A Missouri abortion-sabotage law has been upheld in the first court; one Planned Parenthood center has been blocked from performing abortions. This leaves one operating abortion clinic in the state of Missouri.

If you don't have a lover, how can you prove you are really homosexual? How can you prove that to a country that is seeking any excuse to deport you?

The French Academy has made a big mistake, allowing job-title words to have masculine and feminine forms. This introduces a problem of gender-neutrality into a grammatical area where there wasn't one.

Although each of these names for jobs and professions has a gender, it is merely grammatical, and does not make an assertion about the gender (if any) if the person referred to. For instance, "un professeur" can refer to a male, a female, someone who is neither or both, or someone unknown — just like the English expression "a professor".

The use of "une professeuse" for female professors imposes a gender-based choice. Which form do you use when you don't know someone's gender? How can you refer to a professor of non-binary gender?

The word "personne" in French has feminine gender, regardless of who it refers to. I, a man, am therefore "une personne" in French. You are "une personne", too. That says nothing about my gender, or yours. It is just like "a person" or "un professeur".

I hope the academy does not recommend the use of "un person" for males.

The gender-neutrality problems of English are fortunately much smaller.

A dam project in Guinea would swamp the wildlife refuge with the largest population of western Chimpanzees — 1500 of them. This would be a substantial reduction in the population of that subspecies — perhaps as much as 9% — and large populations preserve more genetic diversity much more.

The fact that a Chinese company has been hired to build the dam seems like an incidental detail to me. The government and its funding sources made the decision to build there; they alone could cancel it.

However, the choice of that Chinese company means that China is likely to pressure not to cancel the project.

The person most likely to crack the security on a car is its mechanic.

The most likely entity to use the car systems against the owner or driver is the manufacturer or an insurance company.