Reading

I've been reading Leonardo Sciascia's The Moro Affair, for the second time, and finding it just as disturbing as the first time, though perhaps for new reasons.

I first read Sciascia's work when I heard about The Day of the Owl, a crime novel. A police-procedural, in fact, that knocked the usual police-procedural into a cocked hat. When published in 1961, I gather, it had some impact in Italy because it dramatised the connection between the Mafia and the Christian-Democrat (DC) government. Sciascia, a Sicilian who became one of Italy's major public intellectuals, wrote several other superb crime novels with a philosophical and political edge, a range of other books, plays, and a lot of political journalism. In the 1970s he was elected to the Italian parliament on the Communist (PCI) ticket, but left the party in disgust when its leaders proposed their 'historic compromise' with the corrupt Christian Democrat regime.

Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a “hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything. But today? In case you haven’t noticed, the phrase “new Cold War” or “second Cold War” has indeed crept into our media vocabulary. (Check it out... Read more

A government shutdown was averted at the last second.

The post Amazon and Google Are Finally Facing the Music appeared first on The Intercept.

For three decades, Ronnie Kasrils engaged in a transnational crusade to bring about the destruction of apartheid in South Africa. A founder member of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP), the former government minister began his revolutionary odyssey sixty years ago this […]

A new, well-funded pressure group is fighting to get Apple to weaken iPhone privacy protections in the name of catching child predators.

The post New Group Attacking iPhone Encryption Backed by U.S. Political Dark-Money Network appeared first on The Intercept.

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