A mining company lost its attempt to use a business-supremacy to sue El Salvador for banning a gold mine in the name of environmental standards.

Portugal plans a tax on sugary drinks. However, the tax rules might encourage companies to game the system by putting 79 grams of sugar in each liter. Why not tax per weight of sugar?

And why leave out dairy drinks and fruit juices? There is a lot of added sugar in many fruit juices.

The world has agreed to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (powerful greenhouse gases) starting in 2024.

Short-sighted politicians wanted to start many years later, and India will not start until 2028. What idiocy!

Japan is retaliating against UNESCO for recognizing documents about the massacre in Nanjing in World War II.

Yahoo has presented, through a patent application, the idea of collecting data about people and cars passing by a location to choose what ads to display on a billboard.

The patent application itself is not particularly an issue (other than as an example of a practice, computational idea patents, that is bad in general). Collecting data as envisioned in the application is the issue.

The most important issue is not the use of these data for choosing ads, but collecting the data at all. We need laws to prevent that.