On Fidel Castro’s Friendships With Literary Giants

Whatever else he may have been, it seems that Castro was an avid reader—“ours is an intellectual friendship,” Gabriel García Márquez once said—and he has been tied to a number of literary figures over the years, with varying degrees of importance, not to mention veracity. Here's a brief history of Castro’s relationships, whether good, bad, or not actually very real, with some of the most famous writers of our time.
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‘Born a Crime,’ Trevor Noah’s Raw Account of Life Under Apartheid

His memoir provides a harrowing look, through the prism of Mr. Noah’s family, at life in South Africa under apartheid, and the country’s entry into a postapartheid era.
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China Warns of Safety Risks as Rally in Coal Price Spurs Mining

Soaring coal prices have spurred a surge in potentially dangerous mining activity in China, prompting a government warning about the risk of increased casualties in a country that is home to some of the world’s deadliest mines.
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How a Genius Is Different from a Really Smart Person

The most intelligent two percent of people in the world. These are the people who qualify for membership in Mensa, an exclusive international society open only to people who score at or above the 98th percentile on an IQ or other standardized intelligence test. Mensa’s mission remains the same as when it was founded in Oxford, England, in 1946: To identify and nurture human intelligence for humanity’s benefit, to foster research in the nature of intelligence, and to provide social and other opportunities for its members.
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The Plot to Kill Martin Luther King: Survived Shooting, Was Murdered in Hospital

MLK was murdered in a conspiracy instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and that also involved the U.S. military, the Memphis Police and “Dixie Mafia” crime figures in Memphis, Tennessee… By Craig McKee.
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This Military Base Is Where China Blasts Humans Into Space

Take a look inside.
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Inside Bolivia’s Skull Festival, Where the Dead Get Diamonds and Sunglasses

“Here death isn’t so final.” By Paul Koudounaris.
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How the Internet Works (“Works”) in North Korea

Twenty years after it began changing lives in other countries, the internet isn’t even a concept for the average North Korean—so much so that most people in the country of 25 million literally don’t know what they are missing. And that’s by design.
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In photos: Standing Rock digs in

The encampment set up to protest a pipeline in North Dakota is now more of a small town, and it’s not going anywhere. By Hilary Beaumont.
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Creepy Futures: Nicholas Carr’s History of the Future

The history of the future is replete with horrible utopias. By Geoff Nunberg.
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Spomenik Database | The Monumental History of Yugoslavia

The Spomenik Database explores the Yugoslavia's historic and enigmatic endeavor into grand-scale post-modern monument building from the 1960-1980s.
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Fidel Knew the 'Cuban Model' Couldn't Last Forever

If these were ordinary times, I might argue that the death of Fidel Castro, the revolutionary who brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, the dictator who outlasted 10 U.S. presidents and nearly outlasted an 11th, marks the symbolic end not only of the Cold War but of the 20th century itself. But these are not ordinary times, and I suspect that El Commandante, if he was in command of any of his faculties in his final months, was watching the machinations and manipulations of Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB man and current dictator of Russia, with some wonder, and more than a little envy.
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Philippines' Duterte describes Western threats of ICC indictment as 'bullshit'

Dead Poll candidate
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Video Shows White Helmets Staging Fake Rescue In Syria

Video of the controversial aid group Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the “White Helmets,” has leaked showing the staging of a fake rescue. By Dan Wright.
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His brother’s keeper, Robert F. Kennedy saw conspiracy in JFK’s assassination

More than the president’s brother and attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy was his lead hand on the hardest matters, the ones that made them some dangerous foes. After the assassination, he was left to wonder if one among them had done it. By Bryan Bender and Neil Swidey. (Nov. 24, 2013)
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An Irishman’s Diary on the Belgian refugees of 1914-18

My native Monaghan is famous (nearly) as the “county of the little hills”. Less well known is that for a period after the first World War, it was also the county of the little lace numbers – a brand of high-quality lingerie introduced by Belgian refugees. Actually, the numbers weren’t that little, by today’s standards. And they were more embroidery than lace. Even so, the theory that there was no sex in Ireland until “the bishop and the nightie” affair of 1966 may need to be revisited...
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Eggleston’s Empty America

In William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest: Selected Works, the photographer’s charge to himself seems to be, “Make a picture of nothing at all,” the emptiness takes on a special character. By Alexander Nemerov.
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First Brexit then Trump. Is Italy next for the west’s populist wave?

Italians will soon vote in a referendum on constitutional reforms which could have dramatic results for all of Europe. By Julian Coman.
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Photographs of historical England 'challenge Downton Abbey myth'

Images of factories, schools, universities and civic buildings rising among old streetscapes – but also of rotting houses, barefoot children and faces pinched with poverty – have been unearthed from millions of photographs of late 19th- and early 20th-century England. Philip Davies, an architectural historian, spent seven years trawling through the photographs, compiling the best 1,500 into a 558-page book titled "Lost England."
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Occult Americans

It’s Impossible to Separate Strangeness from American History — And That’s a Good Thing to Remember on Occult Day. By Mitch Horowitz.
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Who speaks for the [British] state?

What is the proper distribution of power between Parliament and the executive? It’s a question raised by the recent High Court decision in Miller v. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union… By Frederick Wilmot-Smith.
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Hawaii's Crazy War Over Zombie Cats

There is an evolutionary death match under way in Hawaii, where half a million feral cats, some of them infected with a terrifying zombie parasite, are wreaking havoc on endangered species. Some people call them the "kitties of doom." Others will do anything to save them.
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Adam Curtis and the Secret History of Everything

In the British filmmaker’s epic documentaries, the world as we know it is pulled back to reveal a complex web of history, technology and power. By Jonathan Lethem.
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A Buddhist monk explains mindfulness for times of conflict

“Compassion is not sitting in your room; it’s actually very active and engaging,” a senior disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh says.
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Fidel Castro condemned as 'dictator' who killed and abused his own people

As Cuba embarks on nine days of national mourning for Fidel Castro, dissidents and exiles around the world labelled the revolutionary a dictator whose “crimes against his own people” must not be forgotten. “History will absolve me,” he once told judges of the regime he would eventually overthrow, transforming Cuba into a Communist state and incurring the wrath of the US and its punishing trade embargo.
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Covert CIA plot to wait until Fidel Castro dies of old age successful

Langley, VA - A decades-long plot to get Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to pass away peacefully in his sleep has come to fruition, according to a statement from the CIA.
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Ceiling

The ceiling in one of my favorite places - the museum Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. New edition of a photo from 2009.
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Fidel Castro Biography

This is a beautifully made documentary packed with rare archive footage and photographs. It shows Castro's childhood, his recklessness as a youth, his blossoming talents at the University of Havana and then his swift and complex ride to lawyer, jailbird, guerilla, politician and revolutionary. Adored and deplored, Castro's life makes compelling viewing.
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Stadium Pow Wow

A Tribe Called Red
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Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
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The UK is about to wield unprecedented surveillance powers — here’s what it means

The UK is about to become one of the world’s foremost surveillance states, allowing its police and intelligence agencies to spy on its own people to a degree that is unprecedented for a democracy. By James Vincent.
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Venezuela’s Currency Just Had the Biggest Monthly Collapse Ever

Venezuela’s currency - the so-called “strong bolivar” - is weakening beyond levels that analysts had forecast just a few weeks ago as an expanding money supply chases a limited amount of U.S. dollars.
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When Slaveholders Controlled the Government

An interview with Matthew Karp about his book, This Vast Southern Empire, and the international politics of American slavery. By Timothy Shenk.
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Miami Beach has run out of sand. Now what?

For years the sea has been eating away at the shore, and the city has spent millions of dollars pumping up sand from the seafloor to replace it, only to have it wash away again. By Josh Dzieza.
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Rarely Seen Photos by Jack London

A new book features the photography of Jack London, along with his words, chronicling poverty in London and the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake.
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I Was a Teenage Nazi Wannabe

I was nearly expelled from high school my senior year, just before graduation. Only my grades, acceptance to a relatively prestigious college, and privileged position as the son of one of the pillars of the local economy prevented it. I was a weird kid: artsy, fay, obsessed with conspiracies, science fiction, Ayn Rand, and the occult. Out of a weird mash of the X-Files, the Turner Diaries and anti-government paranoia, Frank Herbert novels, Ubermensch libertarianism, Aleister Crowley, Indiana Jones, and over-the-counter dissociatives...
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Ice cream for breakfast makes you smarter, Japanese scientist claims

In a discovery that will give nutritionists the shivers, a Japanese scientist has discovered that consuming ice cream for breakfast improves a person's alertness and mental performance.
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Facebook's ideals: As fake as its fakest news

To the social network, you're just a stack of numbers.
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Merkel warns against fake news driving populist gains

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Wednesday against the power of fake news on social media to spur the rise of populists, after launching her campaign for a fourth term.
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Rice farming in India much older than thought, used as 'summer crop' by Indus civilisation

Thought to have arrived from China in 2000 BC, latest research shows domesticated rice agriculture in India and Pakistan existed centuries earlier, and suggests systems of seasonal crop variation that would have provided a rich and diverse diet for the Bronze Age residents of the Indus valley.
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Why Trump is right, and wrong, about killing off the TPP

The United States and other countries are right to reject the TPP, but President-elect Donald Trump's claims about it are misguided.
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Mapping the Watery Future of New York City

What will happen to the city when the polar ice caps melt?
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Top Manhattan Street Art

Yes, New York City is the best city in the world for art. Museums and galleries galore and every block painted with an interesting piece of art.
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Germans are Europeans most immune to populism: study

The survey, seen exclusively by Die Welt, shows that around 18 percent of Germans are receptive to populist forms of politics. This is considerably lower than in the UK and Italy, where just under half the population were seen to have a weakness for populist politics, and far below France at 63 percent.
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The hygge conspiracy

This year’s most overhyped trend is a wholesome Danish concept of cosiness, used to sell everything from fluffy socks to vegan shepherd’s pie. But the version we’re buying is a British invention – and the real thing is less cuddly than it seems.
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The 22 syllables that can get you killed

Afghan women express forbidden love through secret poems, or landays. Eliza Griswold looks at the words of rebellion that have been passed down for centuries.
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As Trump Tweets about SNL and Broadway Shows, China’s Xi Jinping Embraces a New, Powerful Role

The election of Donald J. Trump as the next US president is widely expected to propel China, and Chinese president Xi Jinping, into a new role. Trump’s talk of increasing trade barriers, disdain for global organizations and agreements, and a focus on a domestic agenda could create a more isolationist US, leaving China to fill the gap.
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Portugal: Fifteen years of decriminalised drug policy

Lisbon, Portugal - Under a flyover of concrete, alongside a road full of afternoon commuters, a group of people flock around a van. One of them, a woman in a colourful summer dress and a golden necklace, looks like she came to see a show at the nearby theatre. However, just like the man in his unwashed jeans in front of her, she is here for her daily dose of methadone. It will get her through the night. "Drugs started when my father brought me to the south of Portugal, to the Algarve, where I met people who were in the scene," the woman tells Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
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Olive Killer Disease Arrives on Mallorca

A disease posing a "very serious threat" to the EU's olive industry is recorded on the Spanish island of Mallorca for the first time.
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Las Vegas streetlights are powered by your footsteps

Las Vegas is famous for its lights, bright sunny days and copious pedestrian traffic. That no doubt made it the perfect place for clean tech startup EnGoPlanet to test new LED streetlights powered by both photovoltaic panels and kinetic footstep pads. Married with a battery, the setup not only lights up the Boulder Plaza in downtown Vegas, but also powers security cameras (yep), WiFi hotspots and portable charging stations.
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