Progressives have launched the New People's Party.

If it is to succeed, they will need to change the name. But I wonder, what is the advantage of this party over the Green Party?

(satire) *[invented name] expressed worry Tuesday that Donald Trump retweeting him would undermine his credibility as a conspiracy theorist.*

400 edtech companies have signed a "student privacy pledge", but they suffer no penalty when they violate it.

Aside from the lack of enforcement, the pledge itself is too weak. It excludes only a limited subset of the possible misuses of student data. The right way to handle most student data is never to let any organization other than the school get its hands on the data.

There are a few special circumstances in which student data needs to be held by an organization outside the school itself. Standardized tests are one of these. In those circumstances, the proper pledge is, "We pledge not to keep any copy of the student's data other than name, address, identification number and overall test results. We pledge not to allow any use of these data, except that specific schools by the student can verify the test results."

Another special case is for plagiarism checking. The school should never reveal to such a site anything about the student who wrote the paper being checked — not even that the same student wrote some other previous paper. The school should invent a new "student name" for each paper and only the school should know which student that corresponds to.

Influential progressive groups call on Biden to exclude fossil fuel representatives, in his campaign now and from his government later.

The absence of such people would not guarantee good policies, but their presence would enable them to impose bad ones.

Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, calls on Americans to disregard the CDC's new perverse non-testing guidelines.