Reporting from Washington — The Republican-led House failed to pass an extension of expiring sections of the Patriot Act on Tuesday, an unexpected setback for GOP leaders that shows the difficulty they face in controlling their majority and its “tea party”-inspired members.

Time is short: Key provisions of the terrorist surveillance law expire at the end of the month. A coalition of veteran conservative Republicans and new GOP lawmakers joined many Democrats in blocking passage of …

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We’ll analyze the political dynamics of the unfolding Egyptian revolution with Professor Jason Brownlee. And, John Nichols on the significance of the AOL acquisition of Huffington Post. Plus, Eric Alterman on his new book Kabuki Democracy: The System Vs. Barack Obama, and this week’s edition of The Right Hook. …

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The government of Peru recently set what is being called a “dangerous precedent” by not requiring environmental impact studies for new investment projects. Sixty percent of the South American nation comprises the Amazon rain forest, whose environment is recognized internationally as being intimately linked to the health of the planet as a whole. The Peruvian Amazon is one of the most biodiverse regions in …

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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

By now, you’ve probably seen the photos of young Egyptians and Tunisians holding tear gas canisters and grenades that say, “Made in the USA.”

While it’s rare for the corporate media …

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“This world’s not going to change unless we’re willing to change ourselves.” -– Rigoberta Menchu Tum …

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have poured into Cairo’s Tahrir Square for the latest protest calling for Hosni Mubarak’s government to step down.

Correspondents say it is the biggest demonstration since the protests began on 25 January.

It comes despite the government’s announcement of its plans for a peaceful transfer of power.

President Mubarak has said he will stay until elections in September.

In Tahrir Square, attempts by the army to check the identity cards of those joining the …

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CAIRO — Several thousand demonstrators marched on the Egyptian Parliament for the first time and masses crammed into Tahrir Square on Tuesday to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in a revolt buoyed by the broadcast of an emotional television interview with a young Google executive conducted hours after his release from secret detention.

The executive, Wael Ghonim, had been a quiet force behind the YouTube and Facebook promotion of the protests, but became a …

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By John Nichols

As a new era of media mergers and acquisitions unfolds—in the aftermath of the federal approval of the Comcast/NBCU deal—AOL’s $315-million purchase of Huffington Post ought not come as a surprise.

Media companies, old and new, are rethinking and repositioning in order to grab pieces of a future that will be more digital and less analog, more dynamic and less ponderous, more opinonated and less obsessed with a balance that never was achieved. But …

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In cyberspace they call it “getting pwned”. That’s what happened to the American tech-security company HBGary Federal when it tried to infiltrate the so-called hacktivist network known as Anonymous.

In an interview over the weekend Aaron Barr, chief executive of the Washington-based company, said his firm had successfully infiltrated the shadowy collective behind a series of recent pro-WikiLeaks cyber protests.

Anonymous’s revenge was swift and brutal. Using sophisticated hacking techniques, the group managed to deface HBGary’s website, …

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I’ve used this space to make all sorts of important HuffPost announcements: new sections, new additions to the HuffPost team, new HuffPost features and new apps. But none of them can hold a candle to what we are announcing today.

When Kenny Lerer and I launched The Huffington Post on May 9, 2005, we would have been hard-pressed to imagine this moment. The Huffington Post has already been growing at a prodigious rate. But my New …

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