Elections in Pakistan are over. Though the mandate is regional, as no party has shown a nation wide presence, PML-N has attained a majority in Pakistan’s national assembly after 18 independent candidates joined the party. D. Raghunandan of Newsclick.in discusses the factors governing the present political environment of Pakistan with the senior journalist Seema Mustafa.

Forty years have passed since the Chilean president Salvador Allende died in La Moneda Palace in Santiago, attempting to defend himself with an AK-47 he had been given by Fidel Castro.

Here, in a piece from the New Statesman published in March 1974, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez explores Allende’s record in Chile, his rivals’ dealings with the United States and the rise of his successor – the army general Augusto Pinochet.

Newsclick remembers the revolutionary Hugo Chavez.

That Hollywood is swayed by the CIA was confirmed once again on the Oscars night when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave a number of awards including best picture to Argo.

“Zero Dark Thirty”, the American film nominated for the Oscars this year, is based on the American operation to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.

Yet again, Western governments and media are shocked. A group of fanatic Salafi and Ikhwan types attacked the US embassy in Cairo and the US consulate in Benghazi, and the US ambassador was killed.

Muslims and Muslim governments are angry with Bashar al-Assad. They hold him responsible for the massacre of thousands of people, many of them innocent civilians, in Syria. They want him to go.

It is true that Bashar’s army has killed a lot of people. It has used excessive force ---as I have pointed out in a number of articles before this. Anyone with a conscience would condemn the mindless violence that has bloodied Syria in the last 17 months.

Syria continues to be in the public eye with a bomb blast that killed three senior public functionaries (now four) and the west-backed UK resolution vetoed by Russia and China. The one-sided UK resolution called for the withdrawal of Syrian Government forces from population centres but said nothing about armed opposition groups. It was also under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter that allows sanctions and if necessary, military action by the UN and its member states.

Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began.  Certainly, a smaller percentage of us -- less than 1% -- serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans. 

A blinkered look at the future of US involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan continues to place hope in those who have failed so far.