Over the course of 2016, the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change. For these reasons, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has decided to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock 30 seconds closer to catastrophe. It is now two minutes and 30 seconds to midnight.

Russian media report that the missile will weigh up to

10 tons with the capacity to carry up to 10 tons of nuclear

cargo. Russia reportedly tested a hypersonic warhead in

April that is apparently intended for use on the Satan

2 missiles. The warhead is designed to be impossible to

intercept because it does not move on a set trajectory.

Bob Dylan awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature

for "having created new poetic expressions within

the great American song tradition."

The ashes of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s

author Truman Capote have been sold

at auction in Los Angeles for $43,750.

Last Saturday, news began to spread that the Mosul Central Library had likely been bombed. It was followed on Thursday by video that showed the methodical destruction of the Mosul Museum and news that bookshops on Al-Nujaifi Street in downtown. UNESCO estimates that ISIL-controlled areas are undergoing a massive cultural destruction, which may be "one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." According to mostly anonymous reports coming out of Mosul, last Saturday, improvised incendiary devices were placed around the city's central library. City residents asked ISIL fighters to reconsider, but bombs were set off, igniting fires that destroyed an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 books and manuscripts.

CERN confirmed that two separate teams working

at the Large Hadron Collider are more than 99 percent

certain they've discovered the Higgs boson, also known

as the God particle. The long-sought particle may complete

the standard model of physics by explaining why objects in

our universe have mass—and in so doing, why galaxies,

planets, and even humans have any right to exist.

The Barnes Collection, which included 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos, 16 Modiglianis and seven van Goghs, was hijacked in what has been called  the "Theft of the Century." It was carried out in broad daylight by elected officials and Barnes trustees, all of whom justified it by placing the needs of the vast public above the whims of a dead millionaire. Barnes hired some Philadelphia lawyers and drew up an iron-clad will, endowing the foundation with funds enabling it to be maintained indefinitely where it was and how it was. It was his specific requirement that the collection not go anywhere near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That's exactly where it is today.

 The National Library of Iraq and its irreplaceable holdings were destroyed in the rampant looting and arson that followed the arrival of American troops in Baghdad. The National Museum was also heavily damaged and much of its contents stolen. Virtually nothing was left of the library and its tens of thousands of old manuscripts and books, and of archives like Iraqi newspapers tracing the country’s turbulent history from the era of Ottoman rule through Mr. Hussein. Reading rooms and the stacks where the collections were stored were reduced to smoking vistas of blackened rubble. First came the looters, then came the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sack of Baghdad. 

On the last morning of his life, a charismatic University of Chicago Divinity School professor named Ioan Culianu taught a class on gnosticism, the study of secret mystic sects. Two hours later Culianu was dead of a single .25-caliber bullet wound to the back of the head. His execution-style murder in a campus bathroom stunned the school, terrified students, and stumped the Chicago police and the FBI. Now, after sixteen months, the crime looks more and more like what Culianu's friends suspected it was all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil.

On 31st May 1981, the crucible of Tamil literature and heritage—the Jaffna Public Library—was set ablaze by state security forces and state sponsored mobs. Over 95,000 unique and irreplaceable Tamil palm leaves, manuscripts, parchments, books, magazines and newspapers, housed within an impressive building inspired by ancient Dravidian architecture, were destroyed during the burning that continued unchecked for two nights. The library was one of the largest in Asia.

Chile’s government has acknowledged that Nobel-prize winning poet Pablo Neruda might have been killed after the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. The interior ministry released a statement on Thursday amid press reports that Neruda might not have died of cancer as previously believed. The statement acknowledged a ministry document dated March of this year, which was published by the newspaper El Pais in Spain. “It’s clearly possible and highly probable that a third party” was responsible for Neruda’s death, the document said.

Incumbent Carrol D. Whitmire defeated Dr. Hunter S. Thompson with a vote of 204 to 173. Dr. Thompson

 represented something wholly alien to the other candidates for Sheriff: ideas. And, a sympathy towards the young, generous, grass-oriented society which is making the only serious effort to face the technological nightmare we've created. The only thing against him was that he was a visionary who wanted too pure a world. Ultimately, the interests of "land-rapers and other human jackals . . . capitalizing on the name 'Aspen'" prevailed.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of a murdered President, died at 1:44 A.M. today of an assassin's shots.

The New York Senator was wounded more than 20 hours earlier, moments after he had made his victory statement in the California primary.

Death came moments after Malcolm X stepped up to a flimsy plywood lectern in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom. The extermination plot was clever in conception, swift and smooth in execution. A double-barreled charge ripped up through the lectern and into Malcolm's chest. Then came a back-up volley of pistol fire. Malcolm tumbled backward, his lean body rent by a dozen wounds, his heels hooked over a fallen chair. Four assailants made it to side doors and disappeared. Malcolm had seen the end coming, predicted it, in fact, so long and so loudly that people had stopped listening.

Playwright and poet Federico García Lorca was arrested and killed on the orders of right-wing military authorities in Granada, according to newly released documents that shed light on the death of one of the highest-profile victims of the Spanish civil war. The documents, written in 1965 at the Granada police headquarters, are the first ever admission by Franco-era officials of their involvement in the death in 1936 of the author.