Yuletide .

The West's, and Pakistan's, cynical resurrection of something so profoundly powerful and complex unleashed a force whose roots can be found in al-Qaeda's rage, the Taliban's dream of an Islamic utopia in Afghanistan, and in the dozens of radical Islamic groups rapidly replicating themselves in India and around the world today. "The promise of jihad was never fulfilled," says Gul. "Is it any wonder the fighting continues to this day?" Religion may have been used to unite Pakistan, but it is also tearing it apart.

A German, Ralph Burkei, 51, was fatally injured when he jumped out of the other hotel under assault, the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel. According to several reports citing the Munich newspaper Abendzeitung, Mr. Burkei, a co-owner of an independent television production company in Munich, called a friend from his cellphone and said: “I have broken every bone in my body. If no one helps me now, I’m finished.” He died on the way to the hospital.

And one belt will typically last three years -- the life span of three chains.

That’s the key term - "excessive expansion" - reflecting a concern expressed increasingly within China, not only in regard to iron and steel. The regime can’t sustain its current level of metals consumption indefinitely. For the near future Chinese companies may be hot on the acquisitions trail, but there are finite limits to the raw materials they can absorb, turn into domestic products or into exports. An “over-heated” economy equates with rising industrial pollution and social unrest at home; it’s also not going down well with many of the communities they are exploiting overseas.

The somewhat different results once again illustrate a peculiarity of the Electoral College - it can appear to turn relatively close popular votes (and historically Obama’s victory margin is in the mid-range - decisive but not a blowout) into the perception of an electoral landslide.  Whether this is a redeeming feature of the Electoral College or not often depends on your perspective. But it reminds us that candidates’ strategies are designed to maximize Electoral College votes - not popular votes.  That’s why I’ve never had any sympathy for those who claim Gore “won” the 2000 election by virtue of the popular vote.

We do not know whether this stems from the nature of the human organism or whether it is learned during the process of socialization, but people appear to prefer cognitions that fit together to those that do not. It is this simple observation that gives the theory of cognitive dissonance its interesting form.

they are reluctant to reject the null hypotheses of nondiscrimination and they are reluctant to hold that plaintiffs have met their burden of proof

Incidentally, Zogby himself wants the wingers to stop frothing over his numbers. In his release today, he says: "A special note to blogger friends: calm it down."

“In the darkness at the movies,” as Pauline Kael romanticized the situation, “where nothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses.”

convinced that Hollywood’s greatest achievements are not the monotonously important dramas that so often sucker in Academy voters but the stylish, highly polished entertainments, largely comedies, that endure even though they weren’t made to be lasting. Above all, Thomson prizes wit, charm, and good-natured ease. He’s reached an age, he notes in his appraisal of North by Northwest, when he’d “rather have a great screwball comedy than a profound tragedy. After all, tragedy is all around us and screwball is something only the movies can do.”