A father was concerned that his daughter was sexting, so he asked thugs to convince her to stop. (The last thing your child needs is to have thugs involved in per life!) He copied the photos as evidence, so he was charged with possession of "child pornography" and labeled as a sex offender.

The "sex offender" list does little to protect anyone and a lot to ruin people's lives. But fundamentally it is unjust to prosecute people for having a copy of anything whatsoever.

The War on Pain Sufferers can kill.

"Before providing [DNA] specimens, patients are increasingly looking for compensation, commitments that useful medical information will be returned to them, or control over how their biological samples will be studied."

They are concerned about real problems, but proposing ineffective or useless solutions.

Under a well-run medical system, where advances in treatment and diagnosis are put to the service of everyone, and you don't risk commercial disadvantage or punishment due to whatever is in your sample, the chance that people will be cured because of one's contribution would be all the reason anyone needs to contribute. But instead we have a system with real problems.

One real problem is that under the US medical system, new treatments are in many cases too expensive for them. Another real problem is that insurance companies may use their DNA samples against them, and the state could accuse them of crimes based on those samples.

The "solutions" people ask for do very little to fix these problems, because they are individual "solutions" for a systemic problem. Any reasonable "compensation" for a DNA sample won't be enough to pay for an expensive treatment. Researchers could agree to provide whatever useful medical information they discover, but can't promise to discover anything useful for that particular patient. As for "how" the samples will be studied, it is hard to relate that to one's own interest.

Coastal cities around the world are trying to figure out what to do about rising sea levels.

The real solution is what will solve lots of other problems at the same time: curb greenhouse gas emissions with dispatch. Trying to cope is not only harder, it is futile beyond this century.

Heterosexuals in the UK can now go to the Isle of Man to form a civil partnership instead of a marriage.