Authoritarian President Kagame of Rwanda, running for reelection, reports winning 99% of the votes.

Kagame has brought peace and prosperity, as well as some repression, to Rwanda, and I can believe he received the majority of the votes. However, the reported 99% victory makes me suspect falsification. It reminds me of Russia, where Putin would surely win a free and fair election, but prefers to make them unfair.

The trash collectors of Birmingham, England, are on strike to reject pay cuts.

Today's Americans have been taught to regard surveillance of them as a sign that someone cares.

How pathetic! And how dangerous to all of us who recognize the power advantage that the surveillers have over us!

Gene editing could someday make possible the choice of improved traits for human babies. I don't see anything wrong with that, a priori; but if enhancement is available only to rich parents, they will use it to cement their families' domination of society.

This can't happen very soon. Many experiments would be needed to develop a technology so reliable that people would willingly use it on their children, outside of avoiding a bad disease. Then people would arrive at the difficult question of which genes are preferable for their children, which often begs the question, "better for what?"

Even determining whether a given combination of genes will have some horrible result is not easy. In general, it would require an advanced understanding of how various specific human alleles interact.

Hackers at Defcon went to work on four different models of US voting machines, and cracked all of them within hours of seeing them for the first time.

Even if some model were totally secure against crackers, it can't be secure against the company that develops its proprietary software.

If, however, the software is free, and the local election authority can change it, then the machine can't be secure against the local election authority. There is always someone that can change the software, and we can't trust that someone.

For secure elections, we must vote on paper.