Mohammad Sajjad/AP

Sharif, Pakistan’s former prime minister, once faced possible execution. Now he will return to the nation’s highest office. Bruce Riedel on the inside story of Sharif’s odyssey.

Nawaz Sharif is the comeback kid of Pakistani politics. With his party’s electoral victory, he is poised to become prime minister for an unprecedented third time. The Sharif odyssey has been remarkable—but now we will see if he can convert his victory into a new beginning for his deeply troubled country and our own tortured relations with it.Sharif, 63, was born into money as the scion of a very wealthy family in Lahore. He entered politics to protect the family’s industry from nationalization.

AP

Turkish officials were quick to tie two deadly car bombs to Syria, arresting nine men they said were linked to Syrian intelligence. Mike Giglio reports on the fallout—and Prime Minister Erdogan’s Washington visit this week.

Abdul Majid was a schoolteacher in Aleppo before Syria’s civil war reached the city, and like many Syrians—some 25,000, according to the local government—he now calls the Turkish border town of Reyhanli home. On Saturday evening, after a trip out of town, Majid was headed back to Reyhanli on a public bus when it was stopped and boarded by police. The officers had a warning for the Syrian passengers: when they got to Reyhanli, they should hide.

Antonio Calanni/AP

A vicious spate of copycat acid crimes has shocked the European country—and reveals a deep-seated culture of violence against women. Warning: graphic images below.

When Vania Del Col, 31, opened her door to her Vicenza apartment last Thursday, she found two hooded men waiting for her. They forced their way into her home and pushed her to the floor. Then they poured acid from a glass bottle on her, severely burning her arms and buttocks. The assailants also threw acid on a dog in the adjacent yard. Del Col had survived a brutal rape by an ex-boyfriend in 2002 and the man, who served just under four years for that attack, is the primary suspect, though his whereabouts are unknown.

Musadeq Sadeq/AP

For four years, foreign correspondent Heidi Vogt was always one of the first people to file when a bomb went off in Afghanistan. But as U.S. troops begin to draw down, there is also a corresponding press drawdown that will prevent Americans from hearing the full story.

KABUL, Afghanistan — The first thing is always the boom. Then the rattling of window frames. Then I look up from my computer for someone to make eye contact with. My Afghan colleague does the same. “Was that?” “Did you feel?” We both rush for the stairs, running up to the roof to look for smoke. As I go, I flip through other options in my head: Earthquake? No. Gas tank explosion? Unlikely. The military blowing up a weapons cache? Maybe.When I reach the roof, the photographers and cameramen are already there.

Cpl. Reece Lodder

Carter Malkasian, one of the American government's top experts on Afghanistan, spent two years with locals in one remote district, resulting in his new book, ‘War Comes to Garmser.’ John Kael Weston speaks to Malkasian about what he learned from a dusty corner of the country.

Carter Malkasian spent almost two years as a political officer with the State Department in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province. He is considered one of the U.S. government’s top experts on Afghanistan and counterinsurgency. His new book, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier, stands out for its in-depth analysis of one district, Garmser, located on the east bank of the Helmand River. Perhaps the rarest quality of his writing is the level of detail he provides into Afghans—their lives, stories, and sacrifices.

Lale Koklu/Andolu Agency, via AP

Two car bombs detonated in a Turkish border town Saturday in what appears to be a dramatic spillover of violence from the civil war in Syria. Mike Giglio reports from the scene.

Two car bombs rocked the Turkish border town of Reyhanli on Saturday in what officials suggested was an unprecedented spillover of violence from the Syrian civil war. The blasts killed some 40 people and wounded more than 100, inflaming tensions in an area already badly strained by the conflict raging just miles away.No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks. But many of Reyhanli’s Turkish residents suspected that a faction from the Syrian conflict was likely to blame, and some quickly turned on the Syrians who have flooded the town seeking refuge over the last two years.

Muhammed Muheisen/AP

Millions went to the polls on Saturday in the country's first democratic transition of power between civilian governments. Jahanzeb Aslam on what the outcome means for the U.S.

Millions of Pakistanis voted in the country’s general elections on Saturday, its first democratic transition of power between two civilian governments. But while the 2013 elections are being seen as a herald of change and reform in Pakistan, they could cause further problems for Pak-U.S. relations as NATO forces prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014.Washington relies on Islamabad to fight militants in the tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Yevgeny Khaldei/Corbis

From Syria’s breakdown to Europe’s new anti-Semitism to the shock after Boston, we are again missing the warning signs of the brutality of which humanity is capable.

“The human species is a deeply flawed biological product”—so wrote my countryman Arthur Koestler.There is ample evidence to confirm Koestler’s thesis: the carnage in Syria, the grotesque imprisonment and sexual abuse of young women in Cleveland, the lethal Boston Marathon explosions, and the Sandy Hook massacre, even the rise of anti-Semitism in my native Hungary, from which my parents, my sister, and I escaped to America in the aftermath of the Soviets’ 1956 invasion.

PA, via Landov

On Friday, Britain's home secretary reopened the case of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator found murdered in 1987 after attempting to expose police corruption connected to the News of the World. Peter Jukes talks to the victim's brother, who hopes the true story behind Morgan's death will finally be revealed.

It is Britain’s biggest unsolved murder, and described by a senior police officer as “the pivotal crime of the times.” It plunges into the heart of what former prime minister Gordon Brown called the “criminal-media nexus” exposed by the hacking and bribes scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid titles. Only on this occasion the crimes went well beyond privacy intrusion and corrupt payments, to a brutal killing.On Friday, home secretary Theresa May announced a judge-led public inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, who was found with an axe embedded in his head in a South London car park in 1987.

Weegee(Arthur Fellig)/ICP/Getty; Tom Miller

David Cannadine is a distinguished historian of the British aristocracy, but can he end our binary view of human history once and for all, or will he be ostracized by his peers?

Historians need conflict as poets need spring. Just a smattering of examples: Frederick J. Teggart, writing as the First World War came to an end, called civilization “the result of the stimulus evoked by the friction of one group upon another.” The same year, the declinist Oswald Spengler disagreed with Teggart that one group can stimulate another, but he was not against the fact that civilizations clash. “Between the souls of two cultures the screen is impenetrable,” he wrote in the best-selling Decline of the West.