Beheading Hindus and other things worth reading from around the web

• The withdrawal of ‘The Hindus’ - The Times Literary Supplement reports on how Penguin India’s decision to withdraw and pulp all remaining copies of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An alternative history has provoked outcry in the literary world. The TLS has also revived its original review by placing it on its website. The opening paragraph of the review :

Keep reading the review HERE.

• David Hare: ‘The security services are running the country, aren’t they?’ – “The playwright’s Worricker spy trilogy returns next month, with Bill Nighy as a British agent caught up in a tangled tale of corruption and murder. And it’s all happening in real life, he says.”
• Pentagon Plans to Shrink Army to Pre-World War II Level
• Russia needs a ‘Finland option’ for Ukraine – “Kiev must have no participation in any anti-Moscow alliance, writes Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to US president Jimmy Carter.”
• For Ukraine’s revolutionaries: Beware a Russian backlash - ”Many Ukrainians yearn for their revolution to be a re-enactment of 1989 in Poland or 1991 in the Baltic states: a decisive turn in the direction of freedom, civic dignity, national independence and economic prosperity underpinned by close ties with the European Union. But Ukraine’s internal divisions and strategic importance to Russia mean that there is a real danger that the revolution will produce no such clear-cut outcome.”
• The future of news – “News sources can’t just give us the facts. They must tell us what those facts mean.”