The London thug department is arresting people for "planning" disruptive but nonviolent protests against fossil fuel developments that are likely to kill them in a few decades.

If only it were possible to arrest the people planning to disrupt civilization by building more oil wells, we might have a safer future.

A study of the carbon emissions of 125 billionaires, including companies they own, found that on the average each emits as much as 500,000 people in France.

I suppose that same figure would equal the emissions of around 1 million average Americans.

Protests in Iran have intensified. In Baluchistan, sectarian and ethnic opposition is also at work.

Australia is going to prosecute whistleblower David McBride for telling journalists about alleged war crimes committed by Australian soldiers.

Naturally, Australia has laws on which this decision is based.

The use of programs that compose articles based on machine learning poses philosophical problems for education in writing.

Here's an idea: if these systems tend to be led by their training towards expressing the usual points of view, assign to a student the task of arguing for an unusual point of view, whether perse really believes it or not.

The idea that there is no point in learning to write well if a program can do that for you is misguided. A calculator, or various programs such as dc or Emacs, can do arithmetic for you, but you need to learn how to add and multiply or you you won't understand those operations fully. Once you know how, you can use a program to actually do it.