Ernest Hemingway is the type of writer, renowned almost as much for his lifestyle as his work, who inspires a strange array of responses from nearly everyone. You might not like the guy, but it’s difficult to not form an opinion.

PEN Lifetime Achievement Award winner Clancy Sigal thinks you should look past whatever prejudices you may harbor for the writer that everybody called Papa. He’s written a book called Hemingway Lives! that urges us to celebrate Hemingway’s “passionate and unapologetic political partisanship, his stunningly concise, no-frills writing style, and an attitude to sex and sexuality much more nuanced than he is traditionally credited with.”

Read the full story at Flavorwire.

Clark Stoeckley is Bradley Manning’s most visible supporter at the soldier’s court-martial. He arrives each day in a white box truck with bold words painted on the sides: “WikiLeaks TOP SECRET Mobile Information Collection Unit.” The provocative gag even has a nonworking satellite dish and two fake security cameras on it.

Stoeckley, a 30-year-old art instructor at a New Jersey college, is among the more colorful of the 10 to 20 supporters who regularly attend Manning’s trial, which resumed this week. The loose-knit group of mostly retirees or self-employed workers sits through hours of sometimes bland testimony at Fort Meade, a military installation near Baltimore. They take notes, make courtroom sketches or write blogs, posting their drawings and articles on websites designed to inform people about the court-martial and raise money for Manning’s defense.

Read the profile in its entirety at the Associated Press.

The renderings are set to be published by OR Books in September as a graphic novel, which is an appropriate format for an epic conflict between good and evil. The previews of Stoeckley’s graphic novel look very exciting, but what we find most compelling about the project is Stoeckley’s commitment to the trial and to Manning, and the mundane details of the process that he captures through his daily practice of drawing and observation.

Read the full story at Rhizome.

Jack Colhoun is a journalist and archive researcher with a distinguished record of investigating US foreign policy in Vietnam, Cambodia and the Middle East and publicising the impact of special interest lobbies on domestic politics like the Obama Healthcare legislation. He was the leader of the draft and military resistance registers exiled in Canada during the Vietnam War.

The author laboured for nineteen years over source material, primarily the US intelligence documents on Cuba from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Collection (JFKAC) at National Archives II in Maryland. This archive collection was created by the President Kennedy Act of 1992, which mandated the declassification of documents with possible relevance to Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. The declassified documents offer new insights into US policy making: from Eisenhower’s decision to seek the overthrow of the Cuban revolution in November 1959; to the CIA’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961; to Kennedy’s provocative Operation Mongoose in 1962; to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962; to Kennedy’s covert funding of ‘autonomous’ Cuban exile commando operations in 1963; to back-channel discussions between the Kennedy Administration and Castro in the weeks before President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963; and President Lyndon Johnson’s de-escalation of US policy in Cuba.

Read the full review at the Revolutionary Communist Group’s website.

In ‘Drone Warfare’, American anti-war activist Medea Benjamin has written a guide to how murder is committed by remote control, something all too familiar in Pakistan and other parts of the world.

Read the full story at The Socialist

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George W. Bush’s supporters have one thing right: if the former US president had used drones to kill suspected terrorists with the grim regularity adopted by Barack Obama, it would be treated as a national and international scandal.

Read the full review at Business Day

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Salma is a renowned poet in India. In her time, she’s also been a politician, village leader and on the state social welfare board.

But for 25 years, from the age of 13, Salma was locked away from the world.

[…]

But she began smuggling her poems out in the laundry and her mother posted them off to a publisher. She became a literary sensation, with much speculation about who she was. Despite the subject matter of her poetry which hadn’t been brought to public attention before (the lot of women, their sadness, their subjugation to men), some people even suggested Salma the poet was actually a man.

I met the real Salma at Sheffield DocFest where a film about her life is premiering.

The filmmaker Kim Longinotto documents Salma’s return to the village where she was grew up.

Read the full article and watch the video at Channel 4.

“Bradley Manning, who released hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and classified army reports to Wikileaks in 2010, is facing court-martial at Fort Meade on twenty-two offenses, including aiding the enemy. The trial, which began on June 3, is closed to cameras and recording equipment, so except for the efforts of a handful of observers in the courtroom, it’s hard for those of us outside to follow along.

One of those observers, Wikileaks activist Clark Stoeckley, aims to rectify that problem by producing a graphic novel of the entire proceedings.

[…]

The book, The United States vs. Pfc. Bradley Manning: A Graphic Account from Inside the Courtroom, will be published by OR Books as a print-on-demand title upon the trial’s completion this fall. (OR Books also published Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s manifesto, Cypherpunks.) In a first, those who pre-order the book will receive weekly emails with drawings and notes from the trial so they can stay abreast of developments.”

Read the full article at Melville House.

“Artist and WikiLeaks activist Clark Stoeckley is illustrating the trial of Private First Class Bradley Manning as a comic series. Manning is on trial for allegedly leaking files, videos, and other documents to WikiLeaks in one of the largest releases of classified data in U.S. history.

Drawing and writing in real-time from inside the courtroom, Stoeckley is capturing the important and secretive trial first-hand. The United States vs. PFC Bradley Manning: A graphic account from inside the courtroom features vivid sketches from inside the court and beyond, together with selected transcripts of the proceedings.

These trace the arguments as they move back and forth between the defence and the prosecution, providing a vital record and a uniquely compelling read. A 140-page paperback and ebook edition is due to be published in October.”

Read the full article (including pictures) at PSFK.

“Talen poetically threads personal memoir with imagined futures, nightmares and nostalgia. And yet there is a raw realness to it all, with touching references to his family and friends as well as experiences, ideas and hopes he clearly feels very deeply. One of the main criticisms of catastrophic discourse in environmentalism is that such religiosity turns climate change into Biblical fables, rather than problems to be solved… A critique of Talen’s evangelist garb might be that it simply plays to that. Except the Rev Billy is far from simple. It felt more as if he was inviting us to notice the pseudo-religious cult (of consumer capitalism) we’re already part of, not join a new one. Moreover, for all that it’s a sermon from a preacher, it’s very explicitly embedded in a social system. The “I got to be surreal sometimes to understand” line gradually transforms to “we got to be” (emphasis added) by the end of the poem, which I feel is emblematic of Talen’s approach as a whole. The religiosity of Talen’s style felt, to me, more a matter of “come, let’s congregate” than “you must fear my authoritarian warnings”. There is something very inclusive about his style, and joyous too.”

Read the full story at New Left Project.

A comic book about the trial Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private facing 22 charges for providing classified material to WikiLeaks, is being created from the courtroom by a WikiLeaks activist.

Scheduled for release in October by OR Books, Clark Stoeckley’s The United States vs PFC Bradley Manning: A Graphic Account from Inside the Courtroom combines illustrations of the topics being discussed with actual trial transcripts.

“No other sketch artists are coming to the trial here in Fort Meade regularly. I’m here all the time,” Stoeckley tells The Raw Story. “I want to record every single witness and create a visual record of what’s going on so that people can put faces to transcripts. I’m trying to capture the atmosphere in the courtroom and the characters who are part of the story … I’m doing this in a style that’s never been used in courtroom sketch art.”

Read the full article at Comic Book Resources.