A Harvard study of major media documents the complicity of outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in covering up official high crimes and crimes against humanity since 2001. Compared to previous eras of US imperialism, the present coverage has dropped by as much as a factor of ten.

High Country News features the Southern Ute tribe in an examination of tribal self-determination under federal energy policy. As tribal sovereignty continues to evolve within the parameters set by a hostile U.S. Supreme Court, tribes looking to tribally-managed energy development to displace paternalistic federal agencies hope the future doesn’t replicate the past.

David M. Green looks at the subject of international governance through the lens of the International Criminal Court, an institution opposed by the United States.

The ICC is living testimony to the fact that the world is moving – slowly, to be sure – away from the anarchy of the classic Westphalian System, and dragging the most recalcitrant regressive reprobates (you know who we are) along with it. It’s not an easy trick, in part because there is a real legitimacy to the idea of not universalizing all, or even most, policy issues, but only those which absolutely must be located at a global level, retaining the rest for national, provincial and local polities to grapple with as they individually see fit. This is the doctrine of subsidiarity, a key notion in the practice of federalism, that stipulates policy decisions should always be made at the lowest level pragmatically possible, and it’s a good idea.

Among all the horrors that afflict indigenous communities worldwide, the trafficking of women and children for the business of sexual exploitation (prostitution) has to be one of the worst. While this oppression is not limited to indigenous societies, they are particularly vulnerable as their cultures collapse due to the effects of such things as colonization, neocolonization, globalization, environmental degradation and militarism.

Melissa Farley, Ph.D., an associate scholar with the Center for World Indigenous Studies (CWIS) and based in San Francisco, is someone who has been doing something about this crime against humanity. Her nonprofit Prostitution Research & Education is collaborating with the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition to document the harms (starting with colonization and today with cutbacks in urgently needed social supports) and the current needs of Native American women trafficked for the purpose of prostitution.

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Rolling Stone looks at the low life journalism of mainstream media, and the role it plays in supporting the American Empire.

A San Francisco Bay Area research group is handling the digitization and organization of the Guatemalan National Police archives recently discovered in a building in Guatemala City. As a repository of information, including the notorious death squads that plagued the indigenous Maya over a 36-year protracted struggle against the Guatemalan oligarchy, the archive might shine a light on both the murderous methods used, as well as on the consequences of US policy in the region.