The private companies that own the UK electric and water grids have moved them into offshore holding companies to take advantage of special business-supremacy treaties that the UK has made with a few other countries.

The UK should try to renegotiate those treaties to exclude former state assets that have been privatized. If that doesn't work, it should abrogate those treaties entirely.

The "Contract for the Web" aims to protect privacy, but its privacy rules are inadequate — similar to the European Union's GDPR.

There are cities in Europe and the US that require motorists to enter the car's license plate number to pay for parking. Cities say they chose this method because it is efficient — but its byproduct is to impose an additional system of massive surveillance on a large fraction of the population.

The most sensitive data about you are your daily activities: where you go, what you do there, and who you talk with. Machine learning can deduce many important things about you from these data. It can identify dissidents, whistleblowers, and journalists.

It is useless to try to prevent abuse of these data with rules about using them. Personal data, once collected, will be misused. Businesses and states will push to misuse them, and China shows where that will lead.

Thus, adequate rules to protect privacy must ensure nobody collects these data about you except under a court order that specifies you.

In particular, adequate rules would clearly prohibit using massive surveillance to collect parking fees. So we can judge any proposed rules by checking whether they would certainly prohibit that.

The Contract for the Web offers no certainty of this, so it is not adequate.

We can't count on Democrats in the House of Representatives to stand firm against funding Salafi Arabia's war with Yemen.

It may be useful to phone your congresscritter (of whichever party) to oppose this.

Many US cities have problems with lead poisoning. Here is how Cleveland is taking action to put an end to it.

*Jeremy Corbyn reveals dossier 'proving NHS up for sale'.*