The FBI has added former Black Panther and former member of the Black Liberation Army, Assata Shakur, to its “most wanted terrorist” list. The decision is political and clearly aimed at the Cuban government, which granted political asylum to her after she escaped from prison in 1979. It also is an escalation of the government’s demonization of her for continuing to openly espouse radical political views, while in exile outside of the United States.

Over the weekend there was a major scandal over human rights abuses on the island of Cuba. No, not the hunger strike at Gitmo over the horrendous conditions and loss of legal rights. Some celebrities traveled to Cuba for their vacation and the establishment lost their minds.

Wiener’s new book How We Forgot the Cold War is a travelogue of visits to sites across the US (plus one in Cuba and one in Grenada) where the Cold War is publicly commemorated. As different as they are—among them are half a dozen presidential libraries, a general’s tomb, missile silos, a VIP fallout shelter, a CIA museum that’s closed to the public, and a proposed $100 million Victims of Communism museum, a grandiose project that was never built—all of them are notable for a curious lacuna: the Cold War itself, or perhaps more accurately, the neo-conservative, triumphalist narrative about the Cold War that has been so successfully projected onto the memory of Ronald Reagan.

Here was the oddest thing: within weeks of the United States dropping an atomic bomb on a second Japanese city on August 9, 1945, and so obliterating it, Americans were already immersed in new scenarios of nuclear destruction. As the late Paul Boyer so vividly described in his classic book By the Bomb’s Early Light, it took no time at all — at a moment when no other nation had such potentially Earth-destroying weaponry — for an America triumphant to begin to imagine itself in ruins, and for its newspapers and magazines to start drawing concentric circles of death and destruction around American cities while consigning their future country to the stewardship of the roaches.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches/videos on current issues that may be of interest.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current issues that may be of interest.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current issues that may be of interest.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current issues that may be of interest.

Fatster’s news roundup from May 14, with links to stories on Europe, Scott Walker, Jamie Dimon, ICE, Cuba, Bahrain, Juan Cole, coal’s decline, health care, fishing, Mexican drug war, and more.

News roundup from Tuesday, April 24, including stories and links about the François Hollande, European financial crisis, austerity, ALEC, Grover Norquist, Leon Panetta, Texas Board of Education, Brazilian dam, Cuba, honeybees, BP, Frankenfood, foreclosures, white killer whale and more.