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September 8, 2010 Cuba: Communist Economic Model Loses a Stalwart Defender By REUTERS Fidel Castro  said  Cuba ’s economic model no longer worked, an American journalist reported Wednesday. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in his  blog  for Atlantic magazine that he asked Mr. Castro, left, last week if Cuba’s model of Soviet-style Communism was still worth exporting to other countries. “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Mr. Castro said, according to the report. Mr. Goldberg said that Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the  Council on Foreign Relations , thought Mr. Castro’s answer was an acknowledgment that the state played too big a role in the economy. The comment appeared to reflect Mr. Castro’s support for the economic reforms instituted by his younger brother, President Raúl Castro . In the interview, Mr. Castro, 84, also criticized President  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  of Iran for anti-Semitism and denying the Holocaust. He also criticized his own ac...

Why Do IQ Scores Vary By Nation? Global differences in intelligence is a sensitive topic, long fraught with controversy and still tinged by the disgraceful taint of pseudosciences such as craniometry that strove to prove the white “race” as the most clever of them all. But recent data, perplexingly, has indeed shown cognitive ability to be higher in some countries than in others. What’s more, IQ scores have risen as nations develop—a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect.” Many causes have been proposed for both the intelligence gap and the Flynn effect, including education, income, and even nonagricultural labor. Now, a new study from researchers at the University of New Mexico offers another intriguing theory: intelligence may be linked to infectious-disease rates. The Idea The brain, say author Christopher Eppig and his colleagues, is the “most costly organ in the human body.” Brainpower gobbles up close to 90 percent of a newborn’s energy. It stands to reason, then, that ...

Russia’s Activists Lose Hope in President The resignation of Russia’s top human-rights chief highlights the Kremlin’s backsliding. by  Anna Nemtsova August 03, 2010 Oxana Onipko / AFP-Getty Images Police officers in Moscow arrest an opposition protester at a rally on July 31 When Dmitry Medvedev was elected president of Russia two years ago, he publicly criticized the country’s human-rights record as “far from perfect” and called for reform. But just last week, Medvedev’s image as a civil-rights champion was dealt a stunning blow when his chief adviser on human rights, Ella Pamfilova, resigned. Her reason? A new wave of violent attacks and threats against Russia’s human-rights activists, as well as what Pamfilova calls the “never-ending wave of hate” from the Kremlin toward anyone critical of its policies. (A Kremlin spokesperson would only comment that Pamfilova was not pushed out, but resigned of her own accord.) The past year has been a brutal one for activists in Russia: three...

Warren Buffett's likely successor: Chinese Tiananmen protestor, hedge fund manager Who will succeed billionaire super-investor  Warren Buffett  when the 79-year-old Oracle of Omaha finally retires as chairman of his  Berkshire Hathaway  holding company? Perhaps no question in global finance has preoccupied investors like this one in recent years. The answer,  at least according to Friday's Wall Street Journal , appears to be a 44-year-old Chinese hedge fund manager who participated in the deadly  Tiananmen Square  protests 20 years ago named  Li Lu . Li  was taken from his parents in China when they were sent through Mao's brutal  Cultural Revolution  re-education process, which set China back decades and was responsible for more than 1 million deaths. He became a student activist and took part in the Tianamen Square resistance, in which as many as 7,000 Chinese were killed by their own government, according to NATO intelligence. A...

Have it your way:  Regional chains  feed burger hunger McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy's aren't the only game in town by Peter Hartlaub msnbc.com  Whether you want pear chutney grown by local farmers on your sandwich, or an artery-clogging ball of meat and grease for less than a buck, there’s a regional burger chain for you somewhere in America. While the big three hamburger giants — McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s — still command more than two-thirds of the market in the U.S., the fast food burger landscape has been changing at a breakneck pace. Five Guys, introduced to the nation last year during a visit by President Barack Obama, has gone from a six-restaurant Virginia-based chain in the early 2000s to a national force with more than 600 restaurants in 48 states in 2010. Colorado-based Smashburger, which didn’t exist before 2007, now has 77 locations in 17 states. Many of the fastest-growing restaurants are so-called “better burger” or “fast casual” re...