The New York Times yet again last week displayed a disquieting pattern of presenting dead Africans on the front page of its great newspaper, while refusing to present dead Americans in the same fashion...The disturbing photo might seem appropriate - unless one considers that the children killed by, for instance, American drone attacks in Yemen or Pakistan, never receive similar photographic display.

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"The US Labor Department has caved in to Big Agriculture and their allies in Congress to abandon the most vulnerable working children in America...Instead of protecting child farmworkers, the Labor Department will look the other way when children get crushed, suffocated, and poisoned on the job."

An utter fucking disgrace.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me

Orwell

in any case, system collapse does not necessarily lead to progressive outcomes

Jim McGuigan

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality...Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor

- Adam Smith

Mega-rich Formula One showman Bernie Ecclestone is describing the situation in Bahrain as peaceful ahead of the forthcoming F1 race there.

Earlier today BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reported on what appears to be disturbing new footage of Bahraini police targeting and ransacking a Shia-owned shop.

Perhaps Bernie should read this report from Physicians for Human Rights, which documents '34 reported tear-gas-related deaths in Bahrain since the uprising began a year ago.'

He is 100% right in one important sense, of course.

But what he elides in his remarks are a universe of human suffering and voices.

There can be no friendship between the brave and the effeminate. We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn the use of arms.

- Gandhi, 1918

I believe that it could be cut through and made into an island in two days. I do not think this is necessary, however, for these people are very unskilled in arms.

- Christoffa Corombo, son of a weaver from Genoa

The politicians want us to live in 1992, but I don't want to live in 1992.

'Bosnian war 20 years on: peace holds but conflict continues to haunt'

As one respondent put it, 'You have to be twice as good as the men.'

- Gill Dunne, 1996

We do know, finally, what "water-boarding" is, though it is not clear what version of this torture the Americans are applying. There is, for example, the version French policemen and soldiers used on prisoners during the Algerian War, as in this account from Bechir Boumaza, a thirty-one-year-old Algerian interrogated in Paris in 1958:

I was taken off the bar [on which he had been hung and subjected to electric torture] and my guards started their football again [beating and kicking him], perhaps for a quarter hour. Then they led me, still naked and blindfolded, into a neighbouring room on the same floor. I heard: "We'll have to kill him, the bastard." ...dirty water and urine, probably...
From time to time one of them would sit on my back and bear down on my thighs. I could hear the water I threw up fall back into the basin.

[...]

The Latin American version, called el submarino, uses a wooden table, an oil drum filled with water, and a set of hooks...as a Uruguayan army interrogator put it, "There is something more terrifying than pain, and that is the inability to breathe."

- Mark Danner, 2004