*The federal government has still not set limits for PFAS compounds, and some allege that could be because it is a polluter of them itself*.

Chad is planning to build oil wells near Lake Chad.

The shore of Lake Chad belongs to four countries, all of which will be harmed when the oil pollutes the lake. Meanwhile, the greenhouse emissions from burning the oil will harm the whole world. We cannot afford to extract all the oil from existing wells, so any new well is at best wasted expense, and at worst an assurance of doom.

*Labour's target should be the Tory party, not Johnson's credibility.*

The grand jury did not indict any of the thugs involved in killing Breonna Taylor for that killing. Naturally this triggered protests in many cities.

The decision not to charge the thugs may have been imposed by law. I saw an article, a couple of months ago, which explained that the thugs could legally claim self-defense, and it would have been impossible to convict them.

I did not link to that article because it ended with antisocialist views about right and wrong, which I did not want to link to, and because I did not know if its claims about the legalities were valid. But the outcome suggests that they were.

Since we condemn the outcome, we need to consider this question: at what point did the thugs commit an act that they deserve to be punished for?

I believe that point was when they broke into the house without announcing who they were. When cops act like burglars, they invite the residents to shoot; but if the residents do so, they are the ones that are likely to get killed, as happened this time.

The outcome we want is that innocent people don't risk death. One way to get that outcome is to make cops identify themselves as cops before entering, with no exceptions. Criminals might fight with or without the announcement, but the announcement will inform innocent residents not to.

It is not enough to set a policy against no-knock breakins. It should be a crime for thugs to do that, so we can indeed punish them when they do.

We could allow the cops to send unarmed robots to enter the house, given a warrant. If robots get shot, it is no great loss, and they would not try to shoot back.

The UK's Covid-19 contact tracing app asks users to scan a QR code when they enter certain places.

I suspect that scanning the QR code immediately informs the state where the phone is located at that moment. That is a violation of people's privacy.

The Google/Apple contact detection protects privacy pretty well, though I am not an expert on it. I'd be willing to use that, if it did not require a mobile phone.

Italy has an approach I think is better, both for finding all cases and for respecting privacy: simply test all the acquaintances of anyone that catches Covid-19, and don't worry about whether they saw each other recently.