Tsvangirai accused Mugabe of rigging the Zimbabwe election in several ways including manipulating the voters' rolls.

In a setback for journalism, UK thugs were given court approval to seize and search people's memories for "communication of material to an enemy". This is meant to refer to leaked information about dirty deeds that the government is keeping secret from its principal enemy, the people. Naturally, knowledge of these dirty deeds might help other enemies too, so this is a pretext for the state to attack all the enemies at once.

This is in addition to material that "could be useful to terrorists", which covers amost anything when applied to someone assumed to be inclined towards terrorism.

The UK laws invoked are blatant disrespect for human rights, as are many of the "anti-terror" laws there and in other countries. Terrorism exists, but it is a minor danger compared with the deadly practices these laws are used to cover up.

Data brokers are collecting and correlating a lot more data about people than you may realize.

If this sort of snooping is "essential" for the success of some business, we must make that business fail! Meanwhile, it is possible to keep most of our lives out of their data bases, and I do so.

New Zealand has adopted a law that intends to prevent issuance of new patents covering computer programs "as such".

I have not seen the exact text of this law. I hope that it is airtight. The European Patent Office is operating under a treaty which excludes "computer programs as such" from patentability, but has issued thousands of computational technique patents despite the words of the treaty on the grounds that they cover techniques, not programs as such.

Meanwhile, they failed to protect programs from lawsuits under the existing patents, as I've recommended,so it will take around 20 years for this to eliminate the problem.

The US tacitly helped Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons against Iran.