Big businesses use "trade associations" to lobby the EU to continue unchecked fossil fuel use.

If your MEP has given a phone number to a representative of a "trade association", you need a different one.

A professor at Northwestern University faces the threat of disciplinary action for expressing disagreement with current policy towards handling accusations of rape or not-quite-rape.

The genocide of the Armenians was started 100 years ago.

In Turkey, as in France, it is impossible to speak honestly about this issue. Under those countries' censorship laws, one must choose between risking prosecution and parroting the official line. Hrant Dink, hero of freedom of speech, was prepared to defy both countries to prosecute him for talking about history. If you are in one of those countries and not prepared to go to that length, I recommend that you respond to the subject by saying that censorship makes honest discussion of the question impossible in that country.

Since I am not in Turkey or France, I can speak freely about the subject. I condemn the genocide of the Armenians.

This does not mean condemnation of Turks or Turkey today. Those who carried out the genocide of the Armenians are dead. Turkey's duty today is to confront its past honestly. The Turks and Turkey of today cannot inherit culpability for a wrong committed 100 years ago, but if they deny or defend that wrong, they make themselves culpable for it.

Every country with a long history has crimes in that history. Every country needs to acknowledge these crimes to go forward honestly, and apologize for them to go forward ethically. To deny national crimes corrupts the spirit. To ask which country's crime is worse is a distraction.

The government of Turkey corrupts the national spirit by denying the genocide of the Armenians. The government of Japan likewise corrupts the national spirit by denying its past crimes, including forcing women into prostitution.

The US has recognized that it stole land from indigenous peoples, and apologized for imprisoning Japanese-Americans. But Republicans in the US are actively campaigning to cover up a more recent crime: Dubya's lies that were the pretext for the conquest and invasion of Iraq. Woe to the US if it swallows this lie.

The Australian government has no money for the poor, but it is funding global heating denialism.

A protest against a chemical plant's pollution in China was crushed by 2,000 thugs. It must have been a rather large protest.

The people are probably getting sick from the polluted water.