Citizen Smart-Kites Check China's Air

Xiaowei Wang (center) and workshop participants prepare a FLOAT kite for flight. "The hardest part was probably figuring out how to publicize the projects to locals and draw a diverse group of people to our workshops," says Guler. "We were afraid that no one would come to the first one, but that was probably the best attended." Photo: Screenshot from Stars in the Haze.

Designers Deren Guler and Xiaowei Wang are using sensor-laden kites to monitor China’s air.

Beijing’s air quality is notoriously terrible. It’s so bad that China’s leaders have begun to seal themselves off, all the while producing air-quality reports of extremely dubious accuracy. Earlier this summer, Guler and Wang took to the skies of Beijing to begin challenging the official story, attaching air-quality sensors to kites and publishing the results.

Joining them was documentarian Joshua Frank. Today, they’ve released a documentary about the project, called Stars in the Haze. The project itself is called FLOAT_beijing.

Guler says the project began when Wang, living in Beijing’s “crazy bad” air, began testing out a simple air-quality sensor. “Inspired by the decorative lights they put on kites, we set out to make an air-quality-sensing kite.”

Frank had met Wang in 2011 while on a trip to China filming a documentary about experimental music. When he heard that the team had received funding for FLOAT, “Immediately I got in touch with Xiaowei and told her that someone needed to make a documentary about the project — I wanted to be that person.”

The design of the kite sensors is based on Carnegie Mellon’s Air Quality Balloons project, with some changes to make the sensor module simpler and easier to build from parts they could source locally in Beijing. The team worked with kite masters and local citizens, running a series workshops to teach everyone how to build and fly the kites. Participants soldered the components on to a circuit board and then learned how to attach them to the kites so that their weight wouldn’t disrupt their ability to fly.

Once the kites were ready, they took them out and flew them, then retrieved their SD cards loaded with air quality data that they could use as a basis for comparison with the official readings. The comparison was rarely good.

“Air pollution is a huge issue in Beijing and in many other Chinese metropolises,” says Frank, “It seems to me that more people—especially more Chinese citizens—are becoming conscious of air quality issues and beginning to organize and take matters in their own hands when it comes to the reporting of pollution levels.”

“Our primary goal is citizen science,” Guler says. She acknowledges that there are a lot of similar projects, “but many of them are more like products, or methods of communicating wirelessly. We hope our project instills a DIY ‘you can build your own’ mentality.”

Filming the project introduced its own set of challenges, says Frank. “From a visual standpoint—and this is kind of odd—it’s actually not that easy to film people flying kites.” The problem is that the kites are so far away that it’s difficult to get them in the frame with the people flying them and they are so large that once they’re in the air, it doesn’t take much movement to keep them aloft. “It’s relaxing in a fishing-like way,” he says, “The problem is, a person holding a spool of line and craning his neck to the sky tends to look at little crazed if you can’t see a kite in the frame.”

Looking ahead, the team plans to return to Beijing next year, and Guler says she’s involved in testing the same sensors for a different air quality project in Brazil, and another project to bring the kites to Boston. “It doesn’t sound as compelling to tell people what a great job was done laying the groundwork for future development,” says Frank, “However, I am very excited to see what can be accomplished in future FLOAT installments.”

Frank sees a lot of potential in the lighting system that the team saw on the kites of dedicated hobbyists. “It seemed to me that there would be great potential to ‘hack’ these light systems and rig them up to the DIY sensors,” he says, “To have that degree of spectacle is really where citizen science, art, activism and performance can intersect for FLOAT in what I think would be a pretty revelatory way.”

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“Gangnam Style” in line for UK dictionary inclusion

LONDON (Reuters) – He has the most-watched video in Youtube history, become a pop sensation with a horse-riding dance craze that has swept the world and now Korean singer Psy may cement his place in popular culture with recognition from a British dictionary.

“Gangnam Style,” Psy’s signature song, has been chosen along with “fiscal cliff” and “Romneyshambles” as some of Collins Dictionary‘s words of the year.

“We were looking for words that told the story of the year,” said Ian Brookes, the dictionary‘s consultant editor.

“Some words are from events that have been and gone and so are not likely to stick around … but others are probably here to stay.”

Other headline entries centered on American politics.

“Fiscal cliff” has drawn a lot of attention as the deadline for Congress and President Obama to agree on government spending and tax plans draws nearer.

While the term “Romneyshambles” entered the British public’s consciousness after Mitt Romney‘s gaffe-ridden visit to London in July in which he questioned Britain’s readiness to host the Olympics.

The inclusion of “47 percent” on the list after a leaked video showed Romney telling donors that 47 percent of Americans would definitely vote for Obama because of their dependency on the government capped off a bad year for the losing presidential candidate.

Collins received over 7,000 submissions on its online database.

Twelve words of the year – one for each month – were then selected on the basis of the frequency with which they were spoken, how many places they appeared and their longevity in public discourse.

Appearing on the Collins words of the year list is no guarantee of insertion in the next dictionary.

But Gangnam Style stands a very good chance, Brookes said.

“It’s obviously a craze, so there’s the possibility it will go away. But it’s been heard by so many people that I think it’s probably earned the right to go into the dictionary.”

Other words of the year include “mummy porn” after the popularity of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books, and “superstorm” after Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc along the east coast of America in October.

(Reporting By Peter Schwartzstein, editing by Paul Casciato)

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U.N. Suspends Polio Campaign in Pakistan After Killings of Workers

B.K. Bangash/Associated Press

A Pakistani woman administered polio vaccine to an infant on Wednesday in the slums of Islamabad. Militants have killed nine polio workers this week.

LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.

Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.

At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.

The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.

The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.

On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.

Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.

In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.

Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.

Female polio workers here make for easy targets. They wear no uniform but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.

Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”

That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”

On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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Tool Kit: Equipment for the Mayan Apocalypse, or a Lesser Emergency

We may have only a few hours to live. On Friday, the Mayan calendar will come to an end, leading some to predict that the world will spiral into chaos. It could be the end of days. Locusts could swarm the earth, destroying crops. Tornadoes the size of Florida could shred Europe. Thousand-foot waves could crash over Idaho. Zombies! Flesh-eating viruses, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together.

Or just maybe, as with every other predicted apocalypse before it, nothing will happen. We could just wake up on Friday, roll out of bed, grab our coffee and go to work. Another day in the life.

Either way, it’s probably better to be safe than sorry. You’ll want to be prepared for the end. And if it’s not the end, these supplies will help you when the next subapocalyptic event happens: another hurricane, perhaps, or a blackout, earthquake, blizzard or typhoon.

Given that most of our lives are now hyperdependent on things that require power, you should stock up on batteries. Lots of them. Amazon sells packs of 20 or 48 AA or AAA batteries for as little as $10. Solar panels, or at least devices that incorporate them, are a must too. The WakaWaka solar lamp, $40, can provide up to 16 hours of light on a full charge.

Sometimes sunlight is in short supply. The Etón BoostTurbine 1000 is a power generator that can be hand-cranked to charge a cellphone or other gadgets. If you’re hiding from zombies in a basement and your iPad is about to die, just plug it in and crank the wheel, and you can finish that game of Angry Birds. Cranking for one minute will give your cellphone enough power for a 30-second call.

There is, of course, a chance that your phone will not work, so if you want to get around and communicate with people, be prepared to travel back in time. Before cellphones, there were these things called maps that were made of paper, or plastic. Be sure to have a few showing your local city and state highways. If the power is out, there might not be any Twitter or Facebook either — gasp! — so you’ll have to leave notes the old-fashioned way: with a pen and paper. Don’t forget tape. Duct tape or electrician’s tape has a multitude of uses.

You might want to pick up a pair of two-way radios too. The Motorola MH230R has an astounding range of 23 miles and can operate for up to 10 hours on a charge. These walkie-talkies can also pick up 11 weather channels from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

You will want some canned food: tuna, spaghetti, fruit, pinto beans, vegetables and some soups. (Buy a hand can opener, too, as your electric one needs electricity.) You can also order freeze-dried foods from a camping store. Don’t forget food for your lovable pets.

Studies show that humans can last a couple of weeks without food, but most people can last only three to five days without water.

If you have the money, invest in a Lifesaver Bottle, $230, which can filter out bacteria, chemicals and toxins from your water supply. A less expensive alternative is the LifeStraw Personal Water Filter, $25, which is essentially a fancy straw that, it is claimed, removes 99.9 percent of waterborne parasites. Some people swear by tomato juice, which will quench your thirst while providing nutrition.

You will need a stove to warm up all of those wonderful canned foods. Jet Boil Sol Advanced Cooking Stoves, $100, are go-to items for campers these days. They have an all-in-one top from which you can both cook and eat. They also have a one-button starter, and are compact for easy storage. Get a few extra fuel canisters.

Cash is king in a catastrophe. In 2003, during the New York City blackout, I was caught in the subway when the power went out. When I finally emerged from the tunnels, escorted by the police, I realized I had only $14 in cash on me. Credit cards and A.T.M.’s were useless. Keep a wad of bills and change in your apocalypse kit.

In case you have to hit the road to flee a zombie invasion, grab some Mylar thermal blankets, $10 for a pack of 10. They look like tinfoil, but can actually hold in 90 percent of your body heat. There are also Hothands hand warmers, which can be purchased in packs of 40 for $20.

In the unlikely event of a nuclear emergency, it would be good to have some potassium iodide tablets, $8 for 14. These little pills can reduce the chance of thyroid damage.

You will be amazed how dark it can be at night without a dozen light bulbs glowing in your living room, so stock up on flashlights. You can get a couple that require batteries, but also have backups that don’t need them, even though these might not be quite as bright. Forever Flashlights ($30) can be shaken up and down to create power. They actually do work: shaking for seconds will generate up to five minutes of light.

If you think the world might take a while to wind down, you might want to invest in a generator. They start at around $300 and go up into the thousands. Don’t forget to pick up fuel to run it, though. And you might want to make sure your fire extinguisher is working, in case fireballs start falling from the sky or the toaster goes berserk.

Take a look at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Ready.gov Web site, which tells you how much water and food you will need for an emergency and offers a list of things you should always have at the ready. The agency recommends water canisters or sealed jugs so you do not have to drink from your bathtub.

Finally, don’t forget to have a camera fully charged and some extra batteries so you can document your particular angle on the apocalypse. This way, when society finally rebuilds itself, you’ll be able to post those awesome photos on Twitter and Facebook.

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Robert Bork, failed Supreme Court nominee, dies at age 85

Robert H. Bork, whose failed Supreme Court nomination in 1987 infuriated conservatives and politicized the confirmation process for the ensuing decades, died Wednesday at the age of 85. 

The former Yale law professor and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had a history of heart problems and had been in poor health for some time.

But Bork was a towering figure for an early generation of conservatives. In the 1960s and '70s, he argued that a liberal-dominated Supreme Court was abusing its power and remaking American life by ending prayers in public schools, by extending new rights to criminals, by ordering cross-town busing and by voiding the laws against abortion.

PHOTOS: Robert Bork | March 1, 1927 - Dec. 19, 2012

He was an influential legal advisor in the Nixon administration and served as a footnote to history in the Watergate scandal. When the embattled president ordered the firing of special counsel Archibald Cox, the attorney general and his deputy resigned in protest. Bork, who was in the No. 3 post as U.S. solicitor general, then carried out Nixon’s order.

But Bork’s biggest moment came during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. He left Yale and came to Washington when Reagan appointed him to the U.S. court of appeals in the District of Columbia. The job was seen as a steppingstone to the high court.

In 1986, Bork was passed over for a younger colleague when Reagan named Judge Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. A year later, Bork’s turn came when Justice Lewis Powell, the swing vote on the closely divided court, announced his retirement.

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012

Democrats, led by Sen. Edward Kennedy, launched an all-out attack on Bork’s nomination, saying he would set back the cause of civil rights, women’s rights and civil liberties.

The summer of 1987 saw campaign-style attacks on Bork’s reputation.  In televised hearings, the bearded, heavy-set professor tried to explain his views, but he won few converts. The Senate defeated his nomination by a 58-42 vote.

In his place, Reagan eventually chose Judge Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed unanimously. The switch proved to have lasting consequences. Kennedy cast decisive votes to uphold Roe vs. Wade and to preserve the ban on school-sponsored prayers.

Bork stepped down from the bench a year after his defeat, but wrote several books renewing his criticism of liberalism. In the past year, he served as a chairman of Mitt Romney’s advisory committee on the judiciary and the courts.

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david.savage@latimes.com

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Benghazi Commission Practically Demands Pain Rays at Embassies

Want to stop the next riot at a U.S. embassy? The commission into the September assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has an unexpected suggestion: load them up with exotic, supposedly non-lethal weaponry. Not that the commission has much confidence in the security personnel who’d operate the controversial gear.

In its newly released report into the Benghazi disaster, an independent commission assembled by the State Department found that, among other security failures, “the lack of non-lethal crowd control options” at the consulate “precluded a more vigorous defense.” (.pdf) The September attack, in which Libyans assaulted the sparsely defended consulate with rockets, mortars, machine-gun fire and more, killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The commission doesn’t explicitly endorse any particular form of non-lethal defense of diplomatic installations. But the obvious options would be a laser flash that “dazzles” oncoming attackers, an ear-splitting sonic blaster … and a microwave-like pain ray that make targets feel like they’re being hit with the exhaust of a giant oven. The first two weapons have been used by U.S. military forces overseas in recent years. The third one was pulled from Afghanistan because it was considered too controversial.

The commission does not consider such weaponry a panacea. It does find that the State Department is behind the curve on exploring how those technologies, however. “There have been technological advancements in non-lethal deterrents,” it writes, “and the State Department should ensure it rapidly and routinely identifies and procures additional options for non-lethal deterrents in high risk, high threat posts and trains personnel on their use.”

The U.S. military has been experimenting with non-lethal crowd control systems for years. One of the marquee projects of its Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate is a millimeter-wave gun called the Active Denial System. Intended for the perimeter defense of a base, the truck-mounted weapon blasts angry mobs with 12 joules of focused energy per square centimeter. The blast doesn’t penetrate the skin, but — as I learned first-hand in March — it very rapidly creates an unbearable burning sensation, prompting anyone in its path to involuntarily move out of the way.

Another non-lethal option: sonic blasters like the Long-Range Acoustic Device or the Inferno, which cause, in the words of Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger, “the most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I’ve ever heard in my life.” The Long-Range Acoustic Device, for instance, fires sound waves at a 300-meter distance, and has been used against pirates; a related Israeli weapon, called the Scream, was put to work in 2009 to literally nauseate protesters.

But the commission’s brief plaudit for less-lethal weaponry doesn’t consider some of the very real drawbacks of these systems, both technical and, er, diplomatic. The commission notes that the Benghazi attack happened too quickly for the U.S. military to respond to. That would also be too fast for the Active Denial System, which needs a 16-hour boot-up time if the energy-intensive device isn’t constantly running. It also doesn’t work as well in dusty, rainy, snowy or other poor-weather conditions.

Then there are the diplomatic problems with the weapons. The Active Denial System was recalled from Afghanistan after a brief deployment in 2010 out of fear that the Taliban would effectively portray it as a sterilization device. Mounting one of these on the walls of an embassy would not exactly send the message that the U.S. is eager to work with the locals on matters of mutual interest.

But the Benghazi commission also provides little confidence in the security officers who’d have to operate and oversee the non-lethal weapons. The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security comes across in the commission’s report as barely able to manage the resources that it already has. Not only did the Benghazi consulate depend on a “poorly skilled” Libyan militia and unarmed guards from the Blue Mountain security firm, the commission found the Diplomatic Security bureau needs to “upgrade surveillance cameras at high risk, high threat posts for greater resolution, nighttime visibility, and monitoring capability beyond post”; create an “action plan” about what to do about “the use of fire as a weapon against diplomatic facilities”; and “revisit [its] high-threat training with respect to active internal defense and fire survival.”

That makes it sound like the Bureau of Diplomatic Security is under-prepared at the basics of protecting diplomatic outposts. And it’s not the first time the directorate has come in for criticism. A 2007 State Department inquiry found that the bureau exercised inadequate oversight of its private security force in Iraq, owing to under-staffing and meager budgets. (That’s something Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is asking Congress to correct.) In Afghanistan, Diplomatic Security contracted out for embassy guards that couldn’t speak English, despite repeated warnings from embassy personnel that such a move jeopardized an effective response to a crisis.

Veterans of the bureau describe a hidebound bureaucracy insulated from accountability, especially as it had always succeeded at its core job of keeping diplomats alive. Until Benghazi.

“The [Diplomatic Security] Bureau showed a lack of proactive senior leadership with respect to Benghazi,” the commission writes, “failing to ensure that the priority security needs of a high risk, high threat post were met.” The commission, however, stops short at recommending anyone inside the bureau be fired over Benghazi, punting on that suggestion to “future” studies. But the report appears to have prompted the resignations of top Diplomatic Security officials, including Amb. Eric Boswell. Not exactly the people you’d want manning your acoustic cannons and heat rays.

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A Minute With: Jessica Chastain on “Zero Dark Thirty”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Jessica Chastain carries the weight of starring in one of the year’s most anticipated films, “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the decade-long hunt and eventual killing of Osama bin Laden.

Critics say Chastain pulls it off seamlessly as “Maya,” based on a real-life CIA agent who played a major role in tracking down bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan.

As the film opens in limited U.S. release on Wednesday, Chastain, who is tipped as a likely best actress Oscar nominee for the role, talked to Reuters about playing a character she could not meet and why the film is an important look at America’s role in a dark war.

Q. What did you think when you saw this film finished?

A. “It is a tough one for me to watch, because there is so much responsibility with playing this woman. I find her to be incredible. And I didn’t want to change her story or make her a Hollywood version, with a lot of makeup. I didn’t want to trivialize what she did … I want her to like it, but I don’t know if she will ever see it.”

Q. How did you play someone you had never met?

A. “There was three months of working with (screenplay writer) Mark Boal, doing research, reading lists and talking to people. And then anything I could not solve through research, like what is her favorite candy – ’cause when we are all overseas we have something we do when we are homesick – I had to answer that question myself.”

Q. Boal hasn’t gone into too much detail about her?

A. “We have to protect her because she is an undercover CIA operative, still working.”

Q. What else did you know about her?

A. “When we finished the movie, when the Navy Seal book ‘No Easy Day’ came out. I raced to go read it, because I was like, ‘I need to know if my character is in the book!’ And they talk about Jen, the young CIA girl. Well, everything matched up. She was the only one that said 100 percent ‘he is there.’… They talked about how she had been on it close to a decade and they were only on it for 40 minutes. They said she was crying on the airplane afterwards.”

Q. During filming, were you ever worried about your safety, that the film might be misconstrued?

A. “As an actor you always worry about that. Because you think, maybe someone will see a film and they won’t understand the difference between acting and reality. The good thing is, what (director Kathryn Bigelow) and Mark have done, is that they have not made a propaganda film. They tried to make it as authentic as possible and respectful of the actual historical event as they could. That includes showing the intense interrogation techniques that were used. The end of the film – it’s not a lot of fist pumping and saying, ‘Here is our journey over 10 years and it was so difficult and we finally did it.’ It ends actually on a very different note.”

Q. Can you elaborate on that?

A. “Well, for me the whole thing is about the arc of this woman. She shows up in the beginning and she is wearing her best suit. She thinks she knows what she is in for, and she is completely out of her element. But over the 10 years, this woman, who has been trained to be unemotional and analytically precise … we see her struggling to keep it contained for 10 years and as she descends down the rabbit hole of the world she is in.

“So finally at the end when she is asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ there is no way to answer that question. … She has no idea where she belongs, now that this is done. But not only does it speak in terms of that, but the movie ends with that question – where do you want to go? Where do we go now as a country? Where do we go as a society? It is not a movie that ends with an answer, and I find that powerful.”

Q. How did you cope with filming the torture scenes?

A. “We filmed in a real Jordanian prison, in the middle of nowhere. The environment wasn’t great, especially as a woman.

“They had a lot of trust between the actors, nothing was dangerous or unsafe. There was a lot of discussion to make sure that we weren’t doing something that was going to be salacious. They just wanted it to be accurate.

“I know I am playing a character who has trained to be unemotional. But I have spent my entire life allowing myself to be emotional, and allowing myself to feel everything. … There was actually one day that we were doing a scene, and I said, ‘I am sorry’ and I just had to walk away, and I just started crying … it was a very intense experience.”

Q. You are a top chance for Oscar nomination. Would that be more or less rewarding for this role?

A. “Because she is still an active member of the CIA and undercover, she can’t take credit for what she’s done. … And by making this film, it is my idea as a way of thanking her. It would be very emotional because of that.”

Q. You compare your character to getting lost down a CIA rabbit hole. What about your own dizzying rise as an actress?

A. “That’s a good question. I do think that next year I need to go somewhere for a month and be in a room by myself and be like, ‘Ok, what now Jessica?’ But I am nowhere near where she was at the end of this mission.”

(Reporting By Christine Kearney, editing by Jill Serjeant and Doina Chiacu)

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Irish Government Set to Allow Abortion in Rare Cases

DUBLIN — The Irish government said Tuesday that it was preparing to allow abortion under limited circumstances in an effort to comply with demands by the European Court of Human Rights to clarify the country’s legal position on the issue.

Cathal Mcnaughton/Reuters

A vigil was held in Dublin on Monday in memory of Dr. Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist who died after being denied an abortion.

The proposed legislative and regulatory changes would allow abortion only in cases where there is a real and substantial risk to a woman’s life — as distinct from her health.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that abortion was permissible when risk was present, but the government never passed a law to that effect.

Addressing Parliament after the announcement, Prime Minister Enda Kenny was at pains to emphasize that the proposals would allow abortion only in certain cases. He added that the threat of suicide could be among them.

The abortion debate has convulsed Ireland for decades, but calls for change reached a crescendo after the death of Dr. Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist, in October. Dr. Halappanavar arrived at a Galway hospital in severe pain and was found to be miscarrying. Her fetus had a heartbeat, making termination of the pregnancy illegal under Irish law. She died of septicemia a week after admission.

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A search for normality as Newtown schools reopen after massacre

The Newtown tragedy was in the minds of many as schools opened as usual across the country. Lee Woodruff met with a group of teachers in Westchester County, N.Y., about getting back to work after a difficult weekend.

By Tina Susman and Michael Muskal

December 18, 2012, 9:31 a.m.

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- Amid increased security, schools reopened here on Tuesday as this town searched for a road back to normality after last week’s massacre at a local elementary school.

Funerals for the 20 first-graders and six adults killed Friday morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School will continue throughout the week. Two children were buried on Monday amid the cold and rain and two more funerals are scheduled for Tuesday.

Sandy Hook remained closed, however, and will likely be shuttered for months as authorities continue their investigation into the shooting spree by Adam Lanza, 20, who killed himself after invading the school, opening fire on students and staff and then turning a gun on himself.

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Photos: Massacre at elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Who they were: Connecticut school shooting victims

Full coverage: Connecticut school shooting

Transcript and video: Obama's speech

Timeline: Deadliest U.S. mass shootings

The weapons Lanza used were legally owned by his mother, Nancy, who was the first of the 28 people who died from bullets that morning.

Yellow school buses rumbled along roads Tuesday morning, some still dotted with makeshift memorials to those who were slain. Children laden with book bags waited outside their homes for the buses.

 PHOTOS: Shooting at Connecticut school

But it was clear this would not be a normal day for them despite teachers' efforts and the stepped-up presence oflawenforcement. Staffers met on Monday with psychologists and other specialists to hear how to handle their own grief and children's questions.

“It's important to try to make things feel normal for her,” a mother who would give only her first name -- Barbara -- said, explaining why she decided to have her 8-year-old daughter head back to classes.

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Barbara, who was driving her daughter to school, said she knew not all parents would be comfortable letting their kids go into the schools, even with extra security. “I'll be a lot more anxious than usual,” she admitted.

Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said sending children back to school is a personal choice and parents would have to make their own decisions.

“I can't imagine what it must be like being a parent with a child that young, putting them on a school bus,” Sinko said.

In addition to trying to reassure parents, the increased police presence helped keep the media from the schools. Police have also said they will severely prosecute anyone perpetrating hoaxes, such as two telephone calls saying there were bombs on the grounds of a local church, St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church.

Police have been told to act aggressively, as they did in nearby Ridgefield on Monday where they shut down schools amid reports of a suspicious man at the train station. After investigating, police told reporters there was no threat.

In addition to the investigation at Ridgefield, about 20 miles from Newtown, there have been reports across the country of closures by anxious officials. Two schools were locked down in South Burlington, Vt., and a high school in Windham, N.H., was briefly locked down. Neither case involved any threat.

Two more children will be buried on Tuesday and both funerals will be held at St. Rose, which has been a center of grief counseling and community support. Services will be held for 6-year-olds Jessica Rekos and James Mattioli.

Jessica was avid about horses and had asked Santa for new cowgirl boots and a cowgirl hat this year, according to her family. “Jessica loved everything about horses,” her parents, Rich and Krista Rekos, said in a statement. “She devoted her free time to watching horse movies, reading horse books, drawing horses and writing stories about horses.”

James was described by his relatives as a “numbers guy” who loved math.

On Monday, two funeral homes were filled with mourners for Noah Pozner and Jack Pinto, both 6. Pozner had a Jewish service and Pinto a Christian one.

Noah Pozner’s twin, Arielle, survived the rampage because she was assigned a different classroom.

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Islamic Extremists Rescue NBC Reporter Held in Syria

When Americans encounter jihadi groups in warzones, it can often mean captivity or even execution. Except in Syria, where they just rescued NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent from a days-long ordeal.

Six days ago, Richard Engel and his production team were captured while traveling in northwest Syria with a rebel group when they were taken captive by forces loyal to dictator Bashar Assad. One of the rebels was killed on sight by the 15 loyalist gunmen, and the American crew was subject to death threats and what Engel described as “psychological torture.” But the loyalist plan was to orchestrate an exchange of prisoners with the rebels. Until they ran into a leading Syrian jihadist group.

While Engel and his team were blindfolded and shoved into the back of a truck, the loyalists unwittingly stopped at a checkpoint run by Ahrar al-Sham. As Engel recounted on the Today Show Tuesday, fighters for the jihadist group confronted the loyalists and a firefight broke out, killing two of the loyalists. Ahrar al-Sham let Engel and his producers leave Syria unharmed, and posted the above video of the NBC team to its YouTube channel.

The U.S. is supposed to be in an epic global struggle with Islamic extremism. But the Arab revolutions of the past two years have shuffled the deck. Like with Libya in 2011, the U.S.’ sometimes-reluctant call for the ouster of regional dictators has put Washington effectively on the same side as some of the jihadist groups it fears will take power. In Syria, the U.S. is especially wary of the jihadi fighters, many of whom are believed to be veterans of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Securing Engel’s freedom is a particularly unexpected turn for Ahrar al-Sham, which the Associated Press describes as “Islamic fundamentalist brigade home to many foreign jihadis.” A recently revamped rebel command structure excluded the group, along with the al-Qaida-aligned Jabhat al-Nusra, seemingly to secure Western backing. Such groups are given to criticizing the U.S. — not for intervening in Syria, but for not intervening enough in Syria, and being prissy about the company it keeps.

Ahrar al-Sham might give Westerners pause. But Danger Room pal Matt Fanning, a Fort Worth-based IT consultant who closely tracks Syrian rebel groups, says the jihadist organization is one of the most effective and the most media-savvy of the rebel coalition. Their weapons of choice include roadside bombs and car bombs, tactics that “clearly came from Iraq,” Fanning says.

Ahrar al-Sham is also one of the most prolific Syrian jihadi groups on YouTube. Ahrar al-Sham takes video cameras along on raids — to capture giant explosions for upload — and doesn’t mind displaying maps of its operations against Assad’s forces. “Sham also releases probably three to five videos a day where Nusra is good for about one to three a week,” Fanning says.

But Ahrar al-Sham’s ideology is no less extreme. It’s issued religious edicts against the ruling Alawite minority and has been criticized for rounding up Shias as hostages. “I agree with al-Qaida on certain things and disagree on others,” one Ahrar al-Sham fighter, a veteran of al-Qaida in Iraq, told The New York Times in July. His nuanced view of suicide bombing: OK against government troops, not OK against civilians.

As BuzzFeed recounts, NBC worked hard to keep reporters from mentioning Engel’s captivity, for fear that publicity might jeopardize his safety. That’s no idle concern: The Committee to Protect Journalists says Syria is “by far the deadliest country” for reporters, with 28 “killed in combat or targeted for murder” in 2012 by the various warring factions. Engel and his team are some of the lucky ones — and unexpectedly lucky that they ran into one of Syria’s leading jihadist organizations.

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