Elephant poaching is decreasing in Africa, but the rate is still so high that the population continues to decrease.

The Tories are extending the existing punitive starvation regime for the unemployed and disabled, to cover low-paid workers too.

Poor people must teach each other not to be ashamed of being poor, or of the consequences of their poverty. The shame falls on the right-wing governments that inflict poverty, and on their supporters, nobody else.

China's new person-rating system will track everything everyone does, and rate each person in China for loyalty to the state, based on monitoring all kinds of actions and communications.

Even talking to a person with a low rating will lower other people's ratings. So people with low ratings will be shunned, perhaps unemployed.

In a society like that, talented people who don't want to be heroic martyrs, and don't see a way to escape, but who cannot bear becoming active supporters of totalitarianism, will have to show no views and no talent, and reject any trace of ambition that would tempt them to aim for a higher rating so they can get ahead.

They won't have much chance to do good, but at least this way they will do the least possible evil.

"Free" country governments, with their ever-increasing surveillance, are moving indirectly and quietly towards the same horror.

The temporary workers cleaning up the debris of Houston are not given protective gear. They are exposed to all sorts of toxic material.

They don't get overtime pay or workers' compensation, and their wages are sometimes not paid.

That's plutocracy for you.

Researchers say that we can avoid disastrous sea-level rise if we limit global heating to under 1.9C.