The Economist

Claims in Pakistan that American drone attacks have killed thousands of civilians are undermined by research (see article) carried out at the New America Foundation, a think-tank, suggesting that in the seven years since 2004, 80% of the fatalities ...

In “The Net Delusion”, which came out in January, Evgeny Morozov attacked what he called the “cyber-Utopian” view of the merits of the internet as a force for liberation and empowerment, pointing out that it can just as easily be used as a tool of ...

“He really told him, 'If you give me nothing to work with, America will keep trying to defend you but it will not be enough,'” says Daniel Levy, an Anglo-Israeli former negotiator who works for the New America Foundation, a peacemaking outfit in ...

Peter Beinart, the author in 2010 of a scathing critique of the Jewish establishment in the New York Review of Books, says that by drifting right and defending whatever Israel does, AIPAC and other leading Jewish organisations have become “intellectual ...

Although producers do not hide their agendas, Charles Kenny, an economist, thinks that there could be a “quagmire of a debate over morals and a tangle of regulation”. An increase in divorces, say, may seem like good news to a woman activist, ...

... The alternative view is that the initiative process, by mutating into a virulent form after Proposition 13, caused the decline of the legislature. This side includes Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, authors of “California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It”. ...

Original article

First, according to Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the projected fall in the deficit relies on rosy assumptions and “magic asterisks”. By using more optimistic assumptions about underlying economic, ...

The term “sweeping” hardly does justice to the ambition of Indian-born Parag Khanna. In his third book, “How to Run the World”, Mr Khanna, a pundit and think-tanker at the New America Foundation, sets out to diagnose the failings of today’s diplomacy and treat them with his own formula for global governance. ...

In this gleefully iconoclastic book, Evgeny Morozov takes a stand against this “cyber-utopian” view, arguing that the internet can be just as effective at sustaining authoritarian regimes. By assuming that the internet is always pro-democratic, he says, Western policymakers are operating with a “voluntary intellectual handicap” that makes it harder rather than easier to promote democracy. ...

To read “The Longest War” by Peter Bergen, an American journalist and al-Qaeda watcher, is to be amazed afresh at how badly America has handled the affair. Largely ignorant of al-Qaeda, Islam and weak states, the Bush administration’s response to September 11th was, he argues, conditioned more by its existing prejudices and strategic impulses than by any proper assessment of the terrorist threat. ...