Global economies on the mend, says OECD

Sharif of Agenda NAWAZ SHARIF is back. Critics, he is an unreformed rightwinger, a conservative politician who allows his party to give in to the extremist Islamic fringe, an arrogant bully who reckless confrontation with other institutions, in particular the powerful army threatens. But Sharif is no longer the callow 30-year-old who got his start in politics as a protege of the dictator General Zia. Nor is he the confrontationist wanted which first two terms as Prime Minister came to untimely ends because of his inability to Choose his battles. Instead, a stint in prison under Musharraf, then exile and five years as the leader of the opposition to the Government led by the PPP Asif Ali Zardari seem to have milder ...

The next scapegoat TWENTY years ago, when she was a young foreign service officer in Moscow, gave me a brilliant Victoria Nuland briefing about the various factions within the Russian Parliament. Now she is a friend I usually see a few times a year, on different functions, and I saw her attendance, working with everyone from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serve as Ambassador to NATO, and now as the spokeswoman at the State Department. In the past few weeks, the spotlight Nuland enabled. The indictment is that intelligence agencies prepared exact talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, its political masters, serving them toned ...