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Taco USA, by Gustavo Arellan, Reason.
How Mexican food became more American than apple pie:
Back home, my friends did not believe that a tater tot burrito could exist. When I showed them proof online, out came jeremiads about inauthenticity, about how I was a traitor for patronizing a Mexican chain that got its start in Wyoming, about how the avaricious gabachos had once again usurped our holy cuisine and corrupted it to fit their crude palates.
In defending that tortilla-swaddled abomination, I unknowingly joined a long, proud lineage of food heretics and lawbreakers who have been developing, adapting, and popularizing Mexican food in El Norte since before the Civil War. Tortillas and tamales have long left behind the moorings of immigrant culture and fully infiltrated every level of the American food pyramid, from state dinners at the White House to your local 7-Eleven. Decades' worth of attempted restrictions by governments, academics, and other self-appointed custodians of purity have only made the strain stronger and more resilient. The result is a market-driven mongrel cuisine every bit as delicious and all-American as the German classics we appropriated from Frankfurt and Hamburg.
All the World Is Staged, by Brett Forrest. ESPN.
How a notorious fixer of soccer matches got caught:
Though puzzled by the seemingly random tip, Rovaniemi police put Perumal under surveillance. Three days later, they followed him to a French restaurant near the soccer stadium, where the local club, Rovaniemen Palloseura, had just completed a 1-1 draw. Officers watched as Perumal sat down with three Palloseura players. They saw him scold the players, who cowered in fear. The next day, based on the false passport, the Finnish police detained Perumal. They phoned officials at the Finland Football Federation, who in turn contacted FIFA, soccer's international governing body.
One week later, Chris Eaton, FIFA's head of security, arrived in Rovaniemi. He knew exactly who Perumal was. Eaton informed Finnish investigators that they had just caught the world's most prolific criminal fixer of soccer matches, an elusive figure whom Eaton had been chasing for the past six months.
Perumal had rigged hundreds of games across five continents, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent gambling winnings for Asian and European syndicates. He was finally in custody. And he had been turned in by one of his own.
In China's Shadow, by Michael Paterniti. National Geographic.
A report from Hong Kong, 15 years after the handover to mainland China:
"If you want to see capitalism in action, go to Hong Kong," economist Milton Friedman is credited with saying. Yet to idealize the city today as a free market paradise, thriving in its 15th year after the British handover to China, is to sorely oversimplify, if not misconstrue, the darkening forces at work here. It's to miss the tensions and tectonic shifts beneath the glitzy financial center that Hong Kong shows to the world. In the city underneath, one finds asylum seekers and prostitutes; gangsters with their incongruent bouffants; thousands of Indonesian housemaids who flock to Victoria Park on their precious Sundays off; and those barely scratching out an existence, people crammed into partitioned apartment blocks of "cage houses" the size of refrigerator boxes. While Hong Kong's per capita gross domestic product ranks tenth in the world, its Gini coefficient, an index that measures the gap between rich and poor, is also among the highest.
Hong Kongers say their city reinvents itself every few years, citing the ever morphing skyline as one visible example. "We feel all of these great changes, but we don't know how to name them," says Patrick Mok, the coordinator for the Hong Kong Memory Project, a $6.4 million effort to address Hong Kong's identity problem by creating an interactive website of old objects and photographs. "The pace of the city is too fast for memory."
Hugo Chávez's Enemy No. 1, by Jeffrey Tayler. Businessweek.
A profile of Venezuelan presidential contender Henrique Capriles:
Since February, Capriles has emerged from relative obscurity to achieve a technical tie in a poll conducted by Consultores 21 in Caracas, while other surveys grant the incumbent a double-digit lead. Chávez has acknowledged Capriles in disparaging, dismissive, or caustic terms, calling him among other things a "petty bourgeois," a lackey of the U.S., and even a fascist-his favorite, all-purpose moniker of contempt. Because of Chávez's revolutionary regime, Venezuela is allied with Cuba, Iran, and Nicaragua, even as it continues to play a vital role in the U.S. economy as the fourth-largest supplier of oil.
With elections five months away, Capriles has time to rise. Chávez has an undisclosed cancer. Although he has tweeted from the Cuban hospital where he underwent surgery, he has refused to go public with a diagnosis or prognosis, fueling speculation that he's gravely ill and may not survive the summer. Not surprisingly, rumors swirl that Chávez is no longer in control and that the military is plotting to oust him, cancel elections, and impose a state of emergency. Such scenarios could lead to further violence and chaos in a country that has seen plenty-including, most famously, the Caracazo incident of 1989, when the armed forces killed hundreds of protesters in Caracas who were marching against then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez's austerity measures.
Getting Naked to Change the World, by Dialika Neufeld. Der Spiegel.
Can bare breasts change the world? Ukrainian activist group Femen thinks they can, and they're starting with their own:
Oksana Shachko, a girl with a doll-like face, is supposed to go to prison for five years.
It's a cool spring Thursday in Ukraine as the 24-year-old walks through the streets of Kiev with her attorney. She is wearing a leather jacket and black boots, and dangling an almost-finished cigarette between her fingers. Five years, because she bared her breasts in public once again.
The hearing at the Interior Ministry is at 5 p.m., and they are in a hurry. They walk past tall, brown and gray buildings from the Stalin era. They discuss ways to put a positive spin on the expression "kiss my ass," which is what Oksana said to the Indian ambassador. "It was a happy protest. A happy protest for the rights of Ukrainian women," Oksana finally says. She's decided it's what she will say in the hearing at the Interior Ministry.
Shachko is a Ukrainian women's rights activist, and her weapons are attached to her pale, petite body like the two halves of an apple.
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