Monday morning roundup

With all due respect to Secretary Clinton and the fraught public relations line she is walking, must she have referred to Bashar al-Assad as a reformer? Notice she CYAed by doing it indirectly.

The wife of a Chinese dissident asks after her husband.

The Far-Right's witch hunt on academics is detrimental to society.

See the second letter to Miss Manners. It bothers me, a lot, when people post (and label) pictures of me on Facebook (which I'm not on) without my permission.

Processed food manufacturers fight anti-obesity efforts with sleight of hand, as if adding more white flour, to move sugar down the ingredient list, is going to make a muffin healthy. I was at Trader Joe's the other day--the one in Old Town tries to add balance to the universe by staffing its express checkout lines with the slowest people they have. I had a minute to check out the ginger crisps placed up front to lure impulse buyers. On the back of the package, you could read about the health benefits of ginger, including, apparently, fat-burning. In the ingredients, you would see that sugar is not the first ingredient, but that's only because there are at least three different kinds of sugar in there, so they can get away with listing them separately (as the second, third, and embedded ingredients). And sliced apples--really? Has it come to that? You can't sell people whole apples, that they can just bite into?