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

1. The World Health Organization issued promising news about the state of Ebola, noting that the epidemic in Liberia may be slowing down.

2. A mudslide set off by monsoon rains may have killed in hundreds in Sri Lanka.

3. NATO said on Wednesday afternoon that it had intercepted an unusually high number of Russian bomber planes over the Atlantic, Black Sea, and Baltic Sea over a 24-hour period since Tuesday.

4. OPEC Secretary-General Abdalla Salem el-Badri said he expected a sharp fall in US shale output if oil prices stayed low. 

5. It could take months for investigators to determine what caused a rocket built by Orbital Sciences and carrying a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station to blow up seconds after launch, obliterating an estimated $200 million in an instant.

6.Fiat Chrysler plans to spin off Ferrari, its most valuable brand. 

7. Samsung posted a 49% drop in profit to its lowest total in three years as the electronics maker loses its grip on the smartphone market. 

8. Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan believes that the third installment of the government's stimulus program, known as QE3, did not meet its goals, which he revealed after the Fed announced the program's end on Wednesday.

9.US government officials have openly criticized Secretary of State John Kerry, comparing him to a lost astronaut in space because he often gets "out of sync with the White House in his public statements."

10. The San Francisco Giants won the World Series Wednesday night, beating the Kansas City Royals, 3-2, in Game 7. 

And finally ...

Behold: A prototype of the world's most advanced flying car. 

SEE ALSO: The 10 Most Important Things In The World Archives

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has taken time out from his schedule of visiting orphanages and restaurants to instead visit one of the country's airfields. 

North Korean media reports that he watched flights take off at the airfield and perform "the high art of aviation."

Kim Jong-un reportedly "feels whenever watching flight drills that our airmen are very good at flying."

The North Korean air force uses a variety of Chinese and Russian planes. The country's most-used military jet is the MiG-21 PFM, which was created in Russia in 1967. North Korea's "People's Air Force" is reported to number around 110,000 personnel.

The country says that he sat in the seat of pursuit plane No. 550 to "learn in detail" the engineering data and talk to the pilot.

Yesterday South Korea claimed to have "solved" the mystery of the North Korean leader's recent disappearance, saying that he vanished for 40 days while undergoing treatment for a cyst on his ankle. They claimed that his illness was down to obesity, smoking, and his busy schedule. However, the South Korean government and media often make claims about North Korea that have little basis in fact, so the new claim may fully explain why Kim Jong-un was absent for so long.

SEE ALSO: No One Really Knows What Happened To Kim Jong Un

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The past week has revealed just how the Obama administration is operating largely on its own.

Regarding the Middle East, senior US officials described the obvious "disconnect" in the president's plan for battling the Islamic State militant group, while others called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "chickenshit." The administration defended the president's strategy for dealing with the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) and backed away from the insults of Netanyahu.

Within Washington, a senior Armed Services Committee staffer told Politico that the Department of Defense "and Capitol Hill are often taken by surprise at same time and on same issues" by the White House.

An egregious example involved the Obama administration failing to have Pentagon lawyers review the legislative language about training Syrian rebels before sending it to Capitol Hill. Republican staffers on the House Armed Services Committee said the language was "so sloppy that it failed to mention adequate protections against so-called 'green-on-blue' attacks by trainees on American troops." 

Blame has fallen partly on the administration's National Security Council, which has beefed up to 300 members from 50 and is seen as reacting to a series of crises, as opposed to being proactive with a coherent strategy.

"There is a sense that the NSC is run a little like beehive ball soccer, where everyone storms to wherever the ball is moving around the field," one former administration official told Politico.

Furthering their perceived isolation, White House officials even joke that that US Secretary of State John Kerry is so untethered from the White House at times that he is like Sandra Bullock in "Gravity."

Basically, the only people the White House can smile with are themselves. Even campaigning Democrats are keeping their distance from the president as Obama seethes at the government's initially inept response to Ebola.

David Rothkopf, the CEO and editor of Foreign Policy, described the perceived problems with the Obama administration in September. They included "the composition of his team; the structure of the administration; its risk-averseness and defensiveness; its tendency to be tactical and focused on the short term, rather than strategic in its approaches to problems; and the president's seeming unwillingness to devote more of himself to working with peers worldwide to shape and lead action on many big issues."

This week shows that either Rothkopf's assessment was wrong and everyone was being unfair to the White House, or it was spot on and the issues have gotten worse.

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London's famous tower is awash in a sea of red poppies to commemorate the day Britain entered World War I.  

This summer, 888,246 ceramic poppies were poured into the Tower of London moat; each flower representing a British military fatality during the conflict. 

Now, the installation, created by artist Paul Cummins and called "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red," is drawing more attention than ever as Armistice Day, which marks the day an armistice was signed between WWI allies and Germany,  approaches on Nov. 11. 

These photos capture a "powerful visual" reflection of WWI, with sweeping shots from above, and visits from the Queen and war veterans. 

A Yeoman Warder walks amid rain through hundreds of thousands of poppies.

They surround the historic Tower of London —"Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress."

The Queen visits the poppies with husband Prince Philip.

The Syrian border city of Kobane has been under siege from ISIS for nearly two months. At one point, the jihadist group had the city encircled, and was flying its black flag on hills that were clearly visible from the Turkish side of the frontier.

U.S. forces staged 10 air strikes on Islamic State targets near Kobani on Wednesday, hitting two small Islamic State units and destroyed seven fighting positions and five buildings.

U.S. Central Command noted that the strikes also damaged an ISIS headquarters building near Dayr Az Zawr and a security building near Ar Raqqah.

U.S. forces were joined by allies in raids in Iraq that hit small Islamic State unit near Bayji and checkpoint west of Ramadi.

There's evidence that the allied effort to the defend Kobane is making significant headway in Kobani.

On Wednesday, US bombers destroyed an ISIS command-and-control node near the battlefield. John Allen, the retired general in charge of overseeing the US effort against the group, now believes that ISIS Will not take the city.

Allen's certainty is based in another important development: Turkey is now allowing Iraqi and Turkish Kurds to enter Kobane from its territory.

The fight over the city turned into a domestic political crisis for Ankara, whose refusal to intervene in the city triggered widespread protests among the country's Kurdish minority.

Turkey was hesitant to defend a city that's historically been a hotbed of support for anti-Ankara Kurdish militants operating in Turkey. Turkey's refusal to help reinforce Kobane might also have been an expression of its frustration over the US's failure to adequately push for the Assad regime's ouster, a centerpiece of Turkish policy in Syria for over 3 years.

But Turkey has apparently decided that the need to prevent Kobane from falling outweighs its other interests in a highly-complex dynamic around its border with Syria. A group of 150 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters is currently en route to the city through Turkish territory. Along the border, the armed convoy received a jubilant welcome from local Kurds.

ISIS committed substantial resources to taking the city, at a time when the jihadist group was facing US airstrikes and fighting the Iraqi and Syrian militaries and Shi'ite militia groups along multiple fronts.

ISIS's investment of arms and manpower is about to come up empty — a key potential victory in the fight against the world's most powerful jihadist group.

SEE ALSO: These two maps explain ISIS's chokehold over Iraq

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The Tzar Bomba was one of the most fearsome devices ever built, a multi-stage hydrogen bomb that shattered the idea that there were any technological limits to the destructiveness of atomic weaponry.

After the Soviet Union detonated a 50-megaton bomb over an uninhabited island north of the Arctic Circle on October 30, 1961, it was clear that human beings would need to consciously decide that atomic yields had reached a dangerous saturation point. Science had imposed no such limits. The Tzar Bomba was a glimpse of just how enormous a human-made nuclear explosion could be.

Its yield of 50 megatons, or 5,000 kilotons, was equal to 3,800 of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima. "The mushroom cloud reached a height of 60 kilometers [37 miles]," according to the website of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty Organization. "Third-degree burns were possible at a distance of hundreds of kilometres. The ring of absolute destruction had a 35 km [28-mile] radius."

The Tzar Bomba's fireball was over 5 miles in width. According to the Nukemap, a project of nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, if the Tzar Bomba were dropped over Business Insider's headquarters at 20th St and 5th Ave in Manhattan, the "radiation zone" in which between 50% and 90% of people would die if they didn't receive medical assistance would stretch from north of Times Square to south of the Brooklyn Bridge, while the fireball would stretch from Brooklyn Heights to the Natural History Museum:

The "thermal radiation radius" where there's near-certainty of receiving third-degree burns would swallow pretty much the entire New York metropolitan area:

And it could have been even larger: Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev originally wanted to test a 100-megaton weapon. Plans were scaled back when researchers realized that such a device would produce dangerous fallout that could pollute areas far beyond the bomb's test site.

As the Nuclear Weapons Archive notes, the bomb's design wasn't technologically path-breaking, and "pushed no envelopes, saved for size." The weapon used a thermonuclear detonation to trigger an additional and even larger explosion, a process that could be used to produce ever-larger blasts.

But the Tzar Bomba would represent the high-water mark of explosive output. A bomb of the its yield had little practical applicability: it was large enough in size to make it nearly impossible to deliver through existing systems, and in a battlefield scenario it would potentially kill as many friendlies as enemies.

Miniaturization was, and is, a far more important technical hurdle for the would-be nuclear power, which needs bombs that are small and light enough to fit on ballistic missiles far more than it needs ones that produce an impressive yield. Indeed, the Tzar Bomba test came during a period when the US was trying to build high-yield thermonuclear devices that it could practicably deliver by air, the aspiration behind the disastrous Castle Bravo test that the US carried out in the Pacific in 1954.

According to authors Michael Fitzgerald and Michael Packwood, the Tzar Bomba was a means of projecting Soviet power, and Khrushchev's own strength, during one of the tensest stretches of the Cold War, a time when the Berlin Wall was under construction and the US's missile capabilities were worryingly ahead of Moscow's.

Kruschev had at least proven that the Soviets had built a weapon with a horrifying yield — a contemporary BBC report on the test notes that British officials were immediately aware that the Soviets had managed an unprecedentedly large blast. But the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Soviet removal of nuclear delivery systems from the western hemisphere, would come roughly a year after the Tzar Bomba test, which seemed to pay no real strategic dividend for Moscow.

Both the US and the Soviet Union quickly realized that there was no point in building a bomb that had nothing more than a symbolic purpose. No test of its magnitude was ever attempted by either side.

But it's a reminder that such devices have been within the human race's technological capabilities for decades now, and that it's only their lack of a practical application — and not any insurmountable technical barriers — that has prevented ever larger and more alarming weapons from being built.

Video of the test can be found below, in this excerpt from the documentary Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie.

SEE ALSO: Here's how the US reacted to China's first nuclear test 50 years ago

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When the US withdrew its last troops from Iraq in 2011, Al Qaeda in Iraq had been defeated and one of the Middle East's most troubled countries had the chance to carve out a normal existence for itself.

Three years later it had all fallen apart.

Al Qaeda in Iraq turned into ISIS, seized Iraq's second-largest city, took over large sections of Iraq and neighboring Syria, and triggered a full-on regional crisis. 

Between the divisively sectarian policies of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the chaos in neighboring Syria, al-Qaeda in Iraq quickly went from a broken organization operating at the fringes of society to a major military threat.

To make sense of the meteoric rise of ISIS, Frontline, PBS's award-winning news documentary series, produced an in-depth look at the group's ascendancy. Here's what they found about the rise of a jihadist group that has become one of the most consequential players in the Middle East.

The rise of ISIS in Iraq would not have been possible without the sectarian policies of former Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, a Shi'ite who used strong-armed tactics to rule a highly diverse country.

As soon as the US completed the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, Maliki attempted to arrest his Sunni Vice President, Tariq al-Hashimi. Hashimi's security guards were reportedly tortured until they confessed to charges of terrorism on video.

Hashimi fled Iraq, where he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death. Meanwhile, Maliki continued to arrest thousands of Sunnis on dubious charges. Shia militias also carried out extrajudicial executions of Sunnis throughout Baghdad.

Afghanistan's opium economy provides more employment — "up to 411,000 full-time-equivalent jobs"— than even the country's armed forces, according to a quarterly report released today by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). 

The country's poppy cultivation is at an all-time high, covering more than 200,000 hectares, another SIGAR report found earlier this month.

Opium and its derivatives are the country's largest export, worth $3 billion in 2013, an increase from $2 billion in the year before.

In fact, Afghanistan's opium production has been on a constant uptick since 2010, according to a chart included in the SIGAR report:

"Counternarcotics Appears To Have Fallen Off The Agenda" 

Despite the rampant growth of an illicit drug economy that stokes corruption and even finances the Taliban, the concern over opium has diminished. The US and its partners seem to have given up on opium eradication as a goal in the country. As the SIGAR report notes, it isn't even mentioned in "the declarations and communiqués from the conferences on Afghanistan reconstruction that have become a mainstay of the international effort."

Opium cultivation is paid only "oblique reference" in the 2012 document laying out the country's reconstruction. Indeed, nowhere in the Tokyo Mutual Accountability Framework do the words "poppy" or "opium" appear, even as the industry plays an ever-bigger role in the life of Afghans.

Meanwhile, appropriations for the Department of Defense's Drug Interdiction and Counter-Drug Activities Fund (or DOD CN) have plummeted since a steady climb in the aughts and a peak in 2012. Since 2002, the US has spent nearly $7.8 billion trying to tackle Afghanistan's opium problem.

This chart shows how that effort received less and less US budgetary attention, at the same time opium production in the country increased:

Read the entire report here.

SEE ALSO: How ISIS became one of the world's most dangerous terrorist groups

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Warning: This article contains images and descriptions of extreme violence.

Islamic State militants drove 600 Shia, Christian, and Yazidi male prisoners into the middle of the desert, lined them up along the edge of a ravine, and executed them at point blank range, according to a report by Human Rights Watch released Thursday. 

The inmates, taken from a local prison, were forced to count themselves as they lined up before members of the jihadist militant group opened fire on them with machine guns. 

Human Rights Watch says it spoke to nine survivors of the massacre. They told the organization they made it out alive by rolling into the ravine and pretending to be dead, or were shielded by the bodies of other prisoners who fell on top of them.

Militants from the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL or Daesh) separated the group from more than 1,500 prisoners along religious and ethnic lines.

A survivor recounts an ISIS leader as saying “the Sunnis must stand on one side. The Shia, Kurds, and Yazidis must stand on the other. If I find out that a Shia is among the Sunnis, I’m going to cut off his head with a sheet of metal.” 

The moment they made us give up all of our possessions, I knew they were going to kill us.

The men were interrogated about their beliefs, names, hometowns, and other details — witnesses said about 100 Shia prisoners were successful at pretending to be Sunni to escape further violence.

The remaining Shia, Kurdish, Christian, and Yazidi prisoners were then searched. 

“They took everything from us — money, watches, rings, identity cards,” one survivor said. “The moment they made us give up all of our possessions, I knew they were going to kill us.”

The prisoners had been given no food or water for 24 hours, but ISIS militants promised them supplies as they drove them deeper into the desert. When they arrived, the militants told them “you’ll have water in paradise.”

The militants then made the men kneel in a single line along the rim of a curved ravine 6 to 12 feet deep. They were then asked to number themselves off, with each person forced to “raise his hand and say his number.” 

Survivors said many of the gunmen were young. Some appeared nervous. Others were excited, including some who joked at the end of the count that they had “a nice-size herd,” and were "going to eat well tonight."

After we said goodbye to each other, I took my daughter’s picture and kissed it, and I prayed to God to save me for her.

One survivor says that after the count, the militants decided that shooting was the most efficient way to exterminate the group. 

“One put his knife to an inmate’s neck, planning to cut his throat, but the other guy said, 'There are too many and we’re not enough, so let’s kill them with bullets.' So he went to the first one and he fired several shots into his back. Then they opened fire on all of us.”

“Before they started shooting, I managed to kiss the men on each side of me, because we knew we were going to die. After we said goodbye to each other, I took my daughter’s picture and kissed it, and I prayed to God to save me for her, because I have no one else,” another survivor said.

Seeing some had survived the first round of shootings, the militants came back for a second volley. The fired until they ran out of ammunition.

“My face was down in the sand. I heard the footsteps of the ISIS guy, he was standing over me and he shot the man lying next to me in the head. He shot me too but the bullet hit my right forearm. I heard death gasps. I felt something coming under me. It was warm. It was the blood of my friend Haider. I took some of that blood and put it on my face and head so that if they came back they would think I am dead,” a survivor told Human Rights Watch.

Another said he used a small knife to cut his own head and neck so that the blood would make it look as if he had been shot. After the gunmen left, he says he raised his head.

They set my right leg on fire. But I had to withstand the pain so they wouldn’t know that I was still breathing.

“I saw one body without a leg, another with his head blown apart. One man went up a nearby hill to see where ISIS was. One of their [ISIS’s] cars saw that guy so they turned around and came back. We fell back to the ground. They started to shoot at us again. Then one of the men from ISIS told the others, 'Let’s leave. We’re out of ammunition.'"

Militants set fire to brush around the ravine, and worked to spread the flames toward the corpses.

“They set my right leg on fire. But I had to withstand the pain so they wouldn’t know that I was still breathing. When they saw that I didn’t move, they told each other that I was dead. Then they burned the person next to me,” one survivor said.

The witnesses told Human Rights watch that 30 to 40 men survived the shooting, though several later died while trying to crawl or stagger away. After the militants left, the survivors fled.

“I took a few steps and fell to the ground because I was losing too much blood," one survivor said. "I was with a group of 11 survivors. One was not shot and he helped me walk. We sat under a bridge. The man who helped me, he put his urine in a bottle. We all drank the urine. Otherwise we would have died of thirst."

Human Rights Watch says the day after the June 10 massacre, ISIS gunmen carried out a similar mass killing of Shia soldiers in the city of Tikrit. ISIS claimed to have executed 1,700 Shia troops and posted videos on the internet showing their gunmen shooting at hundreds of captive men.


Survivors of the June 10 massacre said they saw a man filming the events with a video camera, though Human Rights Watch says no video has been posted online. 

Human Rights Watch says that attacks by the Iraqi Government and anti-ISIS militias have also targeted and killed hundreds or even thousands of Sunni Muslims, giving a boost to ISIS support among Sunnis in the area.

Read the full Human Rights Watch report here.

SEE ALSO: ISIS Is Actively Recruiting Female Fighters To Brutalize Other Women

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Sweden's government made the country the biggest in Europe to recognize the state of Palestine Thursday, and while the move made Israel furious, it took the opportunity to make a joke about Ikea furniture.

"Today the government takes the decision to recognize the state of Palestine," Sweden's foreign minister Margot Wallstrom said in a statement in the Dagens Nyheter daily.

The Israeli foreign minister called it a "very unfortunate decision," Haaretz reported.

In his swearing-in earlier this month, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven pledged that his government would eventually recognize a Palestinian state. Soon after the Israeli government found out, it summoned the Swedish ambassador to protest the move, according to Haaretz.

Sweden went forward, however, making the formal announcement on Thursday "as an important step that confirms the Palestinians' right to self-determination," according to a statement.

"We hope that we can make the parties a little less unequal," Wallstrom told CNN. "[and] that we might inject some new dynamics into the suspended peace talks."

From the Associated Press:

While the US and European powers have so far refrained from recognizing Palestinian independence, they have become increasingly critical of Israeli settlement construction. The 28-nation European Union has urged that negotiations to achieve a two-state solution resume as soon as possible.

In a symbolic move, British lawmakers earlier this month voted in favor of recognizing Palestine as a state.

"The Swedish government needs to understand that relations in the Middle East are more complicated than a piece of furniture from Ikea that you assemble at home," Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman told Haaretz, referring to the Swedish furniture retailer, "and should act with responsibility and sensitivity."

In response to Lieberman's comments, Wallstrom quipped (via NPR): "I will be happy to send Israel Foreign Minister Lieberman an Ikea flat pack to assemble. He'll see it requires a partner, cooperation, and a good manual."

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The ex-Navy SEAL who wrote the best-selling memoir "No Easy Day" that provided a first-hand account of the raid resulting in the death of Osama bin Laden is under a Justice Department criminal investigation for possibly leaking classified material.

Though Matt Bissonnette's 2012 book initially got him in hot water since he failed to submit the manuscript to the Pentagon for review, people familiar with the investigation told The New York Times there is more interest in what he's said in paid speeches at corporate events.

From The Times:

They include at least one talk last year, at a golf club in Atlanta, in which audience members were asked to turn in their cellphones before he spoke so that nothing could be recorded, according to people who attended the event.

Mr. Bissonnette has apologized for failing to have the book vetted through the Pentagon’s required security review process.

Bissonnette's lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, told The Times he thought an agreement was reached with Justice and the Pentagon to settle the book matter and have Bissonnette forfeit some of the royalties. Instead, a criminal investigation was opened in May or June.

The SEAL's book, which he wrote under the pen name "Mark Owen," offered insight into the training and workings of the elite SEAL Team 6 — known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) — along with interesting details about the Bin Laden raid.

Although it remains the only first-hand book written of the raid, there were few startling revelations from "No Easy Day." A long article about how the May 2, 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan transpired appeared in The New Yorker just three months after it occurred. And other books, including "The Finish" by Mark Bowden, and "Manhunt" by Peter Bergen also recounted what happened, citing both military and civilian sources.

The website SOFREP, a military news site run by former Navy SEAL Brandon Webb, reported in Aug. 2012 that the public affairs officer for Adm. William McRaven, then commander of Special Operations Command, "[had] been in contact with the author directly, and that (apparently) no classified information has been disclosed in the memoir."

SEE ALSO: 25 Things We Learned From SEAL Book 'No Easy Day'

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Jerusalem (AFP) — Israel reopened Jerusalem's flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound Friday ahead of the weekly Muslim prayers, after a rare closure following clashes sparked by the killing of a Palestinian by police.

The streets of east Jerusalem were calm ahead of the prayers at midday, following an Israeli clampdown on the shrine, which is holy for Muslims and Jews alike.

Clashes erupted when Israeli police on Wednesday night shot dead a Palestinian accused of trying to kill a Jewish hardliner.

The closure was the first for decades and prompted a spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to condemn the move as an Israeli "declaration of war".

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that because of fears of unrest at the midday prayers, entry for Muslim men would be restricted to those over 50.

Additional police were deployed around the Al-Aqsa compound in the heart of the Old City, with local media reporting the presence of some 3,000 officers, three times more than usual.

The Al-Aqsa mosque compound — known to Jews as the Temple Mount — is the third holiest site in Islam and Judaism's holiest.

The clashes subsided late Thursday with a few sporadic confrontations between stone-throwing Palestinians and police firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Three Palestinians were arrested, Samri said.

The funeral of the Palestinian passed off without incident, she added.

Jerusalem has been shaken by months of unrest sparked by the murder of a Palestinian teenager in July in revenge for the killings of three Jewish teenagers in the West Bank.

A 50-day war between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza in July and August intensified protests and clashes in the Holy City.

SEE ALSO: Israeli Far Right Activist Shot And Wounded

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Omar al-Shishani, the red-bearded Georgian ex-commando, is the most recognizable Islamic State leader below Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It was Shishani who posed with the stolen US Humvees taken from Mosul and brought into Syria to reinforce the militant group's advances in the west. 

Shishani is also credited with leading successful operations by the Islamic State (also called ISIS or ISIL) against Iraqi Security Forces in Anbar province, putting the group within striking distance of Baghdad. 

Yet, according to Will Cathcart, Vazha Tavberidze, and Nino Burchuladze of The Daily Beast, Shishani is a figurehead.

They say the Georgian, named Tarkhan Batirashvili at birth, is the charismatic face for the real brains behind some of ISIS' more effective battlefield operations: His older brother, Tamaz Batirashvili. 

The Daily Beast: 

If this is true, it explains why, unlike the rest of the top ISIS commanders, Tarkhan allows himself to be photographed extensively. They are creating the illusion that he is the “head of snake”— while the real architect of ISIS’s Syria operation, Tamaz Batirashvili, remains in the shadows.

This preference for avoiding the spotlight mirrors the brothers' shared history.

Shishani had formerly served in the Georgian special forces — where he may have received training from British or American instructors — during the war against the Russians in 2008. However, Shishani was eventually dismissed from the military with tuberculosis and arrested for 15 months for illegally harboring weapons. 

Meanwhile, Shishani's brother fought on the front lines against the Russians in Chechnya as part of the growing jihadist movement in the separatist republic. Tamaz's battlefield resume made him of particular interest to the Georgian military, a small force always in need of experienced soldiers.

“Tarkhan [Shishani] was the only newbie,” an unnamed Georgian military source told The Daily Beast. “We only recruited him because we were interested in his brother — Tamaz and his friends, who were ‘real wolves,’ experienced soldiers, and veterans of the Chechen wars."

Shishani's military style could reflect his brother's experience fighting for an insurgency. Whereas other ISIS commanders fight in a more standard way through wave attacks or frontal assaults, Shishani "is fighting like an insurgent. He’s using a complex style in Anbar, relying on a very small force,"according to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 

If Shishani is merely a charismatic front for his tactically brilliant brother, it highlights the difficulty US and coalition forces may have in tracking down the ISIS leadership. Little is publicly known about either Tamaz or Shisani. And perhaps even less is known about Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS' self-declared caliphate.

One of ISIS' top leaders has already managed to evade capture despite being one of Iraq's most well-known fugitives for more than a decade. It is believed that one of the premier military commanders in ISIS is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam Hussein's former deputy and one of the most wanted men in Iraq. Al-Douri has effectively evaded US-led efforts to capture him since 2003. 

If Shishani is merely a front for the real tactical commander within ISIS, the coalition faces a serious hurdle in identifying, let alone capturing or killing, the group's leadership. 

SEE ALSO: This Is The ISIS Mastermind Responsible For The Group's Advance Through Western Iraq

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The US-led mission in Afghanistan is coming to an end this year, with allied forces withdrawing from the country's fractious Helmand Province earlier this week.

With coalition troops leaving Afghanistan to meet their withdrawal deadline this calendar year, there's no better time to watch Ben Anderson's 2013 documentary: "This Is What Winning Looks Like".

The British producer spent six years in the country, capturing a damning picture of both the Afghan National Army and the US-led coalition's efforts to train it.

Rampant corruption, illiteracy, technical incompetence, and a Taliban threat indistinguishable from provincial civilians are only a few of the problems stacked against the prospect of the Afghan state's meeting success by western standards. It's a reminder of the uncertainty that lies ahead for the country, and the failure of the US to fulfill many of its major goals.

The documentary takes its title from the words of American General John Allen in February 2013, on his last day as head of NATO forces in Afghanistan. Allen's words were meant to inspire. The documentary adopts them with dark irony.

At a patrol base, US soldiers discover that Afghan troops have been detaining four men in a makeshift prison of stacked sandbags. An interpreter translates their version of the facts ...

... but confronted about the illegal detention, an Afghan soldier puts his foot down, and the Americans see little choice but to back off in response. A US soldier later tells one of his comrades: "Just wait, I don't want to piss them off. It's their show." The whole episode is just one example of a lack of communication and differing standards between the Afghan and US militaries.

Casualties in Afghanistan are climbing for everyone except coalition and US soldiers, according to a report by the Inspector General in charge of investigating US-led reconstruction efforts in the country.

US troops have taken on an advisory and training role in the past two years, in preparation for their exit from the country by the end of 2014.

That translates to lower American casualties: 49 American soldiers have been killed in the country this year, which would be the lowest annual rate in over a decade if it holds.

But last month, the UN Secretary-General reported on violent incidents in Afghanistan overall, which are at their second-highest clip ever. The latest quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) represents these statistics as an average of 71.8 "security incidents" per day, a rate only surpassed in 2011.

Civilian deaths and injuries have increased to levels on par with those of that same year, the UN found in a separate report, while Afghan ministries have just stopped releasing police and military casualty data after a particularly bloody 2013.

Here's the SIGAR report's breakdown of security incidents in 2014:

Armed clashes made up nearly half of these incidents, while improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were responsible for 30% of them.

This continues a trend the UN noted during the first six months of this year: mortars, RPGs, and small-arms fire near population centers are responsible for a growing share of civilian deaths.

"The nature of the conflict in Afghanistan is changing in 2014," a UN official said in a statement accompanying the research, "with an escalation of ground engagements in civilian-populated areas." 

Alongside reports of a Taliban force growing in ambition and military initiative, these numbers paint a worrying picture of the legacy that the 13-year-long US-led effort in Afghanistan may leave behind.

SEE ALSO: The US is leaving behind a dysfunctional and incompetent army in Afghanistan

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On Wednesday, Fox News announced it planned to reveal the identity of the Navy SEAL who shot Osama Bin Laden in a documentary set to air next month.

But in a statement issued to Business Insider, the Pentagon stressed that anyone who participated in the 2011 operation that left the Al Qaeda leader dead was "still bound" by a "non-disclosure agreement to not discuss classified information, especially in a nationally televised interview."

This seems to indicate the SEAL could face a criminal investigation for participating in the documentary.  

The statement came from Navy Commander Amy Derrick-Frost, a Defense Department spokeswoman, who said the military had not confirmed that the person participating in the Fox News documentary was indeed the SEAL who fired the fatal shot at Bin Laden.

However, Derrick-Frost spoke generally about whether that person would be allowed to discuss the operation on TV. She began by noting that all members of the military would sign nondisclosure agreements.

"As a private citizen, former or retired service members are free to speak with the media and exercise their First Amendment rights," Derrick-Frost told Business Insider. "However, it is important for all former service members to adhere to their signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) when they seek to openly discuss classified or sensitive information, or make claims about their active duty operations or accomplishments.

"NDAs are voluntarily executed by service members. After a thorough briefing on the NDA and what each paragraph contains, the service member is aware that his/her signature signifies their understanding and intent to comply with the lifelong obligation for protecting National Defense Information."

Derrick-Frost went on to remind the "individual" involved in the Fox News documentary that he would still be "bound" by this NDA.

"If in fact this individual was associated with the military unit that carried out the UBL raid, which is yet to be determined, he is still bound by his non-disclosure agreement to not discuss classified information, especially in a nationally televised interview," Derrick-Frost said.

This is not the first time someone who claimed to have been involved in the raid on Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan has spoken publicly about the operation. In 2012, ex-Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette released a book about the raid. Earlier this summer, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into whether he leaked classified material. 

Derrick-Frost concluded her statement on the Fox News documentary by encouraging any former SEAL to be discreet about his past work.

"Navy SEALs continue to serve and fight bravely around the world, accomplishing critical missions that keep our nation safe. The major details of the bin Laden mission are well known, many of them a matter of public record," she said. "We urge any former SEAL to abide by the SEAL Ethos, particularly the core tenant, 'I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my actions.'"

Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it was concerned the person in their documentary may have violated an NDA.

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Andrew Wylie, one of the most powerful literary agents in the world, has compared Amazon to the Islamic State, saying that the ebook retailer "is sort of a ISIS-like distribution channel," the Guardian reports. 

Wylie, who can name Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth among his clients, was speaking at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA) in Toronto, Canada, on Oct. 27.

In a Q&A session after his speech, he turned his attention to Amazon's Jeff Bezos accusing him of  having "taken the business and distorted it radically." He went on to predict a gloomy future for the online store, saying that soon the readers will realize how bad Amazon is and it "is going to be buried."

Amazon was not directly available to comment.

This is not the first time Wylie has criticized the world's biggest online bookstore, although he tried to collaborate with Amazon in 2010 through one of his publishing houses, Odyssey. 

Publisher Weekly reports that he previously took a public stance in defending Hachette in a dispute against Amazon, while encouraging his colleagues to "stand firm" against the company.

The fight between Amazon and old-school publishers is a old one: Publishers say the online retailer just care about selling the books and not their literary significance. 

Earlier this month, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman compared Amazon to the early 20th century oil drillers like J.D. Rockefeller noting that giant online retailer has "too much power."

SEE ALSO: A Strike In Germany Could Cripple Amazon This Week

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If you told a friend you were in the running for a job at the CIA, you might get a raised eyebrow, be asked whether you're even allowed to revealed that fact, and perhaps some questions about how close to the Bourne trilogy the whole process really is.

But speaking with Forbes, CIA head of recruitment Ron Patrick explained what it takes to get a job at one of the most secretive wings of the US government. And much of it looks like a pretty standard job application. You can even apply online now.

"Everything out there — movies and books — make it seem as if there is some secret way to get into the CIA, when in fact it’s not so secret," Patrick said.

Recruiters will look at your resume before granting you a telephone interview. Pass that and you're looking at a few online tests to gauge your writing and problem-solving abilities, as well as to evaluate whether you're an "interpersonal fit."

Only then does it get into the not-so-standard stuff. If your background investigation goes smoothly — "Have they lived their life in an honest and open way," asks Patrick — it's time for a polygraph test.

The questions at this stage are still similar to what you'd get at any company serious about their hiring process, but Forbes contributor Maseena Ziegler says they just place more value on closely analyzing the answers.

And there's nothing here about the rumored spinal tap meant to tell all about your drug use history (the Navy has actually debunked the myth that only this method can reveal past LSD use). In fact, a Colorado applicant who admitted to having smoked pot wasn't totally barred from entry. Instead he was told to wait at least a year before reapplying for the agency.

As for recruiting priorities, the CIA's needs shift with their expectation of what the global landscape will look like five to ten years down the line.

"So we need cultural knowledge, geographical knowledge and language skills — skills that allow us to do our job in that part of the world," said Patrick, in reference to whatever region the CIA believes will be the source of the next set of challenges.

Getting the job could have a lot to do with having the right skills for the times, just like at any other employer. And even once you've landed it, you'll be drinking fewer shaken martinis at the CIA than you might have hoped. 

As author and former CIA agent Lindsey Moran explained to Pursuit Magazine, a CIA officer's work is more about being able to work with and read people than it is about being able to carry out dangerous or violent missions. "So much of what you do as a CIA operative is psychology-based. On the most basic level you’re acting — almost — as a clinical psychologist for your assets," she said. "They come to you with their problems, and you have to listen, and talk them through their issues."

SEE ALSO: This chart shows how the US military is responsible for almost all of the technology in your iPhone

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Vietnam is becoming a proxy against China in any future possible confrontation in the South China Sea or South Asia as a whole. 

On Oct. 28 India announced that it would sell naval vessels to Vietnam in exchange for an energy-exploration deal. These vessels would arrive at a time of rising tension between Vietnam and China over contested island chains in the South China Sea. 

Massive protests broke out across Vietnam in May and over the summer, as citizens torched Chinese businesses after China moved an oil rig into disputed territory west of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. Both Vietnam and China lay claim to the islands, and the nations have frequently clashed over them. 

India's decision to back Vietnam comes during the country's own border disputes with China. China and India fought a border war in 1962 that has led to the frontier between the two countries in a still-unresolved state of controversy.

China has taken full advantage of this lack of demarcation to slowly eat away at Indian territory by very slowly pushing its troops into the disputed areas and normalizing Chinese control over them. The incursions are never enough to justify a military response from India, but this lack of a reaction gives China a strategic advantage. 

Although China and India are attempting to repair relations and usher in a period of economic coexistence, militarily the two countries are carefully sizing each other up. 

The US has also paid particular attention to the possible use of Vietnam as a proxy against Chinese expansionism. On Oct. 2, the US partially lifted a ban on supplying lethal weapons to the country in a bid to help it improve its maritime security against China. 

"This is a very important first step that will engender future cooperation," an unnamed State Department official told Reuters. "This policy revision enables us to ... provide Vietnam the ability to defend itself in the context of its presence in the South China Sea."

This effort to improve the military strength of China's rivals comes amid a time of rapid Chinese advancement. China is in the process of developing a fleet of nuclear powered submarines. The nation also is attempting to develop a fifth-generation fighter jet fleet to challenge US and allied air supremacy in the region. 

Along with India and Vietnam, China also has unresolved territorial disputes with Japan, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

SEE ALSO: This map shows why the South China Sea could lead to the next world war

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After 27 years in power, Blaise Compaore, president of Burkina Faso, has been overthrown following a wave of popular protests.

Faso joins Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych — the Kremlin client tossed from the presidency during widespread protests in Kiev this past February — as the only other world leader ejected from office as the result of a popular uprising in 2014 (so far, at least).

Compaore's ouster won't involve the US to the degree that Ukraine's turmoil has. But neither is the US totally without interests in the country — interests that could become jeopardized depending on how the post-Compaore period unfolds.

Burkina Faso is home to a number of US national security assets, including a joint special operations air detachment that ran a classified aerial surveillance program called Creek Sand, first revealed by the Washington Post in 2012. Burkina Faso is one of the US's centers of operation in a part of the world that's become increasingly relevant to the fight against terrorism, a country wedged between Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb in Algeria and Niger, and Ansar al Dine in Mali.

Compaore's Burkina Faso was important for a separate yet related reason: the conflict in neighboring Mali.

It's easy to lose sight of this now, what with the country's current relative stability and a spate of other, fresher terrorism-related sagas over the past couple years. But the collapse of Mali after a coup in March of 2012 threatened to create a vast terrorist safe haven in west Africa and rapidly became one of the world's major security crises.

Junior officers ousted the country's elected president in March of 2012, partly because of his failure to confront an intensifying Tuareg insurgency roiling the country's north. In the ensuing collapse of the Malian state, most of the northern half of the country was taken over by a constellation of hardcore jiihadist groups and Tuareg nationalists, some of them former mercenaries for recently ousted Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

By mid-2012, and with astonishing speed, Mali became an example of how an obscure and essentially local dispute over governance, ethnicity, and citizenship could mutate into the possible jihadist takeover of a sizable country not far from mainland Europe.

The crisis seemed to have ended when the French military was deployed to northern Mali in January of 2013, sending the jihadists fleeing from the region's major cities and leaving the new government in Bamako to negotiate with the Tuaregs. But as Thomas Miles, an independent scholar and author of an upcoming book on Mali and Niger told Busines Insider, Compaore played a crucial mediating role in a situation that remains in flux, providing a safe haven for non-jihadist Tuareg groups while holding a certain amount of leverage over them.

"This removes somebody who's abetting the conflict," Miles says, "but it also removes somebody who can control some of its actors."

Lesley Anne Warner, a political and military analyst who focuses on Africa, told Business Insider that the Mali crisis helped turned Compaore's Burkina Faso into an important security partner for the US.

"After the 2012-13 crises in Mali, there were several countries in the region that suddenly became the primary frontline states for US counterterrorism operations in the region," she told Business Insider. "In Burkina Faso, the US started to build the capacity of the gendarmerie to provide border security along its common border with Mali in 2013."

Compaore was well-positioned both politically and geographically to become a vital US ally in West Africa. It doesn't seem like the immediate transitional period will threaten American activities in the country: the military is supposed to shepherd Burkina Faso through a transitional period before handing off power to a civilian government.

But as Miles explains, a more open political system could complicate US policy. Burkina Faso has an unusually active left-wing bloc by regional standards, thanks partly to the legacy of Thomas Sankara, the Burkinabe president sometimes referred to as West Africa's Che Guevara. Compaore was part of the plot that resulted in Sankara's ouster and execution in 1987.

"Opposition to American basing could become a real card for the left, a really active left that has a lot of popular support, much more so than in other places in the region," says Miles. "We've seen the Sankara rhetoric in the protests even though it's not something that most of the actual power brokers share. But there's going to come a moment when those things come at loggerheads."

US assets in the country aren't in an imminent danger of being thrown out. And the US could always redeploy its forces to neighboring Niger, whose government has also been broadly cooperative with American security efforts.

But Burkina Faso's change in leadership already poses some major challenges. It could upset the ever-fragile and unresolved situation in Mali, where there have been deadly clashes between the French military and militant groups this week. And it could lead the US into conflict with a future government in Ouagadougou the character of which is currently unknowable — at least in the frantic 24 hours after nearly 30 years of US-friendly rule has come to an end.

SEE ALSO: The US is leaving behind a dysfunctional and incompetent army in Afghanistan

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