Read Fifty Shades of Black for Free Online Page A

blue-black curtain of auto exhaust is dissipating. Car use in Paris has dropped a whopping 25 percent over the past decade. In the same time, bicycle use has doubled. One-half of all trips in Paris are now made on foot.
    Vehicular diehards are aghast. They predict massive traffic jams and widespread chaos. The head of one pro-car lobby harrumphs, “We can no more eliminate cars from Paris roads than empty the Seine of water.”
    Fulminate away, monsieur. Other large urban jurisdictions are moving in the same direction as Paris. Across the channel, the city of London now levies a daily sixteen-dollar “congestion charge” on all private vehicles travelling downtown. Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa have already set up bike-sharing programs; Vancouver’s working on it.
    Personally, I think McLuhan was just a hair off the mark. Men don’t love their cars because they allow us to be alone. That’s what the bathroom is for. Men love their cars because it’s the last place they can be in charge. Comedian Rita Rudner says car love is the reason most men are afraid to make a commitment to a woman.
    â€œIt’s because we can’t be steered.”

 
    Â 
    Cambodia: Phoenix Rising
    O ne of the more cynical rationalizations used by the US government for its use of drones to kill foreigners is the fact that there’s a legal precedent. The official argument goes that it’s okay to target enemies in their own countries because the US did the same thing to Cambodians during the Vietnam War.
    True—but not something you’d think a country would want to brag about.
    Back in the ’60s and ’70s during what became known as Henry Kissinger’s Secret War, American bombers flew 230,000 separate sorties over Cambodia, dropping more than three million tons of bombs.
    It was, as a US general said at the time, “the only war in town,” since a temporary truce with Vietnam had been declared. It was also a bit like shooting fish in a barrel; the Cambodians had no air force, no anti-aircraft ordnance—no armed forces to speak of. They were mostly rice farmers. Their great crime was allowing the Viet Cong to use their country as a shortcut to South Vietnam.
    Not that the Cambodians had much choice. They were as powerless against the Viet Cong as they were against the US bombers. The US military rationale was loopy at best; a bit like bombing Vancouver because it lies between Seattle and Alaska. Now the US is arguing that the thousands of innocent Cambodians who died as a result of the US pursuing North Vietnamese set a legal precedent, which makes it okay for the US to go after enemies in any neutral territory.
    No one knows how many Cambodians died in the bombings, but estimates run as high as five hundred thousand. We do know that Cambodia was devastated, many of its towns reduced to rubble, the infrastructure shredded, its economy ruined.
    Which made it easy for the monster known as Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge to take over the country and utterly destroy what was left of it.
    Pol Pot was Joseph Stalin on steroids. He practised social engineering with a sledgehammer and a meat cleaver. In four devastating years, Pol Pot oversaw the gutting and abandonment of all Cambodian urban centres. Organized religion was abolished, banks were closed, private property, markets and even money was eliminated. The Khmer Rouge tore down 95 percent of the country’s Buddhist temples. Christians, Muslims, Chinese, ethnic Vietnamese and Thais were murdered on sight, as were government officials, professionals such as doctors or lawyers—indeed, all “intellectuals.” Wearing eyeglasses was enough to get you branded an “intellectual.”
    Pol Pot’s so-called Democratic Kampuchea was in fact a ­prison-camp state. One quarter of the population—about two and a half million people—were executed, died of disease or simply starved to death.
    The best thing you