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Kerry Chides China, Puerto Rico Risks, Kermit/Miss Piggy Split

Kerry Chides China, Puerto Rico Risks, Kermit/Miss Piggy Split

JOHN KERRY CONCERNED BY CHINA LAND CLAIMS

Photo: Then Chih Wey/Xinhua/ZUMA

China should end provocative land reclamation projects in the South China Sea and work with its neighbors to resolve the region's territorial disputes, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Wednesday's summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. China has repeatedly rejected U.S. involvement in regional affairs and was opposed to the issue being raised at the meeting, according to AP. This comes one day after ASEAN foreign ministers called on Beijing's "termination" of the land reclamation projects.


UK POLICE PROBE FORMER PM PEDOPHILIA CLAIMS

At least five police forces are examining allegations that Britain's former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath was a pedophile, including claims that he raped a 12-year-old boy, The Guardianreports. Heath, who died in 2005 at the age of 89, is also said to be linked to an investigation into abuse at a children's home on the island of Jersey. There's suspicion of an attempt to cover up the accusations, which come amid a months-long investigation into a historic pedophile ring that included celebrities such as late BBC host Jimmy Savile. Leah McGrath Goodman, an American journalist, told LBC radio she was "kicked out of the UK" in 2011 while investigating the former Conservative PM. She claims that Heath used to take children from the Jersey care home on his yacht for a ride. "It was reported that some of those children never came back," she said.


ON THIS DAY


Fifty-three years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains an icon. Time for today's 57-second shot of history.


MH370

French investigators are expected to begin examining a Boeing 777 fragment that washed up last week on the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion to assess whether it comes from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. If the piece is successfully linked to the missing aircraft, scientists hope they will be able to learn more about its fate. Read more from France 24.


EXTRA! BOKO HARAM "BEGS" TO NEGOTIATE

Certain members of the Islamist terror group Boko Haram are eager to find a negotiated way out of the conflict with the Nigerian government, responding to calls for dialogue from recently elected President Muhammadu Buhari. See how Nigerian daily Vanguard featured the story on its front page.


VERBATIM

"Do I think about who he was as a person? Not really, because it doesn't matter at this point. Do I think he had the best upbringing? No. Not at all," Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot black teenager Michael Brown on August 9, 2015 in Ferguson, Mo., told The New Yorker about his victim. In the extensive profile, the reporter asks Wilson whether he thinks Brown was "truly a "bad guy," or just a kid who had got himself into a bad situation." The now 29-year-old former police officer replied: "I only knew him for those forty-five seconds in which he was trying to kill me, so I don't know."


MORE TROUBLE AHEAD FOR PUERTO RICO

After failing to make a bond payment on Monday, Puerto Rico has now stopped making contributions into a fund it uses to make general obligation payments, with the next one due on Sept. 1, The New York Timesreports. Though the next deadline is no cause for concern, the newspaper writes that a much bigger payment due on Jan. 1 could trigger "an earthquake for the markets" if it isn't made.


WORLDCRUNCH-TO-GO

For the past 30 years, American lawyer Reed Brody has been tracking down former despots all over the world. The trial of the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, which opened last month, is the latest fruit of his work. Writing for French weekly magazine L'Obs, Christophe Boltanski draws the portrait of this dictator hunter: "Tacked to the world map that covers one of the walls of his office, on the 34th floor of the Empire State Building, in New York, are pictures of his prey: Augusto Pinochet (Chile); Jean-Claude Duvalier (Haiti), Alfredo Stroessner (Paraguay), Pol Pot (Cambodia), Suharto (Indonesia), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Omar al-Bashir (Sudan) — a who's who of warlords, generals, tyrants, rais, dear leaders, number one comrades that, beyond their ideological differences, have all oppressed and massacred their fellow countrymen. ... His aim? To put an end to impunity, which he defines with wit: ‘If you kill someone, you go to jail. But if you're responsible for the death of 40,000 people, you're invited to a peace conference.'"

Read the full article, Reed Brody, My Life As A Despot Hunter.


RUSSIA SUBMITS ARCTIC CLAIM

Russia submitted a new claim to the United Nations for territories in the Arctic covering some 1.2 million square kilometers, with the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Norway also eyeing to get their hands on a piece of the mineral-rich region, The Toronto Starreports. Experts believe that the Arctic region holds up to one-quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas. Moscow had a similar claim rejected in 2002.


WORLD'S GREATEST FREE DIVER FEARED DEAD

Natalia Molchanova, the most decorated freediver in the world with 41 world records, is feared dead after going missing during a dive in the Balearic Sea, near to the Spanish island of Formentera on Sunday. See this CNN video on the Russian-born Molchanova's achievements in this unique sport.


1.2 KM

Dubai is planning to build the world's longest indoor ski slope, as part of a colossal project covering a total 3.67 million square metres, Gulf News reports. Next to the 1.2 kilometer-long ski slope will be a gigantic mall and the Dubai One tower, expected to be the world's tallest residential building.


HOVERBOARD IN ACTION

Lexus has finally shown its Back To The Future-inspired hoverboard in action, but it doesn't seem to work quite as seamlessly as Marty McFly's. It does however work on water.


MY GRAND-PÈRE'S WORLD



KERMIT AND MISS PIGGY BREAKUP

Today's most bizarre news item informs us that The Muppets' Kermit The Frog and Miss Piggy "will be seeing other people, pigs, frogs, et al."

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Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

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