The oceans will be empty in fifty years…

…is that its very existence eventually necessitates its own existence. Some of the detainees may not have been America-hating terrorists when they landed there, but after seven years without trial in sub-human conditions, they sure will be when they get out… ALSO: Mohammed Jawad was likely only twelve years old when he was sent to Guantanamo Bay as an “enemy combatant.” The US military insists he was eighteen…

The world paid little attention to the brutal denouement of Sri Lanka’s civil war, and now that it’s over, even less attention is being paid to the aftermath, which in and of itself is shaping up to be a humanitarian and human-rights tragedy. Last weekend’s Globe and Mail describes a network of “processing camps” where ethnic Tamils are being held to determine if they have links to the Tamils Tigers. The paper describes

a remote archipelago of 41 facilities that includes processing camps and “welfare” camps overseen by the UN, and more secretive interrogation centres and prisons known only to the government, all of them linked.

The network, which spans the country’s north, holds almost 300,000 people and is designed to separate Tamil Tiger fighters from the civilian population using former Tiger cadres as “witnesses.”

More than 40 per cent of those in the camps are children, according to surveys by Unicef, and they will stay until their parents have been screened for Tiger affiliations. The detainees are not just those who have fled the violence, but the entire civilian population of the northeastern conflict area, which is being swept clean of inhabitants by the military.

The Times of London expands on this with news that

Paramilitary groups with links to the Sri Lankan Army are abducting Tamil children as young as 12 from state-run internment camps set up to hold 300,000 people displaced by the Government’s war with the Tamil Tigers, a campaign group says.

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers said that children under 18 were being snatched from the camps, which are struggling to cope with refugees from the war zone on the northeastern coast.

Minors were also being taken from the northern town of Vavuniya by paramilitary groups with the tacit support of the Government, the coalition, which includes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said.

I’d like to say “more soon,” but there probably won’t be.

Google has developed an algorithm to predict which of its employees will quit…

Why is George W. Bush surrounding himself with adoring teenagers?

Two countries claiming to be democracies are planning to legislate political and historical viewpoints. Russia is planning legislation “to criminalize statements and acts that deny the Soviets won World War II, or claim it used poor tactics in battle or did not liberate Eastern Europe.” Meanwhile, Israel’s cabinet is considering two bills, one which would force Israeli Arabs to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in a “loyalty oath” to the country, and another to making it illegal to mark the anniversary of Israel’s creation as a negative event.

“The Czech government has expressed outrage over the broadcast of an anti-Roma (Gypsy) campaign advert by a far-right group on national television … The NS advert spoke of “a final solution to the Gypsy issue…”

Der Spiegel writes of the Demjanjuk trial:

It’s already clear that this last big Nazi trial in Germany will be a deeply extraordinary one because it will for the first time put the foreign perpetrators in the spotlight of world publicity. They are men who have until now received surprisingly little attention — Ukrainian gendarmes and Latvian auxiliary police, Romanian soldiers or Hungarian railway workers. Polish farmers, Dutch land registry officials, French mayors, Norwegian ministers, Italian soldiers — they all took part in Germany’s Holocaust.

So is this a bit of German historical revisionism, or just a statement of fact? Either way, the Poles are not amused…