Muslims in Sweden think that there must be "boundaries" to freedom of expression, and these must include criminalizing burning a Qur'an.

Burning a symbol of something you condemn is a form of protest that everyone is entitled to. That's why the US Supreme Court invalidated the law that used to criminalize burning the US flag. Burning it is a symbolic act of denunciation of the US, not material damage to the United States. Likewise for burning any religion's holy book, or Mao's little red book, a copy of the Bill of Rights, a copy of a Microsoft software license, a copy of the GNU GPL, or any text that represents something you oppose.

Where Muslims are in charge, they usually protect their feelings by censoring any criticism of their religion. They label criticism of Islam as "blasphemy" and punish it very severely — in some countries with death. This violates the human rights of people with certain views.

Where Muslims are in charge, they don't respect religious freedom either. Many countries which make Islam the established religion punish any Muslim who tries to stop being a Muslim. In Malaysia, the law simply says that people of Malay race are Muslims whether they like it or not. This too violates the human rights of people with certain views.

We need more respect for human rights, not less. Sweden must not use "hate crime" as an excuse to repress condemnation of Islam.

Nor is it legitimate to claim that an act of symbolic condemnation "endangers national security". How could that ever happen? If Muslims (or any other group) threaten to attack the nation in revenge for a symbolic act of condemnation, they are the ones threatening national security, not the people they demand to repress.

Niger *Niger: thousands gather for rally to cheer generals who led coup.*

Some carried Russian flags as well as Niger flags. That confirms that this rally was not a grass-roots expression of public opinion. It confirms that the generals are allied with Wagner, which also supports coup-installed governments in neighboring Mail and Burkina Faso.

Wagner may have suggested the coup in Niger and encouraged the generals to organize it.

Wagner is a conventional military force and Ukraine has shown it be defeated by conventional military force. It was sent to serve Putin's wish to get more global power by military means, but it is officially a private mercenary company, not the Russian army. There is no reason not to send a Western force to operate ground-attack aircraft and heavy weapons to help defeat it. But given the hostility in the region toward France, the former colonial power which is accused of continuing neocolonial exploitation there, it would be wise not to include French troops.

(That article includes lots of other pertinent information.)

To prevent atrocities, it would be important for the force to have people from Niger as advisors, and consult them about each proposed attack to make sure the target is not a wedding or a family. American soldiers, even with strict orders and good will, can't always distinguish correctly. I expect that no one else can do better.

The governments sending that force must firmly resist the temptation to convert it into a counterinsurgency battle afterward against the predatory Islamist gangs that threaten all the countries in that region. They are a very different problem, and much harder, and Western countries tend to do it very badly.

*Air pollution linked to rise in antibiotic resistance that imperils human health.*

As air pollution as increased, so has the amount of resistance — in every country.

Resistance is also increased by misuse of antibiotics.

Many US states are reviving the harsh penalties of the War on Drugs, and worse, in an effort to reduce the underground use of fentanyl.

Relatives of people who died emotionally tend to direct their grief into revenge against targets of opportunity, and I think this is an example of that tendency.

These laws are unlikely to reduce use of fentanyl, but will cause a lot of avoidable secondary suffering.

The way to reduce the use of fentanyl and other addictive drugs is with harm-reduction policies.

The judge in the insurrectionist's trial, for trying to use fraud and force to overturn the 2020 election, gave him release conditions which included not threatening witnesses. Since then, he has threatened witnesses several times.

Robert Reich says, and I agree, that he should be jailed now for this.

I must take issue with one of his points that may mislead readers. If indeed 400,000 defendants in the US are in jail pending trial because they "didn't meet a condition of their release" — and I take Reich's word for that, it doesn't imply what it sounds like. For many of them, this had nothing to do with their doing anything wrong — they simply did not have money to make bail.

There is a movement now to put an end to keeping defendants in jail simply because they are poor.