The bizarre story behind the assassination of Shinzo Abe

From Robert Worth for The Atlantic: "On the last morning of his life, Shinzo Abe arrived in the Japanese city of Nara, famous for its ancient pagodas and sacred deer. His destination was more prosaic: a broad urban intersection across from the city’s main train station, where he would be giving a speech to endorse a lawmaker running for reelection to the National Diet, Japan’s parliament. Abe had retired two years earlier, but because he was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, his name carried enormous weight. No one seems to notice the youngish-looking man about 20 feet behind Abe, dressed in a gray polo shirt and cargo pants, a black strap across his shoulder. Unlike everyone else, the man is not clapping. Abe started to speak. Moments later, his remarks were interrupted by two loud reports, followed by a burst of white smoke. He collapsed to the ground. His security guards ran toward the man in the gray polo shirt, who held a homemade gun—two 16-inch metal pipes strapped together with black duct tape."

In search of the legendary female eagle hunters of Mongolia

From Asha Tanna for Al Jazeera: "In 2013, Kazakh women in Mongolia captured global attention when a young eagle huntress, Aisholpan Nurgaiv, became the subject of a viral photograph taken by Israeli photographer Asher Svidensky. He returned to the country in 2014 with director Otto Bell, who made a documentary about the teenager. The storyline focused on her being an outlier in Kazakh culture in what Bell described as an isolated community with “a certain kind of ignorance about what woman can do”. These remarks were made during a press interview on CBS's Mountain Morning Show in January 2016, where he also said she was the “first woman to eagle hunt in the 2,000-year-old male-dominated history”. But Kazakhs and historians say this is not true. “Eagle hunting always included women,” says Adrienne Mayor, a historian at Stanford University."

Where did the QWERTY keyboard come from?

From Nick Yetto for the Smithsonian: "In 1866, Christopher Latham Sholes, a Wisconsin newspaper publisher and former state senator, co-invented an automated machine to number coupons and tickets—a task previously done by hand. When Sholes unveiled his device to a fellow inventor, Carlos Glidden, Glidden had an idea, exclaiming: “Why can’t you make a machine that will print letters as well as figures?” Sholes shared Glidden’s enthusiasm, as did S.W. Soule, a Milwaukee printer, so the three of them set up shop and began work on what would become the world’s first commercially successful “Type Writer." There’s some dispute over how and why Sholes and Glidden arrived at the QWERTY layout. Some historians have argued that it solved a jamming problem by spacing out the most common letters in English; others hold that it was designed specifically to help telegraphists when transcribing Morse code."