Beatles’ secretary breaks silence

For Freda Kelly, secretary to the Beatles and head of the band’s fan club, work sometimes involved trailing the Fab Four to the barber shop, sweeping their locks from the floor and mailing strands of hair to adoring female fans. Kelly, one of the Beatles’ longest-serving employees, worked for the British band for more than a decade but had never shared her stories publicly until now.

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Books: Your Obt. Servt.

*Harbert, Mich., is a crossroads town about 60 miles east of Chicago across the lake. To get there you have to drive through the gritty desolation of South Chicago, through Gary, where in autumn the blast furnaces at night make a glowering sheet lightning, through the smoke of Michigan City and into clean air again, along Lake Michigan behind some of the biggest sand dunes in the world.

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South Africa: Dispensing with Judges

In 1960 chocolate-skinned Robert Sobukwe, 38, head of the black nationalist Pan-African Congress, was sentenced to three years in jail for “incitement to riot.” As his release date drew near last week, Sobukwe, a slim onetime university lecturer, was hustled from the maximum-security prison in Pretoria to a bleak detention camp on Robben Island in Table Bay, six miles from Cape Town. There he learned, just the day before he was to receive freedom, that South Africa's Parliament had rammed through a new security act empowering Justice Minister Johannes Vorster to keep political prisoners in custody indefinitely, even after their sentences have expired

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Where Racing Is Going to the Dogs

The face Macau shows to the world today may be its 29 sparkling casinos, but one of the last links with the city’s gambling past can still be found two miles away from the main strip, in a plastic reproduction of Rome’s Coliseum that stands out amid the dowdy surroundings of its working-class neighborhood. Inside, six sinewy greyhounds stand shivering on an oval race track, waiting for a mud-stained mechanical rabbit to give them something to chase.

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South Africa’s Public-Sector Strike a Dilemma for Zuma

The use of rubber bullets by South African police against striking public-sector workers in Soweto — erstwhile cauldron of antiapartheid protest — carries a symbolic significance that will send shockwaves through the country. But it also marks a milestone in the slow transition by the ruling African National Congress from being a rebel movement that reflexively backed striking workers to being a government that can’t afford to heed their demands

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Mark Sanford Sex Scandal: South Carolina and GOP Assess the Damage

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has never shied away from talking about his religious faith. So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that he invoked “God’s law” throughout his long, rambling press conference on June 24 — after going missing in Buenos Aires for six days — to confess his yearlong extramarital affair with an Argentine woman

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South Korea Gaming Curfew to Battle Video-Game Addiction

Ever since Yoon Hyuk-joo, a 16-year-old in Seoul, started playing the popular computer game StarCraft eight years ago, studying has taken the backseat. For six hours every day in dim, smoky Internet cafs known in the South Korean capital as “PC Bangs,” Yoon leads a squad of soldiers in Battlefield Online and then maims the undead in Counter-Strike: Zombies

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