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This time, they're through. Done. They're walking out the door on Friday.

Unless they aren't. Unless they renew their vows and their union grows ever closer.

That's basically where Greek officials and European finance ministers are in their complicated relationship. After years of possible-breakup drama, a real deadline will arrive Friday and the parties must decide: Are we in this thing together or not?

If Greece tells Europe, in effect: "Fine. Walk away. Russia will love us instead," then Europe — and the United States — may have a whole new set of economic and geopolitical problems to worry about.

There were hints Tuesday that Greece is moving toward saying: "Wait! Let's talk. I know we can work it out." Those positive rumors kept European financial markets calm — for now.

But economists say real stability will come only when the hints and rumors have been turned into a clear proposal.

This fraught relationship has been having its ups and downs for so long, you may have stopped paying attention. To help you catch up, here's a 1-2-3 recap, and a look-ahead to Friday:

1) Greece is a small country with a big problem; for years, it was spending too much. So the government had been borrowing a lot, and finally could not meet its debt obligations when the global recession hit.

2) But Greece is not a stand-alone country, free to default on debt or devalue its currency. It's part of the European Union, and uses the euro. Europeans did not want one of their members to tumble into financial chaos.

3) So in 2012, EU finance ministers helped cobble together a plan to bail out Greek debt in exchange for the country raising taxes while cutting wages, pensions, public investment and social security benefits.

With the bailout in place, Greece's economy started improving. But a lot of Greeks who had depended upon government pensions and paychecks were still suffering. In late January, voters elected a new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, who opposed austerity.

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Talks Collapse, As Greece Rejects E.U. Bailout Deal

Parallels

In A Twist, Greeks Demonstrate In Favor Of Their Government

The Two-Way

Greece's Left-Wing Prime Minister Takes Charge

The timing of his election was, shall we say, awkward because on March 1, Greece's credit lines will expire.

Europe's finance ministers met Monday. They had hoped to come up with an extension of the bailout package — with its attached austerity strings.

Negotiations broke down. Afterwards, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis told reporters: "In the history of the European Union, nothing good has ever come out of ultimatums."

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem kept holding firm, saying Athens must agree to more austerity and make the next move: "It's really up to the Greeks."

But there's little time left. Friday is the real deadline because national parliaments need time to ratify any deal before the Feb. 28 expiration of the existing bailout.

Speculation had been swirling that Greece might turn to Russia or China for help. That would be a bad outcome from the perspective of U.S. and European officials, who do not want Greece to: grow distant from Europe; pull out of the euro currency union; or default on its debts.

Any of that could shake up financial markets. There's been more than a hint of jitters in the banking sector: Greek banks reportedly have been losing deposits at the rate of 2 billion euros ($2.27 billion) a week.

IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm, issued an assessment Tuesday morning saying that failure to reach an agreement could cause turmoil in Greece, bringing "a re-emergence of wide-scale protests, riots and labour strikes, which would cause disruption to businesses."

But on Tuesday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed source saying Greece will try to escape such turmoil by asking for a temporary credit extension of up to six months. So maybe, once again, there will be no clear resolution, just another agreement to keep living together — for now.

Although most economists side with EU officials, some liberals don't. One example is U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont. He says Greece should stand its ground and European officials should allow Tsipras to do what Greek voters want.

Blocking him from reversing austerity would "make a sham of the recent democratic election held there," Sanders said in an essay.

Greek bailout

Greece

There's always been one guy in every precinct who has been so haunted by a case that they either knew who did it and couldn't prove it, or the guy walked, and it just gets inside the cop to the point [that] when they retire, they're sneaking out all the legal boxes with all the case files, all the transcripts, the interviews and everything. And they're going to continue working on it in their basement, have a six-pack of beer and start making odd calls like they're still cops. They can't let go of this thing — this thing can't let go of them.

It's different for every cop in a world of 20 years of mayhem, they each pick one case that got to them. It's rarely the goriest case; it's rarely about a body count. It's about some element of this crime that spoke to them — identification with the aggressor, identification with the victim. ...

The point is all these obsessed cops with their single case. ... They all reminded me of [Moby Dick's] Ahab ... they're looking for their whales. They're looking for their whites.

On moving to Harlem

When I was with my soon-to-be wife Lorraine Adams, the novelist, we were sitting there one day when we decided we were going to ultimately live together and it just came out, "Where do you want to live?" It just came out of her mouth, "Harlem." Now, my experience with Harlem, even though my grandmother had been born there in the turn of the 20th century, my experience with Harlem for the last 15 years before that was going up there with the crime scene unit or the night watch to process a dead body on the sidewalk, so I had a very narrow view of Harlem. I'd just go up there for death. So when she said [that] I just thought, "Gulp, OK."

Here's this big-deal writer, this macho writer of Clockers and Freedomland, and all of a sudden his mate says, "Harlem," and he has to swallow a golf ball. Then I realized, she, Lorraine had been to Iran, Afghanistan, she's been to Pakistan seven times, always on her own, and now she's with a guy, this big-shot street guy and I was just too embarrassed to say, "No," So I said, "OK." ...

So we rent a house, I go up there, it's the first day, I'm bracing [myself] and I can't get close to my house because there are movie trailers because they're shooting an episode of Sesame Street in the house across the street. So that was my first day in Harlem.

On what happens when there's a public outcry against police

My thoughts go to two places: One is that when cops are attacked, they close ranks. I'm not talking about the blue wall of silence, but I think what happens is "us versus them." I'm talking about incidents which the cops — like [in] Ferguson where an unarmed man was shot, when they get under attack with the media, they just close ranks. It's like buffalo when they see lions out there. ...

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The other thing is that I think there are certain sub-climates of cop culture in [cities] like Cleveland ... or Ferguson or, as many cops have told me, Staten Island, [N.Y.] [It's] an island unto itself ... where I think the cops are insulated and have their own culture and they've always been this way. ... When cops feel isolated, when cops feel like there's nothing attacking their infallibility because of the culture and the politicians around them, they kind of feel like they're in a world of their own — that they're the sheriffs and what they do is what they do.

On his pen name, Harry Brandt

First of all, I picked the name Brandt in honor of my former agent Carl Brandt who had represented me from the time I was 22 till the time I was 40. He had died the year before — I was just giving him a little shout out by choosing his name. The reason why I picked the pen name was because what I intended to do in this book was slicker, tighter, faster, more the surface of what's happening, more propelled by the mystery at its core and [it] didn't have any social resonance.

I mean, [in] my earlier books I was always inspired by a crime that spoke to a larger issue in the culture: the Susan Smith kidnappings, the gentrification of the Lower East Side, the impact of crack on a community. ... This time I just wanted to write about people; I wanted to focus on the characters, not the social impact of the story. ... It was going to be different from my other books and I wanted to signal that. ...

Read an excerpt of The Whites

All of a sudden I realized it's another damn book by me, there's no separation, there's no genre, there's no nothing, except another book. And, at that time, it was too late to withdraw the pen name. And so I'm living with it, but if I had to do it all over again — if I had a crystal ball four years ago — I would've had it under my own name.

Updated at 2:10 p.m. ET

The Federal Aviation Administration has released long-awaited draft rules on the operation of pilotless drones, opening the nation's airspace to the commercial possibilities of the burgeoning technology, but not without restrictions.

In short, the proposed rules that have been a decade in the making would limit drones weighing no more than 55 lbs to flying no more than 100 mph at an altitude no higher than 500 feet. The FAA would ban their use at night and near airports. And, they could only be operated by someone with a certification who keeps the vehicle "in line of sight" at all times.

The FAA also will require anyone using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) for commercial purposes to obtain a special pilot certification to operate them.

"We ... want to capture the potential of unmanned aircraft and we have been working to develop the framework for the safe integration of this technology into our airspace," Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said during a teleconference with journalists about the new proposed rules.

Under the rules, these aircraft could inspect utility towers, antennas, bridges power lines and pipelines in hilly or mountainous terrain," FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said, adding that wildlife conservation, search and rescue, movie making and aerial photographs for real estate purposes were also among the opportunities that could be opened up by the new regulations.

In a statement, the White House called drones "a potentially transformative technology in diverse fields such as agriculture, law enforcement, coastal security, military training, search and rescue, first responder medical support, critical infrastructure inspection, and many others."

The statement says that the proposed rules ensure "that the Federal Government's use of UAS takes into account ... important concerns and in service of them, promotes better accountability and transparent use of this technology."

FAA Drone Rules

Reuters, quoting industry experts, calls the new rules "relatively benign."

Even so, the news agency says, "the rule was unlikely to help Amazon.com in its quest to deliver packages with unmanned drones, since its approach requires an FAA-certified small drone pilot to fly the aircraft and keep it line of sight at all times — factors not envisioned in the online retailer's plan."

The draft regulations must still undergo public comment and revision before being officially adopted.

Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, says in a statement that the proposal represents "an important step in restricting how the government uses this powerful surveillance technology."

But, Guliani says, it "falls short of fully protecting the privacy of Americans.

"For example, the proposal allows the use of data gathered by domestic drones for any 'authorized purpose,' which is not defined, leaving the door open to inappropriate drone use by federal agencies," she says.

FAA

drones

Parallels

Libya Today: 2 Governments, Many Militias, Infinite Chaos

The headquarters of the National Oil Corporation in Tripoli are gleaming, the floors marble, the offices decked out with black leather chairs and fake flowers. It seems far from the fighting going on over oil terminals around the country.

But the man in charge looks at production and knows the future is bleak.

"We cannot produce. We are losing 80 percent of our production," says Mustapha Sanallah, the chairman of Libya's National Oil Corporation.

He looks like a typical executive, decked out in a suit and glasses. But beneath his calm veneer, he's worried.

"Now we have two problems: low production and low price," he says.

At the current rate, he expects that the country won't even earn 10 percent of the budget money Libya had in 2012, before militias started taking oil infrastructure hostage.

"If there is security in Libya, we can resume production within a few days," Sanallah says.

If there's one thing that has a chance of keeping Libya from totally falling apart, it's oil. It provides nearly all the country's revenue. It's what militias are fighting over. And it's the prize coveted by the two rival governments — one in Tripoli, the other in Libya's east — that claim to be running the country.

The Tripoli faction is seen as Islamist, the eastern government as anti-Islamist — but the fighting is mainly over turf and resources like oil, rather than ideology.

The international community has recognized the eastern government, but it opposes what it sees as the east's divisive attempt to set up a rival national oil company and take control of the industry, something Sanallah says is impossible anyway.

"We are still the NOC [National Oil Company]; the legal NOC is here. I am the chairman of NOC," he says. "[The east] nominated a new chairman of NOC, but there's no staff, there's no people, there's no hardware, there's no software."

International mediators are trying to keep the oil company independent of either side, but oil fields are under attack. One tanker was bombed, and another one was threatened.

Sanallah says he wants to keep oil out of the fight.

"I hope so. I hope so," he says — but he doesn't sound convinced.

His employees are fighting fires at major oil terminals, and with no real security forces, it only takes a few gunmen to shut things down or hold them hostage.

"I think the message was clear to the oil company: There is no security, good security. Otherwise a few people cannot control the vein of the blood of Libya," he says.

And with the terminals closing, Libya's battered economy is taking even more blows because foreign oil companies are pulling out. Libya is only producing about 330,000 barrels a day, increasing the economic burden.

"When you are closing the terminals, it means you cannot produce oil, and if you cannot produce oil, then you cannot produce gas. So we are making up the gas by importing diesel. This is another burden on the shoulders of NOC," he says.

Again, oil is basically what pays for any central Libyan government. How much? "All — 90 to 95 percent. There is no revenue but oil," he says.

If negotiations don't end the fighting, Sanallah says, the country will collapse. A functioning oil industry could be all that stands between Libya as a nation, and Libya as a failed state.

Libya

oil