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A whopping 70,000 questions poured into Change.gov over the past week, in response to the Obama transition team's call for citizen queries to the President-Elect. After votes from about 100,000 people, the top ranked question asks Obama whether he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture and illegal surveillance by the U.S. government. I've been working with activist Bob Fertik to organize support for the question, and several progressive bloggers urged readers and Obama supporters to vote for it last week. Digby, who has written extensively about the Bush administration's abuse of the rule of law, recently reported on the progress:

The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters packed into Cairo's Tahrir Square yesterday for one of the biggest anti-government demonstrations since Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February. As suspicions over the conduct of the ruling military council continued to simmer, crowds of people surged into the iconic Downtown plaza in scenes not witnessed on a similar scale since the deposed leader was ousted nearly five months ago. The rally was boosted by the official support of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest political organisation, which until now has refused to take part in most of the protests that have happened since February. A large number of the country's other political groups and parties also backed the rally. There were similar protests across the country, including in the northern Mediterranean city of Alexandria. But it was in Tahrir Square where the greatest numbers gathered. Tens of thousands of men, women and children arrived throughout the day carrying Egyptian flags and banners, and by the afternoon central Cairo was awash in a sea of street vendors, tents and ebullient slogans.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Millions of Iranian students are due to stage nationwide rallies on November 4 to voice their strong support for the Wall Street protests which have now overwhelmed all the western countries ruled by the capitalist system.

I'm genuinely excited today to announce the release of my new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. As of this morning, it is available in bookstores as well as for shipping online. The book focuses on what I began realizing several years ago is the crucial theme tying together most of the topics I write about: America's two-tiered justice system - specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be - the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities - into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality. This is how I described that development in the book:

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell

Speech from Viviane Reding Vice-President of the European Commission, responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Privacy matters. The European Data Protection and Privacy Conference Brussels, 30 November 2010

Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

Risks and Opportunities of the Digital Natives - European Perspective. S. 38: Rules and Regulations in the EU, parental mediation