Polio has broken out in Syria.

The most important point about bugging the phones of politicians in Germany, Spain and elsewhere is that the NSA was keeping Obama and Feinstein in the dark along with all of us.

To stop snooping on a few allied leaders is not sufficient remedy. The US should stop snooping on Americans, too (except those for whom there is a specific, constitutional court order).

Feinstein, aren't US citizens' rights as important as Merkel's?

The witch hunt against pedophiles led a mob to kill a man.

This is an unusual extreme, but the same spirit that whipped up this mob can be found in other measures taken against adults that have sex (or even head in the direction of sex) with teenagers.

Another accused man was found dead at home when he was supposed to go to court.

Either anxiety killed him, or he committed suicide, or this was an unlikely coincidence.

In all such cases, the official accusations carefully suppress the distinction between rape and willing sex, even love. First they define willing sex as "rape", and then they try to bury all knowledge of whether it was willing sex or not. We're invited to judge all these men as rapists, which some of them are and some are not.

Glenn Greenwald discusses honesty in journalism and the factors that degrade it.

Clandestine gold mining in the Amazon is causing accelerating deforestation.