M.I.A has dropped a new track in response to Lynn Hirschberg’s controversial New York Times article that questions the pop star’s political effectiveness. Hirschberg was dismissive of M.I.A.’s intellectual ability to understand the complexity of the situation in Sri Lanka, among other things. Here are some choice excerpts: Unity holds no allure for Maya — [...]

Hakim al-Zamili was Moqtada Sadr’s man in the Iraqi Ministry of Health, and contemporaneous reporting indicated he ran it like a butcher shop, targeting Sunnis for disappearance and murder. An Iraqi court failed to convict him. Now he’s running for parliament. Sunnis who joined the Baath Party for simple professional reasons during the Saddam era, [...]