Giant US food companies are preparing to spend millions, perhaps billions, in many states to block laws to require labeling of GMOs.

Parents whose child died as a result of eating their heroin have been sentenced to long prison terms.

It is gratuitously cruel to punish people harshly for not preventing a tragic and unusual accident (tragic for them!), the danger of which they didn't recognize. If the goal is to teach other parents to prevent such dangers, merely publicizing the events of the child's death would do the job.

The doctrine of legal negligence has a valid place. There are common dangers that everyone is supposed to know about and actively prevent. But this one seems too unusual to claim everyone should know about it.

I wonder if the doctrine of legal negligence should be accompanied by a state responsibility to inform people from time to time of their responsibilities to avoid accidents. Not only could that help legitimize punishing people who fail to carry out those responsibilities; it might also in practice do far more to reduce these accidents than the remote threat of punishment.

Fallout from French nuclear tests in Polynesia spread plutonium over Tahiti and all of French Polynesia. Increased levels of cancer have resulted.

Westerners made a grave mistake in accepting the creeping general surveillance that authoritarian states say "keeps us safe".

2001-2010 was the warmest decade since records started.