"People holding a sign 'To: America. From: the Egyptian People. Stop supporting Mubarak. It's over!" so tweeted my brave colleague, Democracy Now! senior producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous, from the streets of Cairo.

The Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol that Jared Loughner is accused of using in his rampage in Tucson, Arizona, is, according to Glock's website, "ideal for versatile use through reduced dimensions" and is "suitable for concealed carry." The site continues, "Compact and subcompact Glock pistol model magazines can be loaded with a convincing number of rounds," from the standard 15 up to 33. The shooter was able to kill and wound to the extent that he did, with six dead and 13 injured, because he had a semiautomatic, concealed weapon, along with the "extended magazine." He was attempting to reload the weapon with another extended magazine when a brave, unarmed woman knocked his next clip from his hand.

The Tucson massacre that left six dead and 14 injured, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, brought into sharp public focus the local sheriff, Clarence Dupnik. He's been the sheriff of Pima County, which includes Tucson, Arizona's second-largest city, for 30 years. For the 20 years before that, he was a police officer. Dupnik has gained attention this week for linking the shooting to the vitriolic political climate in the U.S., and in particular, Arizona.

Speaking at a press conference shortly after the shooting, Sheriff Dupnik said: "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Remember "freedom fries"? That's what the House Republicans, when they were last in the majority, renamed french fries, after France refused to support the invasion of Iraq. It seems like renaming fries might be just about the extent of food regulation that some in Congress are willing to support.

The new Republican majority threatens a barrage of investigations. California Republican Darrell Issa is the new chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Issa has been tweeting about the subjects he intends to investigate: "CONTINUED INITIAL OVERSIGHT INVESTIGATIONS LINEUP: Wikileaks, the safety of American food/medicine and effectiveness of @FDArecalls ..."

President Barack Obama signed a slew of bills into law during the lame-duck session of Congress and was dubbed the "Comeback Kid" amid a flurry of fawning press reports. In the hail of this surprise bipartisanship, though, the one issue over which Democrats and Republicans always agree, war, was completely ignored. The war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, and 2010 has seen the highest number of U.S. and NATO soldiers killed.

One of President Barack Obama's signature campaign promises was to protect the freedom of the Internet. He said, in November 2007, "I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality, because once providers start to privilege some applications or websites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out and we all lose."

Jump ahead to December 2010, where Obama is clearly in the back seat, being driven by Internet giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. With him is his appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, his Harvard Law School classmate and basketball pal who just pushed through a rule on network neutrality that Internet activists consider disastrous.

Despite being granted bail, Wikileaks founder and editor Julian Assange remains imprisoned in London, awaiting extradition proceedings to answer a prosecutor's questions in Sweden. He hasn't been formally charged with any crime. His lawyers have heard that a grand jury in the United States has been secretly empanelled, and that a U.S. federal indictment is most likely forthcoming.

Politicians and commentators, meanwhile, have been repeatedly calling for Assange to be killed.

CANCUN, Mexico -- Critical negotiations are under way here in Cancun, under the auspices of the United Nations, to reverse human-induced global warming. This is the first major meeting since the failed Copenhagen summit last year, and it is happening at the end of the hottest decade on record. While the stakes are high, expectations are low, and, as we have just learned with the release of classified diplomatic cables from Wikileaks, the United States, the largest polluter in the history of the planet, is engaged in what one journalist here called "a very, very dirty business."

Wikileaks is again publishing a trove of documents, in this case classified U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. The whistle-blower website will gradually be releasing more than 250,000 of these documents in the coming months so that they can be analyzed and gain the attention they deserve. The cables are internal, written communications among U.S. embassies around the world and also to the U.S. State Department. Wikileaks described the leak as "the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain [giving] an unprecedented insight into U.S. government foreign activities."

Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, makes great movies but they are not generally considered "cliff-hangers." All that might change since a whistle-blower on the Democracy Now! news hour revealed that health insurance executives thought they may have to implement a plan "to push Moore off a cliff." The whistle-blower: Wendell Potter, the former chief spokesman for health insurance giant Cigna. He was quoting from an industry strategy session on how to respond to Moore's 2007 documentary Sicko, a film critical of the U.S. health insurance industry. Potter told me that he is not sure how serious the threat was but he added, ominously, "These companies play to win."