A major campaign to introduce Islamic banking and finance into India was kicked off in the Kerala city of Kochi on Friday with Justice Krishna Iyer taking the lead. "I welcome Islamic finance in India," said Iyer, a former Supreme Court judge. "Islamic finance has proven successful in poverty alleviation and promoting sustainable growth in many countries, including the United …

  It is difficult for politicians to admit they were wrong. But when it comes to Afghanistan, the consequences of not doing so could be high. It is time for the West to cut its losses and withdraw. The most difficult thing to do in politics is to change course — admitting that everything that was right yesterday is wrong …

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present …

"In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history." This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective. Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the …

Hats off to Wikileaks.com for revealing the murderous character of the United States' war in Afghanistan though one does not know why its sources decided to reveal those top secret documents. WikiLeaks, the website that allows whistleblowers to post documents that expose corruption in governments, non-governmental organisations and transnational companies, made headlines once again this week when it announced that …