Google's self-drive car

Google says: "Fully autonomous driving has always been the goal of our project, because we think this could improve road safety and help lots of people who can't drive.

We're now developing prototypes of vehicles that have been designed from the ground up to drive themselves—just push a button and they'll take you where you want to go! We'll use these vehicles to test our software and learn what it will really take to bring this technology into the world."

 Google hopes that by this time next year, 100 of its driverless two-seaters will be on public roads, following extensive testing. The cars would not be for sale and instead would be provided to select operators for further tweaking and have limitations such as a 40-kilometre-per-hour top speed.

United States prison rate has quadrupled since 1960s

Source: The Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.

*Rates are from 2013 for all countries with the exception of Greece, Israel, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States, which are from 2012; and Canada, which is from 2011–12. The rate for Britain is a weighted average of England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

The New York Times says that despite a recent dip, the incarceration rate in the United States has almost quadrupled since the 1960s. The US now has far more people in prison as a share of its population than any other developed country and partly reflects the failed 'War on Drugs' which has criminalised a generation of young men.