Agence France Presse,  August 20, 2013

PAKISTAN's ex-military ruler Pervez Musharraf has been indicted on three counts over the murder of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, who died in a gun and suicide attack in December 2007.

Bringing charges against a former army chief is an unprecedented move in a country ruled for more than half of its life by the military and considered the single most powerful institution.

By Allan Sloan, Columnist, Washington Post/Business, August 15, 2013

[....] Call me naive, if you like, but I think that if you’re going to own a high-class journalistic enterprise like The Post, whose job is to call powerful forces to account, you should expect to be called to account yourself.

But good luck trying to get that done when it comes to Bezos.

When I exposed the thesis of this column to Amazon, I couldn’t even get a response, much less an interview.

By Tim Arango, New York Times, August 17/18, 2013

BAGHDAD — The black-masked soldier stood at the army checkpoint examining the identification cards of each passenger, denying entry to anyone who did not live in the Sunni district of Ameriya. One resident later said entering his neighborhood now felt like crossing the border into a different country.

New York Times, August 17/18, 2013

One of them "must reads." Impossible to summarize. Step-by-step narrative with lotsa international players (not to mention everyone's favorite two Senators, McCain & Graham.)

4 pages by a team:

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Peter Baker and Michael R. Gordon from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker from Washington; Mark Landler from Chilmark, Mass.; and Steven Erlanger from London.

By Sangwon Yoon, Bloomberg News, August 16, 2013

More than 5,000 Syrians crossed into Iraq’s Kurdistan region yesterday in a “sudden, massive movement,” the United Nations refugee agency said.

By Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic, August 16, 2013

I have a secret to tell you: There is a mobile app you've probably never heard of that gets 2.5 billion page views a month, substantially more than all of CNN. It's called Whisper, and the youths just love it [....]

The case highlights the hazy definition of privacy rights in dense cities like New York

By Julia Halperin, theartnewspaper.com, 09 August 2013

Al Jazeera, 15 August, 2013, 23:27

A car bomb explosion has killed at least 20 people in Beirut's southern suburbs, according to the Lebanese Interior Ministry. The explosion struck near a complex used by Hezbollah, the Shia political party and armed group that in recent months has become increasingly and more publicly involved in the conflict in neighbouring Syria. 

At least 200 people were injured in the blast [....] The blast put buildings and cars on fire and sent a column of black smoke over the densely populated area.

By J. Dana Sluster, Passport @ ForeignPolicy.com, August 15, 2013

[....] On Thursday, the National Security Archive reported that it had gotten its hands on a newly declassified CIA history of the development of the U-2 spy plane. The report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, contains the CIA's secret record of how Area 51 came to be. [....]

ITN video (59 sec.) via guardian.com, August 14, 2013

A prototype jetpack developers are calling their 'motorbike in the sky' can be tested by manned flights, the country's civil aviation authority says. The New Zealand company behind the venture wants the vehicle, which can climb to above a km, to become commercially available. The jet pack's current price tag is $150,000 (£97,000)

My comment: In grade school The Weekly Reader magazine promised us Boomers we would have this by the year 2000, so it's only 13 years late.

By Robert Pear, New York Times, August 12/13, 2013

[....] The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014. [....]

By Douglas Quenqua, New York Times, August 12/13, 2013

A surge of brain activity in dying rats may hold an explanation for the vivid, realistic visions experienced by some human victims of cardiac arrest, researchers say.

By Charlie Savage, New York Times, August 13/14, 2013

As the Nigerian Army cracks down on Boko Haram, the radical group escalates with attacks on mosques, after last month killing dozens of children.

By Heather Murdock, Christian Science Monitor, August 13, 2013

Evidence of huge rip-offs at the heart of the “Bolivarian revolution” has unleashed political infighting

The Economist, Caracas, August 10, 2013 issue & online

By Suketu Mehta, New York Review of Books, August 15, 2013 issue & online

By Park Mac Dougald, Passport @ ForeignPolicy.com, August 8, 2013

By Christine Gross-Loh, The Atlantic, August 9, 2013

Is violent play bad? I used to think so. Then I spent some time outside of the United States

Highly recommended on the thought-provoking front.