The Londoner

A senior government official said that the government and party leaders gave the military full backing on Friday, vowing to weed out militants and restore the writ of the state. "The ground operation has begun," said Tariq Hayat Khan, the secretary of Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun tribal regions. The army has said about 28,000 soldiers are in place to take on an estimated 10,000 hard-core Taliban. About 500 commandos arrived in the region on Friday, security officials said. The army has stepped up its air and artillery attacks in recent days to soften up the militants' defences while civilians have been fleeing. The militants have launched a series of brazen attacks in the past 12 days, striking at the United Nations, the army headquarters, police and the general public, killing more than 150 people and apparently trying to stave off the army assault. The head of the army, General Ashfaq Kayani briefed government and party leaders on Friday and they all agreed that the mi...

Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomia, "management of a household, administration") from οἶκος (oikos, "house") + νόμος (nomos, "custom" or "law"), hence "rules of the house(hold)".Current economic models developed out of the broader field of political economy in the late 19th century, owing to a desire to use an empirical approach more akin to the physical sciences. A definition that captures much of modern economics is that of Lionel Robbins in a 1932 essay: "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."Scarcity means that available resources are insufficient to satisfy all wants and needs. Absent scarcity and alternative uses of available resources, there is no economic problem. The subject thus defined invol...