1. The overall decrease in armed conflict. With the Iraq war, the Darfur crisis, the Israel/Palestinian conflict, and other armed conflicts in the news (with good reason), it’s sometimes hard to remember that the world is actually much more peaceful now than it was just over a decade ago.
2. Steady donations for disaster relief. [...]

Micheal Crook, who is being sued by the EFF for sending out false DMCA claims regrading the above image (he sent us over 10 DMCA claims), is now retracting all of his DMCA claims. This is all part of a pending settlement with Jeff Diehl (10 Zen Monkeys) and EFF, the details of which have [...]

Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida’s largest counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.
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Other states that rushed to buy the touch-screen [...]

January 6, 2007: Reverend Magdalen announced today that she has received a call from her lawyer stating the custody battle has been won. She will rejoin her son on Monday, January 8, 2007. The official judge’s decision will be made public then.
Full Story: The High Weirdness Story.
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Researchers at University of Toronto plan to introduce a software tool on Friday that aims to help people in countries that censor the World Wide Web.
Psiphon (pronounced sigh-fawn), a web-based utility, lets individuals in a country that censors the internet sign on to a server that gives them secure access to web pages anywhere, bypassing [...]

Nepal’s bloody, decade-long civil war officially ended today with a public holiday to celebrate a peace deal between Maoist guerrillas and an alliance of seven political parties.
The pact, which ends a war that has claimed 14,000 lives, will see the Maoist guerrillas lock up their weapons under supervision of the United Nations and subsumed into [...]

Legions of Web users and Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other major Internet providers dodged a legal morass Monday when the California Supreme Court ruled they cannot be sued for posting or distributing libelous material written by others.
In a 34-page ruling, the state’s high court overturned a lower court decision that had stripped immunity against such [...]

Republican George Allen of Virginia will concede the election for his U.S. Senate seat to Democratic challenger Jim Webb on Thursday, sources close to the senator said Thursday.
A victory for Webb will give the Democrats control of the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives.
Full Story: CNN.
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Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.
Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be [...]

Nathan Newman on the elections:
Let’s be clear– this wasn’t just a good night for Democrats. It was a good night for progressives, and no media spin that these new elected officials are “conservatives” changes who they are. The media is always marvelling that “new” Democrats are so much more conservative than “traditional” liberal Democrats of [...]