I came across the photo above randomly. It’s from a Reddit user I’ve gotten in touch with, who says this about the guy with the gun:

Definitely 100% my grandfather I don’t know for sure where this was taken. I asked my dad about it and he’s not sure either. You see, my grandfather and grandmother didn’t want to talk about the holocaust, according to my father it was total taboo to even mention anything about it. All he kept in a little shoebox was some pictures like this one, his writings and recordings in Yiddish which I’m trying to convince my father to listen to (no success yet) and some misc pictures of his family that he managed to acquire after the war.

I emailed the photo to the Holocaust survivor I call “Yossi Cohen” in this radio story. But he didn’t get back to me. Cohen was pretty hesitant to talk with me at all. “We were tough guys back then,” he told me at his apartment in Tel Aviv. At 87 years old, Cohen moves slow and speaks in a soft raspy voice. But I could sort of picture him as a genuine tough guy, if half of what he was saying about the war and its aftermath were true. As a commander with a group of resistance fighters outside Vilnius, Lithuania, for example, Cohen said it was his job to question the people they came across and determine if they were friend or foe. Friends could join the resistance and help fight the Nazis. “But we didn’t have prisons,” Cohen explained. “We didn’t have prisons.” This is what Cohen meant by being a “tough guy.” As an interrogator, his job was to pretty quickly figure out if the people being questioned were lying or not. And if they would be allowed to live.

Finally, here’s a link to the book I mention in the radio story by Jonathan Freedland. It’s written under his pen name, Sam Bourne and titled, The Final Reckoning.

“I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good,” Zaur Tsarnaev, who identified himself as a 26-year-old cousin, said in a phone interview from Makhachkala, Russia, where the brothers briefly lived. “[Tamerlan] was always getting in trouble. He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend. . . . He was not a nice man.”

Fayyad did succeed in cleaning up the PA’s fiscal act. But even there, as Nathan points out, the prime minister’s hands were tied. In a farewell radio address this week, Fayyad called for general elections in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s not clear who will take over as next PA prime minister. But it might end up being President Mahmoud Abbas himself.

For more background on Salam Fayyad, see Ben Birnbaum’s piece in the New Republic, and Nathan Thrall’s in the New York Review of Books.

And speaking of Palestinian elections, here’s my radio piece on “The President.”

Asked if Israel would adopt a more aggressive military stance in Syria, Mr Netanyahu said: “We are not aggressive. We don’t seek military confrontation, but we are prepared to defend ourselves if the need arises and I think people know that what I say is both measured and serious.”

 

Mr Netanyahu would not confirm what was widely believed to have been an Israeli air strike on a suspected Syrian government weapons convoy in January.

One runner from Dubai tells her marathon story to The National newspaper.

“Many Dubai-based runners achieved the qualifying for next year’s marathon and I know this cowardly act will not stop our runners coming to Boston to run in what is known to be the oldest marathon in existence.”

At Ha’aretz, Dina Kraft writes about how her experience in Boston yesterday felt both familiar and different.

European authorities are going on alert, but the London marathon will go ahead as scheduled.

And here’s audio from BBC TV’s interview with former Boston police commissioner Bill Bratton.

– Investigators have warned police to be on the lookout for a “darker-skinned or black male” with a possible foreign accent in connection with Monday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, according to a law enforcement advisory obtained by CNN. The man was seen with a black backpack and sweatshirt and was trying to get into a restricted area about five minutes before the first explosion, the lookout notice states.

Two Saudi nationals were also reportedly injured. And this.