*Q&A: how fast do we need to cut carbon emissions?*

If global heating continues, the Great Barrier Reef will be toast.

Bacterial infections are becoming ever more dangerous due to antibiotic resistance, which spreads further every year. In a few decades we will be back where we were in 1940, when there wasn't much to help people fight fight off an infection in a wound.

The article proposes "more incentives" to develop new antibiotics. I fear that means "more patent power, as well as subsidies." If we aren't careful, that will result in antibiotics that are too expensive for most people to use.

Let's learn a lesson from the other drugs that are so expensive people die for lack of money. Let's fund more research on antibiotics, and exclude them from the patent system.

The US is suing to block the merger of Penguin with Simon & Schuster.

Finally, the US government treats big mergers the way it should never have stopped treating them.

A woman died in Poland as a result of being denied an abortion. This has provoked protests.

This was a special case — a late-stage abortion which most European countries would permit on grounds of medical necessity.

The everyday issue of abortion rights concerns the rights of women who simply don't want to have a baby.