New York's mayor called for an increase in state psychiatric hospital facilities as a way to deal with the recent subway shooting.

That is a step in the right direction, and better than what I had expected.

Australia is sending 2000 "pod homes" to victims of flooding.

How about providing these to homeless people, too?

Some Muslims in Sweden are violently crazed, trying to prevent a right-wing group from burning a Qur'an.

Freedom of speech includes the right to offend anyone -- even you, even me. If someone burns your sacred book in a free country, whichever book that may be, you just have to live with it.

Those who demand the privilege to punish people who offend them are fighting against other people's freedom. The state must never surrender to that.

Rape of civilians is a frequent concomitant of war, but it is very rarely punished as a war crime.

It seems to me that there are two big practical obstacles to prosecution of war rapists:

(1) to identify the rapist and

(2) to arrest the rapist so as to try him. This is possible in special situations, but usually very difficult.

Ukraine accuses the Putin forces of kidnaping Ukrainian children and taking them by force to Russia.

If this is true, I can imagine that Putin might make it extremely hard for Ukraine, or their relatives, to find them in Russia and ask where they would rather go.