Several thousand poor residents of Arkansas have been dropped from Medicaid because they failed to meet new requirements, the first Americans to lose the safety-net health insurance under rules compelling recipients to work or prepare for a job to keep their coverage. Under Arkansas Works, the state’s expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, able-bodied adults must go online every month and report their hours of work or other community engagement. They lose insurance if they fail to comply for three months in a year. Statewide, nearly a fourth of the population lives in areas in which Internet service is not available, according to figures from the Federal Communications Commission. Even when they have cellphones, many low-income people have plans in which they pay by the minute, said LaShannon Spencer, chief executive of the Community Health Centers of Arkansas. “So spending your minutes to report [work hours] — what’s the likelihood?” Spencer asked.

In Lee County in the Mississippi Delta, where poverty is rampant, nearly three-quarters of the people lack online access. “I’ve had people say, ‘What’s Arkansas Works?’ and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, you don’t even know what it is, so how do you know that you need to go online and report work?’ ” said Kellee Farris, who runs the Lee County Cooperative Clinic.

The Federal Trade Commission kicked off a series of hearings to discuss whether the agency’s competition and consumer protection policies should change to better reflect new technologies and companies. FTC Chairman Joseph Simons expressed openness to a new approach. “The broad antitrust consensus that has existed within the antitrust community, in relatively stable form for the last 25 years, is being challenged,” Chairman Simons said. “I approach all these issues with a very open mind, very much willing to be influenced by what we see and hear at these hearings.” The  hearings, the first of 15 to 20 over the next several months, are one of several efforts underway on the federal and state level that threaten to limit the expansion and power of tech companies. “It will be a slow-moving ship, faster on privacy than on antitrust, but it’s an important moment,” said Blair Levin, a senior adviser at the research firm New Street and a former chief of staff at the Federal Communications Commission.

The United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters' (GCHQ’s) methods in carrying out bulk interception of online communications violated privacy and failed to provide sufficient surveillance safeguards, the European court of human rights (ECHR) has ruled in a test case judgment. But the Strasbourg court found that GCHQ’s regime for sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments was not illegal. It is the first major challenge to the legality of UK intelligence agencies intercepting private communications in bulk, following Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing revelations. The long-awaited ruling is one of the most comprehensive assessments by the ECHR of the legality of the interception operations operated by UK intelligence agencies. The claims, which had already been heard by the UK’s investigatory powers tribunal, were brought by a coalition of 14 human rights groups, privacy organisations and journalists, including Amnesty International, Liberty, Privacy International and Big Brother Watch. By a majority of five to two votes, the Strasbourg judges found that GCHQ’s bulk interception regime violated article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which guarantees privacy, because there were said to be insufficient safeguards, and rules governing the selection of “related communications data” were deemed to be inadequate.