US citizens: call on several big banks to stop fueling destruction of the Amazon forest.

By contrast, let's all fuel destruction of the predatory near-monopoly called Amazon.

Laos arrested Chinese human rights lawyer Lu Siwei on China's behalf as he was about to travel to Thailand.

I think this is the definitive criterion for a puppet regime of China: arresting people that China wants to make political prisoners.

Hedi, a Frenchman of Algerian decent, walked past some uniformed thugs, and one shot him in the back of his head with a "less lethal" weapon.

The weapon did not kill him, but maimed him instead. It also knocked him down, which gave the whole group of thugs a chance to beat him up. He may have lost the sight of his left eye.

France did the right thing, quickly prosecuting all of those thugs. Whether it is necessary to keep the shooter in jail until trial, I am not sure. When a non-thug is accused of such crimes, refusing bail is justified if there is a danger that that accused will commit more crimes, or flee justice. I can't judge a priori whether that is the case here.

*US education department opens inquiry into Harvard’s legacy admission policies.*

*Poverty Is a Systemic, Not Individual, Failure.*

If you want to blame it on individual poor people, you can spin the facts that way. When a system becomes hard for certain groups to cope with, some people will crack before others.

Why would certain people crack sooner? Perhaps their personalities or other characteristics are more predisposed to cracking. Perhaps they have bad luck. There is always randomness that affects the outcomes in specific cases.

But those causes of randomness have little to do with political questions — the aspects what make a system better or worse. That is what governments can adjust so that fewer people crack — or, for those who seek scapegoats, so that more people crack.