Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians died in the last, bloody months of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the International Crisis Group said in an investigative report to be released Monday, most of them as a result of government shelling of areas that were supposed to be safe zones.

The decision to bar him from entering the West Bank to speak at Birzeit, a Palestinian university, “is a foolish act in a frequent series of recent follies,” remarked Boaz Okun, the legal commentator of the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, in his Monday column. “Put together, they may mark the end of Israel as a law-abiding and freedom-loving state, or at least place a large question mark over this notion.”

Just to be clear, this is Yediot Aharanot, not the mildly left-leaning Haaretz.

Colin Blakemore is a neurobiologist and below he is talking about the capacity of the human brain, but the scenario he lays out quite aptly describes what awaits us after the Tea Party, Sarah Palin and Fox News (not dissimilar from Afghanistan after the Taliban, for approximately the same reasons)!

My argument stresses the plasticity that our brains were endowed with when this mutation occurred. Some scientists believe that skills like language have a strong genetic basis, but my theory stresses the opposite, that knowledge, picked up by our now powerful brains, is the crucial mental component. It means that we are uniquely gifted in our ability to learn from experience and to pass this on to future generations. That has a bad side: a single generation starved of knowledge, thanks to some global disaster, for example, would be cast back to the Stone Age.

What has changed over the past few years is the recognition that animal abuse is often a warning sign for other types of violence and neglect.

I asked one woman whether she’d been part of “9/12,” as tea partiers call the great taxpayer march on Washington, D.C., last September. No, she’d missed it, she said, and “felt really guilty” about doing so, but she and her husband had been on vacation.

“Where did you go?”

“We spent a week in Amalfi, then we toured Tuscany, then we spent a week in Rome.”

Another woman, hearing my accent, told me about her and her partner’s second home in Torquay, England, which they visited three times a year from their base in Atlanta, and about their thirty-five-foot powerboat, in which they’d crossed the Channel to Le Havre and cruised down the French canals to Marseilles.

From the NYRB, amusing anecdotes from the Palin and other circus acts Tea Party convention.

More than half of the nation’s medical residency programs to train doctors in internal medicine accepted financial support from the drug industry, even though three-fourths of the programs’ directors said accepting the aid was “not desirable,” a survey found.

Of course, protecting American security interests isn’t the only reason why India and Pakistan should work toward a solution in Kashmir. As Basharat Peer’s new book, Curfewed Night, recounts, India’s occupation of the valley, enforced by more than half a million soldiers, has given a powerful raison d’etre to militant organizations in Pakistan, which have grown exponentially since 1989. Peer, a Kashmiri journalist and currently a Fellow at the Open Society Institute, was in his teens when the insurgency began in Srinagar, the capital of India-held Kashmir. His own friends, enraged by police firing upon unarmed demonstrators, left the valley to train in militant camps set up across the border by Pakistani intelligence and army officers. Sent away to India by his parents, Peer witnessed the progressive alienation and isolation of Muslims as Hindu nationalists unleashed one violent campaign after another through the 1990s. He later returned to Kashmir as a journalist, and Curfewed Night reflects his diverse experience of the valley by combining memoir with reportage, history, and analysis.

From a review of “Curfewed Nights” (Basharat Peer) by Pankaj Mishra, covering the current situation in the region and the rise of the “military-industrial complex” in India.