Portside

Just before breakfast, the government of India secretly hanged Afzal Guru, prime accused in the attack on parliament in December 2001, and interred his body in Delhi's Tihar jail where he had been in solitary confinement for 12 years. Was this execution just? Was the trial fair? Or are the political parties and the institutions of Indian democracy on trial?

Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation is in character in several ways. As an institutionalist who believes in the Roman Catholic Church as the carrier of truth in a sinful world, he would worry a great deal about the impact of his own infirmities on the institution’s capacity to thrive. He is a traditionalist who was nonetheless greatly affected by modernity.

What starts out as a minor skirmish can wind up determining the outcome of a war, and that seems to be the case when it comes to the mounting battle over the Keystone XL pipeline. If given the go-ahead by President Obama, it will daily carry more than 700,000 barrels of tar-sands oil to those Gulf Coast refineries, If Obama says no, the Canadians (and their American backers) will encounter difficulties in exporting their heavy crude oil, discouraging further investment.

This for-profit hospital chain is growing fast; cutting costs with tough management, innovation. Like everything else about for-profit Steward — robotic surgery, fixed-rate insurance contracts, managers working with patients to prevent hospital readmissions — the e-ICU is focused on innovation, efficiency, and finding ways to save money. It’s a formula that has been reshaping the way business is done in the state’s health care industry since Steward took over Caritas.

Readers respond on - The White South's Last Defeat; Henry Wallace; The Americanization of the United States; Climate RALLY - Bay Area - Sunday Feb 17

Is the country more or less racist? How can the percentage of people holding anti-black attitudes have increased from 2006 to 2008 at a time when Obama performed better among white voters than the two previous white Democratic nominees, and then again from 2008 to 2012 when Obama won a second term? In fact, the shifts described by Tesler and Pasek are an integral aspect of the intensifying conservatism within the right wing of the Republican Party.

It’s worth noting that this continued antibiotic use, and continued and rising appearance of resistant bacteria on meat, is happening as the FDA has abandoned attempting to regulate livestock producers’ use of antibiotics, and has switched to a voluntary approach. Given the trend, I think it’s worth asking how well that voluntary approach is going to work.

Dramatic cuts in tax rates have not led to an acceleration in economic growth, investment, or productivity.

On Ditching the Geithner doctrine

The burgeoning popular literature about how to navigate the “new old age”