*Air pollution from fossil fuels "kills 5 million people a year" [according to a study].*

George Monbiot conjectures why billionaires mostly oppose efforts to save the world from climate mayhem, even those billionaires whose investments are not in fossil fuels.

The temporary cease-fire in Gaza has not enabled humanitarian aid to enter in sufficient quantity for the civilians of Gaza, nor permitted aid workers and machines to enter to remove rubble of collapsed buildings.

Reportedly Israel has been brought to agree not to repeat in southern Gaza some of the enormous war crimes it committed in northern Gaza. But how could it avoid that, if it does fight HAMAS in the south?

US citizens: phone (202) 224-3121 three times, once to ask for your representative in Congress, then once for each of your two senators, and say to each one something like this:

I’m a constituent, and I’m calling to ask [name of official] to publicly speak out against the so-called fiscal commission. Social Security and Medicare are popular and vital programs to our nation’s economic security. Any changes to those programs should be handled through regular order, not behind closed doors. Voters want to see Social Security expanded, not cut!

An international agreement about developing "artificial intelligence" to be "safe by design" strikes me as alarmingly unsafe.

I fear that the plan presumes that AI systems will never be released as free software -- that the software will be available only in the form of servers controlled by some company or other, running software that the users cannot ever obtain copies of, let alone change.

Using a server controlled by someone else to do your own computing (which we call SaaSS, Service as a Software Substitute) is never safe -- it is even more unsafe than running a nonfree program.

But the people who negotiated this agreement have no concept of that issue.

If what I hear is correct, machine-learning AI systems have already been used to disrupt democracy. I refer to the recommendation algorithms that many platforms use to decide what to show each user. Reportedly these operate by machine learning and are designed to learn how to make the platform's useds want to stay on the platform longer.

These platforms have promoted the spread of disinformation, which has had the effect of helping violent extremists spread hatred.