President Erdogan accused a reporter of treason for covering the protests in Turkey.

I wonder if examples of similar claims from the US against journalists such as Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald encouraged him to think he can get away with this.

Foreign protesters released from prisoned in Tunisia describe the horrible conditions of the prison there.

Their apology deserved to be withdrawn, since it endorsed the idea that their protest was wrong. However, it was bad that they apologized for it at all. I understand how this might have required a sacrifice they could not make, but it still would have been better to refuse.

George Orwell's birthday was celebrated in Utrecht by putting party hats on the surveillance cameras.

One way to block a cell phone listening device from listening to you and transmitting the conversation is to put it in a refrigerator, which blocks the radio signal.

However, if the programmers of the spy software are clever, they might make it compress and save the audio and transmit it later when it gets signal. Thus, blocking the signal is not reliably sufficient. Blocking it from hearing you is more reliable, if you can be sure the audio blockage is adequate.

A cell culture from an aborted fetus has "no doubt saved the lives of millions of people" through development of important vaccines. However, even if the abortion had not led to such tremendous benefits, it was a good thing, because the woman who was pregnant did not want another baby.

We must firmly reject the idea that there is something ethically dubious about using aborted fetuses for research. These ideas come from people who want to ban abortions, typically based on religious dogma; they hope that tainting everything that relates to abortions can help them achieve that nasty goal. If they kill millions of real people along the way, that's just collateral damage.

I don't think there is any reason to require a patient's consent for research use of removed tissue unless that research might somehow hurt the patient. That is starting to become a possibility, since genetic analysis of that tissue might reveal things about the patient which could cause that patient to be denied health insurance or denied employment. However, the same analysis can be done for other reasons and cause the same dangers; meanwhile, those dangers can be prevented entirely with proper health care laws.

Likewise, the idea of paying the patient from whom the tissue was removed is absurd. What we need from medicine is not the chance of a windfall on the rare occasions when our cells are used in a big enough way that we'd get a significant sum. What we need is for important research to be done, and for the resulting treatments to be available to all those that need them. We can easily have this, if we resume taxing businesses and the rich sufficiently.

The demand for this income comes from people who face the effects of growing inequality that forces many down into poverty. If they joined the campaign against plutocracy instead, we might all win.