After the peace deal between Ethiopia and Tigray, some border areas of Tigray are still occupied by Ethiopian troops. So are areas that the peace deal assigned to Ethiopia but whose inhabitants are Tigrayan. The Ethiopian army blocks aid supplies in these areas.

*Republican Death Star Plan to Kill the Planet.* To vote for any Republican in 2024 is to vote for an across-the-board attack on climate defense for the sake of polluting businesses.

The comparison with the Death Star is not strictly valid. As people have pointed out, global climate disaster will not destroy the planet Earth itself. It will wipe out most species but surely not all life. I expect that some humans will survive, albeit in low-technology societies and with short life spans. In a million years, life will diversify again.

But the disaster could easily wipe out technological civilization and cause the permanent loss of history and culture. Carefully printed books may survive if people recopy them every few hundred years, but what could they write on? And who would have time to spare for this?

Another background issue on which I disagree: Freedom can be taken away either by selective enforcement of rules that protect it, or by replacing them with rules that oppress. To ask which method is the more dangerous today is a foolish question; Republicans use both. They are practiced and adept at combining the two methods: they change rules and laws to facilitate oppressive selective enforcement. They have done this for voter suppression, for preventing prosecution of uniformed thugs while prosecuting poor people at every opportunity, and for censorship of schools and libraries.

The overall point of the article is valid notwithstanding these side points.

*Asylum seeker who escaped from Iran says Dorset barge will be another "jail".*

This might seem like an exaggeration, because the articles which say where the barge has been moored don't explain the implications of "Dorset" and "Portland". They expect readers to be British and know already.

Portland is an island which trains don't reach. It is in Dorset, a mostly rural county whose population is under half a million people. Hardly any of the refugees will know anyone there.

There are buses to Weymouth on the mainland, but it may take a long time to walk to a bus stop from the dock. Weymouth has a train station, but it is a long way from there to London or any other large city. Once there it probably takes an hour to reach whoever the refugee wants to see.

I cannot access the timetable web sites, because they impose the use of nonfree Javascript, but I suspect it is not feasible to go to any large city and come back in a day. In effect, the refugees forced to live on the barge will be quite isolated from everyone they know, including friends and support organizations.

This is a gratuitous cruelty, since it would have been perfectly easy to put the barge in a less isolated place. I am sure this was an intentional part of the "hostile environment" which is the stated basis for the UK's policies towards people who are waiting for asylum hearings or come from countries too unsafe to deport anyone to.

Some Florida schools will not dare teach entire Shakespeare plays because of DeMentis's censorship law.

An appeals court insisted that Starbucks must rehire workers that it fired as retaliation for unionizing.