Paris is displaying the usual Olympian cruelty by "cleaning up" homeless people and squats to look pretty for the games.

These games tend to do permanent harm to street vendors, due to new strict laws, and to everyone that travels on streets, due to new surveillance measures. In addition they tend to enrich companies at the expense of the public.

If your city proposes to host the Olympic Games, I urge you organize to defeat the proposal.

Russia exports lots of oil from the Baltic Sea in ships that go through the narrow passages around Denmark. These ships are badly maintained, and likely to cause disaster even without an intention to do so.

Whether the ships are insured is almost irrelevant, since an insurance company could hardly make up for the damage that a big oil spill could do in those confided waters. The crucial issue is to stop allowing unseaworth ships to pass through.

Regardless of future between Ukraine and Russia, it would be wise to require all oil shipments between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea to be sent through pipelines across Denmark, not by ship. Pipeline leaks on land will make smaller spills than ship disasters.

St Louis thugs went on a rampage at a protest, attacking based on no grounds. Oops! They attacked an undercover thug.

Some of the attackers were jailed for this, which is good. But what we really should demand is that thugs be jailed for rampaging against innocent people even when those are not actually thugs in disguise.

*US reimposes sanctions on Venezuela as hope for democracy crumbles.*

Maduro and his lieutenants deserve sanctions, but US trade sanctions tend to fall on the people who are victims, not culprits.

* Britain’s latest descent into authoritarianism fits a depressingly familiar pattern. This is how it tends to work: a subversive group is identified by political elites and presented as a danger to the nation, often being additionally labelled as allies or dupes of hostile foreign enemies. An air of national emergency is contrived, with exaggerated, distorted, or simply invented evidence used to justify claims of an imminent threat. The ensuing repressive measures are supposedly to defend the security of both individual citizens and the nation alike.*

This year's target is "supporters of Palestine", a term that covers a wide range of views.