Elections, mass media and short-termism in foreign policy making: the case of Afghan war

After nearly eight years of conflict in Afghanistan it appears that the campaign is at its final stretch, with US and British troop withdrawals on the cards. However Nima Khorrami Assl writes that our short-termist strategies in Afghanistan expose inherent problems with the democratic process in producing effective foreign policy and that this is further complicated by an influential mass media

Jacobian of meromorphic curves

The contact structure of two meromorphic curves gives a factorization of their jacobian.Comment: 41 pages, amstex, to be published in the Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Science

The embedding conjecture for quasi-ordinary hypersurfaces

This paper has two objectives: we first generalize the theory of Abhyankar-Moh to quasi-ordinary polynomials, then we use the notion of approximate roots and that of generalized Newton polygons in order to prove the embedding conjecture for this class of polynomials. This conjecture -made by S.S. Abhyankar and A. Sathaye- says that if a hypersurface of the affine space is isomorphic to a coordinate, then it is equivalent to it