Abu Ghraib etc

This weekend I have been mostly going through a stack of news articles etc that I have amassed over the past few months on human rights issues that I should know about, but aren't necessarily related to my PhD. I found out some scary things including:

* Children as young as 11 years old were (or are) held at Abu Ghraib. Women have also been held there
* There are almost 80 more photos, plus four videos, of abuse at Abu Ghraib that the Pentagon is refusing to release. Some human rights organisations have gone to court to force them to release them. They are meant to be much worse that anything which has been in the media so far
* Japan has changed its school textbooks again. Now it is trying to focus on the "positive impact" of WW2 in Asia. There are also Japanese nationalists who blame the US for Japan getting into the war (they obviously forgot about the Rape of Nanking, the colonisation of Korea, and the establishment of the puppet regime in Manchuria, which all happened before Pearl Harbour)
* Similarly, France passed a law in Feb 2005 which seeks to impose on historians and teachers its vision of the colonial past as "positive"
* The British sold heavy water to Israel which enabled them make nuclear weapons with the help of France

I also discovered that bizarrely in postwar Soviet movies, Germans were stereotyped as lazy - quite the opposite of their image of effeciency in the UK.

Finally, there were stories of human courage in compassion in articles I was reading on the Armenian holocaust, which said that Turkish families rescued thousands of Armenian orphans and raised them as their own, despite the danger such an action placed upon themselves.