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During a tough Israeli election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to antagonize, among others, the White House, Israel's Arab citizens and the Palestinians.

Now that Netanyahu's Likud Party has come out on top, the prime minister has sought to ease tensions with a series of gestures.

The latest move came Friday as Israel announced that it would transfer tax revenues it owes to the Palestinian Authority. Israel suspended the transfers — a crucial source of revenues to the impoverished Palestinians — three months ago when the Palestinians moved to join the International Criminal Court.

Israel did not say how much money it would be sending over, but it collects more than $100 million a month in taxes and other fees on behalf of the Palestinians.

"Given the deteriorating situation in the Middle East, one must act responsibly and with due consideration alongside a determined struggle against extremist elements," Netanyahu said in a statement.

The Israeli leader has made related moves in recent days.

He came under criticism for an election day message urging his supporters to vote because Arab Israelis were going to the polls "in droves."

Many Arab Israelis, who make up about 20 percent of the Israeli electorate, described the remark as racist. This past Monday, Netanyahu apologized.

"I am sorry for this," he said. "I view myself as prime minister of each and every one of you."

And just before the election, Netanyahu said that a Palestinian state would not be created while he was prime minister. The statement was seen as an appeal to right-wing voters in Israel, though it went against his previous position and the stance of the U.S. and the international community.

In interviews with NPR and others after the election, Netanyahu said he still supported a two-state solution, but claimed a Palestinian state could not be established under current conditions.

"What I said was that under the present circumstances, today, it is unachievable," Netanyahu told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep. "I said that the conditions have to change."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Palestinians

Israel

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who said he won't seek re-election in 2016, says he is backing Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate's No. 3 Democrat, to succeed him in the leadership position.

"He [Schumer] will be elected to replace me in 22 months," he told Nevada Public Radio. "One reason that will happen is because I want him to be my replacement."

Separately, Reid told The Washington Post that Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, would stand down in place of Schumer.

"Harry is one of the best human beings I've ever met," Schumer said in statement quoted by the Post. "His character and fundamental decency are at the core of why he's been such a successful and beloved leader. He's so respected by our caucus for his strength, his legislative acumen, his honesty and his determination."

For more on this story, please visit our It's All Politics blog.

sen. chuck schumer

Sen. Harry Reid

The crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 into the French Alps earlier this week appears to have been a deliberate act carried out by a co-pilot.

As investigations continue, the incident raises questions about whether better mental-health screening could have prevented a person with suicidal tendencies from taking charge in the cockpit in the first place. Is there any surefire way to know that a pilot is in danger of going down and taking the ship with him?

Unfortunately not, says Gregory Simon, a psychiatrist at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle. There are basic questionnaires that can help identify people at risk of suicide. But these surveys routinely miss a major percentage of people who later kill themselves.

Co-Pilot Deliberately Crashed Germanwings Plane, Investigators Say March 26, 2015

Report: Germanwings Co-Pilot Treated For Depression March 27, 2015

What's more, if a routine screening test were offered to a pilot, who knew he might lose his job if he admitted that he was thinking frequently about death, the chances of identifying someone at risk drops even more.

"For more than half of suicide attempts or deaths, we don't have any clue or signal ahead of time," Simon says. "Another important thing is that these [questionnaires] work in situations where people are seeking help and have some assurance of confidentiality. This would be different in a situation where someone's livelihood is at stake."

In the United States, there are some 500,000 known suicide attempts each year and 40,000 people die at their own hands, making suicide the 10th most common cause of death in this country. And it's not just an American problem. Three-fourths of the world's 800,000 yearly suicide deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.

But preventing suicide is extremely difficult, in part because the people who succumb often die before anyone knows something was wrong.

Studies that have analyzed millions of suicides show that only about 55 percent of people who kill themselves had any previous contact with a mental-health professional. For those who seek help, basic questionnaires can be useful: People who say they spend more time thinking about death and harming themselves, Simon says, are more likely to kill themselves during the next year or two.

But even among people who take these surveys, results flag only about 30 percent who later kill themselves. Instead, studies show that suicidal actions are often impulsive.

"There's a very interesting phenomenon of people who actually saw health-care providers and filled out questionnaires and said no to questions about thoughts of death or harming themselves and then made suicide attempts," Simon says. "It's not an infrequent occurrence."

The lack of knowledge about suicides that involve violent events is a further obstacle to predicting an act like a pilot suicide. Of those who survive a suicide attempt – and can possibly be interviewed by researchers — 80 percent tried to overdose on pills. It's possible that people who choose to act violently have different behavior patterns.

For now, there are no brain scans, hormonal screenings or other technologies that can distinguish a suicidal person from anyone else. Instead, within certain populations, self-policing is the primary method for catching mental health issues. And for pilots, that strategy can work pretty well, says Dave Funk, a retired Northwest Airlines captain who now works as an aviation security consultant at Laird & Associates in Reno, Nevada.

It's a small industry, he says. Pilots tend to work with each other repeatedly. And they keep an eye on how their colleagues are doing. In his 40 years as a pilot, Funk adds, mental-health incidents in the cockpit have been exceedingly rare. Out of tens of millions of flights that have over the last four decades, there have previously been only five cases worldwide of a commercial pilot who was believed to have intentionally caused an airplane accident.

Instead of more mental-health screening, he argues, airlines around the world need to be more vigilant about regulating what happens in the cockpit. Since 9/11, the FAA has required that a flight attendant sit up front whenever one of the pilots has to use the bathroom. If the Germanwings crew had followed the same protocol, maybe the flight attendant could've opened the door from the inside and called out for help.

"The real issue here isn't this guy's mental health," Funk says. "Why was he in the flight deck by himself?"

Attempting to screen pilots more aggressively could also have the unintended consequence of driving people with mental-health problems deeper underground, adds Simon. Before 2010, the FAA prohibited flying for any pilot who took antidepressants or related drugs.

As a result, plenty of pilots either lied about their medications or avoided getting treatments they needed.

"Back in the day, I had a situation where a commercial airline pilot was referred to me for treatment," Simon says. "He said he would never take medication because he would lose his license."

Germanwings Flight 9525

suicide

The FX series Justified, which is in its sixth and final season, is based on the novella Fire in the Hole by Elmore Leonard. Leonard was an executive producer of the series until his death in 2013. The show's creator and showrunner, Graham Yost, says he has made it his mission to stay as true as he can to Leonard's vision and storytelling style.

"Ultimately I look at this show as Elmore Leonard's show, and we're all in service of him and his view and his way of writing and creating these characters," Yost tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "So whatever feels like it works within that world is something we're open to."

Set in Harlan County, Ky., which is coal mining country, the story revolves around two men who have known each other since they were in the mines together as teens: Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, and Boyd Crowder, played by Walton Goggins. Raylan is now a deputy U.S. marshal and Boyd is an outlaw whose criminal activities include robbing banks. Raylan wants to move to Florida to reconnect with his ex-wife and their 5-month-old child, but first he wants to bring Boyd down, which means catching him when he pulls off his next heist.

The show is violent, but Yost says he and the writers have to walk a line to keep the network happy.

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Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Olyphant, left) meets with security expert Ty Walker (Garret Dillahunt, center) and gangster Avery Markham (Sam Elliott). Yost says the show is violent but it can't be too violent because of the network's parameters. Byron Cohen/FX hide caption

itoggle caption Byron Cohen/FX

Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Olyphant, left) meets with security expert Ty Walker (Garret Dillahunt, center) and gangster Avery Markham (Sam Elliott). Yost says the show is violent but it can't be too violent because of the network's parameters.

Byron Cohen/FX

"Elmore's world is a violent world," he says. "In the best Elmore scenes, you think that something is either going to take a hard turn into romance and some kind of liaison, or it's going to take it the other way and go into violence. There's often something oddly humorous about the violence in Elmore's movies and in his books."

The show relies so heavily on Leonard's vision that Yost says fans who want a peek into how the show might end should read Leonard's works.

"Not because that will tell you how the series will end," he says, "but because it's always a good idea to read some Elmore Leonard. But there is, in his world, a certain way of ending things, and we aim for that."

Yost is also a producer of the FX series The Americans.

Interview Highlights

On the character of Boyd, who starts the show as a white supremacist

It's more interesting to me if [Boyd] is using the skinheads as cannon fodder in his desire to rob banks. And ... in the pilot, Boyd doesn't go into the bank, he sends two other guys in. He blows up a car first to distract the law enforcement and then drives up to the bank [while] two other guys go in and do the dirty work and come out with the money. I just liked him as this character who was manipulating other people.

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Walton Goggins plays Boyd Crowder on Justified. His character almost died in the pilot, but the writers liked his chemistry with actor Tim Olyphant, so they decided to keep him alive. Prashant Gupta/FX hide caption

itoggle caption Prashant Gupta/FX

Walton Goggins plays Boyd Crowder on Justified. His character almost died in the pilot, but the writers liked his chemistry with actor Tim Olyphant, so they decided to keep him alive.

Prashant Gupta/FX

When we decided to keep Boyd alive, that was a big decision. When we shot the pilot, Boyd was dead at the end of [it]. And then we tested the show and we had all just fallen in love with Walton [Goggins] and the chemistry between Walton and Tim [Olyphant], so we decided to keep him alive.

So what emerged was the notion of this character, Boyd, as being someone who will come up with a new scheme, a new way of looking at the world, and he'll seem to totally believe it. But it can be very different from what he had been doing in the past.

On creating authentic bad guys

We didn't do any research down in Harlan before we started writing the first season. But between the first and second season, a group of us — I think five or six of the writers and [the producers] — we all went down to Lexington and met the marshals. And then we went down and spent a few days in Harlan.

And one of the first things we heard — I remember [we] were out on an ATV tour up in the hills, and one of the guys [said] that he recognized a lot of the characters that we had created in the first season, and that gave us a big collective sense of relief that we weren't so far off the mark.

"We were always trying to apply Elmore's rules of making characters interesting and having them speak well and be smart and clever."

- Graham Yost, creator of 'Justified'

Again, we were always trying to apply Elmore's rules of making characters interesting and having them speak well and be smart and clever. Yes, we've filled that part of the world with a lot of bad guys, far more than there actually are, but I was always hoping that people in Harlan would view our show in the same way that people in New Jersey view The Sopranos, which is, "OK, it's not reality, but it's fun." We didn't want to ever insult people so we always tried to keep our bad guys pretty clever. I think if you create a lot of stupid characters, that's insulting, but if they're interesting bad guys, I think that's sort of fun.

On the "verbal fireworks" of the show's dialogue

I think to a degree over the course of the seasons we've kind of gone farther even than Elmore might have into the colorful nature of the language. But I have to say, we just had so much fun doing it. [The] particular line, "You're a card in fate's right hand," that's [writer] Chris Provenzano — I can see his fingerprints on that one. ...

There are certain characters, specifically Boyd — Boyd is just a blast to write. There was a line, in fact, that I wrote in season four where a character says to Boyd, "Man, you'll use 40 words when four would do." It can be a bit of a trap for writers — we can kind of get into it almost too much and have to peel it back a little because we don't want to go way over the top, although I'm sure at times we have. But it's a great freedom.

On working with Elmore Leonard

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[Leonard] had spent probably 10 years in the '60s and '70s writing screenplays for Hollywood and he got out of that business because he didn't like getting notes: ... change this character, move this scene around, do this, do that. ... So he lived by that: He didn't give us notes. The only tussle ... we had over the pilot was the hat — that he saw much more of what's called a "businessman's Stetson" on Raylan, basically the kind of hat that the troopers were wearing escorting Lee Harvey Oswald when Jack Ruby shot him. We tried that hat on Tim and it just didn't look great — it didn't look as [good as] a more regular cowboy hat did. That was about the only big fight we had with Elmore on the whole thing.

I joked with him after he had seen the pilot and he really liked it, and I said, "Of course you really like it, 90 percent of the dialogue is from you." Because I felt if you're going to adapt Elmore Leonard, [you should] use as much as you can of him.

On how Justified will end

I was on a showrunner's panel several seasons ago and [Terence] Winters [of Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos] was talking about Boardwalk [and] said he wanted Nucky to live long enough that he could go into a New Jersey diner and kill Tony Soprano. I said, "I don't know how Justified is going to end, but I think I know what song is going to be playing somewhere toward the end." ... We got hooked on playing this great country song "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive" — we used it at the end of the first season and the second season, I think we skipped the third season, but we know that will play a part of it. ... It's just the question of who will live and who will die.