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UNOCI peacekeepers on patrol

UNAMID peacekeepers patrol in North Darfur

Women and children fleeing past unrest in Plateau State, Nigeria

As GOP leaders in Congress consider whether to ban earmarks, there are some willing to speak up for the practice. In Florida, they include environmentalists concerned about finding money for Everglades restoration and local officials with big projects to fund, such as the dredging of Miami’s port.

Soldiers from the Alabama National Guard build and maintain miles of HESCO barriers to protect Dauphin Island, Ala., beaches from the BP oil spill on July 23, 2010. More than 1,600 National Guardmembers supported Operation Deepwater Horizon in four Gulf states.

Voting at a Baghdad polling station in Iraq's parliamentary elections on 7 March 2010

Swedish police officers patrol a street in central Stockholm, near where a suicide bomber killed himself two days earlier, on Dec. 11, 2010

This past fall, al-Qaida's arm in Yemen tried its hand at a new kind of attack: cargo bombs.

Bill Keller, executive editor at The New York Times, told an audience at the Nieman Foundation that now more than ever traditional journalists have an important role to play in publishing government data in an effective and responsible way. The question of which government activities should be kept from the public, he said, “has blossomed into one of the most urgent political debates of our time, joining the question of how we protect ourselves to the question of what it is exactly that we are protecting.”