Most Americans want it to be illegal to allow children to play outside alone.

This shows how far the American insanity about children has gone.

Another foolish overreaction: a foreign tourist who climbed a tower on the Brooklyn Bridge faces criminal charges. He is likely to be jailed for years before trial.

A UK man was sentenced to about 3 years in prison for redistributing copies of a movie.

Someone pointed out that this is as much as the usual penalty for convicted rapists.

This redistribution was done commercially. I don't advocate legalization of commercial redistribution of copyrighted works without authorization. Works made to be used in a practical way should all be free but this was a work of fiction, not a functional work. So I don't think what Danks did has to be legalized.

However, the companies that the UK government caters to would have told it to jail him just the same if he had not tried to make one penny.

Please don't refer to unauthorized copying with the smear term, "piracy". Movie piracy is what you see in Captain Blood.

Uri Avnery: The War for Nothing.

It is interesting that the rockets fired from Hamas, although they rarely injure a person, made life so unpleasant in the farms near the border of Gaza that people began to move away.

Israel has no right to order Gazans to stay away from the border on pain of being shot without warning. Israel does have the right to evacuate the land on its own side of the border. If Israel wants a buffer zone, that is the legitimate way to make one.

Women report that men's verbal confrontation is occasionally followed by their physical aggression, often enough that the verbal confrontation makes them scared physical aggression will follow.

I don't understand those men's attitude towards women. It seems to be a mixture of desire, hatred and contempt. I have never felt that way towards anyone, but I am compelled by women's testimony to believe that some men do.

Nonetheless, expressions of emotion are not physical attacks. The two are not morally equivalent. If some insults lead to an assault, that doesn't mean an insult is as bad as an assault.

In the US: petition major organic dairies to drop out of the organization that is supporting the lawsuit to overturn Vermont's GMO labeling law.