Big Pharma's money affects human lives, and journalism too.

A UK animal rights activist was convicted of "conspiracy" for acts of harassment, though no evidence was presented in her trial to connect her with them.

This is indeed chilling for democratic activity. Even though I firmly support use of animals in medical experiments to advance science, I still defend human rights including protests against those experiments.

Detroit, bankrupt, will spend hundreds of millions on a new sports arena as a handout for the owners of a sports team.

The teams claim that the cities should pay towards these projects because the cities' economy will grow, but it turns out that the growth goes mainly to the rich. Detroit can't afford to be swindled this way.

There are worse ways to spend money — they could be buying surveillance gear or SWAT teams. On the other hand, they are probably doing that also.

Canonical is talking about removing its Amazon spying search from Ubuntu.

I'd appreciate being informed if and when the main Ubuntu release ceases to do this spying.

A lawsuit against Baidu, for imposing pro-China censorship for users in the US, has been rejected on First Amendment grounds.

This was a no-brainer. Baidu has no legal obligation to mention criticism of China, any more than stallman.org has an obligation to mention right-wing propaganda.

What's wrong with the internet in China is that netizens can't find criticism of China somewhere else.