With the United States and Europe struggling to come up with a response to Moscow’s Ukrainian land grab, the German chancellor is considered one of the few world leaders the Russian president will deign to hear out – even if he dislikes what she’s saying. “Merkel’s personal rapport with Putin has never been very good,” Dr Susan Steward, a Russian expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told Yahoo News. “But their relationship is still professional and not unproductive.”

That’s largely because Germany remains Russia’s most important European economic partner, with last year’s trade balance of €76 billion roughly split between exports from both countries. While Germany remains deeply reliant on Russian natural gas and oil, it exports vast quantities of precision machinery, chemicals and cars to Russia. This mutual economic dependency means Berlin has taken a more cautious approach toward levying sanctions on Moscow than some other European Union nations – but it also gives Merkel a modicum of leverage over Putin. “One can’t just go on like nothing has happened,” she said at an extraordinary EU summit in Brussels last week, according to the DPA news agency.

The Istanbul talks were called to decide on the council, which the Orthodox have been preparing on and off since the 1960s, but the Ukraine crisis overshadowed their talks at the office of spiritual leader Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. As the prelates left a special service at Saint George’s Cathedral, a woman in the crowd called out in Russian “Pray for Ukraine!” Two archbishops responded: “You pray, too!”

One of the main questions facing the 2016 council will be how to balance relations among the Orthodox now that the Russian church, after seven decades of subjugation under communism, has re-emerged as an influential voice in world Christianity. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who will meet Roman Catholicism’s Pope Francis in Jerusalem in May, is the senior-most Orthodox leader, but his Istanbul-based church is tiny, with none of the resources the large Russian church enjoys.

Despite the prestige of his post, he has no authority over other churches, unlike the power the pope has in Catholicism, the world’s largest church with 1.2 billion members. The communiqué stressed that all decisions at the council would be taken by consensus, a position the Russians strongly defended in preparations for the meeting. On the Middle East, the patriarchs denounced "the lack of peace and stability, which is prompting Christians to abandon the land where our Lord Jesus Christ was born."

Cosmos — which features an introduction by President Obama — has already stirred controversy with a lengthy segment in the first episode which deliberately pits religion against science, providing an animated story about the Catholic Church's persecution of the 16th-century monk and astronomer Giordano Bruno, which TIME argues provides a clear message to viewers: "there is a right side and a wrong side of intellectual history, and Cosmos is not afraid to say that science is on the right one."

In a recent interview with WNYC host Brian Lehrer, Tyson added to the controversy, addressing people of faith who confuse religious texts with scientific works: “If you start using your scripture, your religious text as a source of your science, that’s where you run into problems, and there is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying ‘I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet because this gave me insight let’s go test this prediction and have that theory turn out to be correct.”

The Air Force responded Wednesday night by hitting 29 targets in Gaza associated with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist groups. Earlier Wednesday Islamic Jihad had threatened to fire long-range rockets at Israel if the IAF were to attack. So far, the group has not done so. Gaza terrorists used long-range rockets against Israeli cities in late 2012, during the Pillar of Defense counterterror operation. Rockets struck the greater Tel Aviv region and the Jerusalem area, wounding one person.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a sharp warning to terrorist groups Wednesday, stating, “If there is no quiet in southern Israel, there will be a big noise in Gaza.”

Palestinian Arab media is reporting now that the IAF are repeatedly slamming Islamic Jihad posts in Rafah, Khan Younis, Deir al - Balah, Beit Lahiya in north Gaza and another target in the center. Hamas's military wing is also being targeted. No casualties have been reported yet. The entire operation, which was launched at 10 pm Wednesday Israel time, was quick - and deadly. The IDF announcement stating that the operation focused on the 29 targets also noted just 45 minutes after the fact that all IAF pilots had returned safely to base after completing their mission.

The IDF also noted that while Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the rocket fire, Hamas's control on the region renders them responsible for preventing escalation and terror activity. Earlier Wednesday, Hamas officials blamed Israel for the rocket fire on its own citizens, claiming "resistance is the right of the Palestinian people." "We hold the occupation responsible, we warn of the consequences of any escalation and we reiterate that resistance is the right of the Palestinian people to defend itself," AFP quoted Hamas spokesman Ihab al-Ghassin as saying Wednesday evening.

The comments were made in an interview with Israel's Channel Two. "Following an attack like this - a barrage of more than 50 rockets - there is no alternative to a full reoccupation of the entire Gaza Strip," he said. Immediately following the initial barrage - which was claimed by Islamic Jihad - Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu threatened a "forceful" response against those responsible.

In the last few minutes Israeli tanks clashed with terrorists in Gaza, destroying two unspecified "terror targets". Israel withdrew from Gaza in the 2005 "Disengagement Plan", which saw the withdrawal of all IDF positions and the destruction of all Jewish communities in the territory, along with the forced expulsion of the roughly 9,000 Jews living there.

At the time, right-wing leaders had warned the withdrawal would worsen, rather than improve Israel's security situation, and that troops would simply have to return to curb rocket-fire against nearby Israeli communities - a stance largely vindicated by the subsequent spike in rocket attacks following the seizure of the territory by Hamas, which prompted two separate counterterrorism operations.

"The second is that these attacks are completely indiscriminate, aimed at civilian populations and that is a demonstration of how barbaric they are," he continued. "The third point is that we must be absolutely clear in the international community and all friends of Israel and the Palestinian people as well that there is no violent route to statehood and that statehood can only be achieved through dialogue and discussion and through agreement between the Israeli and the Palestinian people."

President Shimon Peres also condemned the attack, and opined that the development made a peace deal that much more crucial, in his eyes, between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). "It’s a very severe attack," Peres noted. "Over 50 missiles were fired against a civilian population."

First, moments ago, the US DOE announced in a shocking announcement that it would proceed with the first draw down and sale of crude from the US strategic petroleum reserve, the first since June 2011, in what it said was a “test sale to check the operational capabilities of system infrastructure”, but is really just a shot across the bow at Putin for whom high commodity prices are orders of magnitude more important than how the Russian stock market performs.

And now, as Bloomberg just reported, the US has escalated even further, citing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, who “has claimed that in the case of an escalation of unrest in Crimea, the US Army is ready to back up Ukraine and its allies in Europe with military actions.” From Bloomberg: “According to the website of the Atlantic Council, Dempsey said that ‘he's been talking to his military counterparts in Russia, but he's also sending a clear message to Ukraine and members of NATO that the US military will respond militarily if necessary’.”

“We're trying to tell [Russia] not to escalate this thing further into Eastern Ukraine, and allow the conditions to be set for some kind of resolution in Crimea. We do have treaty obligations with our NATO allies. And I have assured them that if that treaty obligation is triggered [in Europe], we would respond,” Dempsey said. The real question is how Putin will react to this quantum escalation in verbal hostilities: wild guess here, but somehow we doubt he will pick up and leave.

Ms Merkel, 59, a Protestant pastor’s daughter, grew up in East Germany under a system in which Mr Putin, 61, once had a hand, as a KGB agent stationed in Dresden. Fluent in Russian, she literally speaks his language and, arguably, understands his view of the world better than any other European leader touched by the Ukrainian crisis.

It was, by her spokesman’s account, tough talk between two leaders who seemingly could not be more different but who are bound by a shared history. According to advisers in both Berlin and Moscow, the two leaders are unafraid to voice their disagreements and they often heed each other.

Germany is at once dependent on Russia for up to a third of its oil and gas, and tens of billions of dollars in trade, while it is also a leading member of NATO, a pillar of Western policy, and the biggest economy in the 28-nation European Union.

Ms Merkel’s governing partners, the Social Democrats, issued a similar warning. “Europe stands dangerously close to the brink of a military confrontation,” the party said this week in an unusually tense statement. “One hundred years after the start of World War I, military force should never again become the means of conducting politics. Europe stands at a crossroads,” it added. “We must do everything in our power to prevent a new division of our continent and a regression into a pattern of confrontation long considered overcome.”