse this out in the middle of an epidemic," said Khan, now dean of the University of Nebraska's college of public health.
Discerning something like sexual transmission would have to occur in a place where an outbreak was not raging, he said.
That's what happened in Dallas.
The current Zika epidemic is on track to cause millions of infections in Latin America and the Caribbean, but no transmission was reported in the United States until the Dallas case this week.
Health officials said a person there — who had not traveled to an outbreak area — was infected. An investigation concluded the person caught the virus through sex with a person who had recently returned from Venezuela, where Zika infections have been growing.
Officials released few details about the case, except to say both patients have recovered. But it wasn't the first to raise the possibility of sexual transmission of the virus.
A Colorado State University researcher, Brian Foy, picked up the virus in Africa and apparently spread it to his wife back home in 2008. More recently, it was found in one man's semen in Tahiti.
Now, in the wake of the Dallas case, "we're all kind of scrambling in the scientific community how best to tackle this and how best to research it," said Foy.
Most people infected with Zika experience, at the most, only mild symptoms. But mounting evidence in Brazil has suggested a connection between the virus and babies born with brain defects and abnormally small heads.
The Zika epidemic and possible link to microcephaly cases in Brazil prompted the World Health Organization to declare a global emergency on Monday, calling the virus' rapid spread and its apparent link to the birth defect an "extraordinary event" that poses a threat to the rest of the world.
WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said Wednesday that the Texas sexual transmission case is "obviously a concern."
"We need to know more about how likely this is to happen. We also have to understand whether there are other human-to-human transmission routes, such as blood transfusion, such as mother-to-child transmission," he said.
Perhaps a bigger worry than sex is what dangers may lurk in blood donations from people who have been in Zika outbreak areas, said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University infectious diseasesresearcher.
"I would raise caution that any blood used in pregnant women should be tested for the presence of Zika virus," something that currently doesn't happen, Lipkin said.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says there are no approved tests for routine screening of blood donations for Zika virus, but it is looking into the issue. Zika virus usually remains in the blood of an infected person for a few days but it can be found longer in some people, the CDC says. This week, the Red Cross said they are asking travelers to Zika outbreak countries to wait at least 28 days before donating blood.
On Wednesday, Canadian health officials announced that people who have travelled outside of Canada, the continental United States and Europe will be ineligible to give blood for 21 days after their return. Canadian Blood Services says it is implementing the waiting period to mitigate the risk of the Zika virus entering the Canadian blood supply.
Meanwhile, the CDC said it will issue guidance in the coming days on prevention of sexual transmission of the Zika virus, focusing on the male sexual partners of women who are or may be pregnant.
It's a tall order, because so much is unknown about sexual transmission and Zika, experts said.
How long is someone infectious? How long does the virus live in the sperm? Does it only spread if the first person is suffering symptoms?
Foy said that in his case, he didn't begin to experience symptoms until after he and his wife had sex.
"It's completely black box right now" in terms of how little is known about the risk of sexual transmission, Foy said.
As worrisome as possible sexual transmission may be, experts stress that mosquitoes will continue to be the far greater concern. The bugs inject virus right into the blood stream — an extremely efficient way of spreading dangerous germs through the body.
"The mosquito is the deadliest animal on the planet," Schaffner said.
Prominence – the “newsworthiness” of an individual, organization or place.
SCIENCE; Seeking a Return to Prominence
An expert panel of the National Academies is urging Senators Barack Obama and John McCain to restore the position of White House science adviser to the prominence it enjoyed before President Bush took office.
The panel is also calling for the candidates to prepare to move quickly to fill important science, engineering and health-related positions and to choose appointees according to professional expertise and integrity, not politics or policy views.
In a report sent to the candidates on Wednesday, the panel said that whoever is elected should quickly choose a new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology policy and make that person a presidential assistant, a designation that the job lost under President Bush. The panel said the directorship should be a cabinet-level post based in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, in quarters the office vacated in 2001.
Though some of the changes may seem minor, in Washington they are important markers of influence, the panel said, indicating ''the importance the president attaches to science and technology.''
The panel, led by John Edward Porter, a former Republican representative from Illinois, said scientific and technical appointees in top positions should be chosen for their knowledge, credentials and integrity, not their policy views, adding, ''At no other time in the last 50 years has it been so vital to attract people who understand science and engineering into the highest levels of public service.'' CORNELIA DEAN
Impact – the effect or consequence of an event on the audience.
reason: the end of Merkel's leadership means that there will be a new government
The End of the Merkel Era
BERLIN — THE next few weeks will most likely determine the future of Germany’s approach to the refugee crisis — and perhaps the future of the country itself.
There are two important dates coming up: a European Union summit meeting on Feb. 18 and 19, which represents Chancellor Angela Merkel’s last chance to win over the rest of Europe to her open-door refugee policy, followed by elections in three federal states in Germany on March 13, which will offer an implicit referendum on Ms. Merkel’s political course.
Future generations might remember the past months as the final days of the age of convergence. On a continental level, “convergence” means the postwar political development toward an “ever closer union” among the European nation-states, in the words of the German historian Andreas Wirsching. Until recently, convergence seemed almost like a law of nature, an inevitability that could be slowed but never reversed.
Those were the days, and those days are gone.For the last decade — the Merkel era — “convergence” has been applied to developments within Germany as well. The cultural and economic differences between East and West Germany, though still significant, appeared to be shrinking. Society seemed to become ever more tolerant, for example toward gays and career moms. The children and grandchildren of Turkish immigrants made it to important positions, rooting them in mainstream society. The grand coalition between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats seemed to erase what remained of left and right. As a woman, an East German and a moderate in every respect, Ms. Merkel was at once the result of and the leading figure in this development.
Powerful centrifugal forces are now at work. The German party system is being rearranged. Those who feel they were the losers in this age of increased diversity — easterners, older white men — are taking their anger to the Internet and the polls, voting for the far-right Alternative for Germany party that promises to fight “political correctness” and shut the border.
Forecast to get 7 percent to 15 percent of the votes in the coming state elections, Alternative for Germany is winning voters away from the once-grand Social Democrats, which is polling as low as 13.5 percent in the state of Baden-Württemberg, and outpolling the Greens. In Germany, where governments are typically composed of coalitions of the leading parties, having the far right in the mix is unsettling, to say the least.
It’s not just about politics. On the streets, even among families, there is anger and unrest. Violence against homes for asylum seekers is on the rise. The debate online is a heated blur of biased presumptions, where citizens accuse the government and German news outlets of lying to their face and turn to Russian state media for information.
The most evident symptom of disintegration is maybe Angela Merkel herself. For years, her high approval ratings made her unassailable. Now, suddenly, 81 percent of Germans disagree with the government’s management of the migration crisis, and a poll last week found her personal approval rating had dropped by 12 percentage points, to 46 percent. Ms. Merkel, once the center of Germany’s centrism, is marginalized, too.
The narrative of convergence is a teleological one. The “ever closer union” is not just a term in a treaty, or a sober description of what we have witnessed in the past decades. It’s what we thought was naturally meant to be, what Europe was supposed to do.
The same applies to the ever closer union of German society. For sort-of-leftish urbanites like myself, the notion that we might be slipping into a phase of disintegration — not to say regression — is particularly painful, because it shows we had bought into a lie, the lie that history is a one-way street, always moving toward a free, liberal, multicultural society. The anxieties caused by the influx of migrants show that many Germans no longer share this vision, if they ever did.
Perhaps Ms. Merkel herself got caught in the same trap. Her wholehearted embrace of refugees last summer, and her assertion that welcoming them was a communal European effort, seemed predicated on the belief that every development was a step forward.
It’s hard to say what’s going to happen next. Ms. Merkel probably won’t pivot completely, not this time, but in her usual, cautious way, she has already started to shed the image of “Mother Merkel.” At a regional party convention on Jan. 30, she directly addressed the refugees: “When there is peace again in Syria, when ISIS is defeated in Iraq, we expect you to return.”
Meanwhile, one of Ms. Merkel’s closest allies and a leading candidate in the March elections, Julia Klöckner, has offered a proposal on refugees that would essentially place a cap on the number of people admitted to the country — something Ms. Merkel has herself refused to do. Ms. Klöckner’s plan is widely seen as a Merkel trial balloon. But given the severity of the tremors shaking Germany, even quotas are unlikely to settle things.
Professor Wirsching argues that crises have interrupted convergence, but have also ultimately created new lines of cooperation that have eventually brought the Continent closer together. And maybe, in the long run, the same can be said about Germany. I just don’t see that day coming soon.
Conflict – the meeting of two or more opposing forces. These forces can be physical, emotional or philosophical.
reason: conflict between former Nazi member in todays society, this is even more impressive because the conflict was so long ago.
Former Auschwitz Guard, 94, Goes on Trial in Germany
DETMOLD, Germany — A 94-year-old former SS sergeant went on trial Thursday in western Germany on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, based on accusations that he served as a guard in the Auschwitz death camp as hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews and others were gassed to death there.
Reinhold Hanning seemed in good condition for his age, walking into the court in the city of Detmold without even the help of a cane and appearing to listen attentively as the indictment against him was read aloud.
No pleas are entered in the German system. Hanning, who ran a local dairy after the war until he retired in 1984, declined to give an opening statement to the court.
He showed no reaction as the first witness, Leon Schwarzbaum, a 94-year-old Auschwitz survivor, read moving testimony about his own experiences, then looked directly at Hanning and made an emotional plea.
"Mr. Hanning, we are about the same age and we will both soon be before the highest court," Schwarzbaum said, his voice quavering and hands trembling. "Speak here about what you and your comrades did!"
The trial is one of four expected this year against two other former SS men and one woman alleged to have served in Auschwitz. The 11th-hour prosecutions come after a new precedent was set in 2011, when former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a death camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.
Prosecutors successfully argued in the Demjanjuk case that simply serving in a death camp, and thus helping it operate, was enough to convict someone of accessory to the murders committed there. Although Demjanjuk always denied serving at the death camp and died before his appeal could be heard, prosecutors last year successfully convicted SS sergeant Oskar Groening, who served in Auschwitz, on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder using the same reasoning.
Hanning admitted to investigators when first questioned that he had served in the Auschwitz I part of the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denied serving at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were killed.
As the trial opened, however, his attorneys filed a motion asking to exclude that statement, saying that Hanning had been "surprised" when authorities showed up at his house and wasn't fully aware he was under investigation. It wasn't clear when the judges would rule on the motion. His attorney, Andreas Scharmer, would not say whether the defense was planning to try and argue that Hanning did not serve in the camp at all if his statement was excluded.
Prosecutor Andreas Brendel told The Associated Press after the hearing that there was also other evidence that Hanning was there, including SS company lists.
Reading the indictment, Brendel told the court that Hanning served in two different SS Death's Head companies in Auschwitz as a guard. He said those companies were used to guard prisoners used as slave laborers outside the camp, and also were called to Birkenau to help with the tens of thousands being brought in during the so-called "Hungarian action" in 1944 and unloaded from trains onto a ramp.
On the ramp, Nazis stripped the prisoners of their possessions and sorted them into groups: those who would be immediately taken to the gas chambers and those fit enough to be used as slave labor, and likely worked to death.
"The decision over life and death lay with the SS men on the ramp," Brendel said.
Doctors have advised that the trial sessions can run no longer than two hours, in deference to Hanning's age and health.
Schwarzbaum, one of about 40 Auschwitz survivors or their relatives who have joined the trial as co-plaintiffs as allowed under German law, had his testimony cut short before he could finish answering questions. He's due to take the stand again when the trial resumes Friday.
After the proceedings, he told the AP his main hope for the trial is that Hanning will tell his story so the world will better know what happened in Auschwitz and why SS guards did what they did.
"He's an old man," Schwarzbaum said. "He should tell the truth."
Human Interest – the drama the surrounds people involved in an emotional struggle.
reason: people are concerned about person who passed away and their family
Indian Soldier Rescued After Siachen Avalanche Dies
NEW DELHI — An Indian infantryman whose unlikely survival in an avalanche touched off celebrations across the country died Thursday morning at a military hospital in New Delhi.
The soldier, Hanamanthappa Koppad, was buried for five days under 35 feet of ice on the treacherous Siachen Glacier, where Indian and Pakistani troops face one another from camps at elevations approaching 20,000 feet. Nine other soldiers were killed in the same avalanche on Feb. 3.
In retrospect, it appears that Mr. Koppad’s chances of survival were close to nil. He was in critical condition from the moment he was retrieved from the ice, with multiple organ failure, pneumonia in both lungs and catastrophic brain damage, his doctors said in a news conference.
But while he was still technically alive, military doctors put him on a ventilator and administered the maximum permissible doses of antibiotics and other medication. News channels eagerly trumpeted each new health bulletin.
Indian military officials reserve special praise for soldiers willing to serve a three-month rotation on the glacier under life-threatening weather conditions. Mr. Koppad received a bedside visit from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and camera crews followed his shaken family members.
A cease-fire with Pakistan has been in place since 2003, but soldiers live in constant danger of frostbite, oxygen deprivation, hidden crevasses and avalanches. Mr. Koppad and the other soldiers had been posted at an altitude of 19,600 feet, in a spot where nighttime temperatures drop to around 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Shortly after Mr. Koppad was declared dead, Mr. Modi wrote on Twitter: “The soldier in you remains immortal. Proud that martyrs like you served India.”
Novelty – the attraction people have to unusual things and events.
reason: It's very unique that video games could be considered masterpieces and there would most likely be a lot of debate.
An Exhibition That Proves Video Games Can Be Art
In April 2010, a brouhaha erupted in the gaming community that still reverberates today: The film critic Roger Ebert had opined that video games could never truly be counted as art. “Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form,” he wrote on his blog. But three months later, in an erudite follow-up titled “Okay, Kids, Play on My Lawn,” he recanted. Great works of art, he speculated, “could instruct me about life, love, disease and death, principles and morality, humor and tragedy.” Ebert admitted that he hadn’t spent enough time with video games to know if they could, indeed, evoke these feelings. “I don’t know if they can be inspired to transcend themselves,” he wrote. “Perhaps they can. How can I say?”
Had Ebert played the game Passage for five minutes, he might have had a definitive answer.
Passage’s creator, Jason Rohrer, is the subject of a new exhibition at Wellesley College’s Davis museum, “The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer,” which is being touted as the first solo art museum retrospective for a video-game designer. (Passage is already a permanent part of MoMA’s collection.) Aside from putting to bed any lingering doubts about the genre’s artistic potential, the show presents an oeuvre that spans genres and conceits that would be difficult, maybe impossible, to tackle in a different medium. “It works both as a kind of philosophical object, but it’s also an immersive, playful experience that transcends any kind of interpretation that I might offer of it,” says Mike Maizels, the exhibition’s curator. Maizels first learned about Rohrer’s work via aWired magazine article about the game Chain World, which was conceived to exist only as a single copy on a flash drive, to be played once and then passed on. “I was attracted to the provocation of making something that was always thought to exist in a profusion of digital copies into a kind of singular neat object,” says Maizels, who is also interested in the way in which some things are “relegated to mass culture” while others get “validated by a wealthy collector base,” as he says: “I am very interested in games insofar as they don’t self-conceptualize as works of art.”
PhotoRohrer’s work often operates on a more visceral level. Perhaps no example is better than Passage, whose retro visuals and existential premise evokes just the sort of emotional connection that Ebert valued but had never, himself, experienced in a video game. Released in 2007, Passage was the third game created by Rohrer and the first to garner him global notoriety. “People call Passage the first game to make them cry,” says Rohrer matter-of-factly. “There’s no pre-authored story at all. You’re plopped down into the middle of this world and you do whatever you want in it.” But the choices that a player makes are often dire, and there are limitations that can’t be escaped. The protagonist can decide to fall in love, only to suffer emotional devastation after the death of his wife. As time passes, the protagonist grows older; his pixelated shoulders stoop and hairline recedes. No matter the amount of treasure he collects, his ultimate destination is always the same.Continue reading the main story
Rohrer’s other projects range from arcade-style action games, to intricate puzzles, to massive multiplayer experiences. Inside a Star-Filled Sky, a shooter that looks something like the ’80s arcade classic Space Invader, “grapples with the concept of recursion,” says Rohrer. “Every enemy that you encounter, and every power-up that you encounter, and every version of yourself that you encounter on the way up, you can hold down the shift key and move the mouse over any of these things and go inside of them.” As Maizels notes, “It would take millennia to play through.” Rohrer’s latest release is Cordial Minuet, a Sudoku-like puzzle game with a Kabbalist aesthetic that involves betting mechanics drawn from black magic rituals and game theory. For the exhibition, it will be presented in a “Richard Serra-esque” cube, says Maizels.
But Rohrer’s upcoming game, which he describes as a “transgenerational civilization-building game,” may be his most ambitious yet. “It’s about the coordination that happens across multiple generations that weren’t ever in communication with each other,” says Rohrer. Players will only live for about an hour, during which time they can contribute whatever they want to the virtual world in that time, only to be reincarnated as the child of another player. “Whatever you’ve been working on, whatever tools you managed to create, whatever technology you’ve managed to construct, whatever buildings or infrastructure you’ve left in the world, remain after your death for other people to make use of,” Rohrer says. “Just like it is in real life, right?”
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