Venezuela

Andrew Rosati, Christian Science Monitor: "In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez's successor seems to be turning toward big business for help in ending rampant scarcities of basic consumer goods and an almost 30 percent annual inflation rate."

South Korea

Christian Science Monitor: "South Korea, long in the shadow of other Asian 'tiger economies,' is suddenly hip and enormously prosperous — so much so that it may have outgrown its thankless dream of reuniting with the North."

Pennsylvania

Mara Bovsun of the New York Daily News:

Among the most terrifying places in movie history is the pit from Silence of the Lambs, where serial killer Buffalo Bill imprisoned women before he murdered and skinned them. 

Unbelievably horrific it may have seemed, but it was no figment of a writer’s imagination. The prison was drawn from life and a person whose crimes were front-page headlines shortly before Thomas Harris wrote the novel that would become the classic film.

Read more.

Driving in the United States

NBC News (USA): "Imagine having a drink with dinner at a restaurant only to be pulled over on the way home and slapped with a DUI. That could happen under a proposed plan to toughen the drunk driving laws across the country, and it has restaurateurs alarmed."

Biography

Margaret Thatcher by Charles Moore

Oscar Pistorius

Vanity Fair:

When Oscar Pistorius — the South African "Blade Runner," who overcame a double amputation to compete in the Olympics last year — shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentine’s Day, the millions he’d inspired were faced with a shocking possibility: that their hero was also a killer. With Pistorius claiming that Steenkamp’s death was an accident, Mark Seal delves into the murder case that has rocked the country, and the paths the couple took to that fatal night.

Read "The Shooting Star and the Model."

Indonesia

IOL: "A British woman could face the death penalty in Indonesia after being arrested for allegedly smuggling crystal methamphetamine into the country from China, an official said on Saturday."

Italy

Elena Cosentino, BBC News: "This week the boss of one of southern Italy's most powerful mafia dynasties sensationally handed himself in to police after three years on the run — and now faces 16 years in jail."

France

"Pricey Trove of Jewels Stolen From Hotel Room During Film Festival"

Afghanistan

CBS News (60 Minutes): "As the U.S. military continues its exodus from Afghanistan, the long war has caused another exodus few know about in the U.S. Thousands of mostly teenage boys have fled their war-torn country to embark on a 10,000-mile trek to Europe that most will not complete — many because they die along the route."

Porsche

"Introducing the Porsche 918 Spyder"

New York

Voice of America:

New York authorities have arrested 15 men accused of running a cigarette smuggling ring and say some of the suspects may have ties to Islamic militant groups.

Officials said Thursday the suspects allegedly smuggled more than one-million cartons of cigarettes from Virginia into New York, depriving the city and state of tax revenue.

They say despite the lucrative scheme, the suspects lived modestly, raising suspicions that they were sending the money elsewhere.

Authorities also say one of the suspects has ties to a blind cleric who helped plan a 1993 bomb blast in New York's World Trade Center. Another suspect is associated with a Lebanese immigrant jailed for killing a Jewish student in Brooklyn in 1994.

Investigators say they are working on tracking down the cigarette money

Florida

ABC News (USA): "A $625,000 gold shipment vanished early Tuesday in a brazen heist at Miami International Airport after it arrived aboard a jet from Ecuador, police said."

Nicaragua

Tim Rogers, Time:

Deep inside the verdant expanse of Nicaragua’s Bosawás Biosphere Reserve — the western hemisphere’s second largest rainforest — a group of Mayangna indigenous warriors wielding spears, bows, snakes and reputed magical powers are being ordered to stand down after two weeks of preparing for battle against encroaching land invaders. 

Leaders of the Mayangna Nation, the traditional guardians of the Bosawás, say they’re giving Nicaragua’s Sandinista government one last chance to oust the "colonists" — a group of timber traffickers, gold miners, farmers, cattle ranchers and land swindlers who the Mayangnas say are devouring the forest like a swarm of locusts. If the government is incapable of stopping the ravaging of indigenous communal lands, the Mayangnas say they’ll take matters into their own hands.

Read the whole thing.

Belize

BBC News: "An ancient Mayan temple in Belize has been destroyed by a road-building crew using bulldozers and backhoes to extract gravel for road filler."