Britain has had a year of heavy rain, which has damaged wheat production.

This is surely related somehow to global heating. Whether it will continue, get better, or get worse, I have no basis to predict. But it is a dangerous situation.

China is building new coal-fired generators faster than the US and Europe are closing them.

A corporation that changed its name to "abrdn" claims to be entitled to certain kinds of human kindness that we think humans deserve. Corporations are not in fact persons, and they are not entitled to human rights or even human kindness.

I conjecture that the name "abrdn" was meant to acknowledge that large corporations are often a brdn on society, and to encourage regulating them more strictly ;-}.

Where the article comments on a matter of trademark law, it injects gratuitous confusion by using the propaganda overgeneralization of "the intellectual property" instead of the objective and concrete term, "the trademark".

Trademarks are nothing whatsoever like copyrights or patents or trade secrets — be careful never to generalize about all those laws.

Reportedly US military drones have proved unreliable in Ukraine, so Ukraine is buying commercial Chinese drones (and spare parts), which work better.

Google is testing a response to California's "news link tax", which is to remove all news links from what users post on Google platforms.

I see this as a counterattack rather than as a compelled reaction. But it is a fact that nothing can stop Google from retaliating this way. Whether Google's claims are right that the tax encourages further concentration and hollowing out of the newspaper business, I don't know.

The article talks about possible "better alternative" in a vague way, and I have no idea what Google means to suggest. But I do have a suggestion.

Adopt a tax on web sites that display advertising and allow users to post their own messages. The tax should be based on the amount of usage and/or the amount of advertising. The money should be distributed to news organizations in a way that does not depend on who does or does not post links to them. This way, Google and other platforms could not evade the tax by counterattacking.