China will start a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions.

This could be a big help in curbing global heating, or it might do nothing at all. A cap-and-trade system tends to be ineffective when the economy shrinks, and corruption can make it a no-op as happened in Europe.

By contrast, a tax on substances and activities that emit greenhouse gases is easier to enforce, and has its effect even if the economy shrinks.

Here's a proposal for a different way to do cap-and-trade, using a fixed total carbon emissions budget. Would that avoid the flaws? I don't know. But I think it is important to design the system so that the budget can be reduced.

Pope's Call to Congress to Abolish Death Penalty Comes at a Critical Moment.

Drug-Price Hikes Don't Lead to Better Cures. We Must Find Another Way Forward.

The principal advisor of the European Court of Justice said that the "safe harbor" fiction, which allows European organizations to entrust personal data to US companies, should be declared invalid.

AVG says that its anti-virus program will collect data about users for AVG to use.

Simply removing the user's name from a data record does not prevent others from reassociating it with the user, and in practice it is common to do that.

This program is gratis, but not free software. It is commonplace for such software to mistreat its users.