Your “small government” lawmakers are at it again, passing laws in the U.S. House of Representatives that give the government — namely, agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency — the power to basically obliterate your privacy — in this case, via private businesses, namely large corporations. The good news is that President Obama has threatened to veto the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) if it made its way through Congress, due to its vastly overreaching provisions. However, while he has come out against the House bill, what if the Senate tones things down a bit?

It’s 2012, we are still at war in the Middle East, and women are still not allowed to fight in Army combat roles. And women who are in the Army and being denied the chance to serve to the same extent as their male counterparts have found a new way to prove that they can fight on par with men: MMA-inspired cage matches. With men.

After suing her high school — and winning — for displaying a religious mural in the auditorium, saying that it was a direct violation of the separation of church and state, 16-year-old Jessica Ahlquist of Rhode Island was attacked in the local media and vilified by her community. Basically, for not being religious enough. While she doesn’t identify herself as an atheist, Ahlquist had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the religious displays in her public school as well as the invented “Holiday Tree” controversy happening in her state. And now, because she refused to back down despite being called an “evi little thing” by a state representative, an atheist organization has stood up for her in the most productive and generous way they could think — they gave her a $42,000 scholarship.

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, the largest breast cancer research, treatment, and awareness organization in the United States, shocked a lot of people earlier this week when it announced it would no longer be making its usual grants to Planned Parenthood, eliminating more than half a million dollars of funding that would have allowed PP to offer breast cancer exams and education to women without the income to otherwise receive them.

Luckily enough, John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War and president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is trying to help Planned Parenthood out, and urging others to do the same.

Tunisia hasn’t exactly had the easiest time lately, what with the 2010-11 Tunisian revolution, their president fleeing the country, and the recent election of a veteran human rights activist to the new presidency. Now, controversy over a television airing of Marjane Satrapi‘s 2007 film based on her 2000 graphic novel and memoir Persepolis, is rallying rights activists and political figures to again defend freedom of speech.

While the list of lawmakers opposing the internet censorship bills PIPA and SOPA continues to grow, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) tweeted this morning that he will be postponing the January 24 vote. No new date has set, but this follows his decision not to force Democrats to vote for the bill in order to prevent a potential veto by President Obama. It also appears that SOPA’s lead sponsor in the House, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), has put the bill on hold following Reid’s announcement. However, Reid is pledging to continue working on the bill and released a statement about his intentions. Unfortunately, his intentions still involve voting on and passing PIPA in some shape or form. Let’s also point out the irony of Harry Reid making this announcement on a site that thrives on sharing so much copyrighted material.

The internet protest is over, and you can finally use Wikipedia without having to look at a gross, spooky cached page. (You knew you could do that, right? Oh, well, doesn’t matter now.) But what was the real impact of the swath of blackouts on the web? Was is much ado about nothing? And what could have been the most significant reaction to this widespread outcry? In fact, something pretty important happened: the people responsible for actually voting on the bill and turning it into the law of the land have decided not to support it. Even lawmakers who co-sponsored the bill have taken their names off and withdrawn their support. That’s wonderful! And it was also nice of them that they were so honest about apparently not reading the bill they’d initially supported in the first place. Transparency!

If you found yourself wondering what the name of the second general of the Dutch Revolution was, or if that was even real, and you ventured on over to Wikipedia to look it up, you probably noticed that the site looked different today. Different, as in blacked out. And then you may or may not have panicked, because now how would you satisfy you thirst for random trivia that is probably somewhere else on the internet, but your go-to site has shut itself down, and now your brain must find something else to do for the next — hey, someone mentioned you on Twitter. You should check that out.

Anyway, you most likely heard about this earlier in the week, when the site’s administrators announced that in protest of the highly controversial internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA, they would “censor” their own site for 24 hours. But Wikipedia is not the only site protesting today. After the jump, find out who else has shut themselves down, and see what the internet will look like should these bills become law.

Over the weekend, President Obama publicly declared his administration’s opposition to the controversial internet censorship bill being introduced in Congress known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA. (The opposition includes both versions of the bill, the House of Representatives’ SOPA and the Senate’s Protect IP Act aka PIPA, which is still, technically, alive.) And now, after a continuous loss of support and facing severe and vocal opposition from the public, the House has shelved the bill, and it is what insiders like to call “Dead On Arrival.” But what about PIPA? Well, it’s what I like to call a “Dead Bill Walking.”

The lawmakers on Capitol Hill are running out of ways to get people on board to vote for the U.S. Senate’s highly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (known as the Protect-IP Act in the House of Representatives), so now they’re claiming that those scurvy-ridden internet pirates have completely obliterated the film industries of several countries, including Sweden. Sweden, a country that has apparently not produced any feature films since the advent of the internet … except for, I don’t know, Let the Right One In, the entire original Millennium Trilogy, you know. Nothing anyone’s ever heard of … if they are living under a Washington Monument-sized rock. Or they’re just lying. But here’s the good news: one lawmaker has a great idea to make this bill seem really unsavory to support: porn.