Rumi Nations

Since they are accessible for now, seems must read them now. http://www.businessinsider.in/The-New-Yorker-Is-Temporarily-Making-All-Of-Its-Archives-Free--Here-Are-8-Stories-You-Should-Definitely-Read/articleshow/38816950.cms http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/07/22/new_yorker_online_free_for_three_months_what_should_you_read.html More suggestions about what to read in the New Yorker http://www.theawl.com/2014/07/all-the-new-yorker-story-roundups-you-should-read-while-the-stories-are-still-unlocked-as-well-as-all-the-new-yorker-stories-they-link-to More New Yorker healthcare articles. Also, Pankaj Mishra's Edmund Wilson in Benaras .

Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the fluid was drawn off with a long needle and sent for testing. Instead of an infection, as everyone had expected, it was lung cancer, and it had already spread to the lining of her chest. Her pregnancy was thirty-nine weeks along, and the obstetrician who had ordered the test broke the news to her as she sat with her husband and her parents. The obstetrician didn’t get into the prognosis—she would bring in an oncologist for that—but Sara was stunned. Her mother, who had lost her best friend to lung cancer, began crying. The doctors wanted to start treatment right away, and that meant inducing labor to get the baby out. For the moment, though, Sara and her husband, Rich, sat by themselves on a quiet terrace off the ...

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEAL s from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU . A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.  Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters ducked into an alpine valley and slipped, undetected, into Pakistani airspace. For more than sixty years, Pakistan’s military has maintained a state of high alert against its eastern neighbor, India. Because ...

That's the title of an article about him in The New Yorker. All I can say is ... What a Life ! http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2011/01/postscript-james-acord.html The only private individual in the world who had license to handle nuclear materials. More related tales here: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/park/di21/art_tech_ec_files/acord.htm

http://www.livemint.com/2012/09/03123633/Of-8216growth-stories8217.html?h=A1 http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/09/the-new-yorker-on-obama.html#slide_ss_0=1 http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/kennedys http://swampland.time.com/2012/09/06/tight-security-ahead-of-obamas-dnc-debut/?iid=sl-article-latest http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/18/060918fa_fact1?currentPage=2 http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/08/looking-up-to-neil-armstrong.html http://www.kurzweilai.net/communicating-with-the-universe http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=obama-romney-science-debate&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20120905 http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-my-predictions-are-faring-an-update-by-ray-kurzweil

Seymour Hersh has an enviable knack for generating controversy with everything that he writes. May be, he has what might be called the 'Hersh Touch', a latter day version of the Midas Touch. His New Yorker article about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal has predictably generated strong reactions from Pakistan. Well, what can one expect if Hersh is basically saying that there's a secret argument between the Pentagon and the Pakistan Army whereby if things get out of hand in Pakistan and the Taliban are on the verge of getting hold of nukes, then Special Forces from the United States will swoop in and "secure" the assets. It would be quite something for one nation to share the exact locations (Bunker No. 9) where each component of a discombobulated nuclear device is located with another nation no matter how friendly that nation might be. On a related note, I recently read some scholarly piece about the history of India's nuclear posture ... how it slowly evolved f...