"Going postal" is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker--archetypically a postal worker--"snaps" and guns down his colleagues. As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub--disconcertingly--"Going Muslim." This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American--a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood--discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.

:: via forbes.com

Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- India is targeting generation of 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022, joining China as the two Asian nations that resist emission caps draft plans to boost renewable energy before next month’s global climate change talks. India, Asia’s third-biggest energy consumer, is set to unveil its national solar energy plan “in about a week,” Minister for New and Renewable Energy Farooq Abdullah said in Mumbai today. China and India have opposed legally binding caps as industrialized nations seek commitments for programs that will curb the output of gases blamed for global warming. The two fastest-growing major economies balk at emission targets because their energy usage is projected to rise as more people are lifted out of poverty. “It’s not a big challenge in terms of technology or engineering,” said Shirish Garud of the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi. “The major challenge will be in mobilizing the financing.”

:: via bloomberg.com

Her fate was all but sealed, the wedding bells ringing in her relatives' heads. Then the bride-to-be, a little girl playing in the dirt in this impoverished village, plucked up her courage and said, "I do not."

:: via latimes.com

Pakistan has an estimated 80 to 100 nuclear warheads. How secure are they? Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh talks with host Terry Gross about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and what Pakistan and the U.S. are doing to keep it safe.

:: via npr.org

Mr. Khan’s company, K.K. Plastic Waste Management, which he founded with his brother, Rasool Khan, has built more than 1,200 kilometers, or 745 miles, of roads using 3,500 tons of plastic waste, primarily in Bangalore, India’s technology and outsourcing hub.

:: via nytimes.com

In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Urumqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, according to accounts written by the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and provided to The Washington Post. The uranium transfer in five stainless-steel boxes was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that culminated in an exceptional, deliberate act of proliferation by a nuclear power, according to the accounts by Khan, who is under house arrest in Pakistan. U.S. officials say they have known about the transfer for decades and once privately confronted the Chinese -- who denied it -- but have never raised the issue in public or sought to impose direct sanctions on China for it. President Obama, who said in April that "the world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons," plans to discuss nuclear proliferation issues while visiting Beijing on Tuesday.

:: via washingtonpost.com

Mala Fernando got married in Sri Lanka on her 22nd birthday. She was an adult by then — but not in her husband's eyes. Mala discussed those days recently with her daughter Ashanthi Gajaweera.

:: via npr.org

The mysterious name, Rahul, mentioned extensively in LeT operative David Coleman Headley’s e-mails to handlers in Pakistan has finally been identified. It’s neither Shah Rukh Khan nor Rahul Gandhi, but the son of famous filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt. And nor is Rahul Bhatt, 25, a fitness instructor and a body builder, on the LeT hit list; he is in fact a friend of Headley who was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Chicago last month. The two met at a gym where Rahul who at one point weighed 122 kilos, had come to lose weight and get fit. Rahul Bhatt at that time was supposed to be launched in a film, Suicide Bomber, under his family banner Vishesh Films, based on the London bombings which was eventually scrapped.

:: via timesnow.tv

Those arriving in New Delhi a day early for the recent World Economic Forum India summit were greeted by a smog so dense, so noxious, that it seeped indoors, giving a brackish smell to hotel lobbies and making one wonder whether India's breakneck economic growth was going to be accompanied by the sort of pollution that made hellholes of old industrial cities such as Pittsburgh and Manchester.

:: via time.com

Under harsh fluorescent lights, dozens of heads bend over keyboards, the clattering unison of earnest typing filling the room. Monitors flicker with insurance forms, time sheets and customer service e-mail messages, tasks from far away, sent to this corner of India to be processed on the cheap. This scene unfolds in cities across India, especially in the high-tech hubs of Bangalore and Gurgaon, places synonymous with the information technology revolution that has transformed India’s economy and pushed the country toward double-digit economic growth. But these workers are young people from villages clustered around this small town deep in rural Karnataka State in India’s southwest.

:: via nytimes.com