Ivan MacFadyen sailed across the Pacific and found it a desert filled with human junk, where he used to find fish.

Just as negotiations with Iran offer some hope of success, the US congress wants to impose additional sanctions.

I think it is clear what's going on. The powerful Zionist lobby, backed by the money of lunatic right-wing Christians who think they can cause the second coming of Jesus if they rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, wants Iran to remain an enemy of the US, would like to prevent any deal.

Report on the torture of political prisoners in Ethiopia.

The US also forces prisoners to hold painful "stress positions".

Considering ethical issues raised by AI programs applied to people's medical records, or to driving cars.

The ethical issues mentioned in this article are not the biggest ones that these technologies raise.

For medical records (including prescriptions), the biggest issue is not whether IBM's program should be allowed to chew on them, but a logically prior issue: whether everyone's medical records should be put in a centralized data base where the state can trivially look at them, even in less sophisticated ways.

For driverless cars, assuming are as safe as human drivers, who to blame for the occasional accident will be a side issue. The biggest issues will be whether they construct for each person a travel dossier that GCHQ or the NSA can study years later, and whether they condemn today's millions of paid drivers to the underclass of the permanently unemployed.

In the times of increasing unemployment, and redistribution of wealth to the rich, efficiency is a misguided goal.

Argentina: Case Study in Perils of Pesticide-Heavy GMO-Crop Boom.

Although "Roundup-ready" corn supposedly permits the use of a small amount of herbicide, the amount needed has been increasing as weeds develop resistance, and previous techniques employed a clever combination of methods to avoid pesticides.