Australia kept an Egyptian refugee in deportation prison for 12 years because the government gave undue respect to a conviction in absentia in an Egyptian court which used torture to get "evidence".

Kafkaesque rigidity prolonged his imprisonment.

A new French law says that people who move into living spaces near existing activities that normally make noise have no right to demand an end to the noise.

This is simple common sense.

Some Republican-ruled states want to prohibit lab-grown meat.

Some of those states have already passed laws to punish making pictures of how farms treat their animals. We know the reason for both kinds of laws: to serve the powerful few companies that dominate US agriculture, and also to oppose efforts to curb global heating.

A UK thug accused press photographer Dimitris Legakis of "assaulting" per, and arrested him. Seven months later, just before the trial, prosecutors realized Legakis had committed no crime, and dropped the case.

The thug seems to have accused Legakis of a fictitious crime — something not unusual for thugs. Dropping the prosecution was the right thing for prosecutors to do, but it isn't enough. It is necessary also to teach thugs to lose that unjust habit.

What has been done towards that end?

HP invites customers to rent printers, with a contract that requires the printer to be reachable over the internet from HP, so it can monitor lots of things about what the renter prints.

Supposedly HP makes this snooping legitimate by making the renter explicitly consent to it. Balderdash! Massive surveillance cannot be justified by the manufacture of consent.

If we seriously want to stop companies from putting digital shackles on people, this sort of monitoring and control should be a crime. It should be punished with prison for the people who implemented it, as well as with fines to, or dissolution of, the company.