The fourteenth page of images in No Easy Day contains a map showing the routes taken by the two flights of helicopters: the Black Hawks taking the assaulters to Abbottabad, and the MH-47 Chinooks carrying a quick reaction force (QRF) and forward area refueling point (FARP) team. While the latter flew due east to a staging area northwest […]
We should welcome the news that the Taliban are reportedly open to the idea of negotiating a general ceasefire and even a peace settlement. The peace process in Afghanistan is at risk from spoilers on all sides and fraught with challenges. But we owe it to the Afghan people, and to all those who have suffered […]
During a diplomatic visit to Calcutta, India, in May, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clintonstopped at a shelter for young women and girls. It was not an ordinary shelter, but one with a specific mission – a mission Ms. Clinton wanted reporters to broadcast to Americans back home. It was a shelter established to help victims […]
Seth Rosenfeld reveals that Reagan’s relationship with the FBI, which began in 1947, when he became president of the Screen Actors Guild, was far deeper, and creepier, than anyone has ever known before. But documenting the depth of that covert alliance is only one of the amazing things this sweeping book accomplishes. Read Here – Bookforum
Eleven years after 9/11, al Qaeda is fighting back. Despite a focused and concerted American-led global effort—despite the blows inflicted on it by drones, SEALS, and spies—the terror group is thriving in the Arab world, thanks to the revolutions that swept across it in the last 18 months. And the group remains intent on striking […]
If there is a road to a happy ending in Afghanistan, much of the path may run underground: in the trillion-dollar reservoir of natural resources — oil, gold, iron ore, copper, lithium and other minerals — that has brought hopes of a more self-sufficient country, if only the wealth can be wrested from blood-soaked soil. Read Here – […]
“GOING OUT” is the name China calls its strategy to increase outward foreign direct investment (ODI—ie, not the FDI coming in), first proposed in 1999 and implemented in earnest five years later. From 2004 to 2011, China’s ODI grew from $5.5 billion to over $65 billion a year, and it is expected to reach $150 billion by […]
Not long after a tsunami washed over Japan‘s Fukushima nuclear power plants in March 2011, causing a partial meltdown, it appeared to many that humankind’s half-century experiment with nuclear power might be in permanent jeopardy. Although nuclear energy provides 15 percent of the world’s electricity, all without spewing greenhouse gas emissions, many countries seemed ready […]
To see the ice disappear this quickly is unprecedented. The 2012 melt has comprehensively broken all previous records. We are now heading into uncharted territory because the Arctic helps to cool the climate and regulate our weather patterns. Read Here – The Independent
This essay is adapted from Mark Mazower’s Governing the World: The History of an Idea, coming this month from the Penguin Press. Read Here – The Nation
