Amnesty International says that the surveillance done by Facebook and Google amounts to a threat to human rights.

This is a big step towards what I've said for years, but they still have a ways to go. Every system that tracks people's movements or actions is a threat to human rights. A lot of tracking is a bug threat. Whether that tracking is done by one large system or by many small systems, either way it adds up to a big threat.

Harvard and Yale alumni held a protest for fossil fuel divestment on the field at half-time at the annual Harvard-Yale game.

The Bolivian coup government accuses Morales of "sedition" and terrorism, based on an audio recording calling for protest strikes.

Protests are not terrorism, and even less is advocating protests terrorism. The use of the term "sedition" proves the injustice of the charges, since it simply means "criticizing the government," and a government which makes that a crime is unfit to rule.

Stiglitz: It's time to retire metrics like GDP. They don't measure everything that matters.

I propose three numbers to measure the overall health of the economy:

• What fraction of the cost of basic needs can some with a 20th percentile income have?
• What fraction of the cost of basic needs can someone with no income have for basic needs?
• What is the most a person with a 20th percentile income or less ever has to pay in order to access medical treatment?

In Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, people are protesting against the power of the government of Iran. Too bad that many of them are protesting to demand subsidized fossil fuels. That's exactly the thing to kill billions of people, given time.

The article errs in equating Iranian influence with Shi'ite power. The Shi'ites are the majority in Iraq, by far, and they will surely continue to be the dominant group in Iraq whether Iran is involved or not. The crucial question is whether they will admit individual Sunnis on a basis of equality, or crush them to the point that they rebel yet again.