Most Recent Posts

The son of former Ugandan leader Idi Amin has written to The Guardian listing what he says are inaccuracies in the British newspaper's 2003 obituary of the late dictator.

Parts of the letter were published in a column by Chris Elliott, the newspaper's reader's editor, or ombudsman.

Hussein Amin, who says he is running for parliament in 2016, is one of the more than 30 children Amin is said to have fathered. The Guardian reported that he is the son of the late Ugandan leader's fourth wife, Kay.

Hussein Amin's concerns about the obituary included the number of people whose deaths were blamed on his father; his role in Britain's Burma campaign during World War II; whether he participated in the massacre of Turkana nomads; and his date of birth.

The Guardian's full piece is worth reading, and is available here, but one fact jumped out at us: Hussein Amin's concerns about his father's victims. The original obituary had this to say:

"The death toll during the Amin regime will never be accurately known. The best estimate, from the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, is that it was not less than 80,000 and more likely around 300,000. Another estimate, compiled by exile organizations with the help of Amnesty International, put the number killed at 500,000."

But Hussein Amin, citing the ICJ, notes that the number was lower — between 30,000 and 80,000.

"I am not sure if you can take this from Idi Amin's son however factual my criticism is," Hussein Amin's letter says, according to The Guardian.

The newspaper's Elliott adds:

"The readers' editor's office always considers a complaint seriously, from wherever it comes. The son of the principal is always worth listening to, although that relationship does not guarantee the complainant will always be right."

Elliott said the newspaper investigated the 15 areas where Hussein Amin alleged inaccuracies in his father's obituary, adding the original obituary "was supported by all the major sources we consulted and so we shall not be revising it online, although we respect Hussein Amin's different view of his father's history."

idi amin

Uganda

Thin Mints, Do-si-dos and Samoas just became easier to buy: Girl Scouts will now be able to use Digital Cookies to sell the treats online.

"Girls have been telling us that they want to go into this space," said Sarah Angel-Johnson, chief digital cookie executive for the Girl Scouts of the USA. "Online is where entrepreneurship is going."

Her comments were reported by The Associated Press.

About 1.6 million Girl Scouts, out of a total of about 2 million, sell cookies each year. The program nets about $800 million. The Digital Cookies program is expected to complement that effort.

Scout councils were given the option of using either personalized websites or a mobile app for sales of the boxes that cost between $3.50 and $5.

The AP has more on how the website and app will work:

"For web-based sales, scouts customize their pages, using their first names only, and email prospective customers with links to click on for orders. They can also put up videos explaining who they are and what they plan to do with their proceeds.

"The mobile platform offers tabs for tracking sales and allows for the sale of bundles of different kinds of cookies. It can be used on a phone or tablet."

The websites will be invitation-only, and the personal details of both the Girl Scouts as well as their customers will be protected. The app will allow credit-card processing and direct shipping, The New York Times reported.

The program, which begins this month, is limited to 51 participating councils. It will go national in January, when most of the 112 councils start their cookie sales.

Reaction on the Girl Scouts' Facebook page was mixed.

One woman wrote: "Soon the girls won't have to interact with anyone. Not sure this is a great thing."

Another added: "LOVE this!! We have lots of family and friends that want to support my daughter, but I spend more on shipping than her troop got credit for the sales."

Some Girl Scouts echoed those sentiments.

"I love going around my neighborhood, my parents' jobs and my grandfather's job," Bria Vainqueur, 13, of Somerset, N.J., told The Times. "I've been selling cookies since I joined scouting when I was 6, including setting up a booth at our local Stop & Shop. But the digital option is going to make it easier to reach a lot more people and to take and keep track of their orders."

Girl Scout cookies

Girl Scouts

If you want to give your taste buds a gustatory tour of Mexico, then Margarita Carrillo is ready to be your guide.

The Mexican chef and food activist has spent years gathering hundreds of recipes from every region of the country for Mexico: The Cookbook, her new, encyclopedic take on her country's cuisine.

With over 700 pages and 600 recipes, the book, at first glance, can be daunting. But most of the recipes are just a paragraph long, with prep and cook times under 20 minutes. That emphasis on simplicity was a deliberate choice: Carrillo wrote her book in hopes of encouraging American home cooks to explore Mexico's vast and varied, "labyrinthine" culinary bounty.

"Cook the simpler dishes first," she encourages readers in her introduction, "and then challenge yourself with the more elaborate ones."

i i

Margarita Carrillo, a Mexican chef and food activist, spent years gathering hundreds of recipes from every region of the country for Mexico: The Cookbook, her new, encyclopedic take on her country's cuisine. Courtesy of the author hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of the author

Margarita Carrillo, a Mexican chef and food activist, spent years gathering hundreds of recipes from every region of the country for Mexico: The Cookbook, her new, encyclopedic take on her country's cuisine.

Courtesy of the author

Carrillo is hardly the first cookbook author to try to document Mexico's regional cuisines exhaustively. Indeed, perhaps the best-known authority on the topic is Diana Kennedy, a British cookbook writer whose work has been recognized by the Mexican government with the Order of the Aztec Eagle.

"They've done it well," says Gloria Lopez Morales, president of the Conservatory of Culture and Gastronomy of Mexico, of the American and British food writers who have come before Carrillo. "But I think that now it's time for a Mexican cookbook of this caliber to be done by Mexicans."

The book includes recipes for 40 different salsas, 15 egg dishes, and lots of street-food favorites. When I visited Carrillo recently at her home high in the hills above Mexico City, we decided to make a baked fish dish with a spicy, nutty marinade paste on top.

I asked Carrillo to slowly pronounce the name of the sauce – a smoked chile paste from Oaxaca made with nuts, dried shrimp, garlic, pumpkin seeds and dried avocado leaves. Chintextle, she repeats — "it's one of the energetic pastes," by which she means it's full of proteins.

All the ingredients are dry-roasted in either a frying pan or a flat, cast-iron disk known as a comal.

She tosses the seeds into the hot frying pan. What about oil or water? I ask. She says, "You just want the frying pan with nothing, nothing at all on it."

One of the misconceptions Carrillo battles about Mexican food is that it is greasy and oily.

"In all of Mexico, there [are] the traditional cooking techniques — there is comal, steaming, boiling, hot stones and the pit," she insists. Oil and deep-frying, she says, are modern imports. Frying, she notes, "wasn't ours. It was brought to us by the Spaniards."

Mexico

The Cookbook

by Margarita Carrillo Arronte

Hardcover, 704 pages | purchase

Purchase Featured Book

TitleMexicoSubtitleThe CookbookAuthorMargarita Carrillo Arronte

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

Amazon

Independent Booksellers

Nonfiction

Food & Wine

More on this book:

NPR reviews, interviews and more

Carrillo is the real deal. In a growing field of Mexican celebrity chefs, she insists on keeping it simple. There is no Asian or Mediterranean fusion in her cooking, no foam or fancy layers.

When editors with New York-based publisher Phaidon were looking for someone to add to their line of authentic, country-specific cookbooks, they went straight to Carrillo.

Lopez Morales says Phaidon had many great Mexican cooks to choose from. "But I believe that Margarita is one of the people with the most qualities necessary to write a truly authentic book about Mexican cooking," says Lopez Morales, whose non-governmental agency is charged with promoting Mexican food as an "intangible cultural heritage" as designated by UNESCO.

Until recently, Carrillo owned restaurants in San Jose de Los Cabos and Mexico City. She has a popular cooking show on the Latin American Gourmet cable channel, and Carrillo was part of the decade-long campaign to get Mexican cuisine listed on the UNESCO cultural heritage list.

Carrillo says she wants everyone, Mexicans included, to appreciate the food and techniques that have survived generations and "made traditional Mexican cuisine an invaluable representation of a nation with a rich cultural identity."

"You know, it is really, really outstanding the way this food, this cuisine, has survived through the centuries. Of course, it evolves, but you can eat the same tortilla that Moctezuma ate 500 years ago," she says as she throws all the dry-roasted ingredients into a food processor.

She adds some apple cider vinegar to smooth it all out. And in a clay baking dish, she lines the bottom with a splash of olive oil and some sliced onions, then places a fresh chunk of local robalo, or snook, a firm, flaky white fish. Carrillo says she gets riled that most Mexican restaurants serve imported salmon, when Mexico has thousands of miles of coastline.

"Why would we have to import fish? It is absurd," she says. "I think that Mexican cuisine is designed for Mexican products."

i i

Carrillo and NPR's Carrie Kahn cooked robalo, or local snook, a firm white fish, in chintextle, a smoked chile marinade paste. Carrie Kahn /NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Carrie Kahn /NPR

Carrillo and NPR's Carrie Kahn cooked robalo, or local snook, a firm white fish, in chintextle, a smoked chile marinade paste.

Carrie Kahn /NPR

CHINTEXTLE

Smoked chile paste

Adapted from Mexico: The Cookbook by Margarita Carrillo Arronte

Region: Oaxaca

Preparation time: 20 minutes

Cooking time: 10 minutes

Serves: 6

Ingredients

5 Oaxacan pasilla or other smoked dried chiles, dry-roasted

3 1/2 oz/100 g dried shrimp (prawns)

6 avocado leaves

1/2 head garlic, roasted

1/2 cup (4 fl oz/120 ml) pineapple vinegar or apple cider vinegar

1/2 cup (4 fl oz/120 ml) olive oil

sea salt

Instructions

Preheat the broiler (grill), then broil (grill) the chiles, turning frequently, for 5 minutes. Remove and set aside. Broil the shrimp (prawns) under low heat for 2 minutes—broiling for longer will make them bitter. Remove and set aside.

Dry-roast the avocado leaves in a heavy frying pan or skillet over low heat for 2–3 minutes, until the leaves are a little shiny.

Put the chiles, shrimp, avocado leaves, and garlic into a food processor or blender and process until thoroughly combined. With the motor running, add the vinegar and enough oil to make a spreadable paste. Season with salt.

Variation: You can add dry-roasted pumpkin seeds, pecans, almonds, guajillo chile, and cooked black beans.

Mexican food

foodways

To gauge international interest in Uruguay's legal cannabis market, spend just a few minutes at a small marijuana shop called Urugrow in Uruguay's capital, Montevideo.

In a period of about 10 minutes, owner Juan Manuel Varela gets a call from Brazil. A man from Canada shows up to see what the market would be for his company, which sells child-safe packaging for marijuana products. Shortly after, two American travelers stop by looking to score weed.

Another lurking pot-preneur, Argentinian Mauricio Luporini, explains to them that under the new law, selling to foreigners is illegal — to their obvious disappointment.

Afterwards, Luporini says that he is also looking to get a piece of the cannabis market.

"Uruguay is such a little country, with such few people," he says. "The speed of the people is slow, you know. But It has a great potential."

Parallels

Meet Uruguay's Pot-Legalizing, VW-Driving, Sandal-Wearing President

The Two-Way

Lawmakers In Uruguay Vote To Legalize Pot

A Progressive Approach To Pot

Foreigners are dreaming big, but the locals seem a bit overwhelmed with all the interest in a new law that was passed legalizing marijuana in the last year.

The law allows Uruguayans to register to grow their own weed, or join growing clubs — cooperatives of up to 45 people — for personal consumption.

Under President Jose Mujica's maverick leadership, Uruguay went further than any country in the world: The government will plant, cultivate and ultimately distribute marijuana, too.

Mujica says decades of failed drug war policies necessitated a radical new approach to curb drug violence and addiction. If the government sells dope, the idea goes, the criminals can't. But the reality has proven complicated, and some advocates say the government has bitten off more than it can chew.

"I think the Uruguayan government has been invaded by a big monster, which is called cannabis," Luporini quips.

A Cultural Shift Out Of The Shadows

Under a tarp tied to a rusted car, dozens of cannabis plants are being pruned in the summer sun at a new growing club. The club is located in a small house with Che Guevara and Bob Marley posters on the wall and a sign outside that shows a cannabis leaf. For the club, the new law is about community and progress.

i i

A legal marijuana crop in Uruguay. Matilde Campodonico/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Matilde Campodonico/AP

A legal marijuana crop in Uruguay.

Matilde Campodonico/AP

"We don't see this as a business," says Julio Rey, the president of the Cannabis Growers Association of Uruguay. "We see this as a social advance and a victory of rights."

And that is part of the wider issue here — everyone sees the law a different way. Rey objects to the requirement to register people as an unnecessary headache and he doesn't want to see the industry commercialized, unlike the businessmen flooding into the country.

Club members have been traveling around the country to inform rural residents about the new law and how it works. Despite the publicity and world-wide attention, only about 15 clubs and 1,000 people have registered for the government program.

Rey explains this is partly as a cultural issue — pot smoking flourished in the shadows for a long time. But he worries if people don't sign on, the black market in cannabis will thrive. Others are concerned that tourists, unable to buy legally, might turn to criminals for their pot.

Personal Consumption May Be The Easy Part

The government faces even greater challenges. It has had to change the planned location of its marijuana fields — Rey says no one in Uruguay knows how to plant marijuana on an industrial scale — and who will guard it. So far the project hasn't gotten off the ground.

There's also fierce debate about how the drug will be distributed. The law calls for pharmacies to do it, but that has raised other questions, like how should this product be taxed?

"If you tax it like cigarettes, for example, you will make it too expensive," says analyst Ignacio Zuasnabar of Uruguay's Catholic University. "It won't be competitive, and people will still go to the black market."

Pablo Iturralde Vinas, a right-of-center opposition politician, worries about the government's plan to plant and sell drugs.

"The state is very inefficient in the grand majority of the things it does," Vinas says. "So imagine, planting marijuana will be equally inefficient. The government will probably have a great number of public employees that will produce something that is vastly more expensive."

Implementing the law is "one or two months behind schedule," acknowledges Julio Calzada, who oversees the law as secretary general of the National Commission on Drugs, but he says the stages are going as planned.

"This is the first time this has been done anywhere in the world," Calzada says. "There are a lot of things we are inventing from nothing."

Or as another Uruguayan said, with a mixture of chagrin and pride, "We are kind of just winging it."

Uruguay