The decline of wild salmon populations is slowly wiping out the orcas of Puget Sound.

Thousands in Australia protested Abbott's war on children and young people.

The high rate of arrest warrants in Ferguson — more than 1.5 per year per inhabitant — is due to systematic harassment of the poor.

This is common across the US, and amounts to an additional tax on the consequences of poverty.

California is about to pass a bill that in effect requires college students to explicitly ask "Do you want to have sex?" before doing so.

The article does not make it clear that this law will regulate how colleges handle accusations of sexual assault — not students directly.

However, it is so common for people to have sex without explicitly asking each other "Do you want to have sex now?" that I fear students will consider the requirement for "affirmative consent" ridiculous, and systematically ignore it, so that they will nearly all be technically guilty if the school ever investigates them.

Another point in the article, which makes the law seem unreasonable in a different way, describes it wrong. The law does not say that consent is invalid if "given under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs", as the article put it. Those words would seem to mean that if two people meet after drinking alcohol, and then have sex, then neither of them really consented — if the law said that. But the law really says that a person who is "incapacitated" by alcohol and/or drugs does not consent. That seems correct to me.

Massachusetts citizens: see how your candidates stand on abortion rights.