'Shoe Thrower' Sentence Reduced "Muntadar al Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist convicted after he threw a shoe at President George Bush, has had his jail sentence reduced from three years to one year."

The Digital Divide and the Color Line  "Across the country, many urban families are struggling to explore job opportunities, communicate with loved ones, and attain an education—because they lack access to a high-speed Internet connection."

Sex, Drugs and ESL: new laws policing foreign teachers in Thailand are mostly ignored "The second most popular justification is that it’s “part of their culture and who are we to interfere?” As though having sex with a prostitute in Thailand is akin to a pig-roast in Hawaii or a thermal pool in Iceland. You simply haven’t experienced Thailand until you’ve tried it!"

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The Progressive reports on the Authors Guild of America forcing Amazon to turn off the Kindle 2's text-to-audio feature arguing that it violates copyright laws by enabling people to listen to books without paying for audio rights.  Paul Schroeder of the American Foundation for the Blind writes, "There are more than 20 million Americans who report experiencingsignificant vision loss, and many others who would benefit fromtext-to-speech, such as people with dyslexia and people with physicaldisabilities, to name just a few."

Bitch blogs (with some great illustrations) on women's comics of the '70s and '80s.

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Worthless money [via Wooster Collective]: "'Thanks To Mugabe'…[small Zimbabwean newspaper prints] all their advertising on actually money - which, unfortunately, has become completely worthless":

Oil money [via Political Affairs]: "During the second Summit of Arab and South American Nations in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez proposed a new international currency backed by oil reserves and an international bank managed jointly by petroleum exporting countries."

Fear money [via FAIR]: "There is money to be made from fear—and business has been good for those hawking the online child predator threat. Exploiters of the scare range from the Internet-policing groups who ferret out suspects and share information with authorities (and sometimes, for a fee, with journalists) to vendors of [...]More

Dollars and Sense blogs about We20, "the people's G20." 
"The website at we20.org acts as a facilitator and hub for these meetings. Visitors to the site can find an existing meeting or set one up to discuss and agree on a local, national or global challenge, or to read and vote on plans from other we20 meetings."

In These Times presents an interesting debate between Naomi Klein and Rabbi Arthur Waskow on divestment and sanctions in South Africa and Israel. 

Racewire asks: do you know people of color who lived through the depression?
"The [...]More

New solutions for fighting hunger…
"In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by scarcity of food but scarcity of democracy."  Frances Moore Lappe explores how Brazil's 4th largest city has recruited farmers to do something the US cities have yet to do: end hunger. 

New thoughts on the death of the print industry…
In These Time's Jeremy Gantz evaluates the coverage of the crisis in print journalism and highlights Clay Shirky's recent piece as "the best meditation on the death of newspapers."  Shirky argues: "When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before [...]More