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Syria's government appears to be making gains this week in a battle against rebel forces in the key city of Qusair, along the border with Lebanon. NPR's Steve Inskeep traveled to the edge of the city, and we hear from him first, followed by Kelly McEvers, who reports from just across the frontier in Lebanon.

A Syrian provincial governor told us this week that the government army has largely retaken Qusair, though a battle continues for the airport. We asked to see for ourselves.

So the governor appointed two men to lead us to the city, which holds great importance because it is a busy crossing point with Lebanon. The drive proved to be revealing. Miles before reaching Qusair, we saw towers of smoke in the air.

From across a lake we made out Qusair's airfield, the scene of the heavy fighting this week. It should have been a short drive to the city, but we took a roundabout route.

Our guides, members of Syria's Alawite religious group, explained this was for security. President Bashar Assad is Alawite and depends on the group for his firmest support, though they make up just a little more than 10 percent of the population.

The guides were taking us from one Alawite village to another, fearing violence if they drove through villages of the majority Sunni Muslims, many of whom support the rebellion.

As we drew closer, we heard the thud of Syrian artillery, pounding Qusair. We also heard fighter jets overhead, and occasionally heard small arms fire. And yet even when the gunshots sounded as if they were close by, we would still see children sitting casually on the side of the street.

Blocked From The City

We were finally stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint, and they said we could not enter Qusair, telling us that rebel snipers were on the road ahead.

Unable to get closer, we knocked on the door of a nearby house, and the residents let us climb on the roof. We had a panoramic view of the landscape.

It did not look like Qusair was entirely under control. We saw smoke rising up from the city, suggesting the fighting was still going on.

The rebels have said they're still fighting in the city, though spokesmen for both sides say the Syrian army has captured most of the region.

In this battle, the government has supplemented its heavy weapons with help from the outside. Fighters from the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah joined the battle from across the border with Lebanon.

It's a sensitive topic here to discuss Hezbollah's involvement in the war.

The government has insisted it's the rebels, not the Syrian army, that rely on foreigners. But Hezbollah's involvement has become more open in recent days, and Qusair is especially well-placed for the Lebanese militia to play a role.

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Scientists in Siberia say they've extracted blood samples from the carcass of a 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth, leading to speculation that a clone of the extinct animal might someday walk the earth. But researchers say the find, which also included well-preserved muscle tissue, must be studied further to know its potential.

The female mammoth's carcass was found "in good preservation on Lyakhovsky Islands of Novosibirsk archipelago," according to a news release about the discovery by North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Siberia.

"The fragments of muscle tissues, which we've found out of the body, have a natural red color of fresh meat," said lead researcher Semyon Grigoriev of the Museum of Mammoths. "The reason for such preservation is that the lower part of the body was underlying in pure ice, and the upper part was found in the middle of tundra."

"The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities bellow the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out," Grigoriev said. " Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to –10C. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties."

The Siberian scientists say they want to work with Canadian professor Kevin Campbell, who has written in the journal Nature Genetics that mammoths' blood may have had special properties that allowed its hemoglobin to deliver oxygen to the body tissues even in extreme cold.

Campbell is also famous for "resurrecting this red blood cell protein hemoglobin from a woolly mammoth," as he told the CBC last year.

Asked about the new Siberian discovery by Scientific American, Campbell says he has no way of knowing whether what "appears to be a remarkable finding" is genuine — but he also said he wants to study the specimens. And he offered some ideas about why the sample was in a liquid state, even at temperatures such as minus 17 degrees Celsius.

"For instance, maybe they did have some sort of cryoprotectant (arctic ground squirrels certainly seem to), and this became concentrated during the long period of preservation," he tells Scientific American's Kate Wong. "Conversely, maybe they had absolutely no 'antifreezes' and instead most of the water in the sample was taken up by the surrounding ice, such that the remaining 'blood' became extremely concentrated–which would lower its freezing point."

Another explanation, he says, could be that the sample contains ice-living bacteria, which might have lent their cryoprotective properties to the pooled blood.

The North-Eastern Federal University says that some samples will also go to its "Mammoth rebirth" project, between the school and South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, with the goal of cloning a mammoth.

As our colleagues at the TED blog remind us, humans have a special fascination with wooly mammoths.

"Woollys are a quintessential image of the Ice Age ... We seem to have a deep connection with them as we do with elephants," DNA specialist Hendrik Poinar says in a TED talk. "I have to admit there's a part of the child in me that wants to see these majestic creatures walk across the permafrost of the North."

And for some folks, that fascination is joined by a desire to make money.

"Today, the hunt is on for woolly mammoth tusks in the Arctic Siberia," writes TED's Becky Chung. "Due to global warming, the melting permafrost has begun revealing these hidden ivory treasures for a group of local tusk-hunters to find and sell. A tusk can range from 10-13 foot in length and a top-grade mammoth tusk is worth around $400 per pound. Mammoth ivory, unlike elephant ivory, is legal."

As for cloning the extinct animals, not everyone is convinced it's a good idea to try to bring them back.

As scientist Daniel Fisher tells Kate Wong at Scientific American, "I have more confidence in our ability to generate new knowledge from the fossil record than in our ability to learn from cloned mammoths."

The State Department says Iran has stepped up its efforts on behalf of global terrorism to a level not seen for 20 years, but that the core elements of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan are heading for defeat even as the network's affiliates remain a threat.

"Iran's state sponsorship of terrorism and [Hezbollah's] terrorist activity have reached a tempo unseen since the 1990s, with attacks plotted in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa," says the Country Reports on Terrorism 2012.

Among those attacks was one that killed six on a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Other attacks were thwarted in India, Thailand, Georgia and Kenya, the report says.

It says the vehicle for Iran's troublemaking has mostly been the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the militant Shiite Hezbollah movement, Iran's ally and proxy in Lebanon.

The report also says that al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan continues to decline owing to "leadership losses," and what remains of the group is increasingly focused on survival. However, despite "significant setbacks" to Yemen-based Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Shabab in Somalia:

"The dispersal of weapons stocks in the wake of the revolution in Libya, the Tuareg rebellion, and the coup d'etat in Mali presented terrorists with new opportunities."

Mitt Romney may have lost the biggest prize in American politics last year, but that doesn't mean he's left the game for good.

While there's no evidence to suggest he's interested in a third consecutive run for the White House, the man who topped the 2012 Republican national ticket is signaling his intent to play a role in the 2014 midterm election.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Romney indicated what could be read as plans to return to the political hustings to campaign for 2014 candidates, presumably Republicans. The Journal reported:

"He is considering writing a book and a series of opinion pieces, and has plans to campaign for 2014 candidates. But he is wary of overdoing it. 'I'm not going to be bothering the airwaves with a constant series of speeches,' he told The Wall Street Journal, speaking from his home in La Jolla, Calif."