He's one of the most fascinating figures in the world of international terrorism, a criminal mastermind linked to everyone from al Qaeda to Bollywood starlets to East African drug cartels. Few in the West have heard of him, though he is practically a household name in South Asia.

And now, India is connecting him to last week's attacks in Mumbai.

The Indian government has asked Pakistan to extradite exiled Indian gangster Dawood Ibrahim, who has long been accused of arranging the 1993 bombing attacks in Mumbai. The extradition request is not a new one, and Pakistan has always denied harboring Ibrahim. But now is probably as good a time as any for Indian officials to give it another try -- whether he was involved in the latest carnage in Mumbai or not.

There is precious little reliable information in the public domain on Ibrahim. Some of what we do know comes from the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which designated him a "global terrorist" in 2003.

He was born in India -- ironically, as the son of a police constable. His early history is sketchy, but what is known is that he worked his way up to become a top figure in the Mumbai underworld. Indian officals say he fled his homeland for Dubai, fearing prosecution, though different accounts give different dates for this change of address.

OFAC describes Ibrahim in its listing as "an Indian crime lord" who "has found common cause with Al Qaida, sharing his smuggling routes with the terror syndicate and funding attacks by Islamic extremists aimed at destabilizing the Indian government." He is "known to have financed the activities" of Lashkar-e-Taiba, according to the listing.

That all seems fairly solid. For sheer entertainment value, though, it's hard to beat this 2001 profile by Pakistani journalist Ghulam Hasnain. The lurid details of the story seem too vivid to possibly be true:

Ibrahim lives like a king. Home is a palatial house spread over 6,000 square yds, boasting a pool, tennis courts, snooker room and a private, hi-tech gym. He wears designer clothes, drives top of the line Mercedes’ and luxurious four-wheel drives, sports a half-a-million rupee Patek Phillipe wristwatch, and showers money on starlets and prostitutes. He bought Lahore model, Saba, with whom he reportedly had a passionate involvement, a house and a car. Nor does he shirk his obligations: Mandakini, of Ram Teri Ganga Maili fame, former Bollywood actress with whom he had a child is reportedly still being supported by him.

His daily regimen is also rather kingly. He wakes in the afternoon. After a swim and shower, he has breakfast. In the late afternoon, he gives his employees an audience where he briefs them on their assignments and they give him daily reports of his myriad businesses.

If in the mood, he engages in a game of cricket or snooker with friends. And as the sun sets, Dawood and his party set off for any one of his 'safe houses' in Karachi for an evening of revelry – usually comprising drinks (Black Label is his preference), mujras and gambling. The long-married Dawood’s passion for women has made him a favoured client for local pimps. His current liaison notwithstanding, he whets his allegedly large sexual appetite with a variety of women.

"He prefers virgins, preferably young girls. And he is a good paymaster. If the market rate for a woman is 10,000 rupees, Dawood pays 100,000 rupees. He is thus always surrounded by Pakistan’s top call girls," discloses one of his family friends.

The most incendiary claim in the article? Hasnain says Dawood is "Pakistan’s number one espionage operative." Indian officials may believe that, but I have yet to see solid, independent evidence. Some have speculated that the piece caused Hasnain's four-day abduction, after which he returned "a broken man" and recanted the article.

He chose his words very carefully, but U.S. President-elect Barack Obama nonetheless made big news in India with this exchange from today's press conference:

[Question:] During the campaign, you said that you thought the U.S. had a right to attack high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan if given actionable intelligence with or without the Pakistani government's permission. Two questions on that.

One, do you think India has that same right?

And, two [...] some people up there on the stage took issue with your saying that. They have strong opinions about issues ranging from Pakistan to the surge. And while they're all committed to have a successful United States, what private assurances have they given you that they will be able to carry out your vision even when they strongly disagree with that vision as some of them have been able to do in the past? [...]

OBAMA: I think that sovereign nations, obviously, have a right to protect themselves. Beyond that, I don't want to comment on the specific situation that's taking place in South Asia right now. I think it is important for us to let the investigators do their jobs and make a determination in terms of who was responsible for carrying out these heinous acts.

I can tell you that my administration will remain steadfast in support of India's efforts to catch the perpetrators of this terrible act and bring them to justice. And I expect that the world community will feel the same way.

I don't think this is what Obama intended to communicate, but here's how the Times of India is reporting it -- as if the president-elect had issued a "tacit endorsement" of India "bombing terrorist camps in Pakistan" under certain circumstances:

Sovereign nations have the right to protect themselves, US President-elect Barack Obama said on Monday, when asked if India could follow the same policy he advocated during his election campaign — of bombing terrorist camps in Pakistan if there was actionable evidence and Islamabad refused to act on it.

Although Obama said he did not want to comment on the specific situation involving India and Pakistan, his tacit endorsement of New Delhi adopting the same policy was circumscribed by two caveats: first, let the investigators reach definite conclusions about the Mumbai carnage, and second, see if Pakistan will follow through with its commitment to eliminate terrorism.

That's a bit of a stretch. Now, for the good news: Despite the palpable anger in India and word that India's security status has reached a "war level," no troops are moving to the border with Pakistan as they did after the attacks on the Indian Parliament in late 2001.

Pop quiz: What's the name of the lone surviving attacker from Mumbai?

It's a bit of a trick question. Reports in the Indian press and elsewhere have ascribed various names to the terrorist captured along the Mumbai waterfront, who seems to be the same fellow captured in this chilling photo:

Here's my count of the names in use:

• Ajmal Mohammed Amir Kasab
• Amjad Amir Kamaal
• Ajmal Amir Kamal
• Ajmal Qasab
• Ajmal Amin Kamal
• Ajmal Amir Kasab
• Mohammad Ajmal Qasam
• Azam Amir Kasav
• Mohammed Ajmal Mohammed Amir Kasav

Some of these are just differences in transliteration (Kasab vs. Qasab, for instance), but the rest would seem to be the product of a sloppy media culture and bad press management by Indian officials.

All the reports I've found, however, agree that he is from Faridkot, Pakistan, he is 21 years old, he admitted being a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, and he has only a fourth-grade education.

It's amazing how quickly India appears to be falling into the terrorists' trap.

It seems obvious that Pakistan's civilian government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, has no interest in stirring up trouble between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. And it seems equally obvious that any elements of the ISI, Pakistan's notorious intelligence service, who might have been in some way involved in the attacks in Mumbai would have done so in order to undermine rapprochement between Islamabad and New Delhi.

As for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmir-focused militant group has made clear that it aims to provoke conflict between India and Pakistan and stir up a pro-Islamist backlash among Muslims in India.

Yet one can already see public anger in India leading political developments in a direction the terrorists wanted. Some Indian politicians have been less than careful in saying the terrorists were sent by Pakistan, the state, rather than that they came from Pakistan, the country (which hasn't even been confirmed yet, anyway). India is considering halting talks over Kashmir and ending the five-year cease-fire along the Line of Control. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to "go after" those responsible for the attacks, which could box him into the dangerous step of taking action against Lashkar-e-Taiba within Pakistan-held territory.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's hackles are up, its military leaders raising the alert levels of their forces and threatening to divert troops from the Afghan border to the eastern border with India. Zardari's about-face on sending ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha to New Delhi is clearly a response to domestic pressure after Indian newspapers said Pasha was being "summoned." Similarly, the more vocally India calls on Zardari and Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kayani to crack down on militancy, the tougher politically it will be for them to do so lest they be seen as doing New Delhi's bidding.

In India, the same sort of perverse dynamics are at work. Already, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is making political hay out of the terror in Mumbai. The party has been running newspaper ads saying, "Fight Terror. Vote B.J.P." Instead of rallying behind Singh's government, the BJP has instead called for its resignation and accused Singh of being soft on terror. These tactics may well backfire, but based on the BJP's history of populist, anti-Muslim rhetoric, we should be concerned about its return to power.

Cranking up the pressure on Pakistan may fit the public mood in India -- and it may be smart politics for Singh and his ruling Congress Party -- but it is folly as policy.

Who benefits in Pakistan when tensions with India rise? Precisely the anti-democratic hardliners in the military and intelligence services, and the Islamic hardliners who are their sometime allies, that India should want to see marginalized. As one South Asia analyst told Reuters, "The forces that are threatening the West, the forces that are threatening the civilian democracy in Pakistan and the forces who are acting against India are all interlinked to each other."

We should pray that Singh has the wisdom and the political acumen to navigate this minefield more skillfully than he has thus far.

A few more supposed details from the interrogation of Ajmal Kamal, the militant who was captured, are trickling out in the Indian press. It seems pretty clear from all of the reports that 10-12 bad guys entered the city by inflatable boat. (The New York Times has some good color on their arrival at the Mumbai docks.) Beyond that, accounts differ widely.

Some stories say that there were eight terrorists already waiting in the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Hotels. The Times of India claims that all of the terrorists were Pakistani citizens, and that they had expected to make it back on the fishing trawler they hijacked. This was not a suicide mission.

To give you an idea of how disparate the accounts can be, the Times names the skipper of this purloined vessel as Amarjit Singh, while The Hindu says his name was Balwant Tandel. Rediff says there were two fishing boats. The Times says the terrorists left from "an isolated creek near Karachi," while Rediff reports that "Intelligence Bureau officials are trying to verify if the terrorists came in through the Persian Gulf." Rediff also mentions that its information comes from the interrogation of "Abu Ismail," while according to the Times a terrorist named "Ismail" was killed at Girgaum Chowpaty, a local beach.

All of the Indian press accounts I've read, however, point explicitly to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani militant group. NDTV even claims that one of the terrorist's phones was "used to call Lashkar commander Yusuf Muzamil in Muzaffarabad," the group's headquarters in Pakistan.

UPDATE: The Washington Post clears up some of the mystery:

On the basis of preliminary inquiry, we know that there were a total of 10 terrorists. Nine have been eliminated, one is caught," said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. "They split into teams of two for action, and there were four at the Taj."

Indian television station NDTV reported earlier that, according to the chief minister of Mumbai, at least two of the militants arrested are British citizens.

"[I]t is too early to say whether or not any of them are British," British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told Sky News in response to the story.

It's an interesting potential wrinkle, but the usual caveats apply. Many of the reports coming out of the Indian press have proven unfounded or contradictory.

UPDATE: BBC News reports that there is "no evidence" as of yet that any of the attackers were British.

... perhaps stories like this explain the rumors?

Actor Joey Jeetun, 31, from London, told how he survived the terrorist assault on the Leopold cafe, next to the Taj Mahal hotel, because he was covered in other victims' blood and the gunmen thought he was dead.

Mr Jeetun said: "I just curled myself in the smallest ball I could and closed my eyes. After about five minutes it stopped and I opened my eyes. There were dead people next to me who had been shot in the head."

Mr Jeetun has an Asian appearance and once played the role of July 7 suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer in a Channel 5 documentary 7/7: Attack on London.

After police arrived at the cafe an officer pointed a gun at his head and he was detained as a possible terrorist suspect.

He said: "I was held in a police cell for 13 hours with a group of Arab looking men. They thought I was a suspect even though I said I was a British tourist."

The Hindu reports on the latest from Mumbai:

Maharashtra Police investigators say they have evidence that operatives of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the fidayeen-squad [suicide-squad] attacks in Mumbai — a charge which, if proven, could have far-reaching consequences for India-Pakistan relations.

Police sources said an injured terrorist captured during the fighting at the Taj Mahal hotel was tentatively identified as Ajmal Amir Kamal, a resident of Faridkot, near Multan, in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

Highly-placed police sources said two other Pakistani nationals had also been held in the course of intense fighting on Thursday.

All three, the sources said, identified themselves as members of a Lashkar fidayeen squad.

Based on the interrogation of the suspects, the investigators believe that one or more groups of Lashkar operatives left Karachi in a merchant ship early on Wednesday. Late that night, an estimated 12 fidayeen left the ship in a small boat and rowed some 10 nautical miles to Mumbai’s Gateway of India area.

The investigators say the fidayeen unit of which Mr. Kamal was a part then split up into at least six groups, each focussing on a separate target: Mumbai’s Nariman House, which is home to a large number of Israeli families and a Jewish prayer house; the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus rail station; the Cama hospital; the Girgaum seafront; and the Taj and Trident Oberoi hotels.

As usual, treat such early, anonymous reports with caution.

An interesting article by Alan Cowell and Mark McDonald in today's New York Times reveals an inconvenient truth about analysts who study terrorism: they often have wildly divergent views about the same events.

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.

There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage-taking and they don’t do grenades." By contrast, Mr. Gohel in London said "the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group."

Fair goes on to make the point that India has a lot of angry Muslims of its own, and has a history of telling the world, "Our Muslims have not been radicalized."

I would point out that the two main competing theories -- a domestic group and outside involvement -- are not mutually exclusive. Extremist groups have been known to share logistical networks (for safehouses, weapons procurement, etc.), and there aren't always bright lines between them. So, it could be that domestic perpetrators of the attack conceived and executed the idea, but operatives turned to Lashkar-e-Taiba or some other group for logistical help and expertise.

UPDATE: Here's a pretty strong clue that points to Kashmir:

A militant holed up at the center phoned an Indian television channel to offer talks with the government for the release of hostages, but also to complain about abuses in Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars.

"Ask the government to talk to us and we will release the hostages," the man, identified by the India TV channel as Imran, said, speaking in Urdu in what sounded like a Kashmiri accent.

"Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims. Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?"

On the other hand, a senior Indian military official seems pretty confident the militants are from Faridkot, Pakistan. One captured terrorist had a Punjabi accent.

One must always be suspicious when a "new" terrorist organization crops up. Today's horrific attacks in Mumbai were claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen. But one India journalist claims the pattern of the attacks suggests that Lashkar-e-Taiba, a nasty Islamist organization based in Lahore, Pakistan, and with a significant presence in Kashmir and links to al Qaeda, may be to blame.

Here's where it gets interesting -- and I stress here that I am just speculating. Lashkar-e-Taiba's main goal is to expel India from Kashmir. In the past, some have accused elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence services of having ties to the group. Pakistan's government has always hotly denied such accusations.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has in recent weeks moved closer to the United States, made some significant gestures toward India, and moved to shut down the political wing of the ISI, Pakisan's powerful intelligence service (that's the unit that tries to steal elections). How likely is it that some angry "rogue elements" of the ISI, aligned with Kashmiri jihadists and a team of Indian domestic extremists, sought to head off these moves? I have no idea, but it's definitely a theory worth exploring.

There's another more straighforward explanation for today's attacks -- revenge. A group calling itself the "Indian Mujahideen" has claimed responsibility for attacks in a number of different cities over the past several months. The Indian Mujahideen sent a warning in September expressing anger over recent raids by the city's antiterrorism squad (ATS). Today's message from the Deccan Mujahideen appears to be identical:

You should know that your acts are not at all left unnoticed; rather we are closely keeping an eye on you and just waiting for the right time to execute your bloodshed. We are aware of your recent raids at Ansarnagar, Mograpada in Andheri and the harassment and trouble you created there for the Muslims.

"You threatened to murder them and your mischief went to such an extent that you even dared to abuse and insult Maulana Mahmood-ul-Hasan Qasmi and even misbehaved with the Muslim women and children there.

"If this is the degree your arrogance has reached, and if you think that by these stunts you can scare us, then let the Indian Mujahideen warn all the people of Mumbai that whatever deadly attacks Mumbaikars will face in future, their responsibility would lie with the Mumbai ATS and their guardians - Vilasrao Deshmukh and R R Patil. You are already on our hit-list and this time very very seriously."

The chief of Mumbai's ATS was killed in a gun battle with some of the attackers today.

UPDATE: On CNN just now, terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna says that the Indian Mujahideen are most likely to blame, and they are the same group as the Deccan Mujahideen. "No other group has the capability," he said, emphasizing the group's strength in Mumbai. He also pointed out that such attacks would have taken months of planning.

It was previously reported that today's coordinated terrorist attacks in Mumbai killed at least 10. It now seems to be much worse.

Here's the latest headline from Reuters:

At least 80 killed, 250 injured in Mumbai attacks, police say; Mumbai attackers holding Western hostages at Taj Hotel: reports

Update: Witness accounts indicate that the attacks were directed at foreigners in India's financial capital:

"They wanted anyone with British or American passports," a witness at the Taj Hotel, who said he was from London and was in India on business, told the NDTV news channel. He had smoke stains all over his face. "They wanted foreigners."

More eyewitness accounts from the BBC.

Update2: Reactions from the Indian blogosphere on Global Voices.

Who would dare challenge Google, the superman of the Internet age?

India, that's who.

Fresh off the high of its recent lunar achievements, India is taking on the powerful Internet search company on a playing field a little closer to home: Google Earth. 

The Indian Based Research Organization (ISRO) plans to launch its Web-based mapping system, Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), by spring. The data comes from India's network of 50 satellites.

So, why does India think its program can compete? For starters, Bhuvan users will be able to zoom in on areas as small as 10 meters wide (Google's zoom limit is 200 meters). ISRO will replenish its high-resolution images each year, unlike Google, and its additional GPS component could lead to partnerships on navigation devices for cars.

While initially the program only covers India, if successful, Bhuvan will extend across the globe. ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair also hopes that the online software will lead to improvement India's notoriously bad offline hardware -- potholed road, clogged cities, and degraded environment. "This will not be a mere browser," he says. "but the mechanism for providing satellite images and thematic maps for developmental planning."

This autumn, an ancient trade route that crosses the disputed Kashmiri border between India and Pakistan opened after being closed 61 years ago, when the two countries broke free of the British Empire. Many hope the opening of the trade route, in a bitterly disputed Himalayan region, will boost the economy on both sides of the “Line of Control” that divides the territory. In the photo above, the first truck carrying goods from the Pakistani side rumbles across the bridge to the Indian side.

For Kashmir's artisans, famed for their rugs, copper bowls, and other handicrafts, the opening of the trade route is a sign of hope. Check out some of their beautiful creations and learn more about the trade route in this week's photo essay, "Making Peace, One Trinket at a Time."

TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/Getty Images

Brent Stirton/Getty Images for the GBC

Along with many other aspects of customer service, U.S. debt collection has been outsourced to Indian call centers. As Emily Wax reports in a great piece for the Washington Post, the collection agents, who adopt fake American names and accents when talking to customers, have a unique perspective on the U.S. mortgage meltdown:

The subculture of call centers tends to foster a cult of America, an over-the-top fantasy where hopes and dreams are easily accomplished by people who live in a brand-name wonderland of high-paying jobs, big houses and luxury getaways.

But collection agents at this call center outside New Delhi are starting to see the flip side of that vision: a country hobbled by debt and filled with people scared of losing their jobs, their houses and their cars.

"Lately, 25-year-old Americans are telling me that they are declaring themselves bankrupt," said Chaturvedi, raising her eyebrows in shock. "These days the situation is so emotional, so fragile. We have to have so much empathy and patience."

"It's like people are totally drowning," said Omkar Gadgil, 24, who goes by the alias Richard Rudy and was a math major in college. He is brainy and considered the office expert on the intricacies of debt collection. "There has just been years of overspending and now: the crash."

In the past, debt-saddled customers were often annoyed by Chaturvedi's calls from the open-air office at Aegis BPO Services. But now they seem depressed, defeated. Even the men sob into the phone, several agents said.

Sadly, I have a feeling that these customers would be pretty enraged if they realized where the sympathetic voice on the phone was coming from. In moments of severe economic distress, people tend not to marvel at the wonders of globalization.

President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan suprised quite a few with his comments about relations with India in a Wall Street Journal interview over the weekend:

When I ask whether he would consider a free-trade agreement with traditional archenemy India, Mr. Zardari responds with a string of welcome, perhaps even historic, surprises. "India has never been a threat to Pakistan," he says, adding that "I, for one, and our democratic government is not scared of Indian influence abroad." He speaks of the militant Islamic groups operating in Kashmir as "terrorists" -- former President Musharraf would more likely have called them "freedom fighters" -- and allows that he has no objection to the India-U.S. nuclear cooperation pact, so long as Pakistan is treated "at par." "Why would we begrudge the largest democracy in the world getting friendly with one of the oldest democracies in the world?"

Not only does Mr. Zardari want better ties with Delhi, he notes that "there is no other economic survival for nations like us. We have to trade with our neighbors first." He imagines Pakistani cement factories being constructed to provide for India's huge infrastructure needs, Pakistani textile mills meeting Indian demand for blue jeans, Pakistani ports being used to relieve the congestion at Indian ones. For a country that spent most of its existence trying to show that it's the military equal of its neighbor, the agenda amounts to a remarkable recognition of the strides India has made in becoming a true world power.

Zardari's description of the Kashmir rebels as "terrorists" rather than "freedom fighters" or "jihadis" as Pakistani politicians have traditionally referred to them was particularly controversial. Kashmiri seperatists responded by breaking curfew to protest and burn him in effigy. Zardari has since walked back his remarks somewhat, assuring the public that there's no change in Pakistan's Kashmir policy.

While it would be great if Zardari intended to get serious about normalizing relations with India, it seems like there might have been a bettter way to go about it than overturning decades of military policy through an off-the-cuff remark to an American reporter. Given how fragile his political position is, he might want to cover his flanks a bit more thoroughly before he makes another comment like this.

Kristoffer Tripplaar-Pool/Getty Images

Despite all the turmoil in Congress these days, a bill authorizing the U.S.-India nuclear deal has been quietly moving forward, and yesterday it passed the Senate 86-13. This is one of the last steps in the approval process -- it follows what I and many others thought were almost insurmountable obstacles to the deal in the Indian Parliament and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The summary of the bill, released yesterday, lists several notable provisions that I want to highlight briefly. It notes explicitly that approval of the deal is based on U.S. interpretations of the terms. This means that, contrary to a declaration by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the agreement would not mitigate any penalties incurred by future Indian nuclear tests. For instance, the United States views fuel supply assurances as a political, not a legal, commitment that would almost certainly be suspended in the event of further nuclear tests.

In addition, before any licenses can be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under this agreement, India's safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency must enter fully into force. At the same time, India's declaration of civilian nuclear facilities must be consistent with the one issued by New Delhi in 2006.

This and several other provisions seem to be designed to allow the United States opportunities to prevent or halt technology transfer if circumstances call for it. Such potential loopholes also highlight one particularly important fact: The deal's approval does not necessarily mean the United States will actually sell much civilian nuclear technology to India. It is now legal to do so in most cases, but political, bureaucratic, economic, or diplomatic barriers may nonetheless end up being too problematic to overcome. Indeed, the Bush administration secretly told Congress it would not sell "sensitive" nuclear technologies to India in a letter earlier this month. For those unhappy with this deal, the details of the bill leave America with plenty of wiggle room.

In India, where monkeys are a menace, one man is getting paid $7 per day to rid a train station of its loitering monkeys. The man dresses as a monkey and scares away the simians, who are known to snatch bananas from passengers.

Watch the video here:

The Japanese sure could have used this man in August when a monkey created a commotion at a Tokyo subway station.

Are you a Wall Street exec worried that Congress will take away your fat paycheck, while most of America cheers?

Be grateful you're not a CEO in India, where a mob of angry factory workers just beat to death the head of a company that had laid them off.

FILE; JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

There's a fascinating article in today's New York Times about India's controversial practice of using electronic brain scans for lie-detection in interrogation. Two Indian states have been using electroencephalograms (EEGs) to interrogate criminal suspects since 2006, but this summer was the first time a judge handed down a conviction based on the data. Here's how the procedure works:

This latest Indian attempt at getting past criminals’ defenses begins with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, in which electrodes are placed on the head to measure electrical waves. The suspect sits in silence, eyes shut. An investigator reads aloud details of the crime — as prosecutors see it — and the resulting brain images are processed using software built in Bangalore.

The software tries to detect whether, when the crime’s details are recited, the brain lights up in specific regions — the areas that, according to the technology’s inventors, show measurable changes when experiences are relived, their smells and sounds summoned back to consciousness. The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed.

Based on this scan, a woman who claims to be innocent was convicted in June of poisoning her fiancé.

Neuroscientists have widely condemned this application of EEGs, which has not been sufficiently peer-reviewed to have gained wide acceptance. It's not too far-fetched, though, to see it as the future of criminal investigation. Officials from Singapore and Israel have expressed interest in the Indian program and similar procedures have been developed in the United States.

Before we condemn India for using such an unproven technology in murder trials, it's worth pointing out that U.S. law enforcement agencies still regularly administer polygraph tests even though the Supreme Court ruled them unreliable a decade ago. And of course, there's bullet lead analysis, which the FBI used for four decades before it was discredited.

Let's just be sure these new technologies really work this time around before we start putting them in front of juries.

Emily Wax, reporting in today's Washington Post, thinks so. Considering the longtime rivalry between the two neighbors, this seems counterintuitive at first. But Musharraf, at the very least, was a known quantity for India. Despite his imperfections, the general-turned-president was a source of stability, and his resignation marks an uncertain future for India-Pakistan relations:

He was India's best bet in Pakistan. We will miss Musharraf," said A.G. Noorani, a constitutional lawyer and Kashmir expert. "If he had not fired his judges and gotten bogged down in domestic dramas, I believe we would have been able to make a significant breakthrough in a peace deal in Kashmir today."

Unfortunately, those "domestic dramas" took a decidedly undemocratic turn, and firing the judges was a desperate move to cling to power. The question now for the two countries is whether recent tensions had more to do with Musharraf's waning influence, or his undermining the civilian government by refusing to bow out. Hopefully it's the latter, but I'm not convinced.

Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

While Kim Jong Il tries to throw his weight around on the world stage, one North Korean has actually done it. Today, Pak Hyon Suk won her country's first Olympic gold medal in Beijing, beating out the favorites in the 63 kg women's weightlifting category. This is the first time a North Korean has won a gold in women's weightlifting since the event started in 2000 (China, by contrast, has swept all five of the weightlifting categories it has entered in these games).

Pak was nearly eliminated after failing at her first two attempts. But, with a little help from "Dear Leader" (who declined an invitation to attend the games), she made it through. Says Pak:

[W]hen I was about to do my third attempt, I kept in my head the thought that my dear general's eyes will be upon me ...And that thought by itself was great encouragement, and that's how I managed to lift the last weight."

Pak may be the first North Korean on the medal stand this year but her country has picked up eight golds over the years, putting it well ahead of the chronic Olympic underperformers on FP's recent list. At least India finally broke its gold medal curse with a win in 10-meter air rifle on Monday.