The Week: US

A Frederick County, Maryland, councilman threatened to sue a local newspaper if it continued to print his name in news stories without his permission. "Use my name again unauthorized, and you'll be paying for an attorney," said Republican Kirby Delauter.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Happy New Year! Are you ready to destroy a stranger's life today?It's well known that social media can whip people into peculiar, angry frenzies and turn them into destructive mobs at the service of causes both worthy and ridiculous.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Privacy is often thought of as the right to be left alone. Yet our lives are embedded in relationships — with people, with corporations, with government, and with technological devices — that can't be pursued without some amount of privacy loss.

Cap-and-trade policy was designed to address climate change by putting a "cap" on carbon dioxide emissions — issuing a fixed number of permits — and then allowing firms to "trade" those permits.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

In the middle of 2014, the chattering classes were gripped by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ outstanding essay "The Case for Reparations," which outlined the history of oppression faced by African-Americans and argued for finally coming to some collective recognition of the evils done to slaves and their descendants.

There are about 600,000 bridges in the United States, and about one in four is classified as functionally obsolete or structurally deficient. This doesn't mean they're in danger of imminent collapse; they may be simply too narrow or built for lighter traffic than today's standards.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

An Ohio woman received a bill for $584.87 to cover the cost of the police response to her minor car accident. After Grace Jones, 20, bumped into the rear of a car, two cop cars showed up.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Two New York City police officers are dead, ambushed by a lone gunman as they sat in a squad car in Brooklyn. It's a brazen killing, one so shocking it has left the city and the nation searching for a rational explanation to an inconceivable crime.Why would someone do this?More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

In a remarkable coincidence, the government of Brazil released its own official torture report last week, only a few days after the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee published its findings on the CIA's use of torture during the Bush era.