Now, with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) likely to be confirmed as the next secretary of state, theUnited States will have a top diplomat who has been a frequent critic of America’s 50-year-old effort to force regime change in Havana.

In recent years, Kerry has been the Senate’s most prominent skeptic of US-funded pro-democracy efforts that give financial backing to dissident groups in Cuba and beam anti-Castro programming to the island through radio and television programs based in Miami.

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There are plenty of tragic and inspiring choices, but the most obvious legacy Castro will leave behind is the broken family.

As the plane touched down at Jose Marti Airport I still wasn’t sure I would be allowed to enter Cuba in the first place. I had spent my last trip a few months earlier conducting illegal interviews with the country’s most famous boxing champions, men who had turned down millions and were only willing to discuss it if I paid them under the table. Of course there was no official way to have these interviews given the sensitivity of the topic. The state security had started following me after the first interview. All the Cubans I was working with couldn’t understand why we weren’t being arrested. But we kept going until we landed every interview on my wish list. Then it was just a matter of getting that material out.

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But the files, which previously had been heavily redacted, do not contain any new information about Monroe's death 50 years ago. Letters and news clippings included in the file show the bureau was aware of theories the actress had been killed, but they do not show that any effort was undertaken to investigate the claims. Los Angeles authorities concluded Monroe's death was a probable suicide.

Recently obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act, the updated FBI files do show the extent the agency was monitoring Monroe for ties to communism in the years before her death in August 1962.

The records reveal that some in Monroe's inner circle were concerned about her association with Frederick Vanderbilt Field, who was disinherited from his wealthy family over his leftist views.

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As far as neighbors went, the sex workers were fine — quiet, courteous, not prone to cooking stinky tofu. The few times my clothes fell from the bamboo poles used to dry laundry in China, they saved the garments for me until I could make the trek downstairs to retrieve them. We didn’t share an entrance, though a window in the back of the parlor opened onto my stairwell, and on my way home on hot nights I would see the women brushing their teeth. (Even the room that doubled as a kitchen and bathroom glowed fuchsia.) As the years passed I rarely had reason to think about the brothel. But it remained a difficult thing to explain to overseas guests, invariably evoking one of those questions about China that evade any quick, pat answer.

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Mo says he does not believe censorship should stand in the way of truth, but that it can be used, or is sometimes even necessary, to stop rumors and defamation.

China's first writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature is in Stockholm, where he is set to receive the prestigious prize next week.

Mo dodged questions about fellow writer and compatriot Liu Xiaobo, who won the Peace Prize in 2010 but remains in prison. Mo has previously said that he hopes Liu will be free soon, but he refused to elaborate Thursday while meeting with journalists in Stockholm.

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How about the small towns of rural Colorado? That’s the setting for “Red Dawn,” the 1984 piece of militia porn that pitted a group of American kids against the combined might of the invading armies of Cuba, Nicaragua and the USSR. Led by Patrick Swayze, they lived off the land and harvested what seemed to be a never-ending supply of rocket-propelled grenades, with which they blew up tanks and Soviet-American Friendship Centers.

The film was released in the height of the Cold War, and its ludicrous premise (best summed up as “Hey kids, let’s go fight an insurrection!”) fit well with the rest of the decade’s fear-mongering anti-Soviet propaganda and jingoistic paeans to American exceptionalism. Let’s not forget that this was the same year that Reagan joked, “My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

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The 37-year-old activist — who has won numerous journalism awards, been named on Time’s 100 Most Influential list and interviewed recently re-elected US President Barack Obama — was detained as she and others protested the arrest of opposition lawyers and activists outside a Havana police station. She was released late Thursday night.

The news was broken on Twitter Thursday by Yohandry, a pro-government website which is rumored to have been set up by the state itself as a counterweight to Sanchez’s own blog, Generation Y.

Then her husband Reinaldo Escobar, a fellow activist, confirmed Sanchez's release.

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Since islanders won’t need an “exit permit” to travel anymore — just a passport — many expect a flood of visa applications at foreign embassies once the new policy takes effect Jan. 14.

Maybe so. But probably not.

The reality is that for years the vast majority of Cubans who wanted to travel — and could afford to — were not denied the exit permit to leave the country. More than 30,000 a year emigrate from the island, mostly to the United States. They include the more than 7,000 who arrive illegally, typically across the US-Mexican border or by boat. Any Cuban who reaches US territory is eligible for US residency under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act.

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Days after the 57-year-old novelist thrilled his country by winning the Nobel Prize for literature, China’s central censorship organ issued a directive to media companies instructing them to strictly police online discussion for anti-party chatter or mentions of two other Chinese-born Nobel winners.

China Digital Times has a translation of the leaked directive:

“To all websites nationwide: In light of Mo Yan winning the Nobel prize for literature, monitoring of microblogs, forums, blogs and similar key points must be strengthened. Be firm in removing all comments which disgrace the party and the government, defame cultural work, mention Nobel laureates Liu Xiaobo and Gao Xingjian and associated harmful material. Without exception, block users from posting for ten days if their writing contains malicious details.”

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The image of the world standing still is the turn of phrase of Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate compared to other participants, who were unaware that they were speaking to history.

Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the late 1990s. I will keep to that here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in “the week the world stood still.”

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These nine months have been torture for me. I’m a heat-sensitive person, and American Samoa is like an open oven. No wind blows through here. It’s hard to breathe. I miss fresh vegetables and fresh-squeezed juices. I miss making lattes and baking cakes for customers at the coffee shop in Los Angeles where I worked. The only place I feel comfortable here is the local McDonalds, where I come every morning to use the free Wi-Fi and cool off in the air conditioning. I email with friends back in the United States. I blog about my experience. I email with advocates and petition them to help my case. But I wonder how long I can go on, and just how much one person can bear. I sometimes think of suicide.

Sixteen years ago, I came to America to seek peace and freedom. Now, I am stuck on an island in the South Pacific without the promise of escape.

___

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Throughout, the official U.S. position has remained fixed: the United States government condemns Islamophobia.  Americans respect Islam as a religion of peace.  Incidents suggesting otherwise are the work of a tiny minority -- whackos, hatemongers, and publicity-seekers.  Among Muslims from Benghazi to Islamabad, the argument has proven to be a tough sell.

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While guidebooks might tell you that time collapsed here like wreckage, another theory says that in Latin America, all of history co-exists at once. The mystery of Cuba’s place in the world today has never been anything like a riddle. When Castro was put on trial and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at an insurrection, to all his followers delight, he dropped the name of a poet.

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God/Jerusalem fiasco at #DNC convntion points 2 degree of radicalism that fetters the Democratic Party. #p2 #tcot #sgp #smallccommunism

— Gray Panther (@justbcat) September 6, 2012

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Though 'Shaoyang' means 'the town on the north bank of the Shao river,' it spreads along the junction of two: the pale green Shao Shui river — whose colour is said to derive from a slumbering dragon — and the wider, brown Zijiang. In 1999, the city’s population was just under half a million. From the rampart above the old city gate, one could look over an expanse of roofs whose thick gray tiles were like scales. The streets were lined with peddlers and stalls; most of the shops had roll-down shutters instead of doors. On the pavement, people washed vegetables, impaled eels on a nail, and welded engine blocks. Outside some of the restaurants there were dogs in cages that no longer bothered to bark.

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Walking past the booths and examining the goods are Chinese, North Koreans and even some Europeans, who are exchanging business cards and sharing lively conversations -- North Korea is once again hosting an international trade fair, which opened Monday in Rason in the far northeast, a city seeking to sell itself as friendly to foreigners and a potential hub for international transportation, trade and tourism.

It's a scene not common in the rest of North Korea, where most business is state-run and interaction between foreigners and locals is strictly monitored.

The trade fair is an indication of how keen the insular nation is to attract foreign investment needed to reform its listless economy. Pyongyang has not publicly released detailed economic data for decades, but has made building the economy a focus of government policy since 2009. Rason, however, is one of North Korea's newly revamped special economic zones, governed by a separate set of laws and rules giving local officials more autonomy, and easier to access from the Chinese city of Yanji than from the North Korea capital of Pyongyang.

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