Rep. John Conyers has announced that next week, he will hold hearings on "serious credible allegations of misconduct" by the Bush administration over the last several years. Those allegations include evidence of torture reported by Physicians for Human Rights last month. In the Preface to that report, Ret. Major Gen. Antonio Taguba asserted:

After studying how once-democratic nations slide into fascism, writer Naomi Wolf came to a horrifying conclusion: in the last five years, the United States has taken all of the steps that have historically led to the end of republican government. Wolf issued a call to patriotic dissent in her 2007 book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to A Young Patriot. A sample chapter is available here (.pdf).

Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel Fatah spoke just now at Global Voices Summit about bloggers who resist government censorship. YouTube and mobile blogging and cameraphones are extremely important. But also, connecting bloggers and photobloggers to the wider struggle for democracy in Egypt. The stakes are very high for the government, and you can't fight in isolation to publish what you like without consequence to your body, to your freedom.

I'm in Budapest at the Global Voices Advocacy Summit, where over 50 blog and internet activists from around the world are here to talk about defending free speech online In morning sessions, presenters described the ways that countries block and filter bits and pieces of the Internet, including blogs and blog hosting sites. Currently, BlogHer readers are mostly from the U.S. and do not face government censorship. Yet privacy issues for women can also be domestic issues.

This week, Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai should be facing off in a runoff ballot intended to determine who will be that country's president for the next five years.

The caption on the photo accompanying the May 13th New York Times article, "Love on the Girls' Side of the Saudi Divide," read, "Shaden, who is veiled at 17, spoke with her father as her younger sister looked on in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in March 2008." As I ate breakfast, I stared at the picture. My initial look revealed only a girl who was maybe nine or ten years old wearing a white shirt and black sweater and an older man with a silver mustache wearing white. Where was Shaden? I squinted, pulled the paper closer to my face, and finally noticed her. Covered in the shapeless black fabric of an abaya, I didn't see Shaden at first because to my Western eye she is an utter non-entity, a black void that fills the space between her dad and younger sister. Immediately, I felt sorry for Shaden for her lack of presence. Then I wondered how a different culturally trained eye would see the photo. Would someone from, say, Saudi Arabia notice Shaden first, then her sister and father? (And if so, does that make it OK that Shaden is not allowed to show her face in public, under any circumstances, ever again, because people there still "see" her?)

On April 4, 1968, I was a 5th-grade student at JR Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School in Philadelphia. It was a school within a school -- a school for "gifted" children within a neighborhood school for (I think) mostly Hispanic kids who lived in the surrounding community. I say, "I think" because we never interacted with the kids from the neighborhood school. I only saw them occasionally, from a distance, passing through at the end of a long hallway that we never crossed.

"[Y]ou don't necessarily have to solve a problem. You just have to take the steps that are available to you. . . . I focus on the fact that I don't have to solve it. I just have to do what I can. " --Jerry Fowler, Executive Director of the Save Darfur Coalition, during an interview on the Voices on Genocide Prevention Podcast.

Do you believe we all have human rights? Do you believe: • You have the right to live, and to live in freedom and safety. • Nobody has the right to treat you as his/her slave and you should not make anyone your slave. • Nobody has the right to torture you.

It's been a big day for legal news. One day after the US Supreme Court ruled that judges were not bound by federal sentencing guidelines prescribing heavier penalties for crack cocaine offenses than those involving powder cocaine, the US Sentencing Commission announced that it would allow thousands of offenders incarcerated under the old rules to apply for reduced sentences.

Back in March, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates called for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, saying that revelations about human rights abuses there had "tainted" the credibility of prosecutions of detainees. there. Today, though, the camp still houses an estimated 340 prisoners. Meanwhile, new revelations about US policies in Guantanamo casts the notorious facility in an even more troubling light.

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing is providing leverage for Tibetan, Darfurian, Burmese and Chinese human rights campaigns: