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By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pages, Pub Date: 09/2007, ISBN: 0-374-17772-4

"The Israel Lobby," by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Originally published in the London Review of Books in March 2006, it provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy.

"Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labour in a score of Allied countries, often for years. Incredibly, some Germans were still being held in Russia as late as 1979."

Nigel Jones reviews After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift by Giles MacDonogh

Giles MacDonogh is a bon viveur and a historian of wine and gastronomy, but in this book, pursuing his other consuming interest - German history - he serves a dish to turn the strongest of stomachs. It makes particularly uncomfortable reading for those who compare the disastrous occupation of Iraq unfavourably to the post-war settlement of Germany and Austria.

MacDonogh argues that the months that followed May 1945 brought no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler's Reich, but suffering even worse than the destruction wrought by the war. After the atrocities that the Nazis had visited on Europe, some degree of justified vengeance by their victims was inevitable, but the appalling bestialities that MacDonogh documents so soberly went far beyond that. The first 200 pages of his brave book are an almost unbearable chronicle of human suffering.

Full story : How three million Germans died after VE Day

Untouchability in Rural India

Ghanshyam Shah, Harsh Mander, Sukhdeo Thorat, Satish Deshpande, Amita Baviskar, Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2006, Available at Amazon.com

By Ashok Gopal, Infochange India

A survey in 565 villages across 11 states reveals that in 73% of villages, dalits cannot enter non-dalit homes, and in 33% of villages non-dalit health workers will not visit dalit homes. Clearly, independent India’s efforts to eradicate untouchability have not substantially shaken core beliefs

Underlying much of the heated debate on reservations is the belief that too much is being made of the discrimination suffered by dalits.

US scholar claims more than 1m people were captured by African pirates by Rory Carroll, Africa correspondent, Guardian

North African pirates abducted and enslaved more than 1 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids which depopulated coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall, according to new research.

By Dr. Sohail Inayatullah, Member of World Future Studies Federation & Professor, Queensland University, Australia

The task for this paper is to locate the works of Shrii P. R. Sarkar in a range of classification schemes and at the same time to make these schemes themselves problematic. In general, we find Sarkar's works exemplary for the following reasons. In terms of economy, his work is strong on both growth and distribution dimensions. Sarkar is also eclectic in his theory of political-economy drawing on market and regulatory mechanisms. Alienation is a result not of private property but of the concentration of wealth and of the location of the self in a materialistic paradigm. Sarkar's Prout manages to satisfy survival, wellbeing, identity and freedom needs. Market models are strong on freedom but weak on wellbeing (especially at the periphery). Local "small is beautiful" models are strong on survival, wellbeing and identity but weak on the freedom dimension. Sarkar also takes an eclectic model of epistemology having a range of ways of knowing the world. He also takes a layered "deep and shallow" view of the nature of reality. Finally, and this is the centerpiece of the argument, Sarkar's social theory combines linear, cyclical and transcendental dimensions, thus avoiding cultural exploitation and fatalism, and accentuating ancient, modern and postmodern constructions of the social and the economic.

Full Article: Locating P. R. Sarkar in Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Constructions