By Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, March 28/29, 2013
UNITED NATIONS — The global effort to regulate the sale of conventional weapons suffered a significant but not fatal setback on Thursday after Iran, Syria and North Korea opposed the draft Arms Trade Treaty, blocking the consensus needed for passage after years of arduous negotiations.
BRASILIA - A Brazilian doctor who was charged with killing seven patients to free up beds at a hospital intensive care unit may have been responsible for as many as 300 deaths, according to a Health Ministry investigator.
Prosecutors said Dr. Virginia Soares de Souza and her medical team administered muscle relaxing drugs to patients, then reduced their oxygen supply, causing them to die of asphyxia at the Evangelical Hospital in the southern city of Curitiba.
[....] search warrants, which a judge agreed on Wednesday to partly redact before their release, shed a glimmer of light on Mr. Lanza’s inner world that, more than three months after the tragedy, has largely remained a mystery [....]
By Peter Bergen, National Security Analyst, CNN, March 26, 2013
[....] another member of the secretive SEAL Team 6, which executed the bin Laden raid, tells CNN the story of the Shooter as presented in Esquire is false. According to this serving SEAL Team 6 operator, the story is "complete B-S."
Editorial Board, New York Times, March 26/27, 2013
Gen. Pervez Musharraf has returned to Pakistan, proclaiming an intention to “save” his country. If there is anyone capable of saving Pakistan, he is not it. [....]
By David D. Kirkpatrick & Mayy E Sheikh, New York Times, March 25/26, 2013
CAIRO — The public prosecutor on Monday ordered the arrest of five anti-Islamist political activists on charges of using social media to incite violence against the Muslim Brotherhood. The order stirred accusations of a vendetta by the group’s close ally, President Mohamed Morsi.
In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.
By Tim Adams, The Observer @ guardian.co.uk, 23 March, 2013
Twenty years ago Shane Smith set up a hip little Montreal magazine called Vice. Then along came the internet and Vice reinvented itself as the edgiest, wildest online media brand in the world. It's staffed by twentysomethings and aimed at a global youth who have no interest in mainstream media. Which is why he is courted by everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Google. Here he explains what drives his brand of gonzo journalism [....]
By Ronald Dworkin, New York Review of Books, April 4, 2013 issue
Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter. —The Editors
It was in the Maksimir Stadium that the tremors that presaged the Yugoslav wars first erupted, as a mass riot broke out between fans of Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb in May 1990. With fists flying and knives drawn, dozens were injured in a brawl between the two sets of fans, many of whom would soon be facing each other on real battlefields.
By Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 2013
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will soon face a court-martial. Should the case have been labeled an act of terrorism rather than 'workplace violence?'
By Catherine Rampell, New York Times, March 20/21, 2013
SACRAMENTO — After six years of waiting on the sidelines, newly eager home buyers across the country are discovering that there are not enough houses for sale to accommodate the recent flush of demand.
Who really lives at One Hyde Park, called the world’s most expensive residential building? Its mostly absentee owners, hiding behind offshore corporations based in tax havens, provide a portrait of the new global super-wealthy.
By By Syed Fazl-e-Haider, Asia Times Online, March 19, 2013
KARACHI - The Pakistani Taliban has declared a war on Pakistan's judiciary and announced it will suspend peace talks with the Pakistani government. At least four persons were killed and 30 injured including three policemen and a woman judge on Monday when two suicide bombers blew themselves up within the premises of the judicial complex in Peshawar, the capital of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
