Three Mexican states have now legalized abortion.

It would be unconstitutional for those who aided the Jan 6 insurrection after taking an oath of office in the US, to take up any federal or state office.

The German Green Party is being hit hard by accusations of plagiarism that seem to be exaggerated to hurt the party.

The article is undermined by a mistaken basic assumption: that plagiarism is related to copyright. The two are entirely unrelated. If you publish a copy of Hamlet calling yourself the author, that is not copyright infringement, since Hamlet is in the public domain. It is, nonetheless, plagiarism.

Legally it is possible to infringe copyright by republishing your own writings, if the copyright belongs to some other person or company. But that cannot be plagiarism.

Accusations of plagiarism for short passages seem to be straining to put the accused in the wrong. That does sound like something resembling character assassination. Meanwhile, supposing this is big enough to amount to plagiarism, the one responsible would seem to be the ghostwriter who wrote the book, not the Green candidate whose name was on it. She can't be expected to recognize that a passage was copied from an unidentified book that she may never have read or heard of.

The mere use of a ghostwriter feels, to me, somewhat like plagiarism. You are putting your name on something written by XYZ. To be sure, you paid XYZ for permission to do so, so XYZ won't object. But I don't think that excuses claiming to have written something you did not write.

However, if the candidate's book acknowledges the work of the ghostwriter, that eliminates the issue.

In any case, recognizing that ghostwriting is generally accepted and does no special wrong to anyone, I would not consider it a major ethical issue. If I were a German voter, it would not change my vote.

The brain can respond to some kinds of pain and damage by lowering its pain threshold. This can lead to devastating pain in many parts of the body.

The Tories want to impose secrecy on British environmental protection decisions. That would be very helpful when ministers wish to permit a damaging development because of the developer's political influence. Would Tories ever do that?