Following Guber, a new service matches up PR companies with piecework "journalists" that will take pay to write their press releases into "news articles".

I call it "Guber" because it pays drivers peanuts, but there are many reasons why we should refuse ever to use Guber.

Haiti's "president" Martelly is trying to impose a successor by rigging the election.

The US imposed Martelly through blatant contempt for the Haitian electoral system.

Pennsylvania has jailed a man for telling children on the street that he was on the way to a cabin in the woods.

A paranoid US parent, who has probably heard exaggerated stories about the nearly nonexistent "stranger danger", reported this as suspicious.

Perhaps thugs regarded the man as dangerous because he is autistic and could not rebut the suspicion.

Various organizations demand internet censorship in US universities to eliminate racist statements and insults.

I find some of those statements disgusting — others are merely foolish — but censorship is far more disgusting.

The scariest thing is that this sort of censorship has already become deeply implanted in many otherwise free countries. And in some of them, such as France and the UK, it is spreading to other kinds of censorship.

The UN says that current carbon pledges will probably keep global heating to under 3C.

That is still taking too big a risk. Even the 2C target is somewhat arbitrary, since we don't know it will avoid disaster (or positive-feedback tipping points that would push warming further).

In addition, without an enforcement mechanism, we can't be confident all the countries will carry out their unilateral pledges.