Communist Party

"Comrade, come in," the man said, ushering a visitor into the lobby of Iraqi Communist Party headquarters. Across the busy intersection, a banner stretched across a newly renovated building promised the imminent opening of American fast-food restaurants, including "Kentacky Fried Chicken." Throughout the capital, portraits of Imam Hussein were omnipresent, reminders of a Shiite Muslim pilgrimage commemorating his death in AD 680.

Despite the Chinese government's intent to keep the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square out of public discourse, audio recordings and excerpts of a memoir by the Communist Party chief who was purged for opposing it have begun circulating quietly on the Internet. Before his death in 2005, Zhao Ziyang secretly recorded 30 hours of tapes that have been turned into a memoir, "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang."

The story behind how "Dim Sum Funeral" director Anna Chi ended up becoming a filmmaker is, alone, the stuff of great screenplays. After all, how many successful, L.A.-based filmmakers can say that, in effect, Chairman Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party got them into the movie business? Chi can, and, though it was a long, often difficult journey, she still looks back at her early life as a child of China's Cultural Revolution with a mix of wonder and resignation.

Bitter Spring A Life of Ignazio Silone Stanislao G. Pugliese Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 426 pp., $35 -- "Fontamara" and "Bread and Wine," Ignazio Silone's passionate novels of peasant life and political awakening, are iconic works for anyone who cherishes the literature of social commitment. Inspired by primitive Christianity and revolutionary socialism, Silone portrayed an oppressed, impoverished people's longing for justice and freedom with a unique moral sensibility.

In the markets of Kilju, a city of 100,000 near North Korea's eastern seacoast, the ruling Korean Workers' Party has ordered the removal of Chinese-made cookies, candies and pharmaceuticals. Even soybeans, many articles of clothing and shoes are now forbidden. It is all part of a great leap backward taking place in the secretive autocracy.

Imagine if one of America's foremost writers had once been privy to a shadowy plot by Hitler's Germany to take control of the motion picture industry through its labor organizations and force writers to clear scripts with Nazi censors, and then he courageously stepped forward to blow the whistle on the whole operation. Wouldn't it be bizarre if, when this man died, instead of being celebrated for such heroism, he was criticized and even attacked by colleagues for revealing the identities of those who were behind the intrigue?

Doris Brin Walker, a radical lawyer who fought anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s and helped clear activist Angela Davis of murder and kidnapping charges in the 1970s, died of a stroke Aug. 13 at a San Francisco hospital, her daughter, Emily Roberson, said. She was 90. A lifelong Communist and the only woman in her Boalt Hall law school class in 1942, Walker was a tenacious advocate who took on many difficult cases without pay. Among these was the 1959 trial of John W. Powell, a writer accused of sedition for publishing an article alleging that the United States used germ warfare during the Korean War. Her most high-profile case was the sensational 1972 trial of Davis, an avowed Communist and recently fired UCLA professor who faced the death penalty because a gun registered in her name was linked to the 1970 slayings of a Marin County judge and three abductors.

Speaking recently on Nelson Mandela Day, the chief of South Africa's Communist Party urged citizens to stick to values of equality and selflessness. He sometimes sports a Mao-style cap, and as minister of higher education, he has called for revolutionary content in university schooling. So why did he choose a $137,000 BMW for his official car, and buy it with government money? His party says he needs it for security reasons; his ministry casts it as a money-saving gesture, saying it ended the expensive car rentals of his first few months in office.

This is a parade that demands state-level security. Discipline. Extreme secrecy. Ordinary people will not be allowed anywhere near the parade route in Beijing on Thursday, when the People's Republic of China marks the 60th anniversary of its founding with a military parade. That applies even to people who live in the neighborhood: Entire apartment buildings along the route toward Tiananmen Square are being evacuated to prevent residents from watching. Cameras and binoculars are forbidden in many locales.

Each day at around 4 p.m., Hoang Thi Gai tries to lull her 5-month-old grandson to sleep so that she can prepare supper. About 15 minutes later, a loudspeaker starts blaring just outside her Hanoi home. "He starts screaming and crying and his face turns purple," said Gai, 61. "My dear boy hasn't been able to adapt." As signs of the Vietnam War fade away in this rapidly modernizing country, one relic is hard to miss: a nationwide network of loudspeakers from which the communist government blasts propaganda at dawn and dusk, 30 minutes at a stretch, whether the public likes it or not. Now a Web-savvy Hanoi politician wants to silence the head-rattling messages and put them on the Internet, where people can read them at their leisure.