New Zealand made it a crime to plan or prepare for a terrorist act.

I wonder whether the law criminalizes impossible fantasies of terrorism — the sort of imaginary danger thing that the FBI loves to protect Americans from.

However, this law seems to be less bad than the UK's law criminalizing possession of information "likely to be useful for terrorism," as in the recent case of someone who was convicted in Britain of possessing material presenting hateful opinions, plus a page about how to make a bomb.

Convicting people for having copies of some publication, no matter what publication that might be, is repression.

The bomb page could be useful for terrorism, but just having it doesn't prove he was planning to make a bomb. I think the New Zealand law would require something to show that the accused was specifically considering using them for a terrorist act, and would not in practice criminalize mere possessing copies of publications.

However, there remains some danger of unjust convictions because conclusions about intentions are hard to demonstrate conclusively. It will be easy to convict someone based on stereotypes about what people in per demographic group are assumed to want to do.

*Cutting methane should be a key Cop26 aim, research suggests.*

A hundred Mayan children were massacred in 1988 by the Guatemalan army. A survivor reported the crime this year and the government planned to exhume their skeletons, but unidentified "protesters" came in and blocked the action.

The protesters may be some of the soldiers who killed them, or their relatives or associates.

Kylie Broderick, teaching assistant at the University of North Carolina, has published criticism of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. An Israeli diplomat, and a US congresscritter, both pressured the university to remove her from teaching.

The diplomat cites the IHRA definition of "antisemitism", which was not designed for judging individuals or their views, to erroneously construe Broderick's criticism of government policy as antisemitism.

A study of around 270,000 Americans after they had Covid-19 found that 37% of them had a symptom over three months later.

Some fraction of them may have developed the symptom from some other cause by coincidence, or already had it before catching Covid-19. It may be hard to distinguish those cases.