The Israeli army has dropped charges against soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian prisoner.

The grounds given for dropping the charges are that (1) the prisoner had been released to Gaza and (2) *the conduct of senior officials had affected the chance of holding a fair trial.* To me, this says that (1) they are exaggerating to create an excuse and (2) high officials created an excuse and have suffered no punishment for it.

A facial recognition system falsely identified a suspect as Angela Lipps, and she was jailed for 6 months; then, when she was brought to a courtroom in another state, the court noticed that the criminal could not be her. Meanwhile, she had lost her home and her car.

False identifications will always occur. Although this one used digital face matching, recognition by human witnesses makes mistakes too. But I think that the main mistake here was to wait 6 months before noticing her alibi and without granting her bail.

One of Britain's undercover infiltrator cops seems to have fabricated an accusation that an animal rights activist wanted to get a gun and attack someone with it. Fortunately, his handlers distrusted the accusation.

I speculate that a cop whose job includes lying as part of false friendship will tend to normalize lying to anyone else.

A drug that is used to slow Alzheimer's disease occasionally kills patients. This article reports on an alleged conspiracy to get the drug wrongfully approved, and threats against someone who wrote about deaths that it caused.

of the medical system by Big Pharma is rife, and it does a lot of harm. Threats of violence against journalists are part of the evil of fascism.

But this drug raises an deeper question. Can a treatment for Alzheimer's disease be beneficial for patients, and thus morally deserve approval, despite killing a small fraction of the patients who take it?

Alzheimer's disease turns its victims slowly into zombies. Although the patient's body continues to live, the person who became a zombie is dead. This begs the question, if a certain drug gives a large fraction of patients several more years of non-zombie life, but kills a small fraction of them, does that make it a failure? If on the average it extends patients' non-zombie life, does that make it a bet worth making, one that drug regulations should allow people to make?

This question is important to me personally because I can envision being in that situation in a few years.

*[Various different magat] policies set to increase rates of lung disease and death, study finds.*