Andy Burnham's arrival at Downing Street has spurred British veterans who participated in the UK's nuclear tests during the fifties and sixties to pressure the government for the current premier to fulfill a promise he had repeatedly defended when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester.

The Cold War is back. Spies have more work than ever (CV here). Today the curtain isn't made of steel. The walls aren't made of cement. There are no barbed wire borders. But encryptions, ciphers, invisible languages without photosynthesis are more alive than ever. Real, genuine, good information rules today, just like in the days of the Big Bang, Adam and Eve, or theHomo habilis Doing DIY on a Sunday morning in the cave-house. Information is like tap water: if it's not drinkable, I get disoriented and lose my way through life, I get sick, I die. Information is either healthy or toxic. There's a lot of contamination. A lot of crap in the brain. A lot of filthy human wild boars. This is passed on to me by one of the spies we have scattered throughout the unoccupied country.

Our great historian Josep Fontana liked to quote a phrase from the German satirist Karl Kraus: "May God preserve communism for us forever, so that the capitalist rabble does not become more shameless and so that, at least, they have nightmares when they go to sleep." Fontana used it to shock consciences and point out a counterintuitive historical pattern: as the economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated in his analysis of capital in the 20th century, if we look at the economic evolution of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we see that inequalities reached an all-time low in the 1970s. Well, this week, as we saw the photograph of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Narendra Modi, I can't help but wonder what Fontana would say about this new Cold War in which capitalism must not lose a single minute of sleep because of any ideological enemy.