One of General Pinochet's men phoned a talk show to confess to murdering dissidents under orders.

I guess his conscience insisted on this. He said that he would have been killed if he refused.

The DuPont and Dow Chemical Merger: Bad Deal for People and the Planet.

The merger of two large companies that operate in the same areas reduces competition in all the areas they both operate in. Splitting that company according to area of operation does nothing to increase competition in any one of the areas. Thus, the overall effect is to reduce competition.

Demonstrating cruelty, the US government stopped a hunger strike in an immigration prison by threatening to force-feed the prisoners.

Remember that most of these prisoners have not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. The US keeps them in prison as preparation for possibly deporting them. It may be legitimate to deport them, but that is no excuse for force-feeding them.

The low price of oil is making most oil extraction projects unprofitable to invest in. It the price stays low, it will limit the oil extracted to the fraction which is cheap to extract.

That's good, but the low price also reduces the incentive to invest in renewable energy and increased efficiency. And it tends to encourage investment in burning oil in the future (though that may take years).

Increased tax on oil, or a carbon tax, would give us the best of both worlds: the extraction projects would still be unprofitable, while renewables and efficiency increases would be encouraged.

Cory Doctorow: don't think of trying to work for the NSA so as to limit its wrongs. Great heroes have tried and failed .