India has successfully conducted a test-launch of a nuclear-capable cruise missile that has a range of over 620 miles. 

The Nirbhay subsonic cruise missile is India's first long-range missile to be built and designed inside the country. India's Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) claims that the missile launch was a massive success and that the missile will fill a critical role within India's defensive capabilities.

"The missile maintained an accuracy better than 10 metres throughout its path and covered more than 1000 kms,"said Avinash Chander, the scientific advisor of the DRDO, in a press release after the launch. "The successful indigenous development of the Nirbhay cruise missile will fill a vital gap in the war-fighting capabilities of our armed forces."

According to NDTV, the Nirbhay will function as India's answer to America's Tomahawk and Pakistan's Babur missiles. With a range of up to 1,000 km (620 miles), and a capability to carry nuclear warheads, the missile could be used by India as a deterrent against its nuclear-armed rival Pakistan.

The Nirbhay can be launched from multiple platforms, and different variants are expected to be adopted by India's Navy, Army, and Air Force. The Nirbhay is expected to replace India's previous cruise missile, the Brahmos, which was co-developed with Russia. 

India's development of a long-range, nuclear-capable cruise missile comes within the context of ongoing tensions along the country's various disputed borders. India and Pakistan have exchanged artillery fire over the disputed region of Kashmir this month, leading to tens of thousands of residents being evacuated and India threatening further measures against its northern neighbor.

India is also likely worried about Chinese attempts to move into disputed territory in the Himilayas. China, meanwhile, is developing its own advanced missile capabilities, including boost-glide supersonic weapons and ballistic missiles capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads.

The Nirbhay is just the latest piece of evidence that India is serious about keeping pace with its regional rivals — last year, the country was the largest arms-importer in the world.

SEE ALSO: Pakistan is building smaller nukes, but they just might be more dangerous

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The gathering on October 14th at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, DC, of top military brass from 22 countries in the American-led coalition against Islamic State (IS) had two main aims. The first was to work out how to integrate the effort of each into something that looks like a strategy. The second, underlined by the attendance of Barack Obama, was to demonstrate the seriousness of America's commitment to defeating IS. The president implicitly acknowledged that both are a work in progress, saying that it was going to be a long-term campaign with "periods of progress and setbacks".

Right now, setbacks seem to be more evident than progress. Intensified air strikes by the Americans and Saudis have pushed back IS fighters besieging the Syrian-Kurdish border town of Kobane (Ain al-Arab in Arabic), but America says it may yet fall. Meanwhile, even with coalition air support, Iraqi security forces have put up only pitiful resistance to the latest IS surge in Sunni-dominated Anbar province. 

The refusal of Turkey to lift a finger to relieve the agonies of Kobane has cast a dark shadow over the whole enterprise. 

IS, which this week seized an army base near Hit, some 115 miles (185km) west of Baghdad, is now estimated to control more than three-quarters of the province.

Martin Dempsey, the chairman of America's joint chiefs of staff, says that, had it not been for the intervention of Apache attack helicopters last week, IS would have had a "straight shot" to Baghdad airport. General Dempsey has "no doubt" that IS will "use indirect fire [mortar, rockets and artillery] into Baghdad" in the days ahead.

Mr Obama's hope for progress is hampered by the conflicting agendas of many of his coalition partners; and perhaps also by his own half-heartedness. The air campaign against IS "has been so small by the standard of recent conflicts that it amounts to little more than military tokenism", says Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank.

The difficulties of coalition management are starkly illustrated by the simmering row between Ankara and Washington. The refusal of Turkey to lift a finger to relieve the agonies of Kobane has cast a dark shadow over the whole enterprise. American jets attempting to aid Kobane's desperate defenders are having to fly more than 1,200 miles from the Gulf because Turkey will not allow them to operate from Incirlik, a big NATO airbase less than 20 minutes away.

Whether Turkey can be brought onside may depend upon Mr Obama conceding a long-standing demand of Mr Erdogan's to establish a no-fly zone and buffer zone on the Syrian side of the Turkish border. Mr Erdogan also wants a commitment to take on the regime of Bashar Assad as well as IS. That is not on the cards, but to Mr Obama's discomfort, General Dempsey and the secretary of state, John Kerry, now both favour a no-fly zone.

Measures being urged on the president include a big step-up in the tempo of air strikes in Iraq and Syria from the average of about seven a day since the campaign began to more than 150, and the use of special forces to provide forward air control.

General Dempsey wants a much more intense training effort to reconstitute at least some of the Iraqi army into a moderately effective fighting force, requiring many hundreds, if not thousands, of Western soldiers. Even this may not be enough unless some of those advisers are embedded in Iraqi combat units to stiffen them in battle. None of this is palatable to Mr Obama. But as Mr Cordesman warns: "The US is now embarked in leading and conducting a high-risk air campaign that will do too little and do it too slowly."

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A ceasefire is technically in place in eastern Ukraine, but Donetsk International Airport continues to be the site of intense shelling and fighting between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatists.  

The fighting continues to rage throughout the rebel-held city of Donetsk. The Ukrainian army holds the airport, but the separatists have mounted frequent and sustained attacks in order to push the government forces out.

The continuation of hostilities has prompted the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to release a report from their Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine on Oct. 17. The report found that the situation in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine "remained tense." 

The report states that the monitoring mission heard repeated loud explosions throughout Donetsk and its surroundings that were consistent with artillery rounds. On-the-ground reporters have also circulated images of severe damage at the airport. 

The fight for control of the Donetsk Airport remains one of the key sticking points standing in the way of a more robust ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. The separatists are unwilling to allow the Ukrainian government to retain control of the area, while the Ukrainian military refuses to withdrawal. 

Ukraine and Russia entered into high-level peace talks on Oct. 16 with other European governments in an attempt to bring an end to the increasingly frozen conflict. Despite encouraging words from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the official spokesman of the Kremlin condemned Europe for its biased treatment towards Russia. 

Fighting for control of the airport has continued almost unabated since May, when the Ukrainian government first attempted to dislodge separatists who had taken control of the facility. Months of back-and-forth shelling between Ukrainian and separatist forces have left the airport being heavily damaged. 

SEE ALSO: Here's how the Ukraine crisis is deepening military ties between China and Russia

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Foreign Policy's managing editor, Yochi Dreazen, has had an accomplished career as a conflict journalist and spent five years reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan. But his first book, "The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War," spends relatively little time on the battlefield.

It's about the psychological traumas of war — and what the US military is and isn't doing to assist soldiers affected by post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental-health issues.

The book tells the story of the efforts of two-star general Mark Graham and his wife, Carol, to change the Army's attitudes toward mental health after losing both of their sons in a few short months.

Jeffrey Graham, a second lieutenant in the Army, was killed by a roadside bomb attack in Iraq. His brother, Kevin, a promising Reserve Officer Training Corps cadet, killed himself months earlier, and had gone off of his antidepressants because he feared discovery of his depression would lead to the end of his military career.

The Grahams succeeded in pushing for antisuicide and mental-health reforms in the military. But the first half of 2014 saw an uptick in the military's already troubling active-duty suicide rate.

And as Dreazen explained in an exclusive interview with Business Insider, there's still a lot of work to be done.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can read an excerpt from "The Invisible Front" here.

BI: Most Americans aren't veterans and haven’t served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Do you think the American public really has an adequate understanding of what veterans have been through and what the military as a whole has been through in the past decade-plus?

Yochi Dreazen: I don’t. I think in some ways the military doesn’t understand the civilian world and the civilian world doesn’t understand the military. I think the gap between the two is really heartbreaking and potentially kind of dangerous in the long term.

Part of it is that only 1% of the country serves. But part of it is that that 1% doesn’t live in the major cities, for the most part. It’s clustered in the South or in the Midwest. The bulk of the country that lives in cities probably will never meet somebody who serves, or, if they meet them, they won’t have them as a close friend or family member. 

So when we’re in the airport and we see somebody walk by in uniform and people thank them for their service or they applaud, that’s a wonderful thing compared to post-Vietnam, when that wasn’t the case. But paired with that is a complete lack of connection or understanding …

You have the civilian bubble, and the military bubble and oftentimes people don’t go from one to the other.  

BI: Not only does the civilian world not have an adequate idea of what the people in the military have gone through, but the military world hasn’t been able to integrate some of the attitudes of the civilian world toward certain issues like mental health. How optimistic are you that this can change?

Yochi Dreazen: I think it’s changing, but very slowly.

The military obviously is the definition of a hierarchy. You have people at the top who are talking about stigma and the importance of seeking help [for PTSD], and saying that seeking help isn’t a sign of weakness. There’s a ton of money and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by the military on the issue.

What’s tough is that to really change something you have to have someone at the top not simply say in a general sense “go seek help, it won’t harm your career” but in a very specific sense say, “I sought help and it didn’t harm my career.”

Over the course of the book I interviewed close to a dozen generals, people I had personally known from Iraq and Afghanistan. When we were talking — off-record at first — they were telling me about how they couldn’t sleep or they had anger flashes or their family didn’t recognize them. Most of them did not use the phrase PTSD, but they were clearly talking about PTSD.

When I said to them, general so-and-so, it would be valuable for me to use that in the book, and it would really help a lot of people to know that somebody could go as far as you’ve gone with the issues you’ve wrestled with. And, with one exception, they all said no. 

So when we’re talking about how to change a culture, if the people at the top who are the people everyone else in that culture looks to. If they won’t talk about it, it won’t change. And right now they won’t talk about it.  

BI: The book concludes that the problems around PTSD are only going to get worse, and it notes that there are still tens of thousands of World War II veterans being treated for it. What can we do to make sure that the problem doesn’t substantially worsen in the future?

Yochi Dreazen: I think there are three things that can be done. They’re difficult but I think they are doable ... 

One is having people at the very top, having generals who have had this disorder talk about it so that people at the bottom can see that if they can seek help, their career will not end, they can still be promoted up, and they can still be a success in the military. I can’t overstate how important that would be.

Number two — and in some ways this is a much more practical one, but it’s gigantic — is simply to make it harder for a person to get a gun. Ninety percent of military suicides, if not higher, are with handguns. And a lot of times these are handguns that were issued to the person, but a lot of the time they were personal weapons. 

Israel had a case for a while where they noticed a giant spike of military suicides. And when the Israelis looked into it what they realized is that for decades when soldiers went home on leave they took their weapons with them. It was a safety thing, and part of the culture of the Israeli military.

So they did the logical thing, which was take those weapons away and say, if you’re leaving on a Friday, you leave your gun and your pick it up on a Monday. And the suicide rate plummeted. 

There are little things we know from the civilian world that can help. Trigger guards make it so you have to unlock a gun to be able to use it. It’s an easy thing to do. They cost about $2 to put in. Giving one to every soldier would help, but it’s not being done.

The third thing — and this is something that we as a culture can do — is that it’s very easy for us to just say that we support the troops.

The hard thing to do is to actually meet someone who’s served and try to actually talk to them. And they’ll be somewhat reluctant because they might say, you’re a civilian, you can’t understand, how could you possibly know?

But it will open up, and it will change, and it will help the people who come back and feel lonely and think the rest of the world doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about them. Even just that little human connection can make an enormous difference.

SEE ALSO: An excerpt from Yochi Dreazen's The Invisible Front

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FBI Director James Comey said Thursday that the use of mobile encryption "threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place," even though the FBI's own website has advised people to use encryption on their phones to protect themselves from loss or theft.

Comey, in a speech at the Brookings Institution, was warning of the potential pitfalls from Apple's latest iteration of iOS, which offers hardware encryption on iPhones and iPads. Here's more of what he said:

"Encryption isn’t just a technical feature; it’s a marketing pitch. But it will have very serious consequences for law enforcement and national security agencies at all levels. Sophisticated criminals will come to count on these means of evading detection. It’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked. And my question is, at what cost?"

He says that "encryption isn't new" in his speech, but neither are his problems with it. His allusion to criminal activity lumps in people who are just interested in protecting their privacy among criminals. As I wrote about last year, the use of encryption alone is enough to gain the attention of the National Security Agency.

Most interesting is that the FBI has endorsed the use of encryption in the past. In an email alert of "safety tips to protect your mobile device" in Oct. 2012, it wrote, "depending on the type of phone, the operating system may have encryption available. This can be used to protect the user’s personal data in the case of loss or theft."

It looks like Apple has taken that message to heart, and the FBI director doesn't like it.

The broader point to be made in the realm of law enforcement and national security is that using encryption or worrying about online privacy is not a crime. There are people in this world who engage in no criminal activity whatsoever, yet they send email messages using PGP encryption. There are others who hide their IP address while browsing the web. Neither of these activities should be considered suspicious, but they apparently are in the eyes of the law.

This is the digital equivalent of arousing police suspicion because you shut your blinds at night.

Criminals are out there, as Comey knows. In his speech, he mentions cases helped by the smartphones of sex offenders, drug traffickers, and others. But the pendulum for users has swung toward privacy — especially in a post-Snowden era — and Apple and other companies are responding to that demand.

SEE ALSO: SNOWDEN: Here's Everything We've Learned In One Year Of Unprecedented Top-Secret Leaks

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Naval Submarine Base New London is one of the US Navy's most important and fascinating facilities.

Located along the eastern bank of the Thames River in Groton, Connecticut, New London serves as the home of fifteen attack-class submarines, the largest single contingent of subs in the US Navy. The submarines serve throughout the world, including beneath the polar ice cap.

Almost every sailor serving aboard a submarine will pass through New London for some kind of training. The base is known as "home of the submarine force," although personnel at the base like to call New London the "submarine capital of the world."

Steeped in history, Submarine Base New London was the first port to host US submarines in 1915, prior to the country's entrance into World War I. Since then, the base has continuously expanded as the US has grown into the world's largest naval power, with the most advanced submarine fleet of any country.

In October, Business Insider was given an all-encompassing tour of the base and its operations.

Naval Submarine Base New London started as a Naval Yard and Storage Depot in 1868 but didn't host submarines until 1915, two years before the US entered World War I.

Since its founding, New London has continuously grown. In the 1960s, the base had expanded beyond the waterfront and into the surrounding hills.

Today the base is the home port of fifteen attack subs, and its ten piers allow it to berth 18 subs. Even so, the base has plans to expand over the next two decades.

Yesterday, Reza Aslan, a creative writing professor at the University of California at Riverside and widely respected public commentator on religious affairs, tweeted that "Iran currently has the highest number of US college alums serving in any foreign government cabinet in the world," and included a helpful pictorial guide. It was retweeted several hundred times.

Iran currently has the highest number of US college alums serving in any foreign government cabinet in the world pic.twitter.com/WjQecvZOTk

— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) October 14, 2014

Aslan's recent statements on US relations with Iran give needed context for his intended meaning. After the singing of the Joint Plan of Action between Iran and the so-called P5+1 in Geneva in late 2013, Aslan went on the Daily Show to offer his interpretation of the interim nuclear agreement's impact.

"It's created a reconciliation camp and an isolationist camp and right now the reconciliation camp has all the momentum," he said. "Where here in the US nobody talks about this deal as possibly laying the groundwork for true normalization that's all they talk about in Iran."

In Aslan's mind, this bumper crop of "reconciliationist" and often American-education Iranian leaders proves that the country is shifting towards an accommodation with the US. It shows that Iran has left behind its decades of bellicose anti-American rhetoric and policy and has re-oriented itself towards new realities in the Middle East and the broader world — if only the hawks in Washington could realize the unprecedented opportunity.

"Everybody in the US asks, can we trust Iran to hold up its end of the bargain," Aslan said on the Daily Show. "That's not the problem. The problem is us."

But Aslan's tweet actually doesn't prove what it implies. 

A distressingly vast range of despotic and otherwise anti-Western figures were educated in the United States or Europe. Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of modern Islamism, studied at the Colorado College of Education in the late 1940s. The exposure to American values did anything but endear him to them. In an essay entitled "The America I Have Seen," Qubt condemned the US for its sexual permissiveness, and concluded that "when the book time will have closed, America will have added nothing ... to the account of morals that distinguishes man from object, and, indeed, mankind from animals."

Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric who became a top propagandist for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was killed in a US drone strike in September of 2011, was educated at Colorado State and George Washington University.

Aafia Siddiqui, perhaps the highest-ranking female Al Qaeda operative in history, earned a PhD at Brandeis. Mohammad Atta, the lead hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, held a master's degree in urban planning from the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany.

Looking beyond violent Islamism, Pol Pot studied at the Sorbonne in Paris before he led a campaign of political violence in his native Cambodia that killed between 1 and 3 million people — as did the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, who built perhaps the most oppressive of all of eastern Europe's post-war socialist regimes. Mengistu Haile-Mariam was sent to the United States for military training in the last 1960s, only to later spearhead a communist regime in Ethiopia that became one of the most brutal governments in modern African history. 

Exposure to the democratic world is no guarantee that an individual will develop any kind of sensitivity towards its values or outlook. It can have the exact opposite effect — creating the contrast needed to sharpen an individual's conservatism, as in the case of Qutb or Atta, or fueling visions of a violent revolutionary alternative, as in the case of Mengistu, Pol Pot, or Hoxha.

This is a troubling reality for believers in the idea that the arc of history bends inexorably towards a Western-democratic notion of justice and freedom. Some very smart people have been exposed to the realities of that system up close and have not only found it inadequate but violently rejected it, using their personal experience as the basis for a powerful and often highly resonant critique of western and American values. They serve as evidence that backlash may be more probable than universal democratic triumph, and that that backlash can originate from the heart of democracy itself.

Aslan didn't intend his tweet illustrate this reality. But it does.

Javad Zarif, Iran's California State University-educated Foreign Minister, lived in the US longer than just about any other high-ranking Iranian regime official. As Ali Alfoneh and Reuel Marc Gerecht recalled in an essay in The New Republic, Zarif wrote in a recent Persian-language memoir that he cut himself off from American life as much as possible when he was living in the country:

Apart from a single visit to a professor’s home, where, out of fear of religious dietary restrictions, he did not touch anything but the salad, Zarif recalls that he never set foot in a residence of a non-Muslim American family in the course of more than twenty-four years in the United States. The couple seem to have shared a total disinterest in American society. Zarif admits that they “never learned the name of spices in English” since they did not, either then or later, 
socialize with Americans.

Elsewhere in the book, Zarif expounds upon his view of the Islamic Republic's revolutionary mission, one that involves an explicit rejection of the American and western norms that Zarif had once lived within:

"We have a fundamental problem with the West and especially with America,” Zarif declares. “This is because we are claimants of a mission, which has a global dimension. It has nothing to do with the level of our strength, and is related to the source of our raison d’être." ... While Zarif considers national welfare one of the goals of the Islamic Republic, he stresses that “we have also defined a global vocation, both in the Constitution and in the ultimate objectives of the Islamic revolution.” He adds: “I believe that we do not exist without 
our revolutionary goals.”

Zarif's foreign ministry has apparently taken a hard line on nuclear negotiations, and has refused to back down on uranium enrichment and other fundamental issues. In 2006, a Columbia University undergraduate asked Zarif on camera if he believed that 6 million Jews had died in the Holocaust. Zarif wouldn't say.

What about the others Aslan cites? Mahmoud Vaezi, head of Iran's Ministry for Communications and Information Technology, received a PhD at Lousiana State University after receiving an undergraduate degree at California State University at Sacramento and San Jose. His ministry is responsible for overseeing Iran's National Information Network, the country's compartmentalized and heavily-censored "national internet." It's responsible for all sorts of other censorship as well, and in an interview with Iran's Shargh Daily (Persian original here), Vaezi made it clear that the regime has no immediate plans to lift its web filters.

In 2014, Reporters Without Borders named Iran one of its "enemies of the Internet."

Mohammadreza Nematzadeh, currently Iran's Minister of Industries, was a part of Iran's revolutionary vanguard in the last 1970s, and had a minister-level position in the Islamic Republic's first government. He also held a high position within the Labor and Social Affairs ministry at a time just after the revolution when the Ministry was purging itself of Ba'hai employees. He's an Islamic Republic lifer, although he does hold a degree from Berkley.

Then there's Ali Akbar Salehi, foreign minister during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and currently the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. His PhD from MIT hasn't prevented his agency from continuing to build and research additional uranium centrifuges even with an interim nuclear deal in place. As foreign minister he implemented policies that maintained Iran's relationship with Bashar al-Assad's regime in the opening years of Syria's civil war. Salehi's educational background did little good for the millions of Syrians that Assad victimized with Iranian diplomatic and military cover.

Aslan has pointed to a factoid — a piece of information, and nothing more. The educational history of Iran's leadership does nothing to suggest that Iran will be more accommodating towards the United States, or more moderate in its internal or international policies.

SEE ALSO: How the Shah of Iran's illness may have changed the course of Middle Eastern history

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"Citizenfour," the Laura Poitras documentary featuring Edward Snowden, debuted this weekend at The New York Film Festival to rave reviews.

The film is an utterly fascinating account of the week Poitras and Glenn Greenwald spent interviewing Snowden in his Mira hotel room in Hong Kong in early June 2013. It also covers some of the preparations and fallout.

William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the US intelligence community and one of the best code breakers in NSA history, is a central character in the film. The mathematician tells Poitras how he built a program called "Stellarwind" that served as a pervasive domestic spying apparatus after 9/11, which sets the stage for Snowden's collaboration with Poitras.

But the vivid presentation in "Citizenfour" avoids one of the most important aspects of the Snowden saga: the massive cache of documents that the 31-year-old former NSA contractor allegedly stole but didn't give to American journalists.

And Binney has shared his views of that subject.

The China Leaks And William Binney

Beyond the estimated 200,000 documents given to Poitras and Greenwald, Snowden also took up to 1.5 million documents detailing NSA operations targeting American adversaries.

Two days after leaving the Mira Hotel, Snowden provided documents revealing"operational details of specific attacks on computers, including internet protocol (IP) addresses, dates of attacks and whether a computer was still being monitored remotely" to Lana Lam of the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

"I did not release them earlier because I don't want to simply dump huge amounts of documents without regard to their content," Snowden told the Hong Kong paper in a June 12 interview. "I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists."

That Snowden took a bunch of documents unrelated to civil liberties and showed some of them to a Chinese newspaper is not mentioned in "Citizenfour." And Binney's previous comments on the SCMP become an elephant in the room.

"Among the leaked documents are details of foreign-intelligence gathering that do not fall under the heading of unlawful threats to American democracy — what Snowden described as his only concern. Binney, generally a fervent Snowden supporter, told USA Today that Snowden’s references to 'hacking into China' went too far: 'So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor," George Packer of The New Yorker, who spent time with Poitras and co. in Germany, writes in his detailed review of the film and overall situation.

"This is a distinction that Poitras might have induced Binney to pursue," Packer adds. "Because Poitras is so close to her subject, politically and psychologically, 'Citizenfour' is not the tour de force it might have been."

Earlier this year, Binney described Snowden as a "patriot," but he has not retracted or clarified his comments to USA Today.

And we know even more about the second part of Snowden's epic theft. 

James Bamford of Wired, who met Snowden in Moscow this summer, reported that the former CIA technician moved from Dell to Booz Allen in March 2013 to steal details on "the NSA’s aggressive cyberwarfare activity around the world" and became immersed in"the highly secret world of planting malware into systems around the world and stealing gigabytes of foreign secrets."

Edward Jay Epstein of The Wall Street Journal — who has reported extensively on Snowden's theft — echoed Binney's criticism when he told Powerline that Snowden was "a whistleblower in the case of some documents, and not a whistleblower in the case of other documents."

"So in the case of his work [for Booz Allen] at the National Threat Operations Center, he is not in my book under any theory a whistleblower,"Epstein concluded to Powerline. "At Dell, he could be a whistleblower. These are two different jobs and two different phases."

Further, no one knows exactly what happened to the other documents (beyond the SCMP leak).

James Risen of The Times reported in October 2013 that the former CIA technician said "he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong." (ACLU lawyer and Snowden legal adviser Ben Wizner subsequently told Business Insider that the report was inaccurate.)

In May 2014, Snowden thentold NBC's Brian Williams in Moscow that he "destroyed" all documents in his possession while in Hong Kong.

Greenwald's Response

Greenwald, for his part, recently had a colorful answer to critiques like that of Binney and Epstein.

"I consider [questions about Snowden's motivations] absurd and idiotic,"Greenwald after a TED talk. "That accusation comes from people in the U.S. government, from people in the media who are loyalists to these governments, and ... they are saying a lot more about themselves then they are about the target of their accusations because those people ... never act for any reason other then corrupt reasons.

"So they assume that everyone else is plagued by the same disease of soullessness that they are," Greenwald added.

NOW WATCH: Scientists Say This Is Why You Hate The Sound Of Your Own Voice

SEE ALSO: The New Snowden Documentary Is Utterly Fascinating — And Critically Flawed

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What is going on in Vladimir Putin's mind?

That's the question a panel of Russia experts was trying to answer Tuesday morning. Attention on Russia and the crisis in Ukraine has dwindled as the press has focused more on the West's fight against the extremist group calling itself the Islamic State. 

US Secretary of State John Kerry also announced Tuesday increased intelligence-gathering cooperation with Russia on the group — also known as ISIS — a particularly significant development given the recent thaw in US-Russia relations.

But this panel, which was moderated by Reuters, took a much more alarmist tone when speaking about America's relations with Moscow and speculating about Putin. All the experts in attendance warned that Putin's recent moves in Ukraine might only be the start of new territorial ambitions.

Three of the four panelists — New Yorker editor David Remnick, journalist and author Masha Gessen, Russian political activist and former grand chessmaster Garry Kasparov, and former Treasury Department official Roger Altman — agreed Putin could soon try to stretch his influence into the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

"They already are under pressure," Gessen, the author of a 2012 unauthorized biography of Putin, said of the Baltics. "That's very much where he's doing his nuclear saber-rattling, and that's where he's planning to call NATO's bluff."

Unlike Ukraine, all three Baltic states are NATO members. NATO's Article 5 requires all members of the alliance come to the defense of any member that is attacked or targeted. 

Putin last month made casual mention of his country's nuclear arsenal, around the same time NATO accused Russian forces of an "incursion" in Ukraine. Many analysts have speculated Putin's next move could come in the Baltic states, something that would be a clear challenge to NATO. 

Amid the bluster from Putin — who also reportedly said in a private conversation he could invade Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states if he really wanted to — NATO states made a point of countering with strong rhetoric of their own.

President Barack Obama traveled to Estonia last month on the way to a meeting in Wales with other NATO states, in a trip the White House said was aimed at reassuring NATO allies in the Baltics that felt threatened by Putin's moves in Ukraine. The message, a White House adviser said, was for Putin to "not even think about messing around" with the region.

But members of the panel were skeptical the US and other European members would rush to the Baltics' defense if they were targeted. And they said Putin would love a chance to try to embarrass NATO and paint it as nothing more than a symbolic alliance.

Kasparov speculated Putin may try to push NATO by employing some of the same tactics he used in Crimea, which Russia formally annexed from Ukraine in March. He said that, rather than marching across the border, Russia would try to stir up some pro-Moscow "form of dissent" in the Baltics. This would allow Russia to maintain plausible deniability and characterize any military action in the region as a reaction — something that would make it difficult for NATO members to call it an invasion. 

Remnick agreed a potential Putin playbook for the Baltics would resemble Crimea. He added that a potential Putin push into the region wouldn't resemble "Czechoslovakia in 1968," when the Soviet Union lined up tanks and invaded the country to crack down on reformist trends.

"There's a rich tradition of these highly crude, sophisticated provocations," Remnick said. "It's not going to look like Czechoslovakia in 1968. Thousands of tanks are not going to cross into [the Baltics]. The operation in Crimea, on a military intelligence basis, was brilliant. Brilliant."

What may be most disconcerting about Putin in general, however, is his lack of predictability. All of the panelists agreed on one thing: Putin's end goal is to stay in power. And if that goal is suddenly best furthered through making noise in the Baltics, then there's a very real possibility he'll take action.

"We're talking about a man who doesn't have a plan. So we're trying to figure out what his plan is, but he doesn't have one," Gessen said. "He sees that as an option. It is definitely an option, he is considering it, and he may wake up one morning and do it."

SEE ALSO:  Putin's Ukraine Strategy Is Straight Out Of 'Game Of Thrones'

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The US and Turkey have engaged in an at-times brutally public spat over the US-led coalition's strategy to "degrade and destroy" the group calling itself the Islamic State. And it might only get worse from here, threatening a key flank in the coalition unless the US agrees to take on an even more expansive role in Syria's civil war.

At the heart of the disagreement is Turkey's desire for the US to commit to the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, something the US has been reluctant to commit to during Syria's three-plus-year civil war.

But Turkey's government believes the cycle will repeat itself even if ISIS is defeated: Assad will foster the rise of extremist groups, protecting his own stranglehold on power while the groups present a fundamental threat to the West and their allies.

Frederic Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East and a former special advisor for transition in Syria at the U.S. Department of State, explained the phenomenon in an email to Business Insider. He said Turkey and the US have fundamental differences in how to approach ISIS (emphasis added):

"Yes, there is a fundamental difference between the US and Turkey. The Obama administration sees Syria as an adjunct to an anti-ISIS war in Iraq; Syria as an ISIS safe-haven, logistical rear area, and headquarters; ISIS forces in Syria to be harassed while the main combat effort takes place in Iraq. This approach views the Assad regime as a bystander - someone to be ignored to the maximum extent possible. Turkey sees Syria and the Assad regime as the heart of the problem (as well as a direct threat to Turkey's national security). ISIS, from Ankara's point of view, cannot be 'degraded and destroyed' (Obama's words) without moving toward implementing President Obama's 'Assad should step aside' dictum of August 2011. "

The latest public hiccup came over the last two days, as the US proudly paraded around what they said was an agreement with Turkey to allow the US to use a key base in the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. But on Monday, Turkey denied an agreement had been finalized.

The differences between the two key allies has come in full display as ISIS is reportedly close to seizing control of the Syrian border town of Kobane. The US does not yet have an effective partner on the ground in Syria. And Turkey has been reluctant to intervene because of its fragile relationship with the Kurds fighting ISIS militants in the town. 

Turkey's government is in an ongoing strife with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which is linked to the militias under attack by ISIS in Kobani. The PKK is classified as a terrorist organization even by the US. And though it is currently engaged in peace talks with the Turkish government, the sting of a 30-year conflict between the groups lingers.

Turkey is also pushing the US to establish a so-called buffer zone inside Syria, but that idea would go far beyond President Barack Obama's mission of confronting only ISIS and put it in direct confrontation with Assad's forces.

"This difference has come to a head with the ISIS assault on Kobane," Hof said. "Its solution requires two things: Turkish rededication to a cooperative relationship with Kurds, both in Turkey and Syria; and American agreement to DO something in Syria instead of just talking about Assad having lost all legitimacy, he must go etc etc."

"Grounding Assad's air force so that Turkey can establish a buffer zone inside Syria would be the near-term result of a solution. I'm not optimistic," Hof added. "President Obama seems satisfied with the Syria policy he's been pursuing for over three years."

SEE ALSO: The US And Turkey Fundamentally Disagree On How To Fight ISIS — And That's A Huge Problem

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In a move with potentially significant diplomatic and military implications, the US military airdropped weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies to Kurdish forces fighting the extremist group ISIS in the crucial Syrian border town of Kobani.

US Central Command said two US Air Force C-130 aircraft dropped a total of 27 bundles of weapons, ammo, and medical supplies in a mission that began around 4:30 p.m. ET on Sunday. US officials said they have already determined that at least the "vast majority" of those bundles were successfully delivered.

Senior Obama administration officials said Sunday night that the airdrops were intended to help enable the Kurdish forces, who were running low on supplies, continue their fight against ISIS. The arms were provided by Kurdish authorities in Iraq. 

ISIS, which is also known as ISIL or the Islamic State, has shifted significant resources toward Kobani in an attempt to take full control of the town on the Syria-Turkey border, US officials said. ISIS' strategy presented an opportunity, along with the fact the Kurdish resistance has been "very impressive," one senior administration said.

"ISIS decided Kobani was important to them. This provided us with an opportunity," the official said.

In a statement, Central Command said the US military had conducted 135 airstrikes in Kobani over the past few weeks. It also said the airstrikes had killed "hundreds" of ISIS fighters while slowing the group's advances into the city. 

"We know we’ve killed hundreds. And that’s just around Kobani," one US official said.

Still, US officials stressed the situation in Kobani was still "fragile" and that the town could still fall to ISIS. But the stepped-up airstrikes and the resupply of arms suggests a significant shift in importance placed on the town by the US, which less than a week ago was publicly bracing for its fall and diminishing its overall strategic importance. 

"ISIL is going to suffer significant losses for its focus on Kobani," one official said.

The resupply will most likely anger the Turkish government, which said Sunday it would not accept any arms transfers to Kurdish fighters. Political considerations have largely prevented Turkey from intervening in Kobani, as it is in an ongoing strife with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which has links to the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Iraq.

US officials said the plan to airdrop arms and ammunition was conveyed at multiple levels, including during a phone call between President Barack Obama and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday. One official said he would not characterize the Turkish government's response.

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Welcome back from the weekend! Here's what you need to know for Monday. 

1. Two female Japanese ministers resigned on Monday. "Yuko Obuchi, trade and industry minister, resigned over allegations of improper use of political funds, and Justice Minister Midori Matsushima, 58, quit over claims she breached election laws," Bloomberg reports. 

2. Dozens of people in Dallas who had contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the patient from Liberia who died from Ebola, have been declared risk-free of contracting the virus, The New York Times reports. 

3. The 44-year-old Spanish nurse who was the first person to contract Ebola outside of West Africa has also tested negative for the virus. 

4. The Carnival Magic cruise ship carrying a Dallas health worker who reportedly handled specimens from Duncan returned to its home port of Galveston, Texas, early Sunday morning, after the lab technician tested negative for the virus. 

5. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled major economic reforms on Sunday including "a deregulation of diesel prices and a hike in natural gas prices," CNBC reports.

6. The pro-democracy protests that have gripped Hong Kong for roughly a month are becoming "increasingly violent," according to the South China Morning Post, especially after attempts by police to clear the main Mong Kok demonstration site.  

7. The United States airdropped weapons and medical supplies to Kurdish forces in the Syrian town of Kobani on Sunday in an effort to help combat Islamic State militants. 

8. Lufthansa pilots announced a strike on Monday and lasting into Tuesday, leading to the cancellation of 1,450 flights. 

9. Canada is shipping 800 vials of an experimental Ebola vaccine to the World Health Organization in Geneva on Monday. 

10. Comet Siding Spring passed within 87,000 miles of Mars on Sunday, an event that won't happen again for another one million years. 

And finally ...

A team of kids from South Korea won $1 million for playing a video game. 

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Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to switch his position on the Syrian town of Kobani on Monday, declaring it "irresponsible" to not help the Kurds there fighting the Islamic State group (also known as ISIS or ISIL), according to the Associated Press.

"We have undertaken a coalition effort to degrade and destroy ISIL, and ISIL is presenting itself in major numbers in this place called Kobani," Kerry said during a trip to Indonesia. "It would be irresponsible of us, as well [as] morally very difficult, to turn your back on a community fighting ISIL as hard as it is at this particular moment."

Earlier in October, Kerry was much more dismissive toward Kobani. He urged the public to take a broader view of the conflict and to not simply focus on the town, which he said was not strategically important.

"Notwithstanding the crisis in Kobani, the original targets of our efforts have been the command and control centers, the infrastructure," he said then, according to Reuters. "We are trying to deprive the (Islamic State) of the overall ability to wage this, not just in Kobani but throughout Syria and into Iraq."

The US announced Sunday night that it started airdropping weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies in Kobani. A senior administration official said the Islamic State had prioritized the city, shifting significant numbers of fighters and weapons there. So the US decided to prioritize it as well.

"ISIS decided Kobani was important to them. This provided us with an opportunity," the official said. Another official later added that ISIS would "suffer significant losses for its focus on Kobani."

The US has spent the past week pummeling ISIS targets in Kobani. Central Command said the US military had conducted 135 total airstrikes in Kobani to date, killing "hundreds" of fighters while slowing the group's advances into the city. 

At the same time, however, Kerry noted that it was a "momentary effort" and made it "very, very clear" to Turkey "that this is not a shift in policy by the United States."

Still, the US military warned in a press release that the city remained in danger of falling to the jihadists.

"However, the security situation in Kobani remains fragile as ISIL continues to threaten the city and Kurdish forces continue to resist," it said. "As the US Central Command commander has noted, Kobani could still fall."

SEE ALSO: The US Just Resupplied Kurdish Forces Fighting ISIS In Kobani

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The Mexican Drug War, launched in December 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderon, is approaching its eight-year mark.

The series of conflicts, which has pitted the Mexican military, cartels, vigilantes, and police forces against one another, has had a profound effect upon Mexico. It killed over 60,000 people between 2006 and 2012, but is far from over: in early October, 43 Mexican students vanished from Iguala, a town about halfway between Mexico City and the Pacific coast. The search for the missing students has so far been unsuccessful, although drug trafficking organizations were almost definitely involved and investigators have discovered freshly dug graves. 

The mass kidnapping came at the same time as a couple of high-profile busts. On October 1, Hector Beltran Leyva, leader of an eponymous cartel, was nabbed by the Mexican army in San Miguel de Allende. The head of the Juarez cartel was arrested just days later.

The drug war can be seen as the Mexican state's long-overdue effort to impose order on the country after decades in which the government tolerated or even coddled the cartels' activities. But the war has also pitted the major drug traffickers against each other in excessively violent struggles to maintain, or expand, their positions. 

Here are seven of the country's most notorious organizations, and where the last eight years of chaos have left them. 

The Sinaloa Cartel

The Sinaloa Cartel is the single largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the Western hemisphere.

The Sinaloa is not a single hierarchical organization. Instead, it functions more as a confederacy of groups that are connected through blood, marriage, and regional relationships. Decisions for the group are ultimately made through board-of-directors-type mechanisms, and not by a single leader.

This operational flexibility has allowed the Sinaloa to continue to thrive despite several setbacks. In 2008, the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO), once a core component of the cartel, split from the group and began to wage war against it. And earlier this year, Chapo Guzman, the group's multi-billionaire architect and a criminal business visionary, was finally arrested in the coastal resort city of Mazatlan.

However, the Sinaloa made new alliances and continued to expand. 

Today, the Sinaloa are active in 17 Mexican states and throughout the US. They have connections that stretch to Australia as well.

The Sinaloa's success is allegedly due in part to the organization's history of preferential treatment at the hands of US's Drug Enforcement Administration and the Mexicans, who are accused of using the Sinaloa as a source of information or (even as a hands-off means of enforcement) against other, less pliable cartels. 

The Beltran Leyva Organization 

The BLO was originally formed by four brothers as part of the Sinaloa Cartel and consisted largely of poppy and marijuana growers. Over time, the BLO changed its modus operandi and became muscle for the Sinaloa against the Gulf Cartel and its former military wing, Los Zetas. 

In 2008, the Sinaloa and the BLO violent split. This conflict almost destroyed the BLO, as they were hounded by the Sinaloa, and had to deal with arrests of their leadership and in-fighting amongst the upper ranks of of the organization. This weakness led the BLO to form pragmatic alliances with Los Zetas, the Knights Templar, and the Juarez Cartel in an effort to strike back against the Sinaloa. 

The BLO is likely on the ropes. In October, Hector Beltran Leyva, the last of the original four BLO brothers, was arrested. 

The Juarez Cartel

The Juarez Cartel is one of the oldest surviving drug trafficking organizations in Mexico, with its roots reaching back to the 1980s. The group began its narcotics activities before moving into human trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion.

The wealth of the cartel was largely due to its control of the crucial border city of Juarez, a strategic trafficking corridor into the US. 

Originally one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico, it began fighting the Sinaloa in 2004. Ciudad Juarez became the murder capital of the world for three years straight, before the city's drug trade ultimately came under control of the Sinaloa. The loss of the cartel's home city, coupled with an outdated business model, led to the group's decline. 

Today, the Juarez Cartel is struggling to maintain its relevance against the Sinaloa. It has aligned itself with the Zetas and the BLO in attempts to win back its former zones of control, although this might prove difficult as the group's suspected leader was arrested in the beginning of October. 

The Knights Templar 

The Knights Templar are a relatively new group, and were formed in 2010 by Servando Gomez Martinez. Martinez was formerly a high-ranking member of the nearly extinct La Familia Michoacana, but he left the organization after its leader was killed. 

As a splinter group of La Familia, the Knights Templar employ similar strategies and trappings. They model themselves as a "self-defense" movement against other cartels on behalf of the indigenous population of Michoacana state. The Knights Templar also made use of ritualistic killings and the dismemberment of rivals in an effort to dissuade resistance. 

However, the Knights Templar's brutal methods have backfired. A popular vigilante revolt — sanctioned by the Mexican authorities — effectively pushed the Knights Templar from areas across the state. Rival cartels joined in the effort, eager for a chance to help eliminate one of their rivals.

The Gulf Cartel

The Gulf Cartel, found in the region of eastern Mexico along the Gulf Coast states, started achieving considerable success and infamy in 1984 when it associated with the Colombian Cali Cartel. Once the Gulf had significant funds, it became one of the first cartels to turn into a mega-operation with a dedicated military wing that eventually mutated into Los Zetas, now one of the most violent criminal groups in the western hemisphere.

Ironically, it was the emergence of the Zetas as a seperate entity that did the most damage to the once-powerful Gulf. By 2010, the Zetas had broken violently from the Gulf Cartel and was waging an aggressive war for territorial control in the Gulf's home state of Tamaulipas. 

Aside from war with the Zetas, the Gulf Cartel also suffered from severe infighting and several high-profile arrests of its top membership during Mexico's Drug War. Despite the setbacks, the Gulf still controls a lucrative smuggling corridor along the US-Mexico border into Texas, and the cartel has entered into alliances with the Sinaloa and the remnants of La Familia Michoacana against the Zetas. 

Los Zetas 

Los Zetas are known as being amongst the most brutal of all the criminal groups in Mexico.

The organization's origins go back to the late 1990s as the elite private security apparatus of the Gulf Cartel. In an effort to outdo their rivals, the Gulf Cartel formed the Zetas out of a core of at least 31 deserters of the Mexican Special Forces. 

The formal military training of the early Zetas, along with their penchant for committing bloody and audacious acts such as beheadings and petrol bomb attacks, have led the DEA and the Mexican authorities to declare the Zetas to be their number-one enemy within Mexico. 

In 2010, following the arrests and death of Zetas and Gulf Cartel leaders, the Zetas violently split from the Gulf Cartel, of which they had previously served as a military wing. The Zetas followed the split with a string of high-profile attacks against DEA and US immigration agents.

Today, the group has fractured somewhat under joint attacks from the Sinaloa and the Mexican government, but they have spread into Guatemala and diversified their criminal enterprises into child prostitution and oil theft. 

The Tijuana Cartel 

During its heyday in the 1990s and the early 2000s, the Tijuana Cartel, also known as the Arellano Felix, was among the strongest of the organized crime organizations in Mexico. The cartel controlled the lucrative corridor of Tijuana for running drugs and people into the US.

Today, the organization is a shell of what it once was. A series of high profile arrests and assassinations have decapitated the cartel. In 2013, the oldest brother of the family that ran the group was assassinated at a party by a man in a clown costume. Then, in 2013, the cartel's leader was arrested as well, heralding a breakdown in the organization's control. 

The sudden vacuum of leadership in Tijuana enabled the Sinaloa Cartel to move in and take control of the border town in a relatively bloodless transition. It is now believed that the remnants of the Tijuana Cartel have been folded under the Sinaloa umbrella. 

SEE ALSO: How drug cartels conquered Mexico [maps]

SEE ALSO: Here's where Mexico's top ten drug lords are right now

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Two months after the US launched airstrikes in Iraq to drive back ISIS fighters and save the Yazidi sect from a humanitarian catastrophe, ISIS is still seizing villages and terrorizing the minority group, Loveday Morris and Mustafa Salim report for The Washington Post. 

ISIS militants seized two Yazidi villages on Monday and have driven thousands out of their homes.

The onslaught is reminiscent of ISIS's seizure of Yazidi lands around Mount Sinjar in August that sent 200,000 members of the religion fleeing into the mountains before President Obama authorized airstrikes against the group in Iraq. 

As Musings on Iraq's Joel Wing explained, ISIS had a plan to completely exterminate the group— and was well on its way to fulfilling this grisly objective when US airstrikes commenced. There's no evidence the Islamic State has moderated its genocidal stance towards the group over the past couple of months, which means that thousands of Yazidis now find their lives newly endangered.

The ISIS assault reportedly took place under the cover of bad weather early Monday morning. The militants managed to push back volunteer Yazidi forces that had elected to stay behind on the mountain to defend the region. The group has also blockaded roads leading to smaller Yazidi communities located in the mountains that are now stranded with little food or water. 

To turn the tide of the assault, Yazidi fighters have called for further US action in the region. 

“We have so little ammunition, and they are advancing,” Khalid Qassim Shesho, a trapped Yazidi fighter on Mount Sinjar, told The Washington Post. “I can see five Humvees without using binoculars. We need planes!”

It is uncertain how many Yazidis remain atop Mount Sinjar and are at risk of the ISIS advance. Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, claimed that upwards of 2,000 people remained on the mountain and were at risk of slaughter, although another Yazidi lawmaker said that 700 families remained in the area. 

The sudden militant advance underscores the failings of the US-led coalition effort to defeat ISIS through reactive airstrikes alone. 

“The core problem is that the US does not have the strategic initiative," Christopher Harmer, a senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War told McClatchy. "We are reacting to where ISIS is advancing, rather than proactively implementing a strategy to defeat them.”

The Yazidis have suffered harshly under the expansion of ISIS. The jihadists incorrectly view Yazidis as devil worshippers, leading the group to slaughter the male members of the sect while buying and selling female Yazidis as slaves. 

According to Dakhil, ISIS has abducted some 25,000 Yazidi women.

SEE ALSO: ISIS fighter calls US airstrikes totally ineffective

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The self-declared "prime minister" of the breakaway Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) has declared on Twitter that the month-old ceasefire between Ukraine and the separatist republic has ended.  

Granted, this was the sort of cease-fire during which heavy combat was frequent, including fighting that destroyed much of the Donetsk airport. But on Monday, DNR leader Aleksandr Zakharchenko admitted what has been obvious for some time, and tweeted the following after a period of particularly heavy fighting in Donetsk:

According to a translation provided by The Interpreter, the first tweet says "after today's shelling of Donetsk with rockets, the ceasefire, even formally, has to be considered abandoned." 

In Zakharchenko's second tweet, the prime minister conveyed a more combative message.

He wrote "an hour ago, the [Ukrainians] carried out a strike near the old terminal, after which our artillery carried out a strike on the dillweeds' positions near Peski." 

Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country had reached a ceasefire in September during a round of peace talks in Minsk. The ceasefire, which would last throughout the duration of the still-ongoing peace talks, essentially froze the conflict's front lines — but without providing any actual cessation of hostilities. 

Fighting between the Ukrainian government and the separatists has been particularly fierce around the city of Donetsk and the often-contested city's airport. Both sides have exchanged artillery fire, leading to civilian deaths and the almost complete destruction of the airport's infrastructure. 

On Monday, a huge explosion sent shock waves that rattled significant portions of Donetsk. 

DNR separatists claimed that the explosion was the result of a Ukrainian rocket hitting a rebel stronghold in the city. The Ukrainians have denied that they were responsible for the strike.

Regardless, the DNR has seized on the explosion as reason enough to declare that the barely holding ceasefire has come to an all-too-predictable close. 

SEE ALSO: The endgame in eastern Ukraine is coming into view, and it isn't pretty

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China has developed some impressive defense capabilities in recent years. But one of its flagship achievements has had some notable technical problems in recent weeks.

As Robert Beckhusen explained at War is Boring, the Liaoning, China's sole aircraft carrier, unexpectedly powered down during a sea trial last week. The vessel "appeared to suffer a steam explosion which temporarily knocked out the carrier’s electrical power system," Beckhusen wrote, citing a Chinese-language media report (which is summarized at Asia Defense News).

Beckhusen notes these sorts of failures aren't unheard of on Soviet-built carriers of the late 1980s — before it was the Lianoning, China's carrier was called the Varyag, and carriers of its class haven't aged particularly well.

"The 40,000-ton displacement Indian carrier Vikramaditya—first a Soviet Kiev-class carrier commissioned in 1987 and sold in 2004 — temporarily shut down at sea after a boiler overheated two years ago," Beckhusen recalls, adding that "the 50,000-ton Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov goes nowhere without a tug escort in case her engines break down while underway."

The Lianoning's troubles reveal an important tension within China's defense outlook.

China wants to be a major conventional power. No country goes through the trouble of acquiring a half-operable carrier, or developing simultaneous models of stealth jet, if it doesn't have hopes of becoming one of the globe's leading military powers. Simply pursuing these sorts of projects reveals an undeniable depth of commitment towards keeping pace with the US, which has multiple carrier groups in the Pacific at a given time, and has been developing its own advanced fighter, the troubled F-35, for years.

But China's current military advantages are actually asymmetrical. In other words, capabilities meant to quickly and expediently close the gap between China and the US without having to build up China's order of battle to identical level, even if that means breaking some broadly-accepted rules of how states should behave.

So China's military hacks cyber targets throughout the world, and builds weaponry that few other countries would — things like anti-satellite systems, or missiles capable of carrying nearly a dozen nuclear warheads.

The fact that China even has an aircraft carrier is a reminder that Beijing wants to be a conventional power on par with the US. But the Lianoning's recent problems also show  China is still far behind the US as a military power — something that might only make its actions less predictable and more worrisome as Beijing progresses towards super-power status.

SEE ALSO: Meet the Air Force's incredible X-planes

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Good morning! Here's what you need to know for Tuesday. 

1. The CEO of the French oil giant Total, Christophe de Margerie, died in a plane crash in Moscow. He was 63.  

2. Legendary fashion designer Oscar de la Renta died at the age of 82 after battling cancer. 

3. Turkey said it would facilitate the passage of Iraqi Kurdish forces to the Syrian town of Kobani to help fellow Kurds in the fight against Islamic State militants. 

4. The Ukrainian Army allegedly fired cluster munitions, weapons that can scatter hundreds of smaller bombs when fired, in Donetsk city in early October, according to The New York Times. "If confirmed, the use of cluster bombs by the pro-Western government could complicate efforts to reunite the country, as residents of the east have grown increasingly bitter over the Ukrainian Army’s tactics to oust pro-Russian rebels," The Times writes. 

5. China's economy grew last quarter at its slowest pace in nearly six years, although the results were slightly better than analysts were expecting. 

6. In an interview with foreign media, Hong Kong's leader Leung Chun-ying said that free elections would allow poor people to dominate politics, Reuters reports. The statement comes shortly before talks are due to take place between student pro-democracy protesters and government officials.  

7. Oscar Pistorius will find out if he faces a prison term after being convicted of culpable homicide for shooting and killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. 

8. A new Ebola study predicts the spread of the virus, projecting that up to three infected people fly overseas every month from the three worst-hit African countries, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

9. The US Centers for Disease Control issued new guidelines to health workers for treating Ebola victims, calling for more rigorous training and mandating that no skin is exposed when protective equipment is worn and that all workers are supervised.

10. Apple beat expectations revenue, earnings, and iPhone sales but sold fewer iPads than forecast.

And finally...

Kate Middleton is due to have her second child next April.

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Anonymous Obama administration officials suggested that US President Barack Obama might try to circumvent Congress on approval of any deal with Iran on its nuclear program, prompting bipartisan backlash from members of Congress and from pundits.

The New York Times' David Sanger reported Monday that if Iran and the six world powers do agree to a deal on its nuclear program by a Nov. 24 deadline, Obama would do "everything in his power to avoid letting Congress vote on it."

The administration has concluded that Obama has the authority to suspend certain sanctions imposed on Iran under any deal, based on an unreleased study from the Treasury Department.

He does not, however, have the power to undo them —only Congress has the authority to unravel the sanctions regime it created. But the Obama administration has concluded that it would lose a vote to end the sanctions, meaning it would most likely postpone a vote on the agreement for as long as possible.

"By threatening to cut out Congress from the Iran nuclear deal, the administration is actually uniting Congress," said Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Illinois), a key cosponsor of bipartisan sanctions legislation.

"We will not support an Obama-Khamenei deal that condemns our children to a future where the Middle East is full of nuclear weapons," he added, referring to Iran's Supreme Leader.

The White House on Monday called The New York Times report "wrong." Principal deputy press secretary Eric Schultz told reporters "the notion that we are trying to go around Congress on this is preposterous." 

He said the story conflated two separate things and that it was too early to speculate on which sanctions could be lifted by Obama himself versus through only the legislative process. He said the White House would continue consulting with Congress on the Iran deal. 

"Yes, I saw that story, too, and it’s wrong," Schultz said. "The administration believes that Congress has a very important role to play on the Iran nuclear issue. If you read it, our take was that the story conflated two separate issues: When and how congressional action will be needed to suspend and/or lift ... [the sanctions] and whether we believe they should take up an up-or-down vote on the deal."

But the report left members of Congress concerned enough about being locked out of any deal that they threatened to intervene if necessary.

"The House is not going to sit idly by if and when the administration brokers a bad deal with Iran that compromises our principles and allows it to continue its nuclear ambitions," Kevin Smith, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, told Business Insider.

The deadline to reach a long-term deal with Iran over its nuclear program is Nov. 24. Iran and the world powers are searching for a long-term solution to pare back Iran's atomic activities in exchange for relief from crippling economic sanctions imposed over the past decade.

But it's far from certain that any deal between Iran and the six world powers — the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China — will happen by the deadline. The interim agreement has already been extended once, and the possibility of a second extension has been floated. 

Any deal would most likely face opposition from hardliners in Iran — including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has recently drawn up a new set of demands that would allow Iran to increase enrichment tenfold.

And it would face at least skepticism among most members of Congress. Along with Kirk, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey) has sponsored legislation that would impose new sanctions on Iran if the parties fail to agree on a deal by the deadline.

"The administration has been signaling for months that it will ignore Congress and impose a deal over their objections for one simple reason: The White House knows that any agreement it reaches with Iran will not meet the minimum bipartisan deal criteria set out in the Menendez-Kirk legislation that enjoys the support of 60 Democratic and Republican senators," Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider. 

"The White House also is more interested in seducing Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with promises that Obama can deliver sanctions concessions without Congress. It's an interesting negotiation strategy — and one more likely to weaken your leverage — to be trying to seduce your opponent's bad cop while muzzling your own bad cop."

SEE ALSO: Why The Relationship Between The US And Turkey Will Only Get Worse, In 2 Sentences

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