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Boko Haram, the Nigerian rebel group that kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls in April, has seized the northeastern town where the girls were abducted.

The Guardian reports:

"The militants attacked at about 4pm on Thursday, destroying communications masts and forcing residents to flee, according to witnesses. One described running past bodies strewn on a street.

"The fall of Chibok is hugely symbolic. The town in north-east Nigeria became the centre of world attention in April when Boko Haram fighters stormed the government girls secondary school, forced students onto trucks and drove them into the bush. There was a global Twitter campaign, #BringBackOurGirls, and criticism of the government's response."

Last month, the Nigerian government announced a cease-fire with Boko Haram, insisting that it included a deal to return the kidnapped girls. But the promise cited by the government was never fulfilled and soon more girls were kidnapped by the group.

The Associated Press reports: "In a separate development, police say a car bomb has exploded in northern Kano city tonight, killing at least six people including three police officers. The city is the second largest population center in Nigeria. There's been no claim of responsibility for the bomb, but Boko Haram extremists have detonated them in Kano in the past."

Boko Haram

Nigeria

As part of UNMEER, WHO — along with GoL, GoSL and NGOS like IMC and MSF — has been fighting the EVD crisis, making sure doctors correctly put on PPEs according to CDC guidelines. Meanwhile WFP is sending in food and DETT from JFC-UA are training health workers who will staff pending ETUs in Liberia.

Did you guess that I was writing about the Ebola outbreak?

Like many medical and global health topics, the Ebola crisis has cooked up an acronym soup. There are the familiar and the newly created. An outsider eavesdropping on a couple of healthcare workers might think they're speaking a secret code. And in a way, they are.

Some acronyms are used for convenience — try saying "Department of Defense Ebola Training Team" five times fast. Now try "DETT."

Some roll off the tongue better than others. DART, for Disaster Assistance Response Team, has a snappier sound than UNMEER, for United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response.

Other times, the reason for using an acronym is to speak with precision. "Virology, or more generally science, is loaded with colloquialisms, especially in the public sphere," writes virologist Alan Schmaljohn. of the University of Maryland Medical School, in an email. Researchers commonly use EVD, for Ebola virus disease, as a way to be more accurate than the colloquial "Ebola."

This is what Dr. Schmaljohn had to say:

"Ebola virus (shorthand = Ebola) is the viral agent itself. EVD refers to the disease syndrome, the constellation of symptoms the virus may cause. Note the parallel with HIV (the virus), HIV-infected individual (potentially contagious, but often healthy), and AIDS (the immunodeficiency syndrome caused by uncontrolled viral infection over time). Only recently has the language moved from EHF (Ebola hemorrhagic fever) to EVD (Ebola virus disease), the latter now preferred because it has become more widely appreciated that hemorrhage is typically a late symptom and only appears in a minority of cases."

These acronyms present a special challenge for radio reporters, who might have to tell an interview subject: "Can you repeat that, only don't say PPE, say personal protective equipment."

But in way, these acronyms tell the story of the outbreak.

Here's a sampling collected by NPR's Ebola correspondents. Readers, please let us know of any acronyms you've encountered in this year of Ebola.

CCC: Community Care Center

CDC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

DART: Disaster Assistance Response Team from USAID

DETT: Department of Defense Ebola Training Team

DFID: Department for International Development, which leads the UK, er United Kingdom's efforts on global health and development

DoD: Department of Defense (which raises the question, why do some acronyms include a preposition while others do not?)

EOC: Emergency Operation Center

ETC/ETU: Ebola Treatment Center/Ebola Treatment Unit

EVD: Ebola virus disease, formerly known as EHF or Ebola hemorrhagic fever

GoL: Government of Liberia

GoSL: Government of Sierra Leone

JFC-UA: Joint Force Command United Assistance

LRCS: Liberian Red Cross Society

MMU: Memorandum of Understanding

MoHSW: Liberia's Ministry of Health and Social Welfare

MSF: Medecins Sans Frontieres (aka Doctors Without Borders)

NGO: Nongovernmental organization

PPE: Personal Protective Equipment

UNMEER: UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response

USAID of DA: United States Agency for International Development Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance

USG: United States Government

USPHS: United States Public Health Service

WFP: United Nations World Food Program

MSF

ebola

WHO

CDC

Muslims call it the Noble Sanctuary. Jews call it the Temple Mount. On the contested hilltop that has been the focus of so much of the unrest in Jerusalem, Muslims who see themselves as "defenders" of the sanctuary raise their voices in a call to God whenever Jewish visitors enter.

These mourabitoun (men) and mourabiat (women) have gained attention during the recent weeks. Speaking at a cabinet meeting last Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called them "movements engaged in incitement ... financed by funds from extremist Islam." He said they should be outlawed.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas responded a few days later with the proclamation "We are all mourabitoun." In the same speech, he accused Netanyahu of fanning the flames of a religious war.

During visiting hours for non-Muslims one day this week, all was quiet on the broad plaza for a while. Israeli police in riot gear lounged at the entrance. Boys played soccer in a grove of olive trees.

Muslim men and women sat in shady spots between the gilded Dome of the Rock shrine, which dominates the sanctuary, and the more modest Al-Aqsa mosque at one end.

During visiting hours for non-Muslims, Israeli police patrol the Jerusalem holy site. They often escort Jewish visitors, both to avoid confrontations with Palestinians and to enforce the Israeli policy banning Jewish prayer at the site. Emily Harris/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Emily Harris/NPR

Then a man wearing a Jewish skullcap arrived. As soon as they spotted him, many of the Muslims there called out Allahu Akbar — Arabic for "God is great."

Zaina Ahmer has gone to the sacred shrine almost daily for more than a decade. She teaches classes about the holy site and acts as a guide.

"Our purpose is to educate," she says, "not to create chaos. But when we are provoked, we call attention to wrongdoing. The Jewish people who claim to come as tourists really want to take over. When we call out 'Allahu Akbar,' we are rejecting their presence here."

Things can quickly escalate from cries of "God is great." Police say they have been attacked with chairs, rocks and fireworks. Muslims say they have been hit by Israeli forces, injured by sound bombs, arrested and banned from entering. A video [http://youtu.be/VIqgJE6-zgc ] one woman "defender" posted on YouTube shows police chasing and surrounding her after she got up close to a Jewish visitor, calling out "Allahu Akbar."

Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld says the mourabitoun aim to disrupt.

Parallels

Israelis And Palestinians Ask: Is Another Uprising On The Way?

Parallels

Why Jerusalem's Real Estate Market Is Part Of The Mideast Conflict

Parallels

The Jewish Divide Over Jerusalem's Most Sensitive Holy Site

The Two-Way

Palestinian Slams Minivan Into Pedestrians In Jerusalem Attack

"We're talking about groups that get organized, walk around the Temple Mount, and try and disrupt the visits by shouting or screaming," Rosenfeld says. "There have even been cases where women have thrown stones at individuals and VIPs who have been walking on the Temple Mount."

During the past weeks of unrest in Jerusalem, police have been cracking down. This week, Elham Ibrahim waited two hours with a group of women before police would let them in.

"I come as much as I could, you know. I send my son off to school, then I come here," Ibrahim says. "When I don't come here, I'm missing something. Something is really missing."

She takes religious classes at the mosque and adds to the Muslim presence during tourist hours. But she doesn't yell at visiting Jews, she says.

"They have video cameras, they're taking videos of whoever's saying 'Allahu Akbar.' I have a family, with kids, you know and I wouldn't want to be taken. I wouldn't want to be arrested."

Jews debate among themselves whether they should visit the site. Many believe it is too sacred to set foot on. Others say it's too sensitive politically. Israel bans Jewish prayer at the site, a policy that more than one-third of Jewish Israelis want lifted, according to a recent poll.

Muslim Akram Shurafa says Jews who want to pray there are intruders. He doesn't believe their motivations are solely spiritual.

"We do not consider this aggression religious," he says, referring to increased visits by Jewish believers, some of whom want to rebuild a Jewish temple on the site. "We see it as aggression from extreme Jews who want to claim the sanctuary and take it for their own.

"This is explosive," he says.

Both Israel and Jordan, the official custodian of the site, promised after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry Thursday to take concrete steps to calm tensions around the contested holy site. Israel is also considering measures such as adding electronic security to the gates Muslims enter. That is unlikely to please at least some of those who consider themselves the mosque's "defenders."

Temple Mount

Palestinians

Arab-Israeli conflict

Jerusalem

Israel

Three Minutes in Poland

Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film

by Glenn Kurtz

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Read an excerpt

In 2009, Glenn Kurtz stumbled across some old family films in a closet in his parents' house in Florida. One of the films, shot more than 70 years earlier by his grandparents while on vacation in Europe, turned out to include footage of his grandfather's hometown in Poland.

"I realized it was 1938," Kurtz tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "And there are all of these beautiful images of children and adults in this town, one year before World War II begins. I was just haunted by these faces. They're so happy to be filmed, they're so excited to see these Americans coming to visit the town. And of course I know something that they don't know — which is what's about to happen."

Kurtz set out to restore the film (which you can watch here) and find the people in it. The book based on this journey is called Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.

Interview Highlights

On what you can see in the video

There's this extraordinary, beautiful detail of the people — their faces, the clothing that they're wearing. There's lots of kids who kind of mob my grandfather and jump up and down and wave their arms and try to get into the frame. It's just this sort of commotion of these visitors coming to visit the town, and everybody wants to see what's going on and be in the picture.

When I found the film, it was not in playable condition. It had fused into, essentially, a hockey puck. So I started hunting around, and I ultimately donated the film to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And they were extraordinarily helpful. They gave the film to a film laboratory in Maryland ... and they spent four months restoring the images.

i i

In a still from the 1938 film footage, 13-year-old Morris Chandler appears on the left, among other town children. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hide caption

itoggle caption United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

In a still from the 1938 film footage, 13-year-old Morris Chandler appears on the left, among other town children.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

On finding survivor Morris Chandler, who appears as a 13-year-old boy in the film

Once the film had been restored and digitized, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum put it on their website. It was part of their collection and it was there with all of the other home movies that they have. And I received an email one day, from a woman I'd never heard of, out of the blue. And she said that someone had brought this film to her attention and that she was sitting, watching it with her father; camera pans across the crowd, there are all these children jumping and waving, and suddenly, a boy's face looked out and she saw her grandfather as a 13-year-old boy. And in this email that she wrote to me, she said, "He's still alive, and he'd very much like to talk to you, because I believe he knew your family as a child."

On watching the film with Chandler

A few weeks later, my family and his family gathered in Florida and we watched the film together. And Mr. Chandler has a prodigious memory. I sometimes feel like he'd been waiting his whole life to talk about this town. And we sat for hours, looking at these few minutes of film and he was able to identify a number of people who he recognized immediately. There were stories about those people, and then, of course, about his life, about people who didn't appear in the film. And it was just one of the most extraordinary experiences in my life.

i i

Glenn Kurtz is also the author of Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music. Franziska Liepe/Farrar, Straus and Giroux hide caption

itoggle caption Franziska Liepe/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Glenn Kurtz is also the author of Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music.

Franziska Liepe/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

On what it was like for Chandler to watch the film

Yeah, in fact, one of the things he said to me on the phone when we first spoke was, "You've given me back my childhood." And I think, for someone who survived the Holocaust — the tragedy of that, the loss of it, the intense fear of that experience — just overshadows everything that came before it and makes what came before, in a sense, almost incomprehensible. And when we were sitting and watching the film, one of the things that he said was, "I just can't believe that I was a kid." It was a part of his life that he couldn't even relate to anymore. But here it was, in these beautiful color images, and one of the things that he said to me was, "Now, I can show you that I'm not from Mars." He had felt that isolated in his family, as if he had come from Mars.

On the impact of the Holocaust on that town

When my grandparents visited in 1938, there were approximately 3,000 Jews living in the town, and by the end of the war, fewer than 100 were still alive.

Author Interviews

Try, Try Again: A Guitarist's Second Time Around

On the stories the survivors shared with him

When I started to research the project, I thought that I was going to try and recreate what the town was like. But 75 years later, what you're left with are these fragments — not only documents, but also these memories. Some of these memories which the survivors have been willing to share with their families, you know, have become stories that are fairly polished. And they tend to share with their families stories that aren't too scary — things that are even amusing or things that have, you know, a happy ending.

I was fortunate that the survivors were willing to share with me, I think, more, actually, than they'd shared with their own families. As an outsider, they were willing to talk with me and weren't trying to protect me, although they were still trying to protect themselves in some ways. And it took many, many times of speaking with people, sometimes, to get behind the polished stories that they were willing to share. And, of course, everything that they remember is intimately bound, inextricably bound, with loss.

Read an excerpt of Three Minutes in Poland