Oh yes definitely The Little Prince is a must-read.

The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren is one of my childhood favourites. Originally Swedish but has been translated into English.

The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt another childhood fav., it has been translated from Dutch. Actually, anything by Dragt I loved, but not sure which have translations or not.

In terms of adult fiction, I was hooked on Stig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (he only wrote the first 3 though).

Someone mentioned Kurt Vonnegut; I recommend the one I've read of his: Slaughterhouse 5.

The Circle still gives me pause more than 5 years later. It's by Dave Eggers.

i haven’t needed one for years because i use their app on my phone and i can see their announcements as a notification and i can also kill off most of its tracking by DNS. unfortunately my parents don’t understand this

Sounds like you have a reasonable, compatible alternative on your phone already. Will they even notice if you continue using this and never plug the new alexa in?

That teacher is a sore looser.

Someone recently told me this anecdote:

I overheard on the train home two middle aged ladies talking about their kids mobilephones.

One was saying how they dragged their teen and their mobile phone to the iphone store so they could setup the location tracker and "quiet mode" (parent phone can completly disable the teens phone), and how their child was upset but they are glad it was done.

The other lady was asking how she to can do the same.

the feeling of not being spied on 24-7

"They started it." "We are the real victims here." "Antisemitic terrorists"

This is a case brought by 4 US citizens against the CIA. They are attorneys Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass. They all visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the relevant time period ~2017 and claim their 4th amendment rights have been violated. I can't wait to see this trial unfold! The evidence that will come out of this could well mean the end of the DOJ's pursuit of Assange.

The controversial Gessen quote is featured in Nachdenkseiten -> https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=108755

Masha Gessen schreibt [transl. writes]:

"For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time – in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America, but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term ‚open-air prison‘ seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of occupied Europe, there are no prison guards – Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‚ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

McBride's lawyer Davis said outside the court:

“It was the fatal blow made in conjunction with the decision made a few days ago that limits what we can say to the jury on David’s behalf in terms of what was his duty as an officer was on the oath he took to serve, as we say, the interests of the Australian people.

Well the ruling was, he doesn’t have a duty to serve the interests of the Australian people. He has a duty to follow orders. That is a very narrow understanding of the law in our view that takes us back really pre-World War II. We all know how military law has been judged since then in terms of compliance to follow orders.

So facing that reality, we’re limited in terms of what we could put to a jury in term’s of David’s duty … together with the removal of evidence makes it impossible, realistically, to go to trial. It is a sad day and a difficult day for us to advise David on his options this afternoon and he embraced them.”

McBride said: “I stand tall and I believe I did my duty and I don’t see it as a defeat, I see it as a beginning of a better Australia.”

Remember Julian Assange is in a high security prison without conviction awaiting extradition to the US where the conditions he will be incarcerated in will be even worse. He will be burried in the prison with no contact to his friends or family while being tried in the 'espionage court' where he is charged. The long-term threat of these conditions have amounted to psychological torture, resulting in a medical state that could end his life at any moment. Julian is literally hanging by a thread. His limited contact with his wife and 2 young children are literally his life line. He won't have that in US prison. This is a matter of life and death. Torturers torture to intimidate. In Julian's case it is to intimidate everyone else and in particular the press, so they won't do what he did and expose serious state criminality to the world. The purpose is to avoid accountability and avoid facing justice.

Remember the indictment of Julian relates to 2010-2011 publications only: the Afghanistan War Logs, Iraq War Logs, Diplomatic Cables, Guantanamo Bay Detainee Briefs. The charges have nothing to do with the 2016 release of Clinton's emails, or with WL allegedly helping Hillary loose the election to Trump.