Italy's criminal libel law is coming under fire.

To make libel a crime is unacceptable.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia has imprisoned a journalist without charges for days for covering mass evictions.

California shipping lanes have been moved so that ships will kill fewer whales.

We occasionally get a glimpse of how US "homeland security" organizations spy on environmentalists to aid fossil fuel interests.

I suspect they do this all the time, and only rarely does it leak.

The US government has been systematically corrupted by various kinds of businesses. This includes banks, armament companies, fossil fuel companies, Big Pharma, the copyright industry, and agribusiness, to name a few. Each kind of business, in its area of interest, has turned the state against the people, and each gets various sorts of help from the executive branch. The corruption goes all the way up to Obama.

As a result, in practical terms the US no longer practices democracy. Democracy means that the many non-rich join together to become more powerful than the rich, and stop them from exercising power commensurate with their wealth. What we have in the US is plutocracy, an unjust and illegitimate form of government.

Teaching high school students about the 1920 pogrom against blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and how it relates to race-based wealth disparity in the US.

I would suggest using median wealth levels rather than average to measure wealth disparities, because the average is skewed by a small percentage of rich people and does not reflect life for most people.

Oil companies inject hydrofluoric acid into oil wells to "melt rock" and let oil flow out.

Hydrofluoric acid will burn you terribly if it touches you. Fluorine is very reactive. I don't know whether this endangers people. Perhaps all of it reacts with rock and hardly any of it escapes. Perhaps tiny quantities do no harm to humans. But is this known for certain?