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With a little help from her friendly Dad (Paul) Stella McCartney has made quite a name for herself as an ultra-chic fashion designer. This week she introduced her spring line on Manhattan’s Elizabeth Street with a Cuba-themed garden party where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara featured among the main props of the cheeky soiree.The Stalinist mass-murderers featured both as mannequins and as live costumed humans who walked around posing for pictures with the ultra-chic models and guests along with the delighted (and scrupulously vegetarian) hostess. In keeping with Stella Mc Cartney’s “anti-cruelty” beliefs the event featured strictly vegetarian foodstuffs. None...

Cuba, one of the Western Hemisphere’s least-wired countries, is poised to expand access to the Internet by introducing about three dozen Wi-Fi hot spots around the island and reducing the steep fees that Cubans pay to spend time online. .....“Their model was, ‘Nobody gets Internet,’ ” he said in a telephone interview. “Now their model is, ‘We’re going to bring prices down and expand access, but we are going to do it as a sovereign decision and at our own speed.’ ” Cuba’s Internet isolation is not the result of the United States’ five-decade economic embargo, Mr. Henken said, but...

<p>Everything in the path of the proposed trans-oceanic canal in Nicaragua would have to be relocated. Churches. Cemeteries. Stockyards.</p> <p>As many as 28,000 people scattered in villages and towns face the likelihood that their lands would be expropriated. The government pledges they will be better off, living in new settlements with a bit of cash in their pockets. But skepticism abounds. Ranchers are angry. They’ve held 44 marches and rallies in the past nine months. A few events have turned violent.</p>

The Republican field is crowded, which implies that primary voters have little information about where some of the candidates stand. That is particularly the case this season, with a few relatively unknown contenders who lack legislative experience or a long history of campaign contributions that would allow researchers to precisely identify where they stand on the liberal-to-conservative political dimension.However, one characteristic all candidates share is that they have active and popular Twitter accounts. And as I showed in an article published earlier this year in the journal Political Analysis — now freely available online as an Editors’ Choice article —...

Here is a live map of different war zones. You can zoom in or out just like on Google Maps. Hover over different icons and more. Check out how close ISIS is to Baghdad. Yikes!

According to an inside source, the military collaborations between Iran's Revolutionary Guards and the Gaddafi government date back to 2006.In an interview today on the Al Arabyia news network, an informed source within the Revolutionary Guards Corps revealed that Iran has several military bases in Libya. The source, who requested anonymity due to his sensitive position within the Guards, elaborated further that the Iranian military bases are located mostly along Libya’s borders with the African countries of Chad and Niger. From there, he said, the Guards actively smuggle arms and supply logistical assistance to rebellious groups in the African countries.According...

Documents made available to Pajamas Media prove that the Venezuelan strongman has been selling reformate to Iran Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez has again frustrated the worldÂ’s attempt to derail IranÂ’s nuclear weapons program. Evidence now clearly shows that heÂ’s been sending gasoline to Iran in defiance of U.S. sanctions that sought to deprive the regime of that commodity and bring them back to the negotiation table.On July 1, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA). The act was a consequence of IranÂ’s continued defiance in the face of international pressure to...

From the BBC: 1545: Libyan TV says in an "urgent" screen caption the state news agency is under "piracy" attack, and gives a new web address: "Website of [state] al-Jamahiriyah News Agency (JANA) subjected to suspicious piracy operation." 1528: And AFP has just reported that there are violent clashes between demonstrators and government forces taking place in central Tunis. 1525: In Tunisia, where it all started, hundreds of journalists and technicians from the state-run TV broadcaster have gone on strike over what they say is continued government censorship of their dispatches, Reuters reports. State TV news bulletins have stopped. One...

THE TRAIL OF BLOOD AND SUFFERING LEFT BY THE CASTRO BROTHERS TERROR NETWORKThe Castro brothers, mass murderer tyrants who terrorized a whole Island for over 56 years who killed, imprisoned, and tortured more Cubans per capita than Stalin during his reign of terror and founded and headed the most lethal international terror network is honored, embrace and rewarded by comrades Obama and Pope Francis.The trail of blood and suffering left by Castro’s exploits, especially throughout Africa and Latin America, has had no bearing on the Pope and on the American sycophants support for the longest lasting and most brutal regime...

Today President Obama further opened the financial floodgates from the U.S. to the world’s most notorious deadbeat nation—who is also a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” Quotation marks are now required around the term “State-Sponsor of Terrorism” when referring to Cuba because just this morning, as the 45 day notification period to Congress expired, President Obama officially removed Cuba from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, where President Reagan had placed it in 1982. “Laughing all the way to the bank,” hardly does justice to what the multi-billionaire Castro family must be doing this week. The $7 billion...

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger hammered John Kerry in 1985 for interfering in diplomatic negotiations with Nicaragua’s Marxist government as a Massachusetts senator. Thirty years later, Kerry is skewering Senate Republicans for their open letter to the Iranian leadership warning that any nuclear deal with the United States without the advice and consent of the U.S. Congress would not last beyond President Obama’s term. Kerry and then-Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin visited Nicaragua in 1985 to cut a deal with the Sandinista government, which was close to the former Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan, however, was already set on overthrowing...

Venezuela is afflicted with the world’s highest inflation, its second highest murder rate and crippling shortages of food, medicine and basic consumer goods. Its authoritarian government is holding some 70 political prisoners, including the mayor of Caracas and senior opposition leader Leopoldo López, and stands accused by human rights groups of illegal detentions, torture and repression of independent media. All of that is now pretty well known, and it is finally beginning to gain some attention from Latin American leaders who for years did their best to appease or ignore Hugo Chávez and his “Bolivarian Revolution.” What’s less understood is...

WHY THEY QUIT BEING LEFTISTS By Carlos Alberto Montaner The Independent Institute November 17, 2008 What led these people (along with Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa, Ernesto Sábato, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and so many other valuable intellectuals) to abandon communism and begin to defend the values of liberty? In the first place, the painful realization that the communist governments, without exception, built societies that were very poor and brutal, from which people invariably tried to flee in desperation. All the communist experiments failed, regardless of the substrata on which they tried to erect their systems. The Germans, the Slavs, the Latin...

They say the Cold War is over, but Russia and the U.S. remain the leading supplier of weapons to countries around the world and are the two biggest military powers. Lately, tensions have been pretty high, too. The U.S. supplies much of NATO and Middle Eastern allies like Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Russia supplies many BRIC nations, as well as Iran, much of Southeast Asia, and North Africa.

Russian may sell $5 billion worth of weapons to Venezuela, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Monday after a visit to the South American nation. Putin met Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Caracas on Friday to discuss oil, defense and nuclear energy cooperation, although no new no arms agreements were signed. The United States expressed concern about possible arms proliferation following such a deal with Venezuela, one its most prominent foes in the region. Chavez says his growing arsenal is aimed at countering a planned increase in the U.S. military forces in neighboring Colombia, Washington's closest ally in Latin America....

A U.S. Spanish-language news network that lobbied Hillary Clinton’s State Department on U.S. policies toward Mexico reported on those policies without disclosing its lobbying expenditures and is covering the U.S. presidential election without informing views of its company’s donations to the Clinton Foundation. The network, Azteca America, has employed two Clinton confidantes since late 2008 to lobby the State Department on various initiatives affecting U.S. relations with Mexico, where its parent company is based, during and after Clinton’s tenure at the head of the agency. Mexican parent TV Azteca, a foundation associated with the company, and that foundation’s U.S. counterpart...

Political debates often pit fear against hope, and when it comes to international trade agreements, many Democrats prefer to scare. It's a durable strategy that they can't relinquish -- even though it usually fails. If you're going to make a horror movie, you need a villain who can make your blood run cold. Despite endless efforts to pump this one up, the audience mostly yawns. Americans have gotten too used to the obvious benefits of trade to be terrified by German cars, Canadian oil or Chinese toys. The Obama administration is currently negotiating with 11 other nations on a Trans-Pacific...

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has promised to nationalize food distribution in the South American nation beset with record shortages of basic goods, runaway inflation and an escalating economic crisis. [Snip] Various estimates suggest the government already controls about half of the country's food distribution, but that hasn't stopped record shortages in shops and markets. Venezuela is struggling with a recession, 68.5-percent annual inflation and severe shortages of the basic goods that it relies on oil money to import. On any given day, people in Venezuela can wait hours to get some subsidized milk, cooking oil, milk or flour -- if...

President Nicolás Maduro raised Venezuela's minimum wage Friday for the second time this year to help workers being battered by the world's highest inflation. Speaking at a May Day rally, the socialist leader said he is boosting the minimum wage and pensions for retirees by 30 percent, with two-thirds of the increase coming this month and the rest on July 1. He also said he would raise salaries for government employees and military personnel. The wage increase, while a welcome relief for many workers, fell short of expectations that the embattled Maduro might use Friday's celebrations to expand state control...

Gerardo Hernandez, a spy for Communist Cuba and the man responsible for the murder of four humanitarian workers (three of whom were American citizens) over international waters, was freed from prison last year by the Obama administration, due in part to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). This was revealed at a February 6, 2015, celebration of Hernandez’s release, along with two of his fellow Cuban agents (collectively known as the “Cuban 5.. At the beginning of the event, an IPS official thanked all who who took part in the 17-year campaign and singled out a number of organizations that...