The Indian state of Maharashtra has passed a bill to ban harassment by people who claim supernatural power.

However, the bill is weak.

This is in response to the murder of a rationalist campaigner.

A vocational school in the UK gave radio transmitter tags to its students and staff for several years without telling them.

I think it is misleading to call these "RFIDs" because what they do is very different. Their signals show exactly where the wearer is located.

It's December, normally the cooler and wetter season, but a wildfire destroyed houses in Big Sur.

It isn't proven yet, but one must suspect that this reflects the effects of global heating, which is expected to alter the base conditions towards the hotter and drier.

Human Rights Watch reports various forms of repression used in Saudi Arabia.

A British former headteacher (school principal, in US terms) has been convicted of sexual assault on 5 students, all before 1970.

The victims must have resented this for decades, which pretty clearly implies they were unwilling at the time. Thus, I think those acts do deserve to be crimes.