Most frightening stories:

• In certain provinces with insurgent activity, the Chinese government is reportedly combining surveillance and social media technologies to score people and send those with low scores to re-education camps, from which it is unclear if anyone returns.
• Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
• The U.S. government is apparently very worried about a severe cyber attack. Also, a talented 11-year-old can hack a voting machine.

Most hopeful stories:

• There are some new ideas for adjusting GDP to account for natural capital and ecosystem services. There are also ideas to better account for “intangible products” like software in GDP. And R&D is a good investment that the U.S. could do more of.
• While the U.S. uses a few less straws and pats itself on the back, there are serious ideas in other countries for tackling the root problem of packaging.
• Vancouver has successfully combined green street and complete street concepts. The American Society of Landscape Architects has also compiled some helpful resources on this topic.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

• Google Lens can identify a plant or animal from its picture, and the subway body scanners from Total Recall are now real.
• There are some neat high-tech camp stoves out there that can burn almost anything with very little smoke and even charge electronic devices.
• I found a good article about making box plots in R.