Australia is experiencing record high temperatures in winter just as it did last summer.

While a warm winter may not be immediately unpleasant, it is very dangerous. For instance, it allows pests to spread which were previously limited by cold. This is why forests around the American west are now dying.

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are rising. Most are killed by Taliban land mines.

A school privatizer in Indiana and Florida wrote standards to ensure a campaign donor would get a high mark.

Egypt's military-dominated government says it will break up the pro-Morsi protest camps.

That probably means an even bigger massacre.

I dislike the Muslim Brotherhood's politics as much as anyone in the world does, but they do not deserve to be attacked on the street.

The US is declassifying some info about surveillance as a form of propaganda, stuffing it with false claims.

But officials had to retract a piece of bullshit — that collecting complete phone call records was their "most important tool".

They are trying to pretend that it is ok to collect bulk information about everyone because only computers, not humans, pay attention to most of it.

On the contrary, simply to accumulate these dossiers is unacceptable no matter where they are kept. The state should only be allowed to start building a dossier about someone given a court order.