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As U.S.-Russian relations sour, some observers fear the plan to eliminate Syria's chemical arsenal might stall.

This past week, the removal of chemicals from Syria reached the halfway mark. Without pressure from both superpowers, however, some believe Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will begin to drag his feet.

"I think what you're likely to see is that the Assad regime will comply just enough, at a slower pace, as it consolidates its hold over the country militarily," says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert, at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The plan to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons was hatched at a summit last fall in Geneva. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stood side-by-side and presented an ambitious plan to spirit dangerous chemicals out of the country in a matter of months.

"The United States and Russia are committed to the elimination of Syrian chemical weapons in the soonest and safest manner," Kerry said at the time.

"It's one of the unique instances where both Russia and the United States have come together in a very cooperative way to work on a common goal," says Paul Walker, a chemical weapons expert with the non-profit Green Cross International.

Walker says the Russians were instrumental in getting Assad to go along with the plan. Russia has strong ties with the Syrian regime, and supplies it with considerable military aid to fight its ongoing civil war.

"When the Russians say step up and join the chemical weapons convention, Bashar al-Assad pretty much salutes and says, 'Yes, Sir,'" Walker says.

Syria pledged to remove its most dangerous chemicals by the end of last year, but then it started to stall. Assad said security was the problem, but Western observers suspected he was dragging his feet — drawing out the process to keep America from interfering with the war.

Russia broke the impasse, says Amy Smithson with the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies. In December, it sent dozens of armored trucks to carry the chemicals out of Syria. The trucks addressed Assad's security concerns, but they also sent a message.

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Leaders of high-tech companies, including Google and Facebook, descended on the White House Friday for a meeting with President Obama on the subject of privacy. The meeting itself was private. But aides say Obama wanted to hear from the CEOs about their concerns with the government's high-tech surveillance.

High-tech CEOs are not the obvious messengers to be delivering a privacy lecture to the government. After all, they make their money by scanning customers' emails and tracking their movements, all with the goal of serving up more targeted ads. Just a few years ago, Google's Eric Schmidt told an interviewer, "If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

But Marc Rotenberg, who directs the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says the titans of Silicon Valley have suddenly gotten religion.

"The Internet leaders who might have said a few years ago that privacy is a thing of the past, today they're at the White House telling the president we need to find a way to protect privacy. And that's a remarkable turn of events," he said.

What changed, of course, is the revelation by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden of just how widespread the government's snooping has been, often with the help, knowingly or unknowingly, of those same high-tech companies.

"Mr. Snowden has done more to raise the level of public awareness about privacy issues than probably anyone else I can think of," Rotenberg said.

And that has the potential to hurt the companies' bottom lines. Since the Snowden leaks began last summer, public opinion towards government surveillance has steadily soured. Fifty-three percent of Americans now disapprove of the NSA's spying. Pollster Carroll Doherty of the Pew Research Center says this is the rare issue that unites Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats.

"It's really an area on which you do find common ground between conservatives and liberals. Consistently across these polls, liberals and conservatives are expressing the most concern about it whereas people in the middle of the electorate are somewhat less concerned," he said.

Disapproval of government surveillance is strongest among people under the age of 30. While this generation shows little reluctance to document their every movement on electronic devices, Doherty says they don't like the government looking over their shoulder.

"They are concerned about privacy. They really are. And this issue has clicked a bit with young people," he said.

The White House meeting comes one week before the administration has to make some decisions about how to reform its collection of bulk telephone data.

President Obama has promised to make some adjustments — particularly to the program under which the NSA has been stockpiling telephone records. The legal authorization for that program expires next week and Obama wants to replace it with something different, though he hasn't said what. Obama insists that government workers who carry out survillance do take privacy concerns seriously.

"They have kids on Facebook and Instagram, and they know, more than most of us, the vulnerabilities to privacy that exist in a world where transactions are recorded, and emails and text and messages are stored, and even our movements can increasingly be tracked through the GPS on our phones," he said.

Privacy advocate Rotenberg says Internet companies could reduce the temptation for government spying if they simply stopped storing years' worth of personal data about their customers.

So far though, the companies haven't been willing to take that step.

Republicans seem to have all the momentum lately when it comes to the battle for control of the U.S. Senate.

GOP chances were already looking brighter because of the drag on Democrats from the Affordable Care Act and President Obama's low approval ratings. Then came two developments that suddenly expanded the playing field: Former GOP Sen. Scott Brown recently announced his intent to run against New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, and GOP Rep. Cory Gardner jumped in against Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall.

That makes 12 states with competitive races, according to the Cook Political Report's latest update.

Democratic incumbents currently hold 10 of those seats; three of them are retiring. Republicans need to win a net of just six seats to become the Senate majority.

While their chances of doing that are clearly rising, political consultant Steve McMahon of Purple Strategies cautions against underestimating the advantages of the Democratic incumbents who will be on the ballot in November.

"The states that they are running in are states they have run in before, that they understand well and have been elected to, some repeatedly," said McMahon. "They're the kind of Democrats that match the state well."

As incumbents, they can point to all they've done for their states and they usually can raise the money they need, McMahon said. And he gives Republicans credit for producing a solid field of candidates.

"They've done a great job of recruiting this year. They've run many of the nut jobs out," McMahon said. "But they still do have primaries and primaries weaken candidates."

The president's weakness in the polls, the Affordable Care Act and widespread anxieties about the economy aren't the only factors working in favor of the GOP. Republicans also have a big advantage on voter intensity.

"We always look at the question, how interested are you in the upcoming elections on a 1 to 10 scale, with a 9 to 10 being the most interested," said Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican research firm, who pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll his firm did with Hart Research Associates.

"In a presidential election, it doesn't mean as much because everybody votes. In a midterm election, where you're looking at 40 percent turnout, it does make a difference. ... Among voters who rate their interest a 9 or 10, Republicans have a 15-point advantage, 53 [percent] to 38 [percent]. So you have Republicans now gaining the same kind of intensity they had in 2010. It's like our guys are campaigning downhill as opposed to the Democrats."

2010, of course, was the year of the historic midterm landslide in which Republicans captured 63 seats — and House control. They gained six Senate seats that November. And that was after Brown won a January special election for the Massachusetts seat long occupied by Democrat Edward Kennedy.

If this year's Republican intensity results in a 2010-style wave, there could be some surprising races, Newhouse said. Virginia and Oregon, for example, might seem like real long shots for Republicans at the moment but they might be within reach in that kind of year, he said.

With an expanded playing field and the real prospect of a flip in Senate control, both parties and their outside-group allies are likely to spend a record amount during this year's midterms.

Independent expenditures for the 2014 election cycle through March 20 have already reached $39.2 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Amid all the of necessary analysis of what Russia's move into Crimea means geopolitically and strategically, it might also be good to remember Reshat Ametov.

Mr. Ametov was buried this week. He was 39 years old, married and the father of three young children.

He was last seen at a demonstration on March 3 in Simferopol, where he joined other Crimean Tatars held a silent protest before the pro-Russian armed men in unmarked uniforms who surrounded the cabinet ministers building.

Tatars make up more than 10 percent of Crimea's population. Many Tatars, who are primarily Sunni Muslim, were brutally deported by Joseph Stalin in the 1940s, and scattered over the deserts of central Asia and Siberia. As many as 200,000 Tatars died in that government removal. Some Tatar families began to come back after Ukraine became independent in the 1990s.

Video from ATR, a local Crimean television channel, shows two armed men in green uniforms, and one in a black uniform, surrounding Reshat Ametov, taking him by the arms, and leading him away.

"He was just standing there and they took him away," Ametov's mother, Refika Ametova, told the Kyiv Post, an independent newspaper. "He stood there for about an hour and a quarter, and I suppose they were waiting for him to leave. But he didn't."

His family called the police, who said they could find nothing. Two weeks later, people in a village about 28 miles away found a man's body in a nearby forest. Local media reports suggested there was clear tape wrapped around his head and hands, and signs of torture.

Reshat Ametov's wife identified the body as her husband's.

Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into Reshat Ametov's disappearance and death, and they're concerned the crime is not isolated.

"For weeks, armed, masked men who refuse to identify themselves have harassed and intimidated people," says Rachel Denber, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. And Crimean Tatars living in Brooklyn and Queens told the New York Daily News that relatives in Crimea report that X's have been slashed in paint on the doors of some Tatar families.

Enver Ablakimov was at Reshat Ametov's funeral. He is 21 years old and told the Kyiv Post, "There were always people here who didn't like us, but before, they hid it. Now with the appearance of the Russian army, they feel protected and understand that no one will do anything."

It's that past that may make Tatars in Crimea apprehensive about the future.