How Palestinian teenagers now in prison in Israel are being tortured.

Here, as in general, I decline to use the term "children" to refer to teenagers. For many issues, what's right for children is different from what's right for teenagers. However, that doesn't affect the substance of this issue: torture like this is wrong for teenagers, for children, and for adults too.

Everyone: call on Suncor to stop polluting Canadian democracy and Canadian rivers.

US citizens: call on the Senate to give Obama's judicial nominees consideration (and a vote).

US citizens: call on Obama to cut the big new nuclear weapons spending proposal.

A Seattle thug arrested William Wingate, age 70, for using a golf club as a cane.

Wingate pled guilty to a false charge to avoid the threat of worse charges. This illustrates the systematic injustice of the US legal system which regularly pushes people into false confessions. While the city did the right thing by dropping the charge afterward, that doesn't erase the systemic problem.

The arrest appears to be a typical example of unconscious racism: Wingate had a golf club, and the thug got the impression he was "swinging" it. (I do not see what is wrong with swinging a golf club, as long as you don't come near hitting anyone. Golf clubs are made for swinging.)

Strictly speaking, thug Whitlatch is right in saying that thugs are not "out to get" blacks. Rather, they are systematically predisposed to perceive blacks as doing something threatening, and to respond to this by arresting them, beating them up, even killing them.