Bizarrely, a concern about prices has motivated UK air travellers to refuse to let airport stores scan their boarding passes.

I almost never buy anything in an airport except take-out food, because the stores in an airport are expensive. The exceptions are when something is hard to find in the US: I've bought chocolate, cheese, nama yatsuhashi, and occasionally a book. For my privacy's sake, I have refused to let any store scan my boarding pass. When the clerk insisted on that, I said "no sale."

Then one day it occurred to me to ask, "What do you do when a boarding pass fails to scan properly?" The clerk answered that they can manually enter the flight number in that case. Since then, I've offered this a couple of times, and the clerk accepted it instead of scanning my pass.

As for the question of how this affects the prices, I expect an airport store to be expensive, but there is no use fussing about that. I simply don't buy anything there that I could get elsewhere.

One SWAT team has been denied immunity for carelessly raiding some innocent people's home with less-lethal grenades.

Good, but if the victims win their lawsuit, it will be the city that pays.

Making cities pay damages for misconduct by thugs has proved insufficient to deter thugs from careless or bestial cruelty. We need to punish the individual thugs.

The US Civil War was about whether to end slavery. Everything else followed from that issue.

Coerced prostitution of minors in the US exists, but the victims appear to number in the hundreds , not the hundreds of thousands as sometimes claimed.

California's new water-saving showers will save a little water, but the way to save a lot of water is to stop fracking.