John Stanmeyer/Vll

No one has more domestic servants than the Brazilians. But a new law is designed to move those downstairs upward.

Complaining about the hired help in Brazil is as old as the New World. And yet like the nightly telenovela, where the storyline often turns on maids and masters, the comfortable classes can’t seem to do without their household staff. No country has more domestic servants than Brazil: some 7.2 million, according to a recent report by the World Labor Organization (or 6.6 million, according to Brazilian government figures). By contrast, India, with five times the population, has 4.

Photodisc, Alamy, Getty, Alamy, Getty (2)

Before There Were Scientists The word “scientist” was not coined until 1833. Before that, scientific disciplines were the domain of mostly wealthy men and women who called themselves “natural philosophers.” They might have had curiosity cabinets full of fossils, concoctions, and pickled bits of anatomy, but laboratories were few and far between. Then, oddly, the eccentric, opium-imbibing poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge challenged this use of the metaphysical-sounding word “philosopher.

STR/AP

Russia’s president now gets to tell the West ‘I told you so’ about Chechens after the Tsarnaev brothers were revealed as the bombing suspects, Chechnya’s opposition prime minister, Akhmed Zakayev, tells Michael Moynihan.

In another life, Akhmed Zakayev was a renowned actor, a severe-looking young Shakespearean who often played Caius Marcius Coriolanus and Hamlet in Grozny’s tiny theater scene. After the fall of the Soviet Union, in the violent tumult that followed Chechnya’s declaration of independence, he abandoned the stage for the battlefield, becoming a highly regarded rebel commander and navigating various political appointments (culture minister, foreign minister, deputy prime minister).

Tribeca Film Festival

The new documentary, which screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, captures the perils of enlisting local fighters to take on more sophisticated menaces.

The documentary The Project, shown this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, gives a glimpse into one future for the war on terrorism.The film documents the creation of the Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF) to hunt the pirates that have menaced the coastal waters of Somalia in recent years. But the mission is very similar to the large-scale counterinsurgencies America fought in Iraq and is still fighting in Afghanistan. Train the locals to fight the bad guys, so the Westerners don’t have to fight them.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

After a brief post-9/11 burst, counterterrorism cooperation between the U.S. and Russia never really got off the ground. But in the wake of the Boston bombings and as the Sochi Olympics approaches, that has to change, says Rand Center for Russia and Eurasia director Andrew S. Weiss.

Amid the frenzy of speculation about the Chechen roots of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, I was reminded of a meeting Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, and I had with Vladimir Putin two years before 9/11 in New Zealand.Putin’s chief of staff, Igor Sechin, and I were milling around waiting for the meeting to start. My pager buzzed with a message from the White House Situation Room about a bombing at an apartment building in suburban Moscow that had killed more than 100 people.

Anjum Naveed/AP

The poor ex-Pakistani president hasn’t had much luck since his return to Karachi. No Facebook. Only house arrest. Adan Siddiqi on whether Musharraf will ever taste freedom again.

Part of a wall fencing off Pervez Musharraf's farmhouse in Islamabad collapsed from heavy winds on Saturday, summing up the many troubles the former Pakistani president and Army chief has had to weather since he ended some four years of self-imposed exile and landed in Karachi last month.Musharraf came to participate in Pakistan's upcoming elections, despite risks from Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who have tried to kill him before and have vowed to get him now; the party whose government he ousted in 1999 and which is now polling ahead of others; and judges he sacked in 2007—which includes the country's powerful chief justice.

Jaime Garcia / CEET

A strongman who kept order in Colombia’s wild emerald industry, Victor Carranza lived through two assassination attempts and lots of violence. Toby Muse on the kingpin’s crazy life.

In a life crammed with surprises, perhaps none was greater than the fact that Victor Carranza, Colombia’s emerald czar, should pass away in a hospital bed at the respectable age of 77. Even into his 70s, Carranza was fighting off assassinations attempts. In the end it wasn't the poison he so feared or the assassin’s bullet, but lung cancer that ended his life on April 4.Carranza was the last national figure of Colombia’s violence, a household name that evoked the drug trade, far-right death squads, political violence and above all, emeralds.

AP; AFP/Getty

What happened besides the Boston Marathon bombing, ricin attacks, and the massive Texas explosion? Quite a few major news events, actually.

Between the Boston bombing, attempted political poisonings, the Senate’s defeat of gun-control legislation, and a deadly Texas plant explosion, we haven’t heard much about, well, basically anything else. If these last few days have you fatigued and wondering what is wrong with the world (or nodding along with a recent Onion article aptly titled “Jesus, This Week,” here are some other news stories that managed to slip under the radar.We can’t guarantee these overlooked events are any less depressing, but at least you’ll have an extra bit of knowledge to throw around at this weekend’s cocktail parties.

Matt Rourke/AP

Russia, the U.S., and Israel: these are some of the targets of the global jihad. Bruce Riedel on why al Qaeda likely welcomes the Boston attack, whether they had any role in it or not.

The two Chechen immigrants apparently responsible for the terror attack on the Boston Marathon may never have had any contact with al Qaeda—or even a single member of al Qaeda—but they are likely soon to be lauded as “heroes” of the global jihad.It is much too soon to come to any hard conclusions about the motives and intentions of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged perpetrators, but it is not too soon to understand how al Qaeda and associated jihadists see the Chechen struggle against Russia in the context of their own ideology and narrative.

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In a country where homosexuality was classified as a mental illness until quite recently, gays and lesbians are finding novel ways to “act straight.” By Joanna Chiu.

Xiaojiong has the ultimate online dating success story. On a Chinese matchmaking forum, she not only found her current husband—she found her current girlfriend, too.Born in Shenyang, a city in the northeastern province of Liaoning, Xiaojiong grew up not knowing another lesbian. As a teenager searching for love, or at least some friends, she sometimes took the train down to Beijing but felt awkward in the city's rowdy girl bars.The Internet changed everything.