This provision, unlikely to be deployed against individual file-swappers and those who rip movies from their own DVDs, seems clearly targeted at sites like The Pirate Bay and other major hubs, which don't always operate to make money.

The risks are illustrated by the following selection of mishap. If the people involved had exercised less caution, or if some unfortunate coincidental event had occurred, escalation to nuclear war can easily be imagined.

Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States are squabbling over much of the Arctic seabed and Denmark has called them together for talks in its self-governing province to avert a free-for-all for the region's resources.

Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States are at odds over 1.2 million square kilometers (460,000 square miles) of Arctic seabed which could possibly hold 25% of the world's oil and gas.

Government lawyers told federal judges that the president can send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen and hold him in prison without charge, indefinitely.

The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the order public, civil liberties groups announc

But the US comes in for its share of IP-related criticism from other countries both small and large, too. When it happens, though, we're not nearly so quick to change our ways.

Some political scientists, such as Azar Gat of Tel Aviv University, who coined the phrase "authoritarian capitalism" to describe the trend, see these countries as the first major threat to the idea of free-market democracy since fascism and communism.

For the first time since World War II the United States is not the world's #1 economy. We have slipped behind the European Union. (This, according to Erin Burnett on CNBC, Friday, March 14th.)

FBI headquarters officials sought to cover their informal and possibly illegal acquisition of phone records on thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005 by issuing 11 improper, retroactive "blanket" administrative subpoenas in 2006 to three phone companies