PayPal's corporate blog, with company announcements, product launches, and statements on account disputes and outages.
HN commenters cite it for PayPal's official statements, such as on WikiLeaks, the Regretsy dispute, a site outage, and the site redesign.
PayPal can now do the pre-authorization thing under their Adaptive Payments API (see https://www.x.com/docs/DOC-1419). We did exactly what you're talking about (one-time preapproval, and then either charge or cancel after a few days) for a project earlier this year. You do have to explicitly apply to PayPal for access to these advanced APIs, but we found that process to be quick and painless. The API is relatively clean.
When we were working with it earlier this year, the end user had to have a PayPal account, which might be a barrier. However, my understanding is that this is no longer required (https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2010/06/it%E2%80%99s-official-guest-payments-is-now-live/).
I would have linked to the paypalblog but it seems to be down at the moment :)
https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2010/12/updated-statement-about-wikileaks-from-paypal-general-counsel-john-muller/ for when it is accessible again
perhaps this is a 'less biased' source -- http://emoney.allthingsd.com/20101208/paypal-releases-funds-to-wikileaks-as-supporters-strike-back/
it's not just the homepage redesign - the US customers should be able to see the complete redesigned site [As per the official PayPal blog: https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2012/06/paypal-com-gets-a-makeover-2/ ]
Here:
https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2010/10/paypal-site-is-back-up/
They declare it was back up after 1:17, whereas "customers" are still complaining after four and a half hours.
Good old PayPal.
PayPal has unlocked the account and made a donation to Regretsy
https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2011/12/regretsy-issue-resolution/
Official clarification from PayPal: https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2009/08/a-clarification-on-paypal’s-recent-send-money-updates/