These questions are timely, following Vice President Joe Biden’s dismissive description of the Boston Marathon bombers as “knockoff jihadis.” Mere amateurs, these brothers, who were capable of murdering several marathon participants, maiming scores more and shutting down a major city and even rail lines for hours or days. The real amateurism, it might be suggested, is that of the pundits and journalists trying to psychoanalyze the Tsarnaev brothers and their relations from a distance.

But there are already reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving killer, has said that he and his brother acted in response to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — wars that they considered to be attacks on Islam. What if this really was the motive? What if these brothers really were sincere Islamist revolutionaries, like the thousands of others who have rallied to militant jihadism in the past several decades, whether they were connected to international Islamist networks or acting on their own? That doesn’t exonerate their brutal crimes in any way. But surely Islamist terrorists are best understood in terms of the common Islamist ideology they share, rather than personal or familial experiences that are unique to each.

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Photos taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the red planet pointed to what may be the Mars 3 lander along with its parachute, heat shield and other hardware that it jettisoned during the descent through the thin Martian atmosphere.

While scientists said the find appeared promising, more follow-up was needed to rule out other possibilities.

Mars 3 operated for only 15 seconds on the Martian surface before it suddenly stopped communicating. It was part of a double mission the Soviet Union launched in 1971. Its twin, Mars 2, crashed.

The Russian space enthusiasts were part of an online group that followed the Curiosity rover, NASA's latest Mars mission. They used crowdsourcing to pore through publicly available archive images and contacted scientists about their find.

Earlier this year, at the group's request, the reconnaissance orbiter passed over the region where Mars 3 was thought to have landed and photographed the site.

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The 220-pound (100-kilogram) bomb was found Tuesday evening at a building site near the station, which stands in a relatively sparsely populated area near what used to be the border between West and East Berlin.

Experts decided to defuse the Soviet bomb on the spot, a former freight depot. They evacuated people from a few dozen nearby buildings and diverted trains heading north toward Hamburg. Most trains, however, were able to continue running undisrupted.

As a precaution, authorities also decided briefly to stop planes landing at the city's Tegel airport, a few miles away, while the bomb was defused — an operation that took half an hour. It wasn't immediately clear how many flights were delayed.

Some 150 people who lived nearby waited at a nearby school while the bomb was defused, police spokesman Jens Berger said.

Allied airplanes dropped huge quantities of ordnance on Germany during World War II in an effort to cripple the Nazi war machine.

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American conservatives, they kept hearing, were claiming credit for ending the Cold War and “liberating” them from the yoke of Soviet communism.

They were puzzled not just because the names of these conservatives — Gingrich, Buchanan, Kemp — were unfamiliar. What baffled them was more fundamental: they hadn’t received American help at all. The CIA, by its own later admission, was entirely absent during the long months and years when East German dissidents organized covert meetings in churches and semi-derelict apartment buildings, usually no more than a step or two ahead of the Stasi, the all-pervasive secret police.

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Just about the whole vocabulary of current international dealings were used in that conflict half a century ago. Blockades, showing strength, drawing a red line — all part of Monday’s debate — were at the center of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the war porn that got us all into it – annotated aerial spy plane photos of construction sites and alleged warmaking plans — along with show-and-tell demonstrations at the U.N., were part of the process of invading Iraq a decade ago.

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The image of the world standing still is the turn of phrase of Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate compared to other participants, who were unaware that they were speaking to history.

Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the late 1990s. I will keep to that here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in “the week the world stood still.”

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These nine months have been torture for me. I’m a heat-sensitive person, and American Samoa is like an open oven. No wind blows through here. It’s hard to breathe. I miss fresh vegetables and fresh-squeezed juices. I miss making lattes and baking cakes for customers at the coffee shop in Los Angeles where I worked. The only place I feel comfortable here is the local McDonalds, where I come every morning to use the free Wi-Fi and cool off in the air conditioning. I email with friends back in the United States. I blog about my experience. I email with advocates and petition them to help my case. But I wonder how long I can go on, and just how much one person can bear. I sometimes think of suicide.

Sixteen years ago, I came to America to seek peace and freedom. Now, I am stuck on an island in the South Pacific without the promise of escape.

___

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I know I'm not the intended audience for "Winnie the Pooh," and by all rights, it looks like a very cute picture. But if you're looking for a more far-out interpretation of A.A. Milne's children's classic, check out the Soviet-era "Vinni Pukh" cartoons (sometimes translated as Vinnie-Puh), a trilogy of Russian shorts based on Boris Zakhoder's translation of "Winnie the Pooh."

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Gorbachev on Monday criticized Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev for saying that they will decide between them who should run for president in Russia's March 2012 presidential vote.

Gorbachev said the statements show an "incredible conceit" and disrespect for voters. Gorbachev has previously avoided personal criticism of Putin, who is widely expected to reclaim presidency.

Gorbachev, who will turn 80 next week, also denounced the main pro-Kremlin United Russia party as a "bad copy" of the Soviet Communist Party and said that Russia has only imitations of a parliament and judicial system.

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Yes, if you're keeping score at home that makes three weeks running that Pick of the Week has settled on a foreign film from a snowy northern country (with a fourth, I suspect, on the way next week). I'm not exactly doing it on purpose, but it may well have something to do with the amazing winter those of us in the eastern two-thirds of the country are enduring. Actually, compared to the frozen slush of the Northeastern megalopolis in February, the desolate beauty, perpetual sunlight and endless seafood buffet of an Arctic Ocean summer look like Barbados.

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My own education did not commence until I had reached middle age. I can fix its start date with precision: for me, education began in Berlin, on a winter's evening, at the Brandenburg Gate, not long after the Berlin Wall had fallen.

As an officer in the U.S. Army I had spent considerable time in Germany. Until that moment, however, my family and I had never had occasion to visit this most famous of German cities, still littered with artifacts of a deeply repellent history. At the end of a long day of exploration, we found ourselves in what had, until just months before, been the communist East. It was late and we were hungry, but I insisted on walking the length of the Unter den Linden, from the River Spree to the gate itself. A cold rain was falling and the pavement glistened. The buildings lining the avenue, dating from the era of Prussian kings, were dark, dirty, and pitted. Few people were about. It was hardly a night for sightseeing.

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The oughts can't end a moment too soon.

What does the decade of 2010-20 hold in store? There is already a consensus among America's commentariat. We are told that the near future will see the decline of the United States and the rise of China in global power politics and, as an added attraction, the decline of the nation-state.

Yeah, sure. I'll believe it when I see it.

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