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England captain Ben Stokes still recovering from a broken cheekbone

By The Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — England captain Ben Stokes’ recovery from a broken cheekbone will keep him sidelined for the start of the county cricket season.

The 34-year-old Durham star was was hit by a ball during a training session with academy players early last month, and he had surgery soon afterward.

Stokes has not played since the final game of England’s 4-1 Ashes loss in Australia in January.

He’ll miss the Durham’s County Championship opener against Kent next week.

The all-rounder could return for matches against Worcestershire in early May, Durham coach Ryan Campbell said.

England’s first summer test match is against New Zealand beginning June 4.

Last week, the England and Wales Cricket Board announced it is sticking with the current leadership following its review of the Ashes tour.

Managing director Rob Key, coach Brendon McCullum and Stokes as captain kept their jobs after England lost the Ashes in 11 days with two games to spare.

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AP cricket: https://apnews.com/hub/cricket

Eulogy for the CIA Factbook: The free standard for world facts, long an educational staple, is gone

By The Associated Press
If you attended school any time after the Nixon administration, then you likely beheld at some point the CIA World Factbook, a map and reference manual of Planet Earth and its inhabitants upon which nearly everyone could agree. Maybe you read parts of it from a floppy disk or a CD-ROM for that social studies project due tomorrow. Or scanned its list of countries for Latvia, because that is the country you are representing next week in Model U.N. Even better, you wandered the earth in your imagination as you held the physical Factbook in your own hands, unfolding its maps and understanding, perhaps for the first time, that the thumbs-up gesture your friends flash each other is considered an obscene insult in parts of the Middle East, Europe and Argentina. Who knew? The Factbook and its readers did, for more than six decades. Its authors — some of the world's best intelligence-gatherers, who contributed thousands of their own photos — kept the curated database updated and online for public use at no charge. The reasons stated were geopolitical and philosophical. But since we are talking about facts, it also is true that the Factbook went public in 1975 with lofty statements of purpose at a time when Congress was revealing abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA.
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