SportsShooter:

Months after my trip to El Salvador with Give a Kid a Backpack Foundation, images still keep me awake at night.

I can’t get rid of the passionate embrace those kids gave me on the last day. I can still feel the tight hugs they gave me as they uttered “Thank you” over and over again.

They didn’t let me go then and I know that I still haven’t let go of them.

Here.

NYT:

A few moments later, Amuri’s eyes rolled back in his head, his chest stilled and he was dead.

“Bring something for us to wrap the boy,” a nurse called out.

His mother, Maria Cheusi, realized that her son’s life had slipped away. He was the third child she would bury.

“Mama, mama,” she cried, collapsing to her knees in a contorted pose. “My only son, my only son.”

Here.

TMZ, via WMFU’s Beware the Blog:

Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Mel Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, “You mother f****r. I’m going to f*** you.” The report also says “Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he ‘owns Malibu’ and will spend all of his money to ‘get even’ with me.”

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: “F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?”

Here.

Guardian:

Meanwhile, the Foreign Office seems determined to press ahead with courting radical Islamists. Just this month, the British government paid for Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey to discuss the future of European Islam. At home, it funded two Islamist youth organisations, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and Young Muslim Organisation, to help run a roadshow of Muslim scholars to tour the country. Fosis and YMO, while condemning violence, are ideological allies of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami. It is ironic that conservative thinkers categorise these organisations accurately as part of an Islamist extreme right, while many on the left continue, wrongly, to see them as part of some wider international Muslim liberation movement.

While this situation remains, there is no shame for those on the left opposed to the rise of radical Islam to build alliances with conservatives prepared to call fascism by its real name.

Here.

From SF Chronicle:

A jury convicted four leaders of a white-supremacist prison gang Friday on charges they used murder and intimidation to protect their drug-dealing operations behind bars.

The trial is part of one of the largest federal capital cases, with more than a dozen people potentially facing the death penalty. More defendants face trials in Los Angeles later this year.

Barry “The Baron” Mills, Tyler “The Hulk” Bingham, Edgar “The Snail” Hevle and Christopher Overton Gibson were the first defendants to stand trial in the federal racketeering case aimed at dismantling the feared Aryan Brotherhood.

Here.

From the BBC:

Television journalists were travelling with Russian forces who captured a group of rebel fighters sheltering in the village of Alkhan-Kala.

Mr Yandiyev, dressed in camouflage, can be seen in the footage standing injured near a bus.

He is questioned by a Russian general who eventually shouts: “Take him away, finish him off, shoot him, damn it!”

Mr Yandiyev was then led away and has not been seen since.

General Alexander Baranov, who was seen on camera sending him off to be shot, has since been promoted and awarded a Hero of Russia medal.

Here.

From the New York Times:

The crisis in Darfur, long neglected, finally burst into the world’s consciousness. Congo remains largely forgotten. It is hard to understand why. Four million people have died in Congo since 1998, half of them children under 5, according to the International Rescue Committee. Though the war in Congo officially ended in 2002, its deadly legacy of violence and decay will kill twice as many people this year as have died in the entire Darfur conflict, which began in 2003.

Here.

From the Washington Post:

The very setup of the U.S. presence in Iraq undercut the mission. The chain of command was hazy, with no one individual in charge of the overall American effort in Iraq, a structure that led to frequent clashes between military and civilian officials.

On May 16, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run occupation agency, had issued his first order, “De-Baathification of Iraq Society.” The CIA station chief in Baghdad had argued vehemently against the radical move, contending that, “By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.”

He was proved correct, as Bremer’s order, along with a second that dissolved the Iraqi military and national police, created a new class of disenfranchised, threatened leaders.

Here.

NYT Magazine:

The counterfeiting of American currency by North Korea might seem, to some, to be a minor provocation by that country’s standards. North Korea, after all, has exported missile technology in blatant disregard of international norms; engaged in a decades-long campaign of kidnapping citizens of other countries; abandoned pledges not to pursue nuclear weapons; and most recently, on July 4, launched ballistic missiles in defiance of warnings from several countries, including the United States.

But several current and former Bush administration officials whom I spoke with several months ago maintain that the counterfeiting is in important ways a comparable outrage. Michael Green, a former point man for Asia on the National Security Council, told me that in the past, counterfeiting has been seen as an “act of war.” A current senior administration official, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of relations between the United States and North Korea, agreed that the counterfeiting could be construed by some as a hostile act against another nation under international law and added that the counterfeits, by creating mistrust in the American currency, posed a “threat to the American people.”

Here.