On Wednesday, Syrian rebels in the northeast outskirts of the flashpoint city of Aleppo made an ambitious attempt to storm the city's main prison, setting off two car bombs near the jail's entrance at dawn, according to the Associated Press. The AP, citing the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reports that Syrian warplanes prevented the opposition fighters from breaking though the prison's inner walls.

The rebels were driven back even though they appear to have been observing the neighborhood for days, according to videos uploaded to YouTube. One, posted last week, shows a rebel pointing out a "counterterrorism building" down the street from the prison, while another, filmed as the attack began, shows a truck-mounted machine gun tucked away in a shelter overlooking the prison. A third appears to have been filmed from the opposite side of the prison complex, looking back toward the village where the machine gun was located.

At some point in the fighting, the rebels appear to have breached a wall near the prison. Below watchtowers, fighters take turns shooting AK-47s through holes in the plaster. One rebel, in the video below, tells the camera, "We have assembled more than 5,000 mujahideen ready to liberate the prison and to help the brothers and fight for the brothers.... We are mujahideen and we will liberate the prisoners in the central prison!" When he calls on his comrades to chant "God is great!" though, they sound disheartened.

According to the AP, the rebels have since withdrawn from the vicinity of the prison.

UPDATE: The Telegraph reports rebels have said they withdrew from the area of the prison to prevent more casualties after government forces began executing prisoners and throwing the bodies from windows.

In the latest example of crisis-mapping during natural disasters, the World Food Program's GIS Coordinator, Fabrice Recalt, has charted out the trajectory and intensity of Cyclone Mahasen and also made a map of available storm shelters, with detailed information on their facilities and potential vulnerability to the storm (everything from number of toilets to available water supply to date of construction).

The "digital humanitarian response" trend of compiling such crucial information has been extremely important in past disasters such as Typhoon Pablo in the Philippines, when geotagged tweets referencing previously publicized disaster hashtags (as in #PabloPH) were mapped out and provided to disaster response teams. The United Nations has embraced crisis-mapping as well.

Cyclone Mahasen, which hit Bangladesh on Thursday and threatens more than 8 million people, including displaced Rohingya Muslims in Burma, has so far mainly affected residents of fishing villages, who may not have benefitted much from Recalt's map. The category 1 cyclone has reportedly killed at least 12 people so far, making the storm much less serious than Cyclone Nargis in 2008, which left more than 130,000 people dead, and it is expected to dissipate within the next 24 hours. But had the storm been more serious, initiatives like Recalt's may have helped save lives.

(h/t Mari Ramos)

Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution was supposed to offer ordinary Venezuelans political power and social services. On some of these counts, it has at least partially succeeded. On others -- such as the provision of toilet paper -- not so much.

On Tuesday, Alejandro Fleming, the country's commerce minister, announced that the government would make the equivalent of a frantic grocery store run to pick up some rolls. "The revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper," he told the state news agency AVN. "We are going to saturate the market so that our people calm down." (Not that long ago, the "revolution" was promising to provide housing and health care but hey, Marx said something about the importance of toilet paper, right?)

"This is the last straw," Manuel Fagundes, a shopper trying to track down some toilet paper in Caracas, told the Associated Press. "I'm 71 years old and this is the first time I've seen this."

Though the lack of toilet paper represents a new low for Venezuela's reeling economy, this isn't the first time the country has been hit by goods shortages. Staples like cooking oil, sugar, and flour are often missing from supermarkets. Because the government has imposed strict capital controls, Venezuelan companies say they lack the foreign reserves to buy the goods they need on the international market, leaving shelves bare and consumers furious.

These debilitating shortages, which seem like a throwback to the Soviet era, don't bode well for Nicolás Maduro, who won a narrow victory in presidential elections in April. Opposition figures have wasted little time in making hay out of the government's troubles. Responding to this week's toilet-paper proclamation, for example, the opposition academic Alex Capriles quipped on Twitter, "50 million rolls of toilet paper come out to 1.75 rolls per person. These are the great revolutionary solutions." And writing for the paper El Universal, Diego Bautista Urbaneja described the shortages as the central problem facing the Maduro government:

If [Maduro does not possess], as Chávez did, a great ability to shape popular understandings of the country's problems, they will be imposed on the collective imagination more forcefully the more the government fails to interpret the problems correctly, as the result of years of misguided economic policies.

But the government doesn't appear to be taking this latest shortage as an indication that economic reforms are necessary. Look no further than Fleming, the commerce minister, who blamed the toilet-paper shortage on "a media campaign that has been generated to disrupt the country."

Speaking collectively for the media here, I only want to ask Fagundes one question: How'd you know?!

The good folks over at the Guardian embarked on an ambitious project this week: trying to explain Brits and Americans to one another. That project -- dubbed English to English -- comes in the form of a Tumblr that provides translations of Britishisms and Americanisms. And the results are pretty promising so far. 

As the creators point out, the love affair -- or "special relationship," if you will -- between the United Kingdom and the United States seems to have reached peak adoration recently; for evidence, look no further than Americans' love of Downton Abbey -- even if they don't understand half of what is mumbled in those corridors. (A free article idea for the folks at English to English: A weekly roundup of the at times frustratingly opaque Britishisms deployed on the show.)

Without further ado, here are the highlights so far. It turns out the expression to "shag the balls" doesn't translate all too well across the Atlantic.

Then there's the expression "pissed":

America, the perennial king of desserts:

Vests. They're confusing no matter where you are:

Is "fanny" a less innocent expression than you might think?

It's a wonder we're able to communicate at all. 

It seems like a story cooked up by a columnist for China's patriotic tabloid Global Times hoping to write about the problems with American democracy and press freedom: The U.S. Justice Department snoops on the Associated Press, and, without informing the news agency, obtains two months of reporters' and editors' phone records.

The AP called it a "massive and unprecedented intrusion," while the British newspaper the Guardian wrote that "the Obama administration has opened up a new front in its battle against media freedom."

And yet the response from the Chinese press has been surprisingly muted. An article entitled "The White House's Explanation for 'Eavesdropping' on the Associated Press Gets Refuted" on People's Online, a website affiliated with the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily, covers the revelations as a news story, writing that the U.S. media is "abuzz" and then explaining the facts of the case. China's state news agency Xinhua described the developments in a similar way to how Western news outlets are approaching the story (the IRS scandal has also received desultory coverage). The Global Times, a popular tabloid known for its nationalistic views and the most likely home for a strongly worded editorial deriding American press freedoms, instead published an uncharacteristically measured take on the debate between what is "allowed by law vs infringing upon press freedoms." 

So why is the Chinese media not jumping on this story to score points against a liberal press? (After all, a Russian Foreign Ministry official seized on the opportunity to express concern about U.S. officials attacking press freedom.) One reason is that it's such a damaging example of government encroachment on the media that the facts literally speak for themselves, and little embellishing or editorializing is needed.

But the Chinese public is also paying far more attention to developments in the contested waters near China than to U.S. scandals. On Thursday, for instance, the Philippine Coast Guard shot and killed a Taiwanese fisherman in disputed waters 170 miles south of Taiwan. The killing and the Coast Guard's response -- "if somebody died, they deserve our sympathy but not an apology" -- infuriated Taiwanese and Chinese alike, and protests erupted in Taiwan. For the last few days, the Global Times has been running heavily promoted stories about the Philippines needing to apologize for the shooting as well as several features about Taiwan, which mostly functions independently as a nation but which China claims.

For much of the last two decades, relations between Taiwan and China were frosty at best. But since the signing of a landmark trade agreement in June 2010, the relationship has been warmer and more stable, and both sides seem to have tacitly agreed to shelve the sovereignty dispute for now. This has freed China to focus on its other island claims -- with Taiwan as an unlikely ally. China and Taiwan, for example, both agree that the Diaoyu Islands (which the Japanese, who call them the Senkakus, claim as well) belong to Taiwan."We have 99 percent the same view," but we don't agree on whether or not Taiwan is part of China, a Taiwanese diplomat told me.

One lesson from all of this: The Chinese media has more pressing concerns than taking potshots at the United States. 

Ryan Fogle is having a very bad week. First the American diplomat in Moscow was arrested on charges of espionage while carrying a ludicrous collection of what might generously be called spy gear. Then Russian authorities expelled Fogle from the country. Now the country's state-run television is claiming that Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) intercepted Fogle's telephone conversations with the Russian counterterrorism official he was trying to recruit. And if the reports are accurate -- a big if -- they certainly don't make the CIA look good.

The transcript, only a small part of which has been released, paints Fogle as a man in a rush: "I think it's worth meeting today," he allegedly told the Russian official. "It's not possible tomorrow, it's only possible today. Well, it's worth it, as I said, you can earn a million dollars a year and I have $100,000 with me, but it has to be now."

According to Russia's Channel One, the FSB intercepted two calls minutes before Fogle and his potential asset met at a park in Moscow. "Opposite you is the stairway to the park," Fogle allegedly told his target. "I see you. I'll be there."

From there, the humiliation only continued, as Fogle was wrestled to the ground by the man he was trying to recruit. The Russian intelligence official "was a combat officer who had taken part in counter-terrorists operations many times himself in the North Caucasus, and himself had very serious military training," an FSB officer told Channel One.

According to Channel One, the FSB had been tracking Fogle since his arrival in Moscow in early 2011. "By that time, Russian counter-intelligence had already possessed information about his affiliation to the CIA staff, and from the moment he arrived in Russia, he was put under the appropriate surveillance. We can now say that this is not the first act of espionage in which the American has taken a personal part," an FSB officer told the station.

If the reporting is to be believed, Fogle spent two years under surveillance and was naive enough to bring a large sum of money to a clandestine meeting without realizing that his prospective asset was about to burn him.

That staggering incompetence is enough to inspire some skepticism about the allegations. Beyond the motivation of making the United States look bad, Moscow could be sending a message to Washington about their counterterrorism cooperation in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing (on Wednesday, Russia's Kommersant claimed that Fogle was seeking intelligence on the marathon bombing suspects, who both have roots in the North Caucasus). On the other hand, this certainly wouldn't be the first time the CIA did something stupid.

(Thanks to Catherine A. Fitzpatrick at The Interpreter for translating the original Channel One story.)

Ramzan Kadyrov, the 36 year-old president of Chechnya, reported human rights violator, supercar driver, champion boxer, and prolific Instagrammer, has once again posted an amazingly bizarre photo to his Instagram account -- posing with a lone wolf (Chechnya's national animal). The caption reads:

Wolf -- The only animal that can go into a fight against a stronger opponent. If he has lost the battle, he will look his opponent in the eye until the last breath, after which he dies.... The wolf always shows himself to his prey and chases it down on the run. It is for precisely this that we can respect them, despite their bloodthirstiness. #Chechnya #Hunting #Wolves.

(Interesting how Kadyrov, once a rebel fighter, appears to be evoking Chechen nationalism even as he grows closer and closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.)

But there are two sides to this man, clearly. Here's the picture Kadyrov posted just afterwards, of him cradling this cat:

Ever since November 2012, the Chechen strongman has been uploading several photos a day to the photo-sharing site -- quite a self-indulgent act for someone who once called the task a "burden." But how else to monitor public opinion, comment on current events, and appoint Instagram followers to his cabinet? In case you're not one of Kadyrov's 132,804 (and counting) Instagram followers, here are some of his weirdest pics:

1. #lounging #tiger #bondvillain

2. French actor Gérard Depardieu at table with Kadyrov and his identically dressed children.

3. Tracksuit? Check. Golden stag? Check. Let's do this.  

4. The focus was on back, traps, and biceps.

5. "They fixed a few minor things, told me that I have excellent teeth and sent me off." #oversharing

6. Kadyrov posted this photo along with a caption telling "friends, brothers, sisters, subscribers" to stop making appeals to him via Instagram ("more than half" weren't true anyway!) and to stop arguing with each other in the comments section. #orthisiswhereiwillburyyou

7. Hugging the sheep the wolf will probably eat later. 

8. Chechen rulers -- they're just like us!

9. Just grabbing a bull by the horns, lounging on a tractor...

10. A perk of being president: as much Jello as you want.

11. Anything Putin can do, I can do better.

Christian Caryl contributed to this post. 

All photos from Ramzan Kadyrov's Instagram page.