Nergis at MIT (Credit: news.mit.edu)Karachi-born quantum astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala, Associate Department Head of Physics at MIT is a member of the team of scientists that announced on Thursday the scientific milestone of detecting gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesized by physicist Albert Einstein a century ago.
Professor Mavalvala, whose career spans 20 years, has published extensively in her field and has been working with MIT since 2002.
Mavalvala did her BA at Wellesley College in Physics and Astronomy in 1990 and a Ph.D in physics in 1997 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Before that, she was a postdoctoral associate and then a research scientist at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working on the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).
She has been involved with LIGO since her early years in graduate school at MIT and her primary research has been in instrument development for interferometric gravitational-wave detectors.
She also received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award in 2010.
The girl from Karachi
Born to a Parsi family in Karachi, Mavalvala received her early education from the Convent of Jesus and Mary school, an administration official from the educational institute confirmed to Dawn.com.
She later moved to the United States as a teenager to attend Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she is said to have a natural gift for being comfortable in her own skin, according to an article published on the sciencemag.org website.
“Even when Nergis was a freshman, she struck me as fearless, with a refreshing can-do attitude,” says Robert Berg, a professor of physics at Wellesley.
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“I used to borrow tools and parts from the bike-repair man across the street to fix my bike,” Mavalvala says.
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In an earlier report, Mavalvala’s colleague observed that while many professors would like to treat students as colleagues, most students don’t respond as equals. From the first day, Mavalvala acted and worked like an equal. She helped Berg, who at the time was new to the faculty, set up a laser and transform an empty room into a lab. Before she graduated in 1990, Berg and Mavalvala had co-authored a paper in Physical Review B: Condensed Matter.
Her parents encouraged academic excellence. She was by temperament very hands-on. “I used to borrow tools and parts from the bike-repair man across the street to fix my bike,” she says. Her mother objected to the grease stains, “but my parents never said such skills were off-limits to me or my sister.”
So she grew up without stereotypical gender roles. Once in the United States, she did not feel bound by US social norms, she recalls.
Her practical skills stood her in good stead in 1991, when she was scouting for a research group to join after her first year as a graduate student at MIT. Her adviser was moving to Chicago and Mavalvala had decided not to follow him, so she needed a new adviser. She met Rainer Weiss, who worked down the hallway.
“What do you know?” Weiss asked her. She began to list the classes she had taken at the institute—but the renowned experimentalist interrupted with, “What do you know how to do?” Mavalvala ticked off her practical skills and accomplishments: machining, electronic circuitry, building a laser. Weiss took her on right away.
Mavalvala says that although it may not be immediately apparent, she is a product of good mentoring.
From the chemistry teacher in Pakistan who let her play with reagents in the lab after school to the head of the physics department at MIT, who supported her work when she joined the faculty in 2002, she has encountered several encouraging people on her journey.
Although the discovery of gravitational waves, that opens a new window for studying the cosmos, was made in September 2015, it took scientists months to confirm their data.
The researchers said they detected gravitational waves coming from two black holes – extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by Einstein – that orbited one another, spiraled inward and smashed together. They said the waves were the product of a collision between two black holes 30 times as massive as the Sun, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth.
The scientific milestone, announced at a news conference in Washington, was achieved using a pair of giant laser detectors in the United States, located in Louisiana and Washington state, capping a long quest to confirm the existence of these waves.
The announcement was made in Washington by scientists from the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
“We are really witnessing the opening of a new tool for doing astronomy,” MIT astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala said in an interview. “We have turned on a new sense. We have been able to see and now we will be able to hear as well.”
Saudi women drivers (Credit: telegraph.co.uk)MUNICH: Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister defended his country’s treatment of women on Friday, saying it had made progress on female education but would take time to let them drive cars.
“When it comes to issues like women’s driving, this is not a religious issue, it’s a societal issue,” Adel al-Jubeir told an audience at the Munich Security Conference.
He said it was unfair to fixate on the issue of women drivers, given the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom’s efforts to educate girls.
“We went from no schools for women in 1960 to universal education, to where today 55 percent of college students are women,” said Jubeir.
“Some of our top doctors and engineers and lawyers and business people are women. The issue is one that is evolving just like it is in other countries.”
He compared Saudi Arabia to the United States, arguing that it took 100 years after America’s independence before women were given the right to vote, and another 100 years for it to elect its first female parliamentary speaker.
“I’m not saying ‘Give us 200 years’. I’m saying ‘be patient’,” said Jubeir.
“We hope that in the modern world with technology and communications that this process is accelerated, but things take time. We can’t expect to rush things.”
Restrictions in Saudi Arabia remain some of the toughest in the world with women forced to cover themselves in black from head to toe in public.
For the first time in December women were allowed to stand for election to local councils.
Human Rights Watch has criticised Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system which forbids women “from obtaining a passport, marrying, travelling, or accessing higher education without the approval of a male guardian”.
If there’s one thing that fires up Bernie Sanders supporters—and makes his detractors roll their eyes—it’s his call for a “political revolution.” To his base, it’s the very point of his anti-establishment, anti-elite candidacy. To his critics, it’s the very embodiment of his campaign’s naïve impracticality and vagueness.
But now that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have spoken, it’s time to take the idea of political revolution more seriously—more seriously, indeed, when Sanders himself appears to have. It’s time to ask: What exactly would it take?
It starts with Congress. And here it’s instructive to compare Sanders and Donald Trump. Both rely on broad, satisfying refrains of “We’re gonna”: We’re gonna break up the big banks. We’re gonna make Mexico build the wall. We’re gonna end the rule of Wall Street billionaires. We’re gonna make China stop ripping us off.
The difference is, Trump’s refrains are more plausible. That’s because today’s Congress is already willing to enact many of his proposals, whether repeal of Obamacare or severe restrictions on immigration. And if Trump became president, the 115th Congress would very likely be more conservative than the 114th.
For Sanders to deliver on his “We’re gonna” pledges, he needs an entirely different Congress. How to get it? Thus far, Sanders has laid out a theory of action that is basically, “If I come, they will build it.” That is, if he electrifies enough voters to win, then presumably those voters will have upended Congress as well. He’s banking on an electoral flood tide à la 1980, 1964, or 1932.
That’s possible, but it’s not a plan. If he’s serious about political revolution, the first priority for Sanders now should be to cultivate a crop of Democratic candidates who can oust Republican incumbents. House Democrats, at their lowest numbers since 1947, need 30 seats to regain a majority. If Sanders launched a “Bernie’s 30” effort, to persuade his formidable base of small donors to give money and time to a slate of candidates who can win a targeted set of seats now held by the GOP, that would help effect the actual institutional change his presidency would depend on.
A second step for a true revolution would be a common policy agenda for all these candidates. Here he could take a page from Newt Gingrich’s playbook and issue a progressive Contract With America that prioritizes 10 easy-to-digest legislative goals (Wall Street reform, campaign reform, single-payer health care, and so forth). Historians and commentators differ on how much the Contract truly caused the tectonic 1994 GOP takeover. But it did nationalize, and standardize, congressional campaigns in a way that Sanders would need to do.
Third, Sanders should also take a page from the Obama 2008 playbook. That campaign organized young people more systematically than any presidential campaign in history. Across the country, it held “Camp Obama” trainings, in which young people taught each other Marshall Ganz’s story-centered methods of community organizing. Sanders has the young people; now he needs the machinery to amplify their force.
Fourth, Sanders would have to learn from Obama 2008 how to catalyze culture makers. Every presidential campaign knows enough now to enlist celebrity musicians or artists. But Sanders could invite artists from all around the country, famous or not, to create work that spreads the message of his campaign. Culture shapes norms: about inequality, racism, violence. And culture that isn’t made by the campaign but by the people packs a punch.
Fifth, Sanders would have to link up to other organic movements that are arising in parallel with his own campaign. The Democracy Awakening coalition, led by the NAACP and Public Citizen with dozens of other progressive organizations, for example, is planning a national rally in Washington for this spring. But Sanders should look beyond obviously progressive movements. If he wants a revolution, he needs also to invite in the segment of Trump supporters who aren’t racist xenophobes but who simply feel left behind by a changing country. That would be revolutionary.
Sixth, the Sanders campaign should study the Tea Party closely and learn from it. It’s too easy for progressives to dismiss the Tea Party as a creation of the Koch brothers. The more complex and instructive reality is that, especially early on, there were many thousands of Americans self-organizing on conference calls and Facebook and in person. What was their leadership structure? How did they communicate? What lessons do their grassroots leaders have about dealing with the party establishment?
Seventh, Sanders should be building a web of city leaders—elected and not—who will push policies in sync with his national agenda. Cities are increasingly the locus of civic innovation, whether on the sharing economy or living wages or criminal-justice reform. A true political revolution would activate citizens in every city of scale to provide the foundation from which federal reforms could arise.
Of course, Hillary Clinton could adopt some of these strategies, too. But her disadvantage is that she does not have many young voters. More crucially, she does not seek transformational change. The only other candidate who wants such change, Trump, sees his voters as an audience, as customers, as fans. Not so much as citizens. He loves them the way Il Duce loved his people. He wants to exercise power in their name, not to empower them to shape their own futures.
Which brings me back to the Sanders opportunity—and what I think of as an American opportunity. I supported Obama in 2008, and I’ve supported Clinton this time. But I am genuinely excited about the energy Sanders has activated, and I believe it’s good for the country if that energy gets converted to productive civic action.
So the message now to Bernie Sanders from Americans of every stripe should be this: You say you want a revolution? Help us make one.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who is trying to save his failing campaign in New Hampshire after finishing sixth in the Iowa caucuses, had to beg an audience in New Hampshire to clap for him.
“I will be a commander in chief that will have the back of the military, I won’t trash talk, I won’t be a divider-in-chief or an agitator-in-chief. I won’t be out there blowharding talking a big game without backing it up,” Bush said at a town hall in New Hampshire on Tuesday. “I think the next president needs to be a lot quieter but send a signal that we’re prepared to act in the national security interests of this country to get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world.”
When Bush’s comments were met with silence, he asked the audience to “please clap,” which they did.
According to HuffPost Pollster, which aggregates publicly available polling data, Bush trails Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas), Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) in New Hampshire.
That sentiment was pretty well expressed by GOP presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who cast Obama’s suggestion that the United States discriminates against Muslims as Obama pitting Americans “against each other.”
Others criticized Obama for the specific mosque he chose and its ties. And late Wednesday night, Donald Trump said perhaps Obama “feels comfortable there” — a comment thick with innuendo from a man who championed conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace.
“We have a lot of problems in this country, Greta,” Trump said on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News show. “There are a lot of places he can go, and he chose a mosque.”
Jeb Bush, on the other hand, argued it was a positive step. And as we’ve discussed before, his brother George W. Bush would likely agree. The elder Bush, after all, visited a mosque shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with a message pretty similar to Obama’s.
In a gesture that surprised and gratified Islamic leaders, Bush stepped up an already intense effort by his administration to prevent hate crimes and discrimination against nearly 10 million American Arabs and Muslims in retaliation for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks by Middle Eastern terrorists.
“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” said the president, escorted by Islamic clerics into the ornate mosque full of Turkish tile, Persian rugs and Egyptian paintings. “Islam is peace.”
So why is something a Republican president did in 2001 suddenly divisive when a Democratic president does it 15 years later?
Rubio is free to enunciate why that is — and it could definitely have something to do with Obama singling out Republicans in the speech and his refusal to say the words “radical Islam” (though Rubio didn’t mention those things in his comments) — but more broadly, Islam is simply something that gives an increasing number of Republicans heartburn.
The Pew poll in 2002 showed 47 percent of Republicans and independents who leaned Republican said either “most” or “half/some” Muslims are “anti-American.”
Today, that number is now 63 percent.
Just 3 in 10 Republicans say the number of anti-American Muslims is only “just a few” or “none.” Think about that for a moment, and it’s not hard to see why many Republicans rallied to Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants.
Pew has a raft of other data showing GOP voters are significantly more suspicious of how violent a religion Islam is and are much more likely to say that politicians shouldn’t be afraid of saying things that might be seen as critical of Islam.
But the chart above shows, better than just about anything else, how much more polarized we are on this issue. Call it the Trump Effect. Call it a symptom of how Americans now consume their news and information. Call it a reaction to the rise of the Islamic State.
Whatever it is, it is much more pitched than it was even after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush’s move at the time was seen as somewhat bold; in today’s Republican Party — and without the huge popularity Bush enjoyed in the days after 9/11 — it’s not a stretch to argue that it never would have happened.
PIA said none of its scheduled flights took off from anywhere in the country.
Staff stepped up their industrial action after two employees were shot dead during clashes with security forces in Karachi on Tuesday.
The strikers have been threatened with the sack if they hinder efforts to reform the loss-making airline.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said they may even be imprisoned.
On Wednesday dozens of PIA’s national and international flights were cancelled amid demonstrations by striking staff.
“Everything is shut now and flight operations have come to a complete halt,” airline spokesman Danial Gilani told the AFP news agency.
The violence in at Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport prompted the airline’s chairman Nasir Jafar to tender his resignation, but Mr Gilani said the PM had yet to accept the offer.
It is still not clear who fired the shots in Karachi, with both police and paramilitary forces denying that they did.
On Wednesday, additional police and security personnel were deployed outside major airports.
BBC correspondents say private airlines have been brought in to help clear the flight backlog – in some cases doubling their fares.
Staff are angry at proposals to complete a partial sale of the airliner by July.
PIA was once a source of pride for Pakistan but in recent years its reputation has been hit by losses, mismanagement and cancelled flights.
‘Callous disregard’ – media view
The privatisation issue has come under intense press scrutiny, with most Pakistani newspapers accusing the government of handling the affair clumsily.
As far as left-liberal Dawn is concerned, invoking an act of parliament to stop the airline unions striking was “an act of sheer panic”.
“Beyond the follies of the moment, the entire episode has turned a delicate matter into an open contest of wills of the sort that is usually won by the party with more grit, which in this case would be the unions,” it says.
The News, which is centrist, agrees, saying Tuesday’s events showed a “callous disregard for the norms of a healthy society” and adding: “It took only two days for an already bad situation to be worsened through a needless escalation.”
Urdu-language Nawa-i-Waqt wants an investigation but maintains that if the policy of not giving into pressure from the PIA employees is continued, “their blackmailing could be ended once and for all and the status of the national airline would be restored”.
The Democratic and Republican Iowa Caucuses, the first step in nominating a candidate, will take place on February 1. Iowans defend the caucus as an exercise in real grassroots democracy, given the extent of politicking and discussion that goes on.
On February 1, the first voting contest in the presidential nominating process kicks into gear in the US state of Iowa. Because it is the first state to do so, candidates invest heavily there, whether by holding debates or canvassing.
Iowans vote in caucuses, which are small political meetings held throughout 1,681 locations scattered around the state. They are similar to primaries in that residents cast ballots for their preferred party candidate, and whoever garners the most votes wins. But people do not just show up and vote – the process is essentially a meeting of friends and neighbours in high school gyms and church basements, where discussions about candidates are held.
Representatives for the candidates are present and, at one point, attempt to persuade undecided voters. This is what makes caucuses different from primaries. The Iowa caucuses, which have represented the nation’s first ballot-marking since the 1970s, is also different for Democrats and Republicans.
The caucuses: Republican vs Democrat
In the US, elections take place like this: Citizens elect delegates, delegates elect nominees, and nominees become presidents.
On the Republican side, the caucuses are straightforward: Voters turn up, listen to speeches, and then cast their vote by a secret ballot. Votes are tallied statewide. A winner is subsequently declared.
On the Democratic side, the process is more convoluted and time-consuming. The number of people in the room are counted, and any candidate who does not get a certain percentage (a threshold set at the beginning of the night) in the first round, is eliminated.
Those who voted for losing candidates are then coaxed by the others to join their side and to vote for their candidate of choice. At the end, the results are collated across the state in all precincts.
Despite the hoopla surrounding the Iowa caucuses, the real impact of this process happens further down the line, when results are eventually translated into votes for delegates, who represent their states at their respective party conventions. These delegates are the ones who vote for a candidate to run in the national election.
Why are the Iowa caucuses significant?
Iowans defend the caucus as an exercise in real grassroots democracy, given the extent of politicking and discussion that goes on. However, some argue that the lengthy and complex caucus is archaic and should be changed.
One of the problems with placing so much weight on Iowa is that it is not demographically representative of the US, with a population that is approximately 90 percent white versus 77 percent nationwide.
“The importance of Iowa is enshrined in tradition. It’s not practical,” said Jason Johnson, a professor of political science and communication at Hiram College in Ohio.
“Other states are more demographically and economically diverse and are a better indicator of how you would do nationally. It’s just that we have been doing it for so long that no one wants to advocate its change,” Johnson, who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats as a campaign manager, told Al Jazeera.
If this state is small and unrepresentative, why does it have such an impact on the race? In a nutshell, it is because it is the first contest for people to get their party nomination. If a candidate does not do well in those early states, like Iowa and New Hampshire, financial and electoral support eventually begins to dry up. This gives Iowa the power to narrow down the playing field.
“Because it is the first, a large number of voters within the two parties and a large number of the press and party elites in [Washington] DC choose to make it an important contest,” Johnson said.
“Your success in Iowa is perceived to be an indicator for your ability to organise, to get people on the ground and to have voters enthusiastically support you.”
What do the Iowa caucuses achieve?
Because of the sequential system, the results of the ‘first-in-the-nation’ caucuses can affect how people in the next state vote (it helps them adjust their expectations accordingly), give winning candidates more airtime and media attention, and impact the behaviour of donors. More importantly, it narrows down the number of candidates to a manageable size.
“Its most important facet is that it winnows the field,” said Lara Brown, the author of Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism of Aspirants. “It typically brings out two to three candidates who have the media momentum and organisational campaign to go forward.”
The winnowing effect of the Iowa caucuses helps predict the losing nominee. That is because it separates the “starters from the non-starters,” according to Bill Schneider, a political analyst who has covered every US presidential and midterm election since 1976.
“You will see candidates dropping out after Iowa,” Schneider told Al Jazeera. “People who vote in the Republican caucuses tend to be evangelical. They are not representative of the larger party. On the Democratic side, they tend to be very liberal, because it’s people who have the commitment to attend what’s essentially a meeting.”
Since 1972, no Democratic or Republican candidate who finished worse than fourth place in Iowa has gone on to win their party’s nomination, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
Most often, it is those hopefuls who get a top tier spot who continue to do well in their campaigns. Those who do not usually drop out of the race soon thereafter, although there are a few exceptions. A case in point is former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who, in 2008, won the Republican caucus, but dropped out just three months later, without securing the GOP nomination.
What does this mean for this year’s race?
Essentially, pundits, strategists, candidates and people will be using the Iowa caucuses’ results as a litmus test to see how the nation responds to candidates and to set the stage and build momentum for the first primary held in New Hampshire about a week later. It is also a chance for voters and the media to see if the results measure up to their expectations.
In the Democratic contest, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was leading in polls until Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders caught up with her. In Iowa, he recently topped Clinton at 49 percent to 45 percent, according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll, essentially locking both candidates in a tight battle.
While Sanders has positioned himself to seriously compete in this race, Iowa may be a tough win for him, according to some observers.
“Hillary Clinton has long focused on Iowa as essentially a shortcoming of her previous campaign, and I’d be surprised if she doesn’t win there,” Brown told Al Jazeera. “Bernie Sanders has to bring a lot of first-time caucus-goers who may not be as active and knowledgeable as Clinton’s supporters.”
On the GOP side, all eyes will be on billionaire Donald Trump, and whether people will actually go out and vote for him. The celebrity tycoon is leading in Iowa with about 31 percent, compared with 29 percent for Senator Ted Cruz, according to the same Quinnipiac University poll.
“As Trump gains momentum, there will be a lot of caucusers who think he’s going to be the nominee so they say ‘let me get on board’,” said Joe Watkins, a Republican strategist. “They see who’s going to win and they want in. That’s how it works.”
Trump, who won the endorsement of former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, recently exuded confidence at an Iowa rally when he said he “could shoot somebody” on New York’s Fifth Avenue and “wouldn’t lose any voters”.
“With Palin’s endorsement, he’s digging into Ted Cruz’s base, which is the evangelical Christian base,” Watkins, who was a White House aide to former President George Bush senior, told Al Jazeera.
In New Hampshire, Trump has a much larger lead over the other Republican presidential hopefuls there, so if he wins in Iowa, he can bring both contests to South Carolina, which then puts him in a comfortable position on Super Tuesday, a day on which several US states hold primaries.
Schneider explained that there are two ways things can go for Trump: His supporters, many of whom have never voted in a caucus before, may not show up, especially since he has not invested as much time and energy on the ground there.
“A caucus is a meeting. It takes a lot more energy to attend a meeting,” Schneider said. “You need something to pull people out of their beds, find babysitters for their kids, to get them to that meeting. Without that sort of operation, his people won’t show up.”
On the other hand, it is possible that Trump’s supporters will show up without any organisation. “His people are so fired up, they want their voice to be heard. So it could happen. It happened to [Barack] Obama in 2008.”
What happens after the caucuses?
“Just because a candidate wins Iowa doesn’t mean he wins the general election,” Republican strategist Watkins said. “It’s all very fluid and not automatic.”
“It’s possible Trump can win Iowa and even the Republican nomination, but winning the general election is something else; he’d have to win constituents who aren’t Republican, or he has to walk back many of his comments that alienated others.”
The results of Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primaries also tend to go hand in hand. “Iowa and New Hampshire are different kinds of tests, but they go together: Iowa is a very restricted electorate. New Hampshire is more open because they allow independents,” Schneider said. “If you fail both these tests, then it’s time to leave.”
Tora Bora, Afghanistan (Credit: crackersquire.blogspot.com)
WASHINGTON, Jan 31 — The United States has carried out at least a dozen operations — including commando raids and airstrikes — in the past three weeks against militants in Afghanistan aligned with the Islamic State, expanding the Obama administration’s military campaign against the terrorist group beyond Iraq and Syria.
The operations followed President Obama’s decision last month to broaden the authority of American commanders to attack the Islamic State’s new branch in Afghanistan. The administration — which has been accused by Republicans of not having a strategy to defeat the group — is revamping plans for how it fights the terrorist organization in regions where it has developed affiliates.
Many of these recent raids and strikes in Afghanistan have been in the Tora Bora region of Nangarhar Province — an inhospitable, mountainous area in the eastern part of the country, near the border with Pakistan. It was in Tora Bora that Osama bin Laden and other senior Qaeda militants took refuge during the American-led invasion in 2001, and eventually evaded capture by slipping into Pakistan.
Instructors from the American-led coalition worked with Iraqi soldiers during a live ammunition exercise last week at the Besmaya military base south of Baghdad. The emergence of Islamic State affiliates in various countries has prompted a new American approach. Credit Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters
American commanders in Afghanistan said they believed that between 90 and 100 Islamic State militants had been killed in the recent operations. Intelligence officials estimate that there are roughly 1,000 Islamic State fighters in Nangarhar Province, and perhaps several thousand more elsewhere in the country. But even the generals leading the missions acknowledge that a resilient militant organization can recruit new fighters to replace those killed in American attacks.
“The new authority gives us the ability to take the gloves off to hold them in check, and we have been targeting them heavily and it has had quite an effect,” said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the military’s deputy chief of staff for operations in Afghanistan. “But just because you take a bunch of guys off the battlefield doesn’t mean you will stop this organization.”
Although Mr. Obama had declared an end to combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the operations are part of a continuing and potentially expanding American military footprint in south-central Asia, the Middle East and Africa for the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
In Iraq, the United States has about 3,700 troops, including trainers, advisers and commandos. There are several dozen Special Operations forces deployed in Syria. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has said the United States and its allies are looking to do more, and has asked other countries — including several Arab ones — to contribute more to the military campaign as it moves to reclaim Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, the two major cities controlled by the Islamic State.
Administration officials are weighing a new campaign plan for Libya that would deepen the United States’ military and diplomatic involvement on yet another front against the Islamic State. The United States and its allies are increasing reconnaissance flights and intelligence collecting there — and even preparing for possible airstrikes and raids, according to senior American officials. Special Operations forces have met with various Libyan groups over the past months to vet them for possible action against the Islamic State.
In Afghanistan, American and other allied commanders fear that the combination of fighters loyal to the Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Islamic State is proving too formidable for the still struggling Afghan security forces to combat on their own.
The United States has 9,800 combat troops in Afghanistan. Although that figure is scheduled to decline to 5,500 by the time Mr. Obama leaves office next January, administration and military officials are privately hinting that the president may again slow the troop withdrawal later this year.
At a hearing last week, Mr. Obama’s nominee to be the next commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., was asked by Senator John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, if he believed that the overall security situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating, rather than improving.
“Sir, I agree with your assessment,” said General Nicholson, a veteran of several deployments to Afghanistan. He said that the Taliban had fought against Afghan security forces “more intensely than perhaps we anticipated” and that the emergence of the Islamic State there had been unexpected.
General Nicholson said that, if confirmed by the Senate, he would take his first 90 days to review the two primary missions in Afghanistan — counterterrorism and advising and assisting Afghan forces — before offering his recommendations on American troop levels in the country. The departing commander, Gen. John F. Campbell, is scheduled to testify before Congress this week, and he is expected to likewise underscore the rising threat from the Islamic State.
Under newly relaxed rules the White House sent to the Pentagon last month, the military now needs to show only that a proposed target is related to Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan. Before, such a target could be struck only if it had significant ties to Al Qaeda.
The military had been able to strike Islamic State targets in self-defense, but the new rules lower the standard for such offensive operations against the group.
“Suffice to say we had built up a sufficient amount of intel to be able to go after them in a robust way once we were able to take the gloves off,” General Buchanan said.
He added: “We continue to conduct operations against Al Qaeda throughout, but have been more focused on” ISIS in recent weeks.
There are significant differences between the Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan and those in Iraq and Syria.
In Afghanistan, a majority of the militants were previously part of the local Taliban or Haqqani network, and many of them have now “rebranded” themselves as members of the Islamic State. While the leaders of the group in Iraq and Syria are mostly from those countries, many of their fighters come from other Middle Eastern countries and from Europe.
The Islamic State militants in Afghanistan receive some money from leaders in Iraq and Syria, but there is little evidence that they receive much direction about when and where to launch attacks, according to military officials. There have been few examples of the Islamic State members in Afghanistan being able to effectively communicate with each other to carry out complex attacks, like the ones often carried out in Iraq and Syria. Nevertheless, the group has claimed responsibility for several deadly bombings in Afghanistan in recent months.
President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan has thanked American officials for their recent efforts against the Islamic State, which he fears is gaining strength, according to senior American officials.
As the Islamic State has expanded in Afghanistan, it has also fought the Taliban as the two groups compete for influence and money.
“They are trying to assume control at the local level over checkpoints, over the drug trade, over flows of illicit goods,” Brig. Gen. Wilson A. Shoffner, a spokesman for the American military in Afghanistan, said in a telephone interview on Sunday.
The massive winter storm expected to blast the East Coast beginning Friday is already dominating NASA satellite images.
Images taken by NASA and NOAA satellites show the lumbering beast gathering mass as it prepared to sweep up the East Coast on Friday and into Saturday.
Snow is predicted to bury Washington, D.C., in a blanket two feet deep, with Philadelphia bracing for 18 inches and New York up to a foot, according to estimates by the National Weather Service.
Comparing it to the “Snowmageddon” storm that paralyzed the capital in 2010, and expecting it to rank near the top 10 blizzards ever to assault the Eastern United States, Paul Kocin of the service’s Weather Prediction Service nonetheless said the weekend timing would limit damage and injuries.
While snow is the element hitting the headlines, with blizzard warnings or watches lighting up the storm’s expected path from Arkansas and Tennessee all the way up to New York, that is only one aspect of the weather system.
It also has the potential to inflict “brutually high winds, dangerous inland flooding,” and “even the possibility of thunder snow,” according to weather service director Louis Uccellini.
“It does have the potential to be an extremely dangerous storm that can affect more than 50 million people,” Mr. Uccellini told the Associated Press.
Five states and the District of Colombia have declared states of emergency. Supermarkets have been stripped of supplies. Schools and government offices are closing early. And thousands of flights have been cancelled.
The blizzard’s bulls-eye is set to be Washington, according to Uccellini. The city’s subway is set to shut down for most of the weekend, an unusual step, even during major storms.
New York is likely to be struck by the northern reaches of the system, while Boston looks to be escaping this time.
Further south, from Texas to Florida, severe weather is also expected to strike, though without the snow.
The mayhem is expected to be less severe than superstorm Sandy, but Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and parts of other states have all declared emergencies.
All major airlines are allowing passengers to rebook on earlier or later flights, to avoid the weekend weather. Up to 5,000 flights are expected to be cancelled, according to flight tracking site Flight Aware.
But all is not lost. After a recent act of Congress, sledding will be welcome on Capitol Hill for the first time in decades, as long as conditions are safe.
And the president? He will be hunkered down at the White House, according to spokesman Josh Earnest.
DC under Blizzard (Credit: belfasttelegraph.co.uk)
Snowstorms in January certainly aren’t rare. But what’s unusual about this one is how far in advance it was predicted. Unlike with most major storms, almost all the major weather models were in agreement that this storm was coming almost a week before it hit.
The only differences were in how much snow it would bring.
Moreover, this storm is just one of many similar storms we’ve seen in the past. We call them nor’easters because the wind is blowing from the northeast when it hits. Nor’easters are a nasty breed of storm that hits during winter.
Here are some of the forces that brewed the first nor’easter of 2016:
An energetic upper atmosphere
The storm began on Thursday night over the Gulf of Mexico.
Cold air from the Arctic had descended upon the mid-Atlantic Ocean and combined with moist air from an unseasonably warm Gulf Stream (roughly 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit above average for this time of year).
As the cold Arctic air sank and the warm Gulf Stream air rose, it generated a churning action — producing energy in the atmosphere.
At the same time this was happening, winds from a nearby jet stream blew the storm-brewing mix toward the Gulf of Mexico where it caused severe thunderstorms in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states Thursday night.
But that was just the beginning.
As the nasty mix made its way up the coast, it smacked into a layer of air over D.C. — that came down from Canada — at subfreezing temperatures. This subfreezing air basically acts like a snowmaker.
As the storm generates precipitation, rain falls through this freezing-cold-air layer, which transforms the rain to snow. But the worst part of it all, which makes this storm so epic, is that it’s drawing from “nearly infinite reservoir of high humidity air,” The Washington Post reported.
Moving from the south is a pocket of humid air that will help fuel the storm. That means lots and lots of snow for us.
It takes a lot of ingredients to make a nor’easter, and not all of them are straightforward.
Other factors at play
This winter saw an unusually strong El Niño — a natural weather pattern caused by surface heating in the Pacific Ocean, which is tied to unusual weather around the globe. This creates an abnormally strong jet stream, which provides energy for East Coast snowstorms, as Slate reported.
And finally, while it’s hard to draw a direct link between weather and climate change, the warming trend may be partly to blame for the increase in severe storms like this one. As the planet warms, it’s causing a rise in sea levels, especially in the Northeast. The warmer water adds more energy and moisture to the air, which help drive severe storms like this one.
While storm forecasting has come a long way, it’s still not perfect. Take the “historic blizzard” that was forecast to hit New York City in January 2015, which was predicted to dump as much as 2 feet of snow on the city but only brought about 5.5 inches!
