Palash Ghosh

Some people in South Africa fear that the death of Nelson Mandela will lead to mass chaos and violence.

Black Africans and South Asians have a long history of conflict and violence.

Very few politicians are openly gay and there has never been an openly homosexual US president.

James Gandolfini dies in Rome.

The CIA-engineered coup of 1953 that toppled a democratically elected government Iran and solidified the Shah continues to reverberate into the 21st century.

A critic of Pakistan's new government points to officials wearing luxe accessories while the nation's workers make an average of about $1,257 a year.

Do much time has passed since World War II, that eyewitnesses to crimes have become scarce.

Some Hindus are upset over Henry Cavill's comments that seemed to equate comic book character Superman with Hindu gods.

Steely Dan was unusual in that Fagen and Becker remained rather anonymous -- like studio session musicians who shunned the fame and publicity.

Bill Maher, the obnoxious, execrable and unfunny “comic” who hosts a talk-show on HBO called “Real Time,” is inexplicably one of the most successful and popular television celebrities in the United States.His rise to the top presents yet another example of how mediocrity, vulgarity (and, of course, luck) are far more important in determining the quality of contemporary pop culture than such quaint and forgotten qualities as talent and integrity.Like many of his dubious contemporaries -- including Oprah Winfrey, Michael Moore, Spike Lee, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, among numerous others -- Maher has become a “brand,” a brand that is meticulously marketed for the sake of maximizing profit. Maher does not engage in reasoned debate, nor does he really care about the validity of his viewpoints. Having identified the demographic he wants to target (that is, upscale urban liberals), he simply ladles out what they want to hear.

In Italy, almost 67,000 inmates are housed in Italian facilities that were designed to hold only 45,000.

Ireland has witnessed a number of racialist attacks against black Africans who have migrated in recent years to the country.

After retiring from the NBA in 2002, Hakeem Olajuwon and his family moved to Amman, Jordan, where they spend much of every year.

If the community did form its own country, it would comprise the 18th-largest economy in the world.

Gillard, who is 51 years old and has never been married, has long been the subject of rumors and innuendos, while suffering negative comments about her appearance.

The movement for Khalistan, an independent homeland for Sikhs in Punjab, appears to be stronger among the Sikh diaspora that in India itself.

The fact that two of the oldest people on the planet are both Japanese is not a coincidence.

Some 2.2 million Keralites live and work outside India, with 875,000 in the UAE and 574,000 in Saudi Arabia.

Britain’s Turkish-Kurdish criminal gangs are a relatively recent entry into the UK’s long and bloody history of organized crime.

At least 140 foreigners were killed in South Africa last year, and, this year, about three anti-immigrant incidents are reported weekly.

Key politicians, whose job requires an endless and wearying array of public appearances, are bound to make some embarrassing gaffes.

The city of Philadelphia, Penn., may be 10,000 miles away from Bangladesh, but as soon as I heard about the building collapse in the city of Brotherly Love, I immediately thought about the disaster at the garment factory in Dhaka in April, which claimed more than 1,100 lives.Yes, the scale of the tragedy in Philadelphia was far smaller -- six dead and about a dozen people injured -- but as hard as it might be to believe, parts of Philadelphia and the impoverished Third World country of Bangladesh have much in common.

India’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, said that 2.89 percent of the population (about 36 million people) filed income taxes.

Foreign doctors (that is, qualified physicians with non-French medical degrees) now represent 9 percent of the nation’s total number.

Pakistan's new Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is providing few specifics on how we will solve the country's many woes.

Jiah Khan apparently killed herself over a failed romance and a stalled movie career.

Sunil Prabhu, the mayor of Mumbai, is a member of Shiv Sena, an extreme right-wing Hindu nationalist party,

Indians have been established in Hong Kong since the days it was a British colony.

Said Amirov was said to be the most powerful man in Dagestan with ties to the criminal underground.