The UK government underfunded the NHS, causing a backlog. Now it is using that as an excuse to take another step towards its medium-term goal of privatizing the NHS.

Its long-term goal is to get rid of universal healthcare, so that the poor can't afford it.

Thugs in Georgia shot an unarmed man who was walking nude outside. The man was manic-depressive, which is hardly a reason to kill him.

It seems thugs today are quick to shoot whenever they get the idea that something might be wrong.

Egypt censored a newspaper article that claimed government departments don't pay their workers employer-taxes.

If the failure to pay causes the workers not to get the pensions they are entitled to, or makes the workers pay that tax instead, that is a real wrong — to the workers. Otherwise, it is not clear to me that this "evasion" of taxes from the state to the state really affects anything substantial.

The censorship of the article is a real issue even if the article's subject is not.

35 years from now, every year will be hotter than today's record heat.

Mark Lynas insists that humanity will triple its energy use, whether that brings global disaster or not; then he hopes it won't. It is the arrogance of shut eyes.

Lynas misrepresents Naomi Klein, who did not call for eliminating the free market, capitalism, and growth. She said we must defeat what I call the plutocratic political system: "privatisation of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending."

That system gives the fossil fuel companies the power to block the measures that are needed to avoid disaster, and they are using it with great skill to ensure we charge headlong off the climate cliff.

To reestablish democracy, we must abolish plutocracy. But we can still have private businesses, and economic growth insofar as we can achieve it while keeping resource usage to a sustainable level.