A Nigerian student faces criminal charges of "defamation" after beatings in jail were not enough to make him confess.

The details of what the student said are a side issue — treating defamation as a crime always endangers freedom of speech.

The "big four" accounting firms are structurally embedded in systematic corruption. They are "too big to fail", but sooner or later one of them will fail.

The way to end the corruption is clear: prohibit accounting companies from doing anything other than auditing.

If a sudden change is hard to implement, here's a way to force them to make them separate gradually.

Tax the consulting gross sales of accounting firms a stated percentage that rises annually. It could be 3% in the first year, 6% in the second year, and so on. I think that in 5 years they will have moved most of the consulting business to some new sister company.

The details could be adjusted so as to require splitting each current company's non-auditing work into N or more independent new companies.

Other adjustments could make them split the auditing work among a larger number of new auditing companies.

The insufficient competition in the US allows businesses with market power to gouge by piling on "junk fees". Booz Alan has a monopoly over some kinds of access to some US national parks and other public lands, exercised via a "government" web site run by that company, and pulls in much more income from junk fees than the US government agency concerned actually gets.

But it's worse than that. Aside from the matter of price, use of that "government" web site requires running nonfree software. Those parks are off-limits to the free world.

I have visited some US national parks, and I paid cash to enter them. Is that still possible? Can anyone investigate that site (see the article) and report which parks and places can't be entered by paying cash, without using any web site?

Or which parks and places can still be entered by paying cash, without any web site?

Whichever list is shorter would be the more useful.

*Three Georgia sheriff's deputies, all white, charged with battery after beating black inmate.*

The video shows that they prepared to attack him, while he was standing in a cell, doing nothing significant.

Two versions of the video have been published, one in which it the attack was intentionally blurred and one which shows what happened. The thug department promoted the former and the latter is hard to find.

*Arizona elections official goes into hiding after post-midterm threats* from right-wing Big Lie fanatics.