On Sunday, the Carnival Adonia docked back in Miami, ending the first cruise from the United States to Cuba in over 50 years and days of vomit- and diarrhea-soaked Hell for 14 passengers suffering from “stomach-related symptoms.”

Operation Uphold Democracy: Haiti, 1994-95.

Earlier this week, Russian scientist Sergei Bulat, a researcher at the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, announced that a new life form had been found in an ice sample from the gigantic Lake Vostok, which lies deep beneath Antarctica. The Russians had to drill over 12,000 feet to get to the frozen lake, which is underneath a place that had the lowest recorded temperature in history. Needless to say, the sample from Lake Vostok was extremely hard to obtain, and the Russians were rewarded for their hard effort with some spectacular scientific findings.

Up until 1968, the United States government had a Top Secret plan for what to do in the event that the president died or went missing under mysterious circumstances. The plan was: Nuke the shit out of everyone right now.

Swedish ready-to-assemble furniture maker IKEA today finally acknowledged that a report claiming forced labor had been used in the manufacturing of its products in East Germany during the '70s and '80s was correct.

Residents of Blackburn were treated to quite a display as two rival ice cream vendors went at it in the middle of the road after months of rising tensions over a territorial dispute.

To celebrate its Independence Day, Ukraine yesterday officially opened the first, and most likely only, nuclear missile museum in the world there, the Pervomaisk Strategic Missile Forces Museum. Visitors can check out intercontinental ballistic missiles like "Satan" and "Sandal", as well as have a look around original bunkers. In the ITN video tour above, you also see a Soviet shitter that was used when the present day museum site was an active nuke silo. I'd go.

Claude Levi-Strauss is familiar to anyone who took Anthropology 101 as the most important anthropologist of the 20th century and a father of structuralism, the theoretical forebear to post-structuralism, post-modernism, deconstruction and all that weird subversive French philosophy your parents warned you about. Which may explain why the FBI spent close to a decade spying on him in the 1940s.

A British electrical engineer, Mike Thomas is selling his bomb shelter that he built during Cold War hysteria, and is asking for £350,000. It can withstand a nuclear blast 80 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The Russian spy story continues: A mid-twenties software tester at Microsoft, Alexey Karetnikov, has been deported on immigration charges and is said to be the 12th member of the spy ring. Last chance for reporters to overuse Cold War clichés!

A lawyer for an imprisoned American spy in Russia says a Cold War-style prisoner exchange is in the works so America can rid itself of 10 Russian spies, including glamour model spy Anna Chapman.

Barack Obama confirmed the details of a new nuclear arms-reduction treaty with Russia this morning. The agreement is our first major step in arms-reduction since 1991. Now we just need 8 Senate Republicans to vote to ratify it.

"With retailers struggling to find credit and ordinary Russians being forced to change their spending, a vast lake of undrunk vodka is accumulating in distilleries across Russia." [Telegraph via Maura]

"Medvedev announced agreement to a French-brokered proposal for both Russian and Georgian troops to stop fighting and move back to their initial positions." [Washington Post, Previously]

This link to a ridiculously slanted Russian news story about the war in Georgia has 1,194 Diggs, but please don't pay it any mind. Pravda.ru is a joke, a web-only repository of mistranslated hilarity and boob pictures unrelated to any print publication. Russian newspapers can still be oppositional and independent—it's the TV Putin controls. We should probably worry less about wacky Engrish propaganda and more about the return of the Cold War! Russia's intention just might be to actually topple the democratically elected, adorably pro-American government of Georgia. (They say they won't go to Tbilisi, but they also said that about Gori!) George W. Bush's intention is to not get involved and hope a ceasefire happens soon. That funny little dance he did is not so cute anymore! If it spreads to Ukraine, what then? NATO gets involved at some point. That's a big problem. A big problem called the Cold War! Then what? Then we get President McCain. Because he's still stuck in the Cold War. And Obama dithered and hemmed and hawed in his response to this mess, while McCain said he would personally go to Moscow and deck that paper-hanging sonuvabitch Putin (more or less). Which is dangerous crazy rhetoric. And what does America like to hear during times of international instability in far-off places? Dangerous crazy rhetoric! Also fun to ponder right now: Russia's growing friendship with Iran, Georgia's oil reserves. Surprisingly, Dealbreaker of all things has a terribly informative roundtable on the entire situation that will allow you to sound reasonably intelligent at a cocktail party until you finish your third cocktail and find yourself unable to pronounce any of the names involved. And finally, if the John Edwards scandal had been reported on by the MSM back in 2007, none of this would've happened.