*"Crafting an illusion": US rail firms' multimillion-dollar PR push.* The goal of the PR is to convince officials that it's good for railroads to shift to smaller crews and that safety improvements are not needed.

US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.

If you phone, please spread the word!

US agencies disagree about whether they believe that SARS-CoV-2 spread from animals or leaked from a lab.

I don't think it makes much difference.

It is agreed that deadly viruses can spread from animals; we should take stricter precautions to ensure that does not happen.

Since it is agreed that deadly viruses can leak from labs doing research on them, then we should take stricter precautions to ensure that does not happen.

Which of the two happened this time changes nothing.

Infrared lights attached to a hoodie can reportedly defeat infrared cameras used for tracking people on the street at night, so that they can't follow the person that wears the hoodie.

Tracking people's movements threatens human rights, so it is good to thwart tracking and surveillance cameras; it would be even better to prohibit them. By contrast, security cameras, which record their images locally in case a crime occurs there but do not allow remote examination, are acceptable because they do not make it feasible to track all the non-criminals.

We should require all cameras that watch public places to be the record-locally security camera type.

New South Wales (a state in Australia) is planning carbon bombs that would emit 1.5bn metric tons of CO2.