*Russia arrests Wall Street Journal reporter on espionage charges.*

There is very little the US can do to stop Russia from using those laws to arrest reporters who are not spies, but it can at

least drop the charges against Julian Assange

to stop setting a bad example for other counties.

Each country should stop prosecuting journalists for doing journalism.

*Israel hasn’t been a democracy for a long time. Now, Israelis need to face this fact.*

Democracy in Israel includes only the Jewish part of the population, and a split in that part, mostly about how to treat the rest, is making this partial democracy unstable.

Tory members of the UK parliament, who were former ministers, agreed to represent a foreign company's interests for large sums of money — as much as 10,000 UKP per day. The company was a hoax and their assent was recorded.

For legislators to take pay to serve private interests is corruption and it ought to be a crime. The most shocking thing to me is that in the UK this is lawful. The UK has rules for it, and those elected representatives followed the rules.

Supposedly the US government refused to bail out the investors owner of Silicon Valley Bank — but it seems to have done precisely that. The owner was a holding company that had deposited money in Silicon Valley Bank. By deciding to bail out all depositors, the US decided to bail out the investors.

The antibiotic-resistant bacteria bred by feeding antibiotics to farm animals are consumed by humans when meat is not cooked sufficiently. Then they can get into the bladder and cause urinary tract infections.