*UK accused by Amnesty of ‘deliberately destabilizing’ human rights globally* for political reasons.

*The damning Amnesty report also criticizes Israel's allies for the failure to stop the "indescribable civilian bloodshed" in Gaza.*

The European Parliament has voted take the EU out of the Energy Charter Treaty.

That treaty is a threat to civilization because it penalizes member countries for effective measures to reduce use or extraction of fossil fuels.

Even worse, it was designed to be impossible to effectively get out of. It says that countries that abrogate it are still subject to the treaty;s punishments for reducing the profits of petroleum companies.

If the EU decides to defy that, it may be powerful enough to kill the ghost of the treaty.

Word is that TikTok will shut down in the US rather than sell its US business to some other company.

To shut down TikTok would be a great start. Maybe then we could shut down the other sites that use "recommendation engines" programmed to maximize "engagement with the site" — in other words, addiction.

However, much of the harm done by addictiveness could be prevented by taking recommendation engines out of the control of the platform itself.

If you thought that the insertion of a back door in XZ indicates a problem with free software, please compare that with the worse problem of nonfree software. Microsoft's servers are in far worse shape.

And that's not to mention the ways the developers/owners of those programs can break those programs' "security" — that exists only if they choose to let it exist.

Being a woman in Afghanistan is so horrible that even being a woman in Iran is a big step up.

I'd be tempted to support forcibly removing the Taliban from power so that they can't do these things any more. But that is not a real solution. We tried that already, and it led to 20 years of war that we were slowly but steadily losing.

I don't think we know a way to fight that war and win.

This is why I still believe that removing US troops from Afghanistan was the right thing to do.