11 extreme weather records
January 10, 2014 -- Updated 0511 GMT
(CNN) -- An escaped jail inmate turned himself in just so that he could warm up -- that's how cold the U.S. has been this week.
With the country swept with unforgiving weather since December due to a distorted polar vortex, Brimson in Minnesota plunged to minus 40 C on Wednesday while Chicago saw its record low of -27 C on Monday.
As dangerously cold as it seems to be, however, it's (fortunately) still a long way from beating the world's lowest temperature record.
"Everybody is interested in extremes -- the hottest, the wettest, the windiest -- so creating a database of professionally verified records is useful in that fact alone," says Randall Cerveny from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Steve McQueen’s acclaimed film 12 Years A Slave is brutal in its honesty. But is it too much for American audiences?
The paucity of slavery movies is especially striking when compared with the hundreds made about the Holocaust
The New York Times, then less than two years into its distinguished existence, was among the first with the news. “We have obtained from Washington,” proclaimed its front page on January 20, 1853, “the subjoined statement of the circumstances attending the seizure and recovery of the negro man SOLOMON NORTHROP [sic], whose case has excited so high a degree of interest.”
It told the amazing tale of Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, and whose ordeal ended only after proof of his free status was provided to his owner. For some reason, the author of The New York Times story mis-spelled his name throughout. A few months later, Northup published his memoirs, Twelve Years a Slave. In 1984 came a television movie, Solomon Northup’s Odyssey. And now the film directed by Steve McQueen which, according to virtually every US critic, has rendered this year’s Oscars a foregone conclusion.
French National Front leader calls for ‘explosion’ of Europe
Right-wing eurosceptics will do utmost to block next parliament, claims Marine Le Pen
Lara Marlowe
Marine Le Pen doesn’t want to reform Europe. It is, she says, “unreformable”. She wants to blow it up. Knock it down. Start over with “a space of co-operation between nations that have regained their sovereignty”.
Le Pen has been a member of the European Parliament since 2004. Three years ago, she took over the National Front (FN) party that her father Jean-Marie founded in 1972. Opinion polls show the FN in the lead for the May European elections, with 24 per cent of the vote.
In a meeting with the Anglo-American Press Association at her party’s headquarters in the suburb of Nanterre, Le Pen says she is tripling her party’s participation in the March municipal elections, to 500 towns and cities. In May, she predicts, “the eurosceptics will make massive gains in the European parliament. I want only one thing of the European system: for it to explode. I want it to explode,” Le Pen continues.
Extra UN troops for South Sudan
The United Nations says it's working "as quickly as possible" to deploy 5,500 extra UN peacekeepers to protect civilians in South Sudan where fighting is focused on the oil hub of Bentiu and the Nile river town of Bor.
Forces of South Sudan's President Salva Kiir sought to regain the oil hub of Bentiu from rebels on Friday. At the UN, peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said extra troops were being deployed to protect Sudanese civilians.
Briefing the UN Security Council, Ladsous said the violent breakup of South Sudan's administration in mid-December had left probably a quarter of a million South Sudanese displaced, including 60,000 sheltering at UN compounds and tens of thousands who had sought refuge in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia.
Ladsous said the deadline for the extra deployments was "between four and eight weeks." Troops and police would be drawn from other UN and African Union missions, across Africa, he added, and would go "into a pro-active footing."
The heartbreak behind China's one-child policy
January 10, 2014 - 3:44PMPhilip Wen
China correspondent for Fairfax Media
Rui'an, China: Yu Rongfen was seven months pregnant when city officials came knocking at her door. It was her second pregnancy, and she was hiding the fact from authorities.
Fearing the worst, she hid in an upstairs room. But she was helpless as dozens of men overwhelmed her family and took her to the city’s family planning bureau. There, it became apparent that staff at the bureau had orders to forcibly perform a late-term abortion, despite desperate pleas from Yu and her family.
'I was in so much agony, it felt worse than death ... If I didn't already have another child to look after, I really would have gone and died.'
“I was screaming, I wouldn’t let them do it,” she says. “But it was no use, there were so many of them holding me down.”
The art of Fidel Castro's public night out
Former President Castro was seen publicly in Cuba for the first time in nine months.
Fidel Castro’s Cuba is frequently criticized for its limiting of freedom of expression, but it was a modern art exhibit that drew the communist ex-president out in public for the first time in nine months last night.
Former President Castro, walking with the help of a cane, attended the opening of Estudio Romerillo, a nonprofit cultural center dedicated to promoting the arts.
The Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba’s Communist Party, said the octogenarian visited the studio last night, on the 55th anniversary of his entry into Havana leading the Rebel Army.
The gallery contained the works of modern artists Alexis Leyva, known as “Kcho,” and Wifredo Lam. Cubadebate, an official government website, published one photo today in which Castro is seated in a chair, pointing to one of the works of art.
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