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6. No one today goes to one spot online as the trusted information source. People don’t even go to five or six. Everyone goes to dozens, hundreds — more. A subscription scheme is therefore not workable.

Maidan was a group of tech-savvy pro-democracy activists who used the Internet as a tool to support their movement. Maidan in Ukranian means public square and Maidan’s website features the slogal “You CAN chnage the world you live in. And you can do it now. In Ukraine.”

The main activity of Maidan was election monitoring and networking with other pro-democracy organizations around Eastern Europe.

“websites cannot produce an activist organization.”

These days, you can’t even trust undecided people. Individuals who honestly believe that they can’t choose between two available options may in fact already know what to do, thanks to attitudes that lurk outside their awareness, a new study indicates.

This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.

Beyond that, this attitude that we should uncritically support Obama in everything he does and refrain from criticizing him is unhealthy in the extreme. No political leader merits uncritical devotion -- neither when they are running for office nor when they occupy it -- and there are few things more dangerous than announcing that you so deeply believe in the Core Goodness of a political leader, or that we face such extreme political crises that you trust and support whatever your Leader does, even when you don't understand it or think that it's wrong. That's precisely the warped authoritarian mindset that defined the Bush Movement and led to the insanity of the post-9/11 Era, and that uncritical reverence is no more attractive or healthy when it's shifted to a new Leader.

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

here is a large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and democracy, is so much worse than Bush's America. But during my time in Shenzhen, China's youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).

美林(Merrill Lynch)首席执行官约翰•塞恩(John Thain)拒绝支持其他华尔街掌门人的乐观论调。他们表示，信贷紧缩最严重的影响已经过去。

塞恩认为，消费者刚刚开始感受到食品及能源价格上涨的影响。

这是美林连续第三个季度出现亏损，其业绩不及分析师的预期。

受到信贷紧缩的影响，加之联邦保险教育贷款盈利能力不断下降，越来越多的私营及公共贷款机构正在停止发放学生贷款。由于多数贷款安排介于现在至许多大学开学时的8月份之间，这一问题正变得日益紧迫。颇具影响力的美国参议院银行委员会周二将就此问题向学生融资专家小组提出质询。

“税收规划是遗产规划中非常重要的组成部分；有时甚至是全部，”纽约贝西默信托(Bessemer Trust)的信托顾问苏珊•舍恩菲尔德(Susan Schoenfeld)表示，“但在一个完美的世界中，这不应是唯一的诱因。”

如果处理得明智，遗产规划可以帮助父母让子女珍视价值观，对孩子进行财务责任教育。它还能避免父母死后兄弟姐妹之间的冲突。

负责任的理财行为包括不要让子女被蒙在鼓里。

What is occurring is the meltdown of the biggest pyramid game in human history.

The right course of action is for the US government to establish a Resolution Trust Corporation to take over failing financial institutions, including hedge funds and private equity firms, and leave the Fed to tackle inflation. But a Republican administration could not go to a Democratic Congress for money to capitalise such a corporation. It could not justify spending US$1 trillion to bail out those who deceived investors around the world and destroyed the finest financial institutions in America for their own gains. Instead, the Fed will be called on to save the financial system, boost the economy and suppress inflation at the same time.