Regions & Nations

"A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is said to have remarked. For most Americans occupying the now-now-now world of Facebook, this probably feels apt. And until just over a decade ago, Zuckerberg's statement might equally have applied to Pentagon strategists. A 1995 strategy document from the Defense Department was hardly less blunt: "[U]ltimately we see very little traditional strategic interest in Africa."

On Wednesday some media outlets obtained copies of the heavily embargoed book "No Easy Day" by Mark Owen, the pseudonym of one of the Navy SEALs who was part of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

Before dawn on Friday, a man wearing an Afghan uniform shot and killed three U.S. soldiers during a meeting to discuss local security issues in the southern province of Helmand.

It was one of an unprecedented series of five attacks by people in Afghan security forces uniforms in the past week against NATO forces.

ABSTRACT: PROFILES about Imran Khan. Khan, who once ruled the sport of cricket from Karachi to Lord’s, is in contention to rule the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Khan makes for an unusual politician—a former tabloid celebrity aspiring to negotiate with the Taliban. He is rated in opinion polls as his country’s most popular politician. He leads the somewhat amorphous party Tehreek-e-Insaf, or the Movement for Justice, which he founded in 1996. It promises a crackdown on corruption, freedom from American influence, competent governance, and a more equitable economy.

Pakistan can't get no respect.
 
In 2007, Newsweek published an influential cover story proclaiming it "the most dangerous country in the world."
 
The bill of particulars for this indictment typically includes the inarguable facts that the Taliban is headquartered in Pakistan, as is what remains of al-Qaeda, as well as an alphabet soup of other jihadist terrorist groups.
 
And in 2011, it became embarrassingly clear that Pakistan had harbored Osama bin Laden for almost a decade, even if unwittingly, in a city not far from the capital, Islamabad.

At 6 p.m. Taipei time on Friday, June 1, Ho Tsung-hsun was suddenly shut out of his Facebook account. When he tried to log back in, a message in a red box announced: "This account has been disabled." Ho, a veteran activist and citizen journalist on environmental and social issues in Taiwan, immediately took a picture of the message, then wrote an angry blog post on a Taiwan-based citizen journalism platform. He insisted that he had not violated any of the site's community guidelines.

For centuries, the Yangtze River -- the longest in Asia -- has played an important role in China's history, culture, and economy. The Yangtze is as quintessentially Chinese as the Nile is Egyptian or the Rhine is German. Many businesses use its name. But if you log on to the Internet anywhere in China, type the Chinese characters meaning "Yangtze River" into Google's Hong Kong-based search engine, and click "search," the browser screen will go blank with an error message: "This webpage is not available." (Here is a screenshot taken this morning by an Internet user in Beijing.)

Exceptions to the rules

On Wednesday, an apparent suicide bomber in Damascus attacked a meeting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s war cabinet, killing Daoud Rajha, Syria’s defense minister, and Asef Shawkat, who was the President’s brother-in-law. The attack was the most striking in a series of signs that Syria’s uprising has tipped into a full-blown civil war, as the Red Cross has now labelled it, with the war’s momentum now favoring the rebels.