*Climate crisis: Australia must ready for "devastating" regional disruption,*

The family of Henrietta Lacks settled a lawsuit demanding to be paid for the sale of a cell culture made from a sample of cancer cells that was excised as part of treating her cancer in the 1950s.

I don't think there is anything basically wrong in cultivating Henrietta Lacks's cell culture for sale for use in medical research. (It would not be wrong if it were you or me instead.) This does no harm to the person that the cells came from.

Today's US medical business exploits patients dreadfully and this does enormous harm. Some are driven into penury. That issue is an important injustice and we must fix it ‐ for instance, with a well-funded national medical system.

However letting a few patients charge for use of their cell cultures for research would do almost nothing to address this real problem. That would establish a sort of lottery that would benefit a few people. What we need is a bigger change that would help everyone.

Nowadays the practice raises a privacy issue: anyone who gets a sample of the culture could sequence its DNA and derive about that person (and per relatives). This could indeed do some them some harm. The overall issue of using people's DNA information against them is a big issue, but the special case of selling useful cell cultures is only a small part of it.

The corrupter has been indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia through fraud.

Full text of the indictment.

Republicans have learned their lesson. For 2024 they are amplifying their efforts to rig and steal the election before it is finished.

US citizens: call on the Federal Housing Finance Agency to establish basic rights for renters.

US citizens: call on Congress to restore voting rights to citizens in prison nationwide. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.

If you phone, please spread the word!