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Manufacturers of 3D printers have had a hard time convincing consumers they need a machine that takes 12 hours to make a plastic trinket. But 3D printing enthusiasts do exist, and they’re coming up with lots of different reasons to want one of the machines.

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We’re still several months out from the new Google Pixel 2 devices, but at this early stage of the game we’ve gone digging into what we can expect from the new Android flagships. Based on data from a source with information on the subject as well as our own investigations, we’ve got a pretty decent idea of what the basics … Continue reading

At 4:40 a.m. local time Friday in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, Donald Trump became a war president.

On his order, 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles blasted off the destroyers USS Ross and USS Porter, arced over the Syrian coastline and headed 40 miles inland. The 20-foot-long missiles skimmed over the landscape at 550 mph. As they approached the Shayrat airfield, home to Syria’s 50th Air Brigade, guidance systems pinpointed each target: The missiles carrying 1,000-pound high explosive warheads went for the two main runways, underground bunkers and hardened shelters. Other Tomahawks armed with warheads each carrying 166 lethal bomblets destroyed aircraft, fuel and ammunition depots, and other “soft” targets with red-hot jagged shrapnel and concussive force.

It was a highly technical and tightly coordinated operation, for which the military has long planned and practiced, and it appears to have been carried out flawlessly.

But giving the nod to one $94 million missile strike bought Trump far more than a presidential moment at a temporary lecturn at Mar-a-Lago, where he announced the attack Thursday night. He seemed to have a premonition that things would change earlier in the week when he acknowledged, “I now have responsibility” for Syria.

Now he really does. What comes next is the difficult and perhaps impossible job of managing the rest of this war, a conflict that has killed at least 470,000 people over six years, including 55,000 children. Syrian President Bashar Assad battles bands of murderous and heavily armed fighters, backed by Russia and Iran, as well as dwindling ranks of “moderate” rebels supported by the United States in an uneasy coalition with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others.

The horrendous chemical attack by Syrian government forces on Tuesday caught the Trump administration ill-prepared. Candidate Trump had campaigned on an “America First!” commitment to keeping the United States far away from nasty foreign conflicts. As a result, there is no obvious public support for deepening the American military role in Syria with additional ground troops. The effort to train and equip enough regional forces to topple the Assad regime has failed. The Trump White House has no strategy to direct its next military steps and lacks the senior staffs at the Pentagon and State Department critical to devising new war management plans. At the Defense Department, in particular, only one of 53 key civilian officials ― Secretary Jim Mattis himself ― has been nominated and confirmed and is at work.

While candidate Trump boasted of having a secret plan to “destroy ISIS,” the radical Islamist militia fighting in Iraq and Syria, President Trump has given no sign of having such a plan. And yet now he’s offered a direct challenge to Assad’s regime. For all the world to see, the U.S. just pivoted from fighting ISIS to taking on Assad and his allies, Russia and Iran. Last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson remarked that it was up to “the Syrian people” to decide Assad’s fate. On Thursday, he declared that the way forward in Syria required “an international community effort” that “would lead to Assad leaving.”

That change in goals is causing considerable angst in Washington.

“We now need a comprehensive strategy with clearly-defined purpose and objectives for how we achieve our national security goals in Syria and the region,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said in a statement Friday. “We can’t pour resources and risk the lives of our troops in a new military conflict without a clear and comprehensive strategy and full consideration of the long-term ramifications,” Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-Conn.) agreed. “The consequences of a misstep are grave,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.).

As in most national security crises, there isn’t much time. Tillerson heads to Moscow next week for critical meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s strongest political and military ally. Putin’s initial reaction to the U.S. airstrikes was mild. He temporarily suspended participation in a communications link that enables U.S. and Russian air controllers to avoid potential air collisions over Syria. Presumably, he too is watching for Trump’s next steps.

A clear-cut, thoughtful and practical strategy for Syria would have to consider to what degree Washington will now treat Moscow as a diplomatic colleague or a military foe in Syria; whether more U.S. airstrikes will help or hurt diplomatic initiatives to work toward a ceasefire; whether additional U.S. airstrikes or ground troops, beyond the roughly 800 Americans already deployed in Syria, are committed; and how to avoid clashes with Russian aircraft and ground troops already operating there.

Among the purely military options, for instance, is setting up “safe zones” for refugees inside Syria ― an idea that candidate Trump supported. But planning for safe zones has foundered on issues such as what forces would guard these zones on a daily basis, how to sort out actual civilian refugees from suicide bombers or militia fighters, and which combat troops would defend the zones from a concerted regime attack backed by Russian and Iranian forces.

All that is difficult enough. But the non-military aspects of the situation are more challenging.

“Much more of the heavy lifting is about the diplomatic piece than the military piece,” Christine Wormuth, senior Pentagon official for strategy and plans during the Obama administration, told The Huffington Post. “All the factors that were in place during the Obama administration that made finding a solution to this terrible conflict so difficult remain in place today,” she said.

Managing opponents like Russia and Iran, while keeping friendly allies in line, will demand extraordinary diplomatic finesse, Wormuth said. That’s without even addressing the question of who would govern Syria post-Assad. Not to mention the job of helping rebuild the country after the war.

Syria is “a horrible, intractable mess,” Wormuth said.

The Trump administration will find the new fight it launched with the Tomahawks “considerably harder” to wage without a full supporting staff, she warned.

The secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the national security adviser “are working 24/7, I’m sure, but they can’t do everything,” Wormuth said. “They need senior lieutenants to carry out some of this.”

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As part of News Deeply’s “Women and Jihad” series, we look at how escape from Boko Haram doesn’t always mean the end of the ordeal, as former militants’ ‘wives’ are often rejected and verbally abused by other female abductees.

One afternoon in April 2015, Amina emerged from Sambisa forest with her daughter beside her. They were among the very first women to be rescued by security forces from Boko Haram, the militant Islamist group that has been carrying out a violent insurgency in Nigeria since 2009. Amina, her daughter and the other women who were rescued that day reported having been raped, beaten and, for some, forced to marry Boko Haram fighters. When they stepped out of the forest, they assumed their torture was over.

But for this mother and daughter, and many others like them, their troubles weren’t over.

Many of the women and girls who escape from Boko Haram arrive home only to be rejected by their communities and families, who consider them to be tainted by their forced association with the group.

Amina and her daughter, whose real names have been withheld for security reasons, are among thousands of women and girls who, since 2013, have been taken from their homes in northeastern Nigeria in large-scale abductions. In the best-known example, nearly 300 girls were kidnapped from their schoolhouse in Chibok in April 2014. The abductions gained worldwide attention and inspired the Twitter campaign #BringBackOurGirls.

In May 2015, Mausi Segun, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, arrived at the internally displaced persons camp (IDP) in Yola, Nigeria, where she interviewed women and girls who escaped Boko Haram. While there, she met with Amina, who told Segun that since their arrival both she and her daughter had been subjected to verbal and emotional abuse, and rejected by other women at the camp. Segun was startled to hear that the women responsible for the abuse had themselves been held captive by Boko Haram.

According to Segun, kidnapped women are pressured, through beatings, rape and starvation, to marry Boko Haram fighters. The women who refuse to marry are treated as slaves by the group and forced to do domestic work. “Boko Haram fighters show preference to their so-called wives, [and] the ones who refuse to get married receive the brunt of the abuse,” she says.

Once rescued and rehoused at the Yola IDP camp, women who had refused to marry fighters sometimes take their anger out on those who received better treatment from Boko Haram by marrying.

Both Amina and her daughter had married Boko Haram fighters. “The only way [Amina] could keep an eye on her daughter was to marry one of the fighters as well. For her, that was a sacrifice she had to make,” Segun says.

After they were rescued by security forces, Amina and her daughter arrived at the Yola camp to find their trauma continued. “[Her daughter] said the treatment they received in the camp was worse than the treatment she received with Boko Haram,” says Segun. “She would have rather been with Boko Haram than in the camp where she was suffering from abuse and stigmatization by everyone else.”

Even returning home doesn’t guarantee former Boko Haram captives freedom from being ostracized. Families often reject girls who were unmarried before their abductions and come back pregnant by a Boko Haram fighter. “In [the family’s] thinking, their daughter’s marriageability has been diminished because she has been with Boko Haram,” Segun says. According to her, women in IDP camps in Nigeria typically rally around pregnant women and help deliver and care for babies – but women who became pregnant as Boko Haram captives are often left alone with no support.

Kim Toogood, peacebuilding adviser for Nigeria at International Alert, says women and girls who survive Boko Haram are often marginalized upon their return and may be excluded from receiving basic aid. For their children born of sexual violence, who are often perceived to be carrying the “bad blood” of Boko Haram, the consequences of stigma can be even worse, inhibiting their ability to go to school, to play with other children or even get married, she says.

Together in Trauma

While the shared experience of having been kidnapped by Boko Haram can turn some women against each other, the Chibok schoolgirls who escaped the militant group find strength together as they recover from the trauma of their abduction.

When Boko Haram attacked the Chibok schoolhouse, the militants rounded up the girls and forced them onto trucks. As the trucks made their way through the roads of Chibok, 57 of the girls jumped and escaped. “Two sisters held hands and jumped, it was so frightening for them,” says Margee Ensign, president of the American University of Nigeria (AUN). The girls then hid in the bush before journeying back to Chibok.

Days later, Ensign was approached by one of her female security guards who told Ensign that her sister was one of the kidnapped schoolgirls and that she had escaped. Knowing that the girls who managed to get away from Boko Haram would need a safe haven to continue their education, Ensign offered them full scholarships to AUN. Six escaped girls are now fully enrolled at AUN’s university, and 18 are in its intense foundation program, preparing for university.

According to Ensign, many of the parents were afraid to let their daughters go back to school. One mother told her, “My daughter has been kidnapped and now you want me to leave her with you?”

The girls also had their own cause for concern. The high-profile nature of their kidnapping means they continue to be targets for Boko Haram. To make sure the girls feel safe, AUN has instituted specialized security, which includes a K9 unit. The school also provides security escorts to the girls whenever they leave campus, according to Lionel von Federick Rawlins, AUN’s vice president of security and safety.

The school also gives the girls access to a trauma therapist, who works with them when they show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder or debilitating distress, such as refusing to talk or unstoppable crying.

According to Ensign, allowing the girls to stay together as a group has become increasingly important for their recovery. Since arriving at the school two years ago, almost every girl has suffered the death of a parent or sibling at the hands of Boko Haram. “We have had so many mourning days for parents that have been lost,” says Ensign. “Their response as a group [is] to pray and sit and talk.”

In October 2016, Boko Haram released 21 of the 200 Chibok schoolgirls held by the group. Ensign was with the AUN girls when the news broke and said they were ecstatic and crying with joy. They told Ensign, “Our sisters are coming home.”

Over the Christmas holidays, the girls from AUN reunited with the recently rescued girls in their hometown. On their return to school, the AUNstudents encouraged Ensign to provide scholarships to the girls who had recently been released. “They can look at us and see how far we have come,” her students told her.

This article originally appeared on Women & Girls Hub. For weekly updates, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.