Latest blog posts

THE police in Karachi say they still have an open mind about the murder, late on May 18th, of Zohra Shahid Hussain, a senior politician with the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), or Movement for Justice. The three young men on a motorcycle who attacked her outside her home may have been robbers, they say. Her party colleagues, however, are in no doubt that she fell victim to a political assassination. She died on the eve of a partial rerun in one Karachi constituency of the general election held on May 11th.

SYRIA has been in a state of civil war long enough that it's now beginning to disintegrate, reports Ben Hubbard of the New York Times. His lead paragraph reads like a dispatch from the Wars of the Roses, or a trailer for a new season of Game of Thrones.

The black flag of jihad flies over much of northern Syria. In the center of the country, pro-government militias and Hezbollah fighters battle those who threaten their communities. In the northeast, the Kurds have effectively carved out an autonomous zone.

...Increasingly, it appears Syria is so badly shattered that no single authority is likely to be able to pull it back together any time soon.

TAKE a vast windowless hall. Squeeze in hundreds of garish booths vying to produce the loudest and most obnoxious music possible. Then add thousands of busy people and bake at a high temperature for several days. Visiting a large conference or trade show can be an unpleasant experience, as Babbage can attest from many years of writing about technology. Precisely how unpleasant, though, no one has measured until now. At Google’s annual I/O conference for developers in San Francisco this week, scientists are finally trying to turn sharp elbows, raised voices and sweaty brows into cold, hard data.

AS BRUTAL attacks continue on both sides of Syria's protracted civil war, our correspondent, recently returned from an opposition stronghold, explains the increasingly fraught dynamic between different rebel groups