While an increasingly devastating famine continues to drive Somalis from their homes, many families are citing another reason for leaving: the forced recruitment of child soldiers. A recent Amnesty International report revealed that al-Shabab has intensified its recruitment process in order to gain more control of Central and South Somalia.

Primary schools are raided for soon-to-be soldiers and children are abducted from local playgrounds. Some are bribed with money and phones. Those who run away are often shot in the back, deemed traitors.

A Somali woman who lost several young family members at the hands of the armed rebels told Amnesty International:

"Those recruited by al-Shabab do not come back."

Boys, sometimes as young as eight, are given guns and forced to fight alongside grown men. Girls are used as servants for al-Shabab members, and in some instances, even wives. One testimony of a 16-year-old boy described how young girls are charged with adultery if they refuse to comply with the marriages. Floggings are a common punishment, sometimes ending with the death of the child. Girls and women accused of being raped (yes, accused) have been beaten or stoned to death - even though refugees have told Amnesty International that al-Shabab was responsible for the rape themselves.

Interviews with youth in the region have produced evidence that the Islamist militant group may be using children as suicide bombers, although Amnesty International cannot verify this. A 15-year-old boy described al-Shabab's recruitment tactics:

"They have a methodology, they say you will fight a jihad and then go to paradise. One friend was recruited by them and then he came to the village asking us to join...He had an AK47 and he said he was given lots of money."

While al-Shabab has been criticized for using children as weapons of war, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which is internationally-backed and U.S.-funded, has been listed on the UN's annual list of parties that recruit children for armed conflict for seven years in a row - although they dispute the accusation. During a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on May 4, 2011, TFG members cited a lack of birth certificates and international financial assistance as the main causes of child recruitment. Human Rights Watch, alongside Amnesty International and other humanitarian organizations, have expressed grave concern over TFG training camps that hold refugee children against their will in neighboring Kenya, which has also denied allegations of using child soldiers.

An ex-child soldier who fled to Kenya told Amnesty International:

"I am not feeling safe. I am stressed. I have flashbacks. I am scared that al-Shabab will come here too. I want a better future, better security, further education. I live in fear here."

The trial of former interior minister Habib el-Adly, the mukhabarat (intelligence) boss for 14 years under President Mubarak, was postponed for the third time on Sunday. His trial, now scheduled for August 3, will be a combined affair with Mubarak, who also stands accused of ordering the deaths of almost 900 protesters during Egypt's 18-day revolution.

The intelligence chief was expected to stand trial for murder in May -- after being sentenced to 12 years on corruption charges -- but a Cairo judge pushed the start date back a month after angry protesters attempted to swarm the courtroom.  His trial was postponed a second time -- without explanation -- on June 24, igniting four days of protests that left more than 1,000 people injured when security forces clamped down using tear gas and rubber bullets.

Anger at El-Adly's interior ministry boiled over during this year's protests. Crowds of Molotov cocktail-toting protesters laid siege to the building in the early days of the revolution, defying ministry snipers who opened fire on them using laser sights.  

During El-Adly's tenure, the ministry detained and tortured with impunity, using its estimated 500,000-member police force to terrorize the public into submission. At the height of the protests in January, El-Adly is also thought to have withdrawn police officers from the street and turned prisoners loose in an effort to scare democracy activists back into their homes.

It comes as little surprise, therefore, that the postponement of his trial was met with a mixture of cynicism and outrage by many Egyptians. Wael Eskandar, a blogger and journalist for Ahram Online, told Foreign Policy in a phone interview that "most protesters don't believe that [the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF)] is serious about trying Adly." They are irked for the most part, he said, but "they are not expecting any real form of justice."

There is increased concern, moreover, that a Mubarak-Adly trial won't materialize in August, either. As Kristen Chick, the Cairo correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, said in an email, people are "increasingly worried and jaded that the military does not intend to prosecute Mubarak." Adding to their concern is the fact that Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, falls in August this year, making it highly unlikely that a trial will get underway. As the New York Times recently put it, during Ramadan "most Egyptians fast all day, feast much of the night, and little else gets done."

But the sleepy month of Ramadan will be less of a problem than SCAF's unwillingness to hold the old regime accountable, according to Eskandar. "The police who killed protesters are still in their places while they are waiting for trial," he said.  Meanwhile, many families who lost loved ones during the revolution have been offered bribes to drop charges against ministry officials, according to Eskandar. "When they don't accept bribes, they are threatened with [trumped-up] drug charges," he said.

Similar reports of police bribery surfaced in June, when families of victims of police brutality claimed that they were offered blood money by informants affiliated with the Imbaba police department.

Not all justice dispensed by SCAF is justice delayed, however. For many of the protesters rounded up during the revolution, retribution has been swift. Human Rights Watch reports that at least 5,600 civilians have been sentenced by military tribunals since Mubarak was unseated on February 11. One such civilian was 26-year old Maikel Nabil Sanad who was sentenced to three years after he wrote on his blog that "the army and the people were never one hand," a reference to one of the revolution's widely used refrains. Sanad did not even have the luxury of legal counsel during his sentencing, since his lawyer had been fed misinformation about when it would occur.

Inconsistency between SCAF's handling of the trials of former regime officials and those of protesters is wearing the people's trust thin, and has translated into popular unrest on more than one occasion. "While people here right now may not agree on a lot of things, nearly everyone agrees that they'd like to see Mubarak hanged," said Chick.

The Saturday night train crash in eastern China that killed around 40 and injured around 200 (different reports give different figures) has provoked a firestorm reaction on the Chinese internet. A number of locals have accused the Chinese government of burying the trains to cover up evidence. The accusations were picked up and circulated on the Chinese microblogging site and rumor hub Sina Weibo, and even official state outlet Global Times has quoted family members of the accident victims questioning the official death toll.

Official reports have said that the crash was caused by a lightning strike. If so, it's at least the second time in the last three weeks that thunderstorms have caused malfunctions on high-speed rail trains. The first of these incidents occurred on July 10 on a train traveling the newly opened Beijing-Shanghai rail line, though a subsequent investigation from the Shanghai Oriental Post (translated here by the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project) cast doubt on this explanation.

Chinese state media outlet Xinhua says that the government has recovered the "black box" from the latest crash, so an updated report on the cause of the accident should be forthcoming. But a report from Chinese muckraking magazine Caixin argues that the accident would have been "entirely preventable" had the train's automated data collecting system been functioning properly.

Read on

The fallout from this weekend's Chinese bullet train crash -- in which 39 people died when a train was immobilized after being struck by lightning on a bridge, then rammed by another train from behind, derailing several cars -- continued today. The government fired three senior railway officials and is reviewing safety on the country's four-year-old high-speed rail system. While there was justifiable anger at Chinese officials for trying to keep details of the accident out of the public, China's rail safety is far better than that of its fellow emerging economy -- India.

Journalist Lloyd Lofthouse, compared the numbers going back to 2007 for India, China, and the United States. He found that out of the 177 rail accidents during that period, 20 percent of them actually occurred in the United States, 15 percent occurred in India, and only 4 percent occurred in China. But the death toll in India was far greater.

In the period Lofthouse reviewed, 66 people were killed in U.S. train accidents, about 141 in Chinese accidents, and "hundreds" in Indian rail accidents.

Last year alone, there were at least 17 crashes in India. And, in the past month, three incidents killed more than 100 people. According to Bloomberg News:

In the early hours of July 7, 38 people were killed and at least as many injured when a train collided with a bus carrying members of a wedding party at an unmanned level crossing in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Then, on July 10, at least 68 people were killed and more than 250 injured when 15 bogies of the Howrah-Kalka Mail careered off the tracks, again in Uttar Pradesh, while the train was travelling at more than  60 miles per hour. That evening, six coaches of the Guwahati-Puri Express derailed in Assam after a bomb was set off on the tracks, injuring more than 100 people.

India has one of the largest railway system in the world, carrying about 19 million passengers every day on about 7,000 trains. It's called the "lifeline to the nation." Unfortunately, that often means trains are jam packed.

Given the spate of recent crashes, anger has mounted against the government-run system. Newspapers have editorialized about the system's persistent safety failures and "systemic decay."

The Deccan Chronicle, an Indian paper, said the increasingly accident-prone system could be blamed on the addition of "more trains on nearly every route, mainly to suit the whims or political compulsions of railway ministers, and raising their speed without commensurate upgrading of tracks and other equipment needed to bear the extra load." The Times of India wrote that the railway authority "failed to meet targets it had set for itself in the corporate safety plan ... indicating the low priority it gave to passenger safety." According to the Indian Express, "There is a real danger that the frequency of train accidents in India might soon desensitize people as ‘yet another' instance of what has become thoughtlessly, mind-numbingly commonplace."

Part of the problem is politicians have tried to keep fares as low as possible to keep voters happy, which has turned the system into a "financial disaster," according to the Indian Express, meaning trains are old and not properly cared for -- a deadly combination.

Viewers around the world have flocked to theaters to watch the final movie of the Harry Potter epic, which raked in a record-breaking 476 million dollars on its opening weekend. But for some fans of the boy wizard, the end hasn't come quite yet. Realities of the muggle world -- ranging from taxes to politics -- have prevented Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 from reaching a large segment of the world's population.

For starters, don't even think about trying to see it in Saudi Arabia where the entire Harry Potter series is banned by authorities concerned that the story will promote witchcraft.

The film's opening in both Jordan and Indonesia has been delayed by tax disputes between the respective governments and international movie distributors. In Indonesia, the royalty issue developed when the government proposed movie importers be taxed on a film's expected revenue rather than its length, as is currently done. The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents many of Hollywood's largest studios including Warner Brothers, the producer of the Harry Potter films, balked at the expense, and in February ceased distributing films in Indonesia altogether. The parameters of the debate in Jordan are similar, with the Customs Department seeking to levy taxes based on the "intellectual property content" of films instead of their physical weight.

Many Indonesian fans are outraged by their inability to see the Potter film (as well as many other recent blockbusters), and some have even considered traveling to Malaysia or Singapore to view the movie. Hope, however, is in sight. On July 21^st, Muklis Paimi, head of the Indonesian Film Censorship Board, told the Jakarta Globe that despite the unresolved royalty dispute, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Kung Fu Panda 2 should be in theaters by the end of the month.

Harry Potter is also absent from a much, much larger market: China. And, as in Indonesia and Jordan, it's not the only movie that's missing. According to Time Magazine, Gao Jun, the deputy general manager of Beijing's New Film Association, announced that Beginning of the Great Revival, a Chinese-made film on the rise of the Communist Party, must earn 124 million dollars, before foreign films will be shown in the country. Unfortunately that movie, despite its famous cast, expensive sets, and government support, has not been particularly popular.

China's market for films is growing rapidly with more than 6,200 theaters in the country and ticket sales in 2010 totaling $1.57 billion. Currently, however, the government only allows 20 foreign films to be shown in these theaters annually, and even those films are often censored.  Harry Potter is scheduled to open for Chinese audiences on August 4^th. Any fans hoping to see the movie before then will have to take a page out of a Hogwarts spell-book and try a little magic -- or they can find one of the many hawkers selling a pirated version on the street.

The annual Bayreuth music festival in Germany -- which celebrates the works of German composer Richard Wagner -- kicked off today and for the first time will feature a group of musicians from Israel. Wagner, an avowed anti-Semite and an inspiration for Adolph Hitler, is rarely heard in Israel, where there is an unwritten ban on performing his music. Tomorrow, the Israel Chamber Orchestra will perform Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll" for an audience at the festival. The group rehearsed for the first time yesterday after landing in Germany (they said they declined to practice the piece while in Israel).  

The Wagner family has run the festival for the past 100 years -- including during the Nazi era. But the current co-director of the festival, Katharina Wagner, the 32-year-old great-granddaughter of the composer, said she has been trying to reach out to Jewish groups. The festival plans to introduce a Jewish cultural center and Wagner has said she would open the family archives, allowing historians to see the extent of her family's relationship with the Nazis.

The Israeli group's conductor, Roberto Paternostro, explained the decision to play the music. "Wagner's ideology and anti-Semitism was terrible, but he was a great composer," he told Reuters. "The aim in 2011 is to distinguish between the man and his art."

Last week, when confronted by reporters, a manager of a knock-off Apple store in Kunming, China said, "There is no Chinese law that says I can't decorate my shop the way I want to decorate it."

Technically, he wasn't correct -- Chinese law does prohibit businesses from copying the "look and feel" of other companies, but China is often accused of failing to enforce the law. And, after Chinese officials investigated the store -- and several others in the city -- it is still open. A blogger first wrote about the carbon copy business last week, leading to a flood of terrible publicity. Chinese officials said over the weekend they would investigate "all the city's electronic stores." Today, they announced they were closing two fake Apple Stores (out of at least five in the city). However, the reason had nothing to do with their brazen flouting of copyright laws. The businesses didn't have the proper permits.

"Media should not misunderstand the situation and jump to conclusions. Some overseas media has made it appear the stores sold fake Apple products," Chang Puyun, spokesman of Kunming government's business bureau, told Reuters. "China has taken great steps to enforce intellectual property rights and the stores weren't selling fake products."

According to CNET News, China and Apple have a complicated relationship.

Apple's business is intertwined with China, creating a love-hate relationship. Nearly all of the company's products are born in huge factory complexes in the country's interior, some as large as midsized cities, and Apple has started to move into China's retail market, with four official Apple stores in the sprawling country. But China has also been the source of numerous leaks, cheap knock-offs, piracy and other headaches for Apple. The fake Apple stores have been one of the most impressive such violations to date in their attention to detail.

The U.S. Trade Representative's office says counterfeiting and intellectual property theft in China cost U.S. businesses an estimated $48 billion in 2009.