China is moving to giant multistory pig farms, isolated from the outside, so as to stop transmission of diseases.

China forced 2.6 million "surplus workers" in Xinjiang to move long distances. The critical attention to what it does there is making the government uncomfortable.

Some US cities have plans to use the recovery from the Covid-19 depression to reduce local greenhouse emissions.

Every little bit helps, but we need more than local improvements to avoid most of the climate disaster.

Greg Palast: Republicans may be planning to refuse to certify the elections in some states, using uncounted postal ballots as an excuse. Use early voting instead of postal voting.

That is what I did for the Massachusetts primary on Sept 1, and that is what I plan to do for the general election too.

*The shift to online schooling is running roughshod over children's privacy rules and rights,* which were inadequate to start with.

The article is concerned that wealthier schools will choose systems that "protect" privacy "better" whereas impecunious schools will have to use systems that protect privacy less. That would be a real danger, if some of these systems did protect privacy.

In practice, none of these systems give much protection. Whatever data a company collects is already on the road to being misused. The only effective protection for privacy is not to put the data in a database.