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Dutch investigators have begun clearing the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, four months after the Boeing 777 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 289 aboard in an incident that sparked international outrage against separatists blamed for the attack.

A recovery team working in the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, an area controlled by the rebels, has begun collecting debris from the crash site under the supervision of investigators from the Netherlands, whose citizens comprised the bulk of the passengers on the ill-fated Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur flight. The Dutch Safety Board said it planned to reconstruct a section of the airliner as part of its continuing investigation.

NPR's Corey Flintoff, reporting from Moscow, says investigators are trying to recover as much evidence as possible from the July 17 crash site, but that in recent weeks "access to the area has been blocked by frequent shelling between the separatists and Ukrainian forces."

The removal of debris began as the United States, Japan and Australia, meeting at the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, announced that they were "committed to bringing to justice those responsible for the downing of Flight MH17."

It also follows the release of a photo on Russia's Channel One and Rossiya television that purports to show a Ukrainian jet firing an air-to-air missile at the airliner. The report, which was quickly labeled "preposterous" by the U.S. State Department and became the subject of debunking attempts on social media, is at odds with reports that the plane was downed by a Russian-built and rebel-operated mobile missile platform called a BUK.

TO SEE Russian TV "satellite" photo of #MH17 is a fake! All details: http://t.co/iPim53j7H8 pic.twitter.com/oh222qNKm7

— AirLive.net (@airlivenet) November 16, 2014

The Associated Press says that bloggers cited "a cloud pattern to prove the photo dates back to 2012, and several other details that seem incongruous." In August, the Russian Union of Engineers released an analysis of the June 14 tragedy, arguing against the surface-to-air missile theory (see below).

In a statement, the U.S. said the was an effort to "obfuscate the truth and ignore ultimate responsibility for the tragic downing of MH17."

Russian Union of Engineers Report On MH17

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17

crisis in Ukraine

Russia

Pink was not what Milton thought he'd been laying down on the canvas. So he made an appointment at Johns Hopkins University. "It was a brutal test because what they do is they give you 25 — I think that's the number — 25 discs."

Each disc was a different color of the spectrum, from red to violet, and Milton had to put them in order. So he did, and he thought it was fine — until the lab technician started correcting his work.

"She started moving all the pieces around and substituting, putting some farther down the scale and others up," he says. "It was a massive redoing."

The diagnosis: red-green colorblindness, or deuteranopia. That was on top of the nearsightedness that Milton had known about since he was a kid.

"Peter Milton does not have total colorblindness, but it's fairly severe," says Michael Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University and co-author of The Artist's Eyes: Vision and the History of Art. "We see color because we have three types of cone cells, or receptors, in the retina, one of which is mainly blue sensitive, one is red sensitive and one is green sensitive. Some people are born with abnormal red or green sensors. If they're somewhat abnormal, a person doesn't quite discriminate colors on the red-green end of the spectrum as well, but they may see them if they're bright."

#ColorFacts: A Weird Little Lesson In Rainbow Order hide caption

itoggle caption

For Milton, greens look more like a neutral gray with some yellow, and the color maroon looks like mud.

The Elegance Of Black And White

Colorblindness isn't that uncommon — about 1 in 10 men has some form of it — but Milton was a painter. He studied art at Yale under Josef Albers, who wrote the book on color. Literally. It's called Interaction of Color.

"I was told at one point ... that he thought very highly of my work," Milton says. "And this is very bizarre because I'm the colorblind person, he's the color guru."

Milton wasn't going to abandon art, but he did feel he had to abandon color. And so he embraced black and white. In 1969, he and his family moved to a big yellow house in Francestown, N.H., and in the four decades since, Milton has been making extraordinarily intricate black and white prints. You almost need a magnifying glass to take them in: ballerinas, dogs, children and men on bicycles float in and out of ornate train stations and cafes. They're visual puzzles in which past and present seem to merge, but looking closely won't yield an answer. Milton says it's all about invoking a sense of mystery and a mood.

Take the engraving called Mary's Turn. It was inspired by a 1908 photograph by artist Gertrude Kasebier which shows a woman lining up a billiard shot. In Milton's version, the woman is the painter Mary Cassatt, and the billiard balls are floating in the air.

i i

Milton's Mary's Turn also features Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas paintings hanging on the wall. Click here for a closer look. Courtesy of Peter Milton hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Peter Milton

Milton's Mary's Turn also features Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas paintings hanging on the wall. Click here for a closer look.

Courtesy of Peter Milton

"She's playing this magical game and characters from her paintings have all assembled and come and watched her play the game," he says. The painter Edgar Degas, who had a fraught relationship with Cassatt, is also looking on with a puzzled expression. The whole thing has a sort of graininess to it, almost like an old black and white photograph.

"It's really an examination ... of not having color anymore," Milton says, "of using tonal and texture as your medium. Black and white is almost more elegant; maybe it's fully more elegant than color, unless color is used ... with great elegance in itself."

i i

Milton's The Ministry (Second State) was inspired by the story of Marcel Proust and James Joyce sharing a Paris taxi in 1922. Click here for a closer look. Courtesy of Peter Milton hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Peter Milton

Milton's The Ministry (Second State) was inspired by the story of Marcel Proust and James Joyce sharing a Paris taxi in 1922. Click here for a closer look.

Courtesy of Peter Milton

'I Don't Miss Color'

Of course, Milton isn't the first artist to have worked through eye problems. The two subjects of Mary's Turn, Degas and Cassatt, also had compromised vision.

"Degas probably had a congenital retinal problem," says Stanford's Michael Marmor, "and he had progressive visual loss spanning about 40 years. Mary Cassatt had a different problem: She developed cataracts fairly late in her life."

Claude Monet also had cataracts, eventually losing his ability to tell colors apart. And the 19th-century artist Charles Meryon, who was famous for his etchings of Paris, was colorblind. You might have heard the theory that Vincent van Gogh was colorblind — that one's actually not true.

"He used vibrant greens in many paintings," Marmor says, "and green is a dangerous color for a colorblind person because it lies right between yellow and blue, and to their perception it actually greys out — it loses color."

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Marmor says that, like Milton, most artists who found out they were colorblind just switched to printmaking or sculpture. And Milton says his diagnosis kind of took a weight off his shoulders: "I don't miss color. It helps to have a disability — I use that word; it's a strong word — but it helps it have a disability because when you can do anything, which of all the things you can do are you gonna choose? So something has to help you make the choice."

Or, as Degas put it, "I am convinced that these differences in vision are of no importance. One sees as one wishes to see. It's false, and it is that falsity that constitutes art."

Pink was not what Milton thought he'd been laying down on the canvas. So he made an appointment at Johns Hopkins University. "It was a brutal test because what they do is they give you 25 — I think that's the number — 25 discs."

Each disc was a different color of the spectrum, from red to violet, and Milton had to put them in order. So he did, and he thought it was fine — until the lab technician started correcting his work.

"She started moving all the pieces around and substituting, putting some farther down the scale and others up," he says. "It was a massive redoing."

The diagnosis: red-green colorblindness, or deuteranopia. That was on top of the nearsightedness that Milton had known about since he was a kid.

"Peter Milton does not have total colorblindness, but it's fairly severe," says Michael Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University and co-author of The Artist's Eyes: Vision and the History of Art. "We see color because we have three types of cone cells, or receptors, in the retina, one of which is mainly blue sensitive, one is red sensitive and one is green sensitive. Some people are born with abnormal red or green sensors. If they're somewhat abnormal, a person doesn't quite discriminate colors on the red-green end of the spectrum as well, but they may see them if they're bright."

#ColorFacts: A Weird Little Lesson In Rainbow Order hide caption

itoggle caption

For Milton, greens look more like a neutral gray with some yellow, and the color maroon looks like mud.

The Elegance Of Black And White

Colorblindness isn't that uncommon — about 1 in 10 men has some form of it — but Milton was a painter. He studied art at Yale under Josef Albers, who wrote the book on color. Literally. It's called Interaction of Color.

"I was told at one point ... that he thought very highly of my work," Milton says. "And this is very bizarre because I'm the colorblind person, he's the color guru."

Milton wasn't going to abandon art, but he did feel he had to abandon color. And so he embraced black and white. In 1969, he and his family moved to a big yellow house in Francestown, N.H., and in the four decades since, Milton has been making extraordinarily intricate black and white prints. You almost need a magnifying glass to take them in: ballerinas, dogs, children and men on bicycles float in and out of ornate train stations and cafes. They're visual puzzles in which past and present seem to merge, but looking closely won't yield an answer. Milton says it's all about invoking a sense of mystery and a mood.

Take the engraving called Mary's Turn. It was inspired by a 1908 photograph by artist Gertrude Kasebier which shows a woman lining up a billiard shot. In Milton's version, the woman is the painter Mary Cassatt, and the billiard balls are floating in the air.

i i

Milton's Mary's Turn also features Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas paintings hanging on the wall. Click here for a closer look. Courtesy of Peter Milton hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Peter Milton

Milton's Mary's Turn also features Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas paintings hanging on the wall. Click here for a closer look.

Courtesy of Peter Milton

"She's playing this magical game and characters from her paintings have all assembled and come and watched her play the game," he says. The painter Edgar Degas, who had a fraught relationship with Cassatt, is also looking on with a puzzled expression. The whole thing has a sort of graininess to it, almost like an old black and white photograph.

"It's really an examination ... of not having color anymore," Milton says, "of using tonal and texture as your medium. Black and white is almost more elegant; maybe it's fully more elegant than color, unless color is used ... with great elegance in itself."

i i

Milton's The Ministry (Second State) was inspired by the story of Marcel Proust and James Joyce sharing a Paris taxi in 1922. Click here for a closer look. Courtesy of Peter Milton hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Peter Milton

Milton's The Ministry (Second State) was inspired by the story of Marcel Proust and James Joyce sharing a Paris taxi in 1922. Click here for a closer look.

Courtesy of Peter Milton

'I Don't Miss Color'

Of course, Milton isn't the first artist to have worked through eye problems. The two subjects of Mary's Turn, Degas and Cassatt, also had compromised vision.

"Degas probably had a congenital retinal problem," says Stanford's Michael Marmor, "and he had progressive visual loss spanning about 40 years. Mary Cassatt had a different problem: She developed cataracts fairly late in her life."

Claude Monet also had cataracts, eventually losing his ability to tell colors apart. And the 19th-century artist Charles Meryon, who was famous for his etchings of Paris, was colorblind. You might have heard the theory that Vincent van Gogh was colorblind — that one's actually not true.

"He used vibrant greens in many paintings," Marmor says, "and green is a dangerous color for a colorblind person because it lies right between yellow and blue, and to their perception it actually greys out — it loses color."

Related NPR Stories

TED Radio Hour

What's It Like To Hear Color?

Science

Thanks To Gene Therapy, Monkeys See In Full Color

Marmor says that, like Milton, most artists who found out they were colorblind just switched to printmaking or sculpture. And Milton says his diagnosis kind of took a weight off his shoulders: "I don't miss color. It helps to have a disability — I use that word; it's a strong word — but it helps it have a disability because when you can do anything, which of all the things you can do are you gonna choose? So something has to help you make the choice."

Or, as Degas put it, "I am convinced that these differences in vision are of no importance. One sees as one wishes to see. It's false, and it is that falsity that constitutes art."

The mixed Arab and Kurdish city of Zumar in northern Iraq is a window into the fierce battles for territory between the Kurds and the Sunni extremist group known as the Islamic State, or ISIS.

The mountainous landscape is pockmarked with destruction. ISIS took control of the area in August and held it until late October. Then Kurdish forces, with the help of U.S.-led airstrikes, forced the militants back.

And while the so-called Islamic State is gone now, the dispute over this land, rich with oil, is far from over. Kurds and Arabs have claimed the same territory for decades. And now Kurds appear to be staking their claim to all of it.

It's a microcosm of a country fracturing along ethnic and sectarian lines while ISIS preys on historic enmities between tribes, ethnicities and sect to advance its own cause.

In some parts of Iraq, Arabs are forcibly displacing Kurds; in others, Shiite Muslims are displacing Sunni Muslims or vice versa.

On the road to Zumar that reality comes into sharp focus. For nearly a mile we drive by mounds of knee-high rubble. The Arab village of Barzan is gone; not a single house is standing.

Two young Kurdish soldiers, or peshmerga, riding with us claim that when ISIS invaded, the Arabs celebrated. The soldiers say the Arab villagers accused the Kurds of being occupiers and thanked the Sunni extremists for liberating them.

i i

Barzan, an Arab village outside Zumar, has been completely leveled by U.S.-led airstrikes and Kurdish soldiers. The Kurds say the whole village sided with the Islamic State, though no Arabs remain to tell their side of the story. Leila Fadel/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Leila Fadel/NPR

Barzan, an Arab village outside Zumar, has been completely leveled by U.S.-led airstrikes and Kurdish soldiers. The Kurds say the whole village sided with the Islamic State, though no Arabs remain to tell their side of the story.

Leila Fadel/NPR

During the fight against ISIS here, U.S.-led airstrikes reduced some of the homes to rubble. The peshmerga blew up the ones left standing.

"The Arabs are not welcome here anymore," one of the young soldiers says. In his mind they are all ISIS sympathizers. "They killed our friends, our family and you think we will welcome them back? Impossible."

Among those killed was the young man's brother.

When we arrive in Zumar, the streets are all but empty. I try to get out of the car on a street of destroyed stores, but a truck of Kurdish soldiers stops us. They say they haven't completely cleared the area.

ISIS rigged the homes with explosives and left bombs hidden in pots and buried underground. They tagged buildings with the words "Property of the Islamic State." But those have hastily been crossed out with praise for the peshmerga now in control.

We drive on and find a family who returned home 10 days ago. Like that village on the road, their city looks like a war zone. Many homes are nothing but rubble, some destroyed by airstrikes, others by Islamic State bombings. Twisted pick-up trucks that once belonged to ISIS litter the streets.

i i

Mohamed Ali stands with his Kurdish family. They are one of the the few families that has returned to Zumar after being driven out by the Islamic State. They say their Arab neighbors should not return. Leila Fadel/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Leila Fadel/NPR

Mohamed Ali stands with his Kurdish family. They are one of the the few families that has returned to Zumar after being driven out by the Islamic State. They say their Arab neighbors should not return.

Leila Fadel/NPR

Mohamed and Ahmed Ali are Kurdish brothers; they're among the few families who returned.

"When I came home and saw the walls standing, I kissed the dirt and the walls," Mohamed says. "I never thought I'd see this place again."

But he says, his neighbors, Arabs, have not and cannot come home.

"They are traitors," he says.

His brother Ahmed nods in agreement.

"My neighbor put a gun to my head," he says. The man was masked and he planned to kill Ahmed, because Ahmed is a policeman. But his children wept nearby, and Ahmed's son recognized the masked man's voice as the neighbor. Only then did the man let him go, but warned him to get out of town.

Throughout the city homes are spray-painted with the word "reserved." Others are tagged with the word "Kurdish," followed by a name.

Mohamed explains the graffiti. Kurds who came back and found their homes destroyed by the Islamic State are taking Arab homes to compensate themselves. When they pick a house they write the word reserved on it.

And Kurds who found their homes standing are writing "Kurdish" on the wall, to make sure no one mistakes it for an Arab home and takes it.

Kurdish residents say it's only fair, because they believe the Arabs sided with the Islamic State when the extremists invaded and Kurds had to flee.

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Mohamed points to the homes across the road.

"Those homes are Arab and all of the ones behind them," he says. "And they should not come back."

The Arabs of Zumar, who once made up about half the city, are not here to tell their side of the story. Most Sunni Arabs don't back the Islamic State, and many have died fighting the group, which isn't exclusively Sunni Arab.

But the ISIS does seize on historic grievances, like the tensions between Kurds and Arabs. The Kurds appear to be using this fight to seize land and oil that they believe should be part of a future Kurdistan.

Before leaving town, we meet a Kurdish man, Ismael Ali Ibrahim. He's just returned after months of displacement.

He walks us through his kitchen. A rocket pierced a hole in the wall, and glass and gravel cover the floor. One of his kid's toys, a little stuffed Santa Claus, lay in the rubble.

"I don't know what this ISIS wants or where they came from," he says between sobs, standing in his broken home. "I blame politics and the state."

We walk outside by an empty pen that once housed his sheep, and a bulldozer destroyed by a rocket that he once used to make a living.

He doesn't know what he'll do now, but he thanks God for his life.

Despite this war, his desire is for Iraq to stay united.

But when I ask him if his Arab neighbors should come back, he says no: "They were the cause of all these problems."

Islamic State

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Iraq