democracynow summary (may 8, 2007):
Iraq's infant mortality rate has soared by 150 percent since 1990 according to a new report by the charity Save the Children. One in eight Iraqi children now die of disease or violence before the age of five. In 2005 alone, 122,000 Iraqi children died before reaching their fifth birthday. Save the Children said Iraq's child-survival ranking is now the lowest in the world.
(...) The New York Times is reporting, the U.S. oil company Chevron is preparing to pay up to $30 million in fines for illegally paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein for access to Iraq's oil before the U.S. invasion in 2003. The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal. It appears Chevron began paying Iraq kickbacks in August 2000. At the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a member of Chevron's board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.
(...) In Los Angeles, two high-ranking police department commanders have been reassigned over their role in the police department's violent crushing of a lawful immigrants rights rally last week. Police dressed in riot gear fired 240 rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas. Officers were seen on video clubbing protesters and journalists with batons. Overall 10 people – including seven journalists -- were taken to hospitals with injuries. On Sunday LA Police Chief William Bratton took 60 members of the police department's elite Metropolitan Division's B Platoon off the street.
(...) Investigative reporter Tim Shorrock of Salon.com has revealed that former CIA Director George Tenet has made at least $2.3 million since he left the agency by working for four corporations that are directly profiting from the so-called war on terror and the war in Iraq. Tenet did not disclose any of his corporate ties in his new book "At the Center of the Storm." Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tenet is also a member of an advisory board for Analysis Corporation which is designing terrorist watch lists for the government. Tenet also serves on the boards of two other government contractors, Guidance Software and Kinetic.
(...) A new report from Amnesty International has revealed that Native American women are more than two and a half times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than women in the United States in general. Studies show that one in three Native American women will be raped during their lifetime. Amnesty said many rape cases are never prosecuted because there is confusion regarding tribal and county jurisdiction. It is estimated that 86 percent of rapes against Native women are committed by non-Native men, but tribal councils have no jurisdiction over non-Native offenders even if the crime takes place on tribal lands.

child malnutrition figures:
A 2006 national survey conducted by Unicef says 21 percent of Iraqi children are chronically malnourished. Figures for Darfur alone are not available. For all of Africa, however, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) says child malnutrition in Africa has increased from 27% of the child population in the 1970s to over 33 percent in recent years. According to IFPRI "Child malnutrition is on the rise in Africa. By 2025, hunger could be a daily reality for nearly 42 million children. No estimate is available as to how many children in Iraq will be chronically malnourished by 2025. By then the war may be over. )

rights of the child in the US:
The U.S. is the only United Nations member-state except Somalia that has neglected to ratify the UN's 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. In February 2001, George W. Bush explicitly objected to its "human rights-based approach"-which, among other things, prohibits prosecuting and incarcerating children as adults because their minds are too immature to form "criminal intent."
(...) Indeed, the U.S. stands alone in its rush to sentence children to a lifetime in prison without the possibility of parole, and is home to more than 99 percent of youths serving this sentence worldwide. According to a joint 2005 study by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the U.S. had 9,400 prisoners serving life prison terms for crimes committed before the age of 18, of which 2,225 were serving life without parole. Of those, 16 percent were between 13 and 15 years old at the time they committed the crimes for which they were convicted.
(...) More than 100,000 children are currently incarcerated in local detention and state correctional institutions across the country. "Zero tolerance" advocates would have us believe that the number has skyrocketed because our nation is overrun with teenage predators committing an unprecedented number of heinous crimes. But statistics belie this explanation. The murder conviction rate for youths fell from 2,234 in 1990 to 1,006 in 2000, a drop of almost 55 percent. Yet during that same period, the percentage of children receiving sentences of life without parole more than tripled, from 2.9 to 9 percent.
(...) Back in December 2000, the St. Petersburg Times reported, "Nowadays, children as young as 6 or 7 are carted off in handcuffs, locked up and saddled with permanent criminal records More than 4,500 kids 11 and under were charged with crimes in Florida during the fiscal year that ended in June."
(...) The Times continued, "Kids as young as 7 spend the night in detention centers. Kids as young as 10 are sent away for a year or more. And in a very few cases, children enter the justice system at even younger ages, such as a 5-year-old St. Petersburg boy charged this year with burglary; and incredibly, a preschool arson suspect who went through a pretrial diversion program in South Florida at age 3."
(...) Not all children are treated equally. Race and class loom large. As the Times noted, "there is a stark difference among arrests of children by race -- one that gets sharper as the children get younger." The young targets of "zero tolerance" arrests nationwide are overwhelmingly Black, Latino and Native American. In 2000, according to the Suffolk University Law School Juvenile Justice Center (JJC), African-American children-who made up just 15 percent of the U.S. juvenile population-were 46 percent of those incarcerated and 52 percent of those whose cases ended up in adult criminal court. Black children are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites, while Latino and Native American children are placed in correctional institutions at two and a half times that of whites.
(...) The JJC reported in 2003, "As juvenile crime in Massachusetts has decreased eight years in a row, the rate at which judges are ordering detention of youth increased by 40 percent [T]he proportion of minority youth in total detention admissions has increased annually from 2001, for both boys (from 57 percent to 60 percent in 2003) and girls (from 49 percent to 54 percent).