France has urged the EU to designate Wagner as a "terrorist group".

Wagner may be guilty of terrorism, but it is an injustice to label any person or group as guilty of a crime by mere fiat. That should always require a fair trial.

Wagner might be convicted in a fair trial. It wouldn't astound me. But it would be a foolish own-goal to try that now. Given the appearance of quarrel between Waner's leader Prigozhin and Putin, the wise strategy is to encourafe Wagner and its leaders to surrender to Ukraine, by promising them safety if they do.

Even if that appearance of quarrel is only play-acting, it is still desirable to exacerbate the tension, as long as this is done without sacrificing any military advantage.

In general, I think we should try to avoid applying this spirit of callous realpolitik to people. But it is forgivable to do that to vicious criminals such as Prigozhin and Putin.

Israel bombed Gaza again, killing some leaders of Islamic Jihad.

The air raids bombed civilians too.

In general, killing leaders of a guerrilla movement has little effect on it. There are always new leaders ready to step in. If they are religious fanatics. the possibility of a martyr's death may not discourage them.

The only way to get end the fighting is to change the factors that encourage people to join up.

Australia is planning to punish drivers who did not get enough sleep. This is absurd — people cannot make themselves sleep more, and people can't wait a day because of being tired.

As the article explains, the demands on many people don't let them sleep enough. To punish them for the consequences of the demands placed on them is unjust.

On the other hand. to stop the employers from overworking drivers could be useful and just. This requires a fine, not on drivers, but on their employers.

It won't be trivial to stop the employers from turning this around into an excuse to impose more cruelty on drivers.

RMS will be giving talks in Switzerland about free software and digital injustice.

• Thursday, May 11, at the Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik in Bern
• Saturday, May 13, at Campus Batelle in Geneva
• Monday, May 15, in Moudon
• Tuesday, May 16, in Lausanne

[The Switzerland talks are Thursday, Saturday, Monday and Tuesday (not Sunday).]

The Tories want to ban communication systems that use end-to-end encryption. They've announced their decision that "safety", supposedly to be achieved by monitoring everyone's communications, outweighs privacy, so digital systems that maintai8n our privacy against state surveillance will be banned.

Paradoxically, what may defend us is WhatsApp.

The WhatsApp application is nonfree software -- users can't tell what it really does, let alone fix anything malicious or merely broken that may be in it. So many nonfree programs are malware that we shouldn't suppose any of them is honest. The nonfree WhatsApp App could send all the user's private nessages, in plain text form, to whoever Meta/Facebook wishes, whether that be the Chinese government, the UK government, the US government, or Meta itself.

We can't have free software packages that do communication with end-to-end encryption if communication systens with end-to-end encryption are prohibited. Paradoxically, a proporietary app which is not fit to trust may protect our right to have systems which can be worthy of our trust.