Few bilateral relationships matter more for the long-term stability of Asia than that between New Delhi and Islamabad. But few, too, are as seemingly intractable.India and Pakistan were born out of mutual hostility to one another; during the Partition of British India, many hundreds of thousands of religious minorities felt compelled to flee to either Hindu-majority […]

How did Vladimir Lenin die? UCLA researchers who specialize in posthumously diagnosing departed dignitaries from Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln have some new ideas: Stress, family medical history or possibly even poison led to the death of Vladimir Lenin, contradicting a popular theory that a sexually transmitted disease debilitated the former Soviet Union leader, a […]

First they wanted to ban literary classics from school curricula. Now the geniuses at the increasingly irrelevant United Nations have come up with the brilliant notion that the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People requires the return of Mount Rushmore to the Native Americans. Reports the Associated Press: A United Nations fact finder surveying […]

The week got off to a shaky start, with the elections in Greece portending an unstable pro-austerity coalition facing a motley assortment of fringe parties (comprising communists and fascists), and France opting for the socialist candidate, François Hollande. Markets initially reacted without much fuss, as it looked like Angela Merkel would hold her ground on […]

A statistic that unfortunately is sad but not surprising: the Urban Institute has found that just over 33,000 people holding doctorate degrees receive welfare in the form of food stamps or other aid. Many of those PhDs are adjunct professors making salaries so low that they qualify for food stamps, Medicaid and a number of other […]

Embattled Syria aside, Algeria is the last of the secular Arab authoritarian governments still standing. Having weathered a bitter fight against an Islamist insurgence that saw 100,000 or more deaths, the Algerian authorities are tougher, better organized and, in some ways, more flexible than the despots who’ve fallen across the region in recent years.Now the […]

Via Meadia regulars know that we call out the New York Times from time to time for bad reportage and poor editorial judgment, but today the Times has a piece that reminds us of just how good this paper can be at its best.The piece is by Tim Arango, and it covers the developing struggle […]

The fallout from the collapse of the once-blue chip law firm of Dewey and LaBoeuf is spreading. The New York Times reports that life for the former one percenters at the top of the firm is about to get much, much worse: They are likely to lose the money they were required to invest in […]

Just when you thought things in Syria were as bad as they can get, they got worse. The apparent involvement of Al-Qaeda and/or its affiliates in the recent Damascus bombings will make international policy even less coherent as poisonously radical forces rear their heads in a worsening conflict.Adam Garfinkle offers a no-holds barred assessment of […]

David Weigel has a great piece on the Walker phenomenon over at Slate. As Weigel points out, Walker has built an extraordinary political following in the state, pulling together all the disparate elements in today’s Republican universe from tea party activists to megadonors. The result is a formidable political force that dominates the airwaves and […]