CWL

verbalresistance:

Foxconn, Apple’s main supplier in China, has admitted it employed interns as young as 14 years old.

In a statement, the Taiwan-based manufacturer acknowledged that some students who took part in its summer internship programme were below China’s minimum legal working age of 16.

The company said the interns were employed at its factory in the city of Yantai in eastern China.

Foxconn has previously been accused of poor conditions for its workers.

The firm is best known for producing iPhones and iPads for Apple, but also makes products for other companies, such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard …

The company said it ordered an internal investigation after Chinese media reports and a US-based campaign group China Labor Watch had said it was hiring under-age interns …

Read More: BBC News

See Also - Older Articles:

• Riots, suicides, and other issues in Foxconn’s iPhone factories | CNN
• Mass suicide’ protest at Apple manufacturer Foxconn factory | The Telegraph
• Foxconn suicides: ‘Workers feel quite lonely’ | BBC News

An article that grabbed my eye, as I opened up the BBC News website just a few minutes ago.

Seems somewhat pertinent - since there was a mention of Apple in particular and their out-sourcing to China, in the debate.

I guess what you see right here, is a nice glimpse of a working culture that I’m sure Romney would just love to bring back over to US shores.

vruz:

Approximately 30,000 protesters marched in Tel Aviv last night, with social justice activists blocking central streets and chants of “Mubarak. Assad. Netanyahu” filling the air.

Tel Aviv police arrested 42 activists, which is an extremely rare number, “if not unprecedented,” according to +972 Magazine, which has been closely following the circumstances surrounding the sudden rise of Israel’s progressive left.

The protests are part of a larger movement that began as opposition to rising housing prices, and indeed is still centered around that issue, but has spread to other social justice and progressive causes.

The sign reads “Mubarak. Asad. Netanyahu.”

These protests are being described as “the greatest challenge PM Netanyahu faces on the home front,” and show that the progressive left in Israel has awoken.

Change in Israel may be coming…

Read More: alternet.org

jonathan-cunningham:

Consider Anwar al-Awlaki: Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post describing what the establishment thought of Awlaki ten years ago:

In November, 2001, the very same Washington Post hosted one of those benign, non-controversial online chats about religion that it likes to organize; this one was intended to discuss “the meaning of Ramadan”. It was hosted by none other than … “Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki.”

More extraordinary than the fact that the Post hosted The New Osama bin Laden in such a banal role a mere ten years ago was what Imam Awlaki said during the Q-and-A exchange with readers.  He repudiated the 9/11 attackers.  He denounced the Taliban for putting women in burqas, explaining that the practice has no precedent in Islam and that “education is mandatory on every Muslim male and female.”  He chatted about the “inter-faith services held in our mosque and around the greater DC area and in all over the country” and proclaimed: “We definitely need more mutual understanding.” While explaining his opposition to the war in Afghanistan, he proudly invoked what he thought (mistakenly, as it turns out) was his right of free speech as an American:  “Even though this is a dissenting view nowadays[,] as an American I do have the right to have a contrary opinion.”  And he announced that “the greatest sin in Islam after associating other gods besides Allah is killing an innocent soul.”

So what happened? When exactly did Awlaki become “The Next bin Laden”? Al-Jazeera has an interview with him where he explains exactly what happened:

I have been seeing my brothers being killed in Palestine for more than 60 years, and others being killed in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And in my tribe too, US missiles have killed 17 women and 23 children, so do not ask me if al-Qaeda has killed or blown up a US civil jet after all this. The 300 Americans are nothing comparing to the thousands of Muslims who have been killed.

The “collateral damage” that we ignore creates the very entities that we’re fighting. Every time we drop a bomb on a child, that child’s mother, father, brothers, sisters, friends and extended family come to hate us just a little more. There is only so far you can push a person before they (justly or not) snap and resort to violence.

There was a point where I naively thought that this was by mistake, that Government officials couldn’t possibly understand the consequences of their policy. With the information that Al-Qaeda is on the verge of collapse, however, and the knowledge that the military spending is at least 5% of our GDP, the military industrial complex is a powerful political entity, and that George Bush, our former president is quoted as saying ”The best way to revitalize the economy is war, and the U.S. has grown stronger with war,” I am led to the conclusion that what we call “collateral damage” is just a tool to create more imaginary villains for us to spend money fighting.

verbalresistance:

North Korea may have abducted 180,000 people over the last 60 years, according to a new report by a US-based human rights group.

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea says both the scale and reach of Pyongyang’s abduction programme is far greater than previously thought.

It said it involves citizens from 14 different countries.

The allegations are almost impossible to verify without free access to North Korea.

Abduction by the North Korean government can come in many ways, the report says, and in many different places.

It cites the cases of a Japanese college student and his girlfriend snatched from a beach in Japan by North Korean agents; more than 3,000 South Korean fishermen forcibly towed into North Korean waters; and students in European cities - including London, it says - lured to the secretive state with the promise of jobs and then denied permission to leave.

In all, the report estimates more than 180,000 people from 14 different countries have been taken by North Korea, in a bid to train its intelligence agents and - more recently - to warn Chinese nationals living along the border against helping its people escape.

Once inside the country, the report says, many abductees are tortured, forced to marry and to work for the regime against their will.

In 2002, Pyongyang released a handful of Japanese nationals, in response to Japan’s questions about its missing people.

But since then, it has not confirmed the presence of any more abductees inside the country.

BBC News

verbalresistance:

While Obama talks of saving civilians in Libya, information about innocents killed by U.S. drones is kept secret.

The big focus of the Obama administration in the last week has been, in President Obama’s words, “to stop the violence against civilians.” That’s in Libya, of course, where Moammar Gadhafi was threatening to quell a rebellion based in Benghazi.

In this context, it’s particularly striking to read the news from the ACLU — which has been waging a legal battle to wring information from the government about American drone strikes — that the military doesn’t even keep a tally of civilian deaths caused by drones:

The Department of Defense has confirmed that it does not compile statistics about the total number of civilians that have been killed by its unmanned drone aircraft. The DOD disclosed this information in a letter in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union demanding that the government disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas.

…

According to the DOD, the military’s estimates of civilian casualties do not distinguish between deaths caused by remote-controlled drones and those caused by other aircraft. While each drone strike appears to be subject to an individual assessment after the fact, there is no total number of casualties compiled. Moreover, information contained in the individual assessments is classified – making it impossible for the public to learn how many civilians have been killed overall.

That Defense Department letter is here (.pdf).

Many significant details about the use of drones by both the military and the CIA are shrouded in secrecy. The CIA, for its part, has entirely refused to respond to the ACLU’s request for information about the drone strikes in Pakistan. Now we also know that the Defense Department does not keep a tally of civilians killed by drones.

Read More: Salon.com