Classical Mag

North Korean leader Kim Jon-un has allegedly ordered the executions of the entire family of the uncle he had earlier put to death for plotting the overthrow of the Pyongyang regime. South Korea's Yonhap News Agency, citing "multiple" anonymous sources, reports that several direct relatives of Jang Song Thaek, the once-powerful uncle, were targeted in the purge, including children. Jang was executed last month on charges of attempting a military-backed coup. Those reportedly executed since include Jang's sister Jang Kye Sun, her husband and ambassador to Cuba Jon Yong-jin, and Jang's nephew Jang Yong-chol, who was ambassador to Malaysia. Yonhap reported that some of the relatives who had resisted arrest had been "shot to death by pistol in front of other people". Others related to Jang through marriage had instead been exiled to remote villages with their maiden families. "The...

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday told Pakistan it had the potential to become a future economic tiger as he backed reforms and inclusion of women and minorities. The United States and Pakistan were meeting for the first time since October 2010 for their "strategic dialogue." The process was undertaken to build trust between both the countries, but it quickly broke down due to a series of crises, including Pakistani rage over the US raid that killed al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden. Kerry, who as a senator spearheaded a multibillion-dollar support package for the country, said the United States wants "stronger ties with the people of Pakistan -- I emphasize, with the people of Pakistan" --as the Afghan war which forged their partnership winds down.   He praised Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s economic reforms, which include efforts to build Pakistan´s miniscule tax base, as part of a $6.7 billion loan package from the I...

BEFORE committing mass murder, one of the 9/11 hijackers made a call from San Diego to an al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen. At the time, the National Security Agency (NSA) had no way to tell that the call had come from America. Haunted by such lapses, successive governments have doubled the budget for intelligence in real terms since 2001, to $75 billion in 2012. At its peak, around three years ago, America was spending nearly twice as much on intelligence as it had during the cold war. Rather than write new laws to govern the use of this bounty, Congress relied largely on old ones, drawn up when the internet was an obscure government project. In a long, professorial and rather good speech on January 17th, Barack Obama surveyed the past 250 years of spying, paused to praise the employees of the NSA, who must be fed up with being compared to the Stasi, and then suggested what new rules ought to look like. As yet the proposals are a bit vague and some will be hard to implemen...

FOR the past month three judges, 20-odd lawyers and scores of journalists have assembled in the auditorium of Islamabad’s heavily defended National Library building. There, a special court has the task of deciding whether Pervez Musharraf, a former army chief who seized power in 1999 and ruled for eight years, is guilty of high treason. Yet the main player in the drama has remained defiantly absent. Mr Musharraf rashly returned from self-imposed exile in London last year in hopes of contesting a general election. Almost immediately, charges began piling up against him and he was put under house arrest. Now a series of fortunate events have conspired to spare Mr Musharraf the indignity of appearing in the dock. On two mornings scheduled for court hearings, small bombs were found along the route from Mr Musharraf’s mansion in Islamabad’s suburbs. His lawyers argued that it was unsafe for him to leave home. In this section Then, on January 2nd, whe...

THE news of the first deaths among Ukraine’s protesters  has opened a new and dark chapter in the story of the anti-government movement known as Euromaidan. For three days, the situation on Kiev’s Hrushevsky Street had smacked of a kind of collective madness. During the fiercest clashes on the night of January 19th, leaderless protesters fought riot police with batons and shields made out of stolen pieces of the adjacent Dynamo stadium. A row of police buses was torched in the process. The buses formed a barrier behind which the protesters then dug in, throwing Molotov cocktails and paving stones at riot police on the other side. The police fired the same things back, plus tear gas canisters, sound grenades and rubber bullets. It now looks as though they are no longer firing only rubber bullets. Most of the noise though, for those three days, came from supporters of the young fighters, banging on bins, fences, and the coal braziers they swiftly brought to the area...

TO THOSE who see China as an increasingly assertive, even expansionist, power, it offers yet more proof of its determination to establish authority even over fiercely disputed land and water. On January 1st new fishing regulations from the government of Hainan, China’s southernmost province, came into effect. They require all vessels planning to fish in waters in the South China Sea that are under Hainan’s jurisdiction first to secure the approval of the relevant Chinese authorities. Since China’s claims in the South China Sea are contentious, the rules seem very likely to provoke. That is probably not in fact China’s intention, but its neighbours do have cause to worry. The Philippines and Vietnam, the littoral countries with the most active territorial disputes with China, were quick to condemn the regulations . America called the rules “provocative and potentially dangerous” . Japan’s defence minister, Itsunori Onodera, made explicit the link many had seen ...

Europe’s commemorations may perhaps end a 100-year haunting, says our obituaries editor, in the first of three articles on the centenary of the first world war Nov 18th 2013 | From The World In 2014 print edition Only one war in British history is called “Great”. Why Britons gave that name to the conflict that began in 1914 remains something of a mystery. Compared with the Hundred Years’ War that spanned the 14th and 15th centuries, it lasted barely four years. Compared with the second world war, which sprawled to the Asia-Pacific theatre, most of it was confined to one small, clayey corner of France and Belgium. Morally the Great War was no chest-thumping crusade, just the inevitable outcome of itching rivalries between the great powers of the time, like most wars. The human devastation it produced was also extremely localised. As was traditional in warfare, fighting men were still each...

Monetary policy may call an end to the house-price party HOUSE prices are now rising in 18 of the 23 countries we track across the globe, compared with just 12 a year ago. America tops our table: the Case-Shiller index released on New Year’s Eve reported price increases of 13.6% in the year to October 2013. Homes have risen in value by 24% since their March 2012 trough, but they remain 20% below their peak in April 2006. Builders started work on over 1m new homes in America in the year to November, for only the second time since the financial crisis ended. But this is far short of the 2.3m recorded in January 2006, and below the long-run average of 1.5m. In all, American property is enjoying a recovery but not a bubble. In this section The Federal Reserve’s decision to start tapering its buying of bonds with newly-created money (ie, to scale back the policy commonly known as quantitative eas...

CHINA’S infamous university entrance exam, known as the gaokao , has long been a target of criticism. Admissions are based solely on the points scored in one exam, and the need for rote memorisation does little to foster creative minds. Now the government has taken its first tentative steps towards reforming the system. In December it announced that the English-language part of the test can be taken several times, with the best score counting. More significantly, it said it would move towards an evaluation process where the test did not make up 100% of the score, and would include more subjective assessments of, for instance, extra-curricular activities. Details are expected this year. Many see these reforms as long overdue. But some educators claim a move away from a straightforward points-based system will harm those who most need help getting into university: students from poorer, rural areas. In this section China’s elite universities a...

Lack of security Agriculture is the mainstay of economy of Pakistan as about 67 per cent of our population is associated directly and indirectly with this sector. Agriculture has a big share of 21.5 per cent in the GDP and this sector employs 45 per cent of the country’s labour force. It also contributes in the growth of other key sectors of economy. The development of this country is not possible by ignoring the development of its rural areas. Rural development can be defined as the process of improving the quality of life and economic well-being of people living in relatively isolated and sparsely populated areas. There are so many hurdles and dilemmas of rural development in our country. Transportation issues, unavailability of recent technology in agriculture, undefined and scattered structure of local governing bodies come also emerge as the bottlenecks of rural development. In some countries like India, China and Bangladesh lies voluntary poverty. This t...