News That Stays News

Reading Muammar Gadhafi April 11, 2011

1. Hitler was a painter, Stalin a poet. A Foreign Policy piece with some samples of the slag produced when nobody edits the dictator. Some of it may even be good- here is one poem by Ayatollah Khomeini:

Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night,
For I am sick and tired of the mosque and seminary.
I have torn off the garb of asceticism and hypocrisy,
Putting on the cloak of the tavern-hunting shaykh and becoming aware.
The city preacher has so tormented me with his advice
That I have sought aid from the breath of the wine-drenched profligate.
Leave me alone to remember the idol-temple,
I who have been awakened by the hand of the tavern’s idol.

2. The US and Britain wiretapped their German POWs during WWII, and the transcripts of those conversations are now available. The soldiers of the Wehrmacht are commonly supposed to have been more blameless than the SS, but in these transcripts they boast about their sex crimes and war atrocities. A great piece in the Spiegel with a claim on telling it as it really happened.

3. Evan Osnos at the New Yorker goes on a Chinese tour to Europe.

4. A man on death row for more than 14 years is set free after a private investigator discovers that his prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence. Why aren’t they in prison?

5. Chinese laborers and immigrants now make up nearly 10% of the population of Suriname, a nation of 500,000 people that borders Brazil.

6. James Franco, man of many ways, is graded in the Atlantic on his book, his performance art, and his acting.

Credits: Anselm Chen, The Browser