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Cuba: Former leader Fidel Castro died last week at the age of 90 after a long battle with illness.

Cuban President Raúl Castro, announced his older brother’s death on Friday night.  The nation will spend nine days in mourning.

Castro’s remains will be cremated according his wishes, and the ashes will be toured around Cuba until his state funeral on December 4th.

Castro will then be buried in the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago de Cuba alongside 19th-century Cuban independence hero José Martí and numerous other leading national figures.

Castro toppled Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship with his guerrilla army of “bearded ones” and installed his communist rule in 1959.

For more we go to PBS NewsHour:

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Myanmar: The Muslim minority are being “cleansed” from the Buddhist country, a UN official warns.

John McKissick of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees told the BBC that Myanmar armed forces have been killing Rohingya in Rakhine State during military sweeps launched in response to a coordinated October insurgency attack, which left nine border guards dead.

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority in Myanmar with about a population of around one million.  They have lived in the country for generations but are treated as illegal immigrants and denied citizenship.

McKissick said that security forces have been “killing men, shooting them, slaughtering children, raping women, burning and looting houses, forcing these people to cross the river” into Bangladesh.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims sought refuge in neighboring Bangladesh, while thousands more are gathering on the border, according to Bangladesh’s foreign ministry.

Myanmar government denies reports of atrocities.

For more we go to the BBC:

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Business: The world’s largest social network, Facebook, may work with the Chinese government in order to do business there.

Facebook is said to have developed software that can suppress certain posts to appear in users’ news feeds in specific geographies.

The software may be offered to third parties so that they may monitor popular stories across the network.  The third-party users could decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds.

It is believed that Facebook developed the software to to get China to lift its seven-year ban on the social network so that it would be able to reap huge business benefits by accessing to the world’s largest population of Internet users.

For more we go to Al Jazeera:

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U.S.: American’s spending spree on Black Friday has set a new online record.

Black Friday, the day following Thanksgiving, marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the U.S., when retailers often offer promotional sales.

According to the Financial Times, American online shoppers alone have set a new spending record of US$3.05 billion on Friday, on top of the nearly US$2 billion online sales made on Thanksgiving.

Across the Atlantic, UK online customers reacted with similar frenzy as the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) estimated that £1.27 billion (US$1.59 billion) was spent on Friday, up 16 percent from last year, and online retail sales were expected to reach £6.77 billion (US$8.45 billion) by 28 November, the Guardian reported.

For more we go to ABC Action News:

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Have a story that you’d like us to cover or review? Contact NewsWhistle’s Tony Church at Tony@NewsWhistle.com.

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Photo: “L’Havana, Cuba. 29 November 2016. Plaza de la Rivolucion”; Courtesy of cristiano barni / Shutterstock.com