./emilychang eBot

How does a democracy work without “in-depth” news? It doesn’t. While most of the population will not care about access to high-quality news, there are always some who read to find out what’s really going on, and why. Dictatorships, totalitarian regimes and underdeveloped countries don’t have the luxury of investigative journalism, and the news-as-entertainment in highly capitalist regimes isn’t really informative either - it’s bread and circuses. An informed citizenry, said Jefferson, is necessary for a democracy to function.

In the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama first distinguished himself in the area of foreign policy; criticizing an atrophied approach to international affairs in both parties, he promised a new approach to diplomacy and national security. As the country waits impatiently for inauguration day, his appointments in those areas indicate that change is indeed on the agenda: In a major adjustment for the realms of foreign policy and national security, his new approach will be led by women.

"But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful. “

Shepard Fairey: “...however, there are a lot of people who are really excited about Obama and it’s unique. It’s something that people are willing to take the risk to do—to go out to put some posters on the streets. We sent posters to Philadelphia and they got put up all over—on abandoned buildings and on street corners. That’s something you don’t normally see - that level of motivation in people to spread an image. There are a lot of graffiti artists who are motivated enough to spread their own work and their own name - I’m one of them—but this is that unique case where all we had to do was make the materials and disseminate them to some sort of hubs around the country and the rest of it pretty much took care of itself.”

The following is the transcript of Senator Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, as recorded by CQ Transcriptions.

Almost one-third of the world’s species will face extinction if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, a United Nations report will say this week.

Scarcely a week before an existing ban on Internet access taxes is set to expire, the U.S. Senate late Thursday voted to let the prohibition live on for seven more years.

The compromise bill, which was approved by a voice vote, would prohibit state and local governments from taxing any service that enables users to connect to the Internet and some related services through 2014.

After the government shut down Internet access and denied visas for outside journalists, keeping much of the world at bay, terror continued to rage through Yangon, the main city, for days, according to witnesses and dissidents here. Soldiers raided homes and monasteries to arrest demonstrators, witnesses said, using pictures taken by government informers during the protests.

Savvy Internet fans in the people’s republic have known for a long time, however, that there have been simple ways to get forbidden information. One of those ways was the magical gift of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. The Great Firewall can block specific web sites all it wants, but as long as there’s an RSS feed, many Chinese surfers can use feeds to access otherwise forbidden information.

Unfortunately, China appears to have finally gotten wise to RSS as of late—reports have been popping up from our readers and around the web of not being able to access FeedBurner RSS feeds as early as August of this year. More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with “feeds,” “rss,” and “blog,” thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites—including ones that aren’t blocked in China, such as Ars Technica—useless.

I sat down with Naomi Klein to talk about her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This revelatory work belongs in that rarefied air with A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and Witness to a Century by George Seldes.