“My life would be worthless without music,” the girl said.

And the music came, up from the garbage, through her hands and heart and out to the world. My god, she was playing a violin made out of an old can. A boy was playing a cello crafted with more love and ingenuity than I can imagine, from a used oil drum, old wool and tossed-out beef-tenderizing tools.

The brief YouTube video, precursor to a documentary film to be released in January, is called “Landfill Harmonic [2]”; it’s about a children’s orchestra in a Paraguayan village — a slum — called Cateura, which is built on a landfill. Reclaiming and reselling the trash that arrives every day is the residents’ means of survival. Real violins are not to be found in such a place; they’re worth more than a family’s home.

“There was no money for real instruments when local musician Favio Chavez started his music school in the barrio,” according to the movie’s website, “so together they started to make instruments from trash — violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates.”

The sun rose with a moral verdict on Bradley Manning well before the military judge could proclaim his guilt. The human verdict would necessarily clash with the proclamation from the judicial bench.

In lockstep with administrators of the nation’s war services, judgment day arrived on Tuesday to exact official retribution. After unforgiveable actions, the defendant’s culpability weighed heavy.

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house,” another defendant, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, wrote about another action that resulted in a federal trial, 45 years earlier, scarcely a dozen miles from the Fort Meade courtroom where Bradley Manning faced prosecution for his own fracture of good order.

“We could not, so help us God, do otherwise,” wrote Berrigan, one of the nine people who, one day in May 1968 while the Vietnam War raged on, removed several hundred files from a U.S. draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them with napalm in the parking lot. “For we are sick at heart…”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The Philippines, Asia's only Catholic-majority country, has ordered Muslim women to remove their facial veils when teaching the government's experimental curriculum of Arabic language and Islamic values, because students benefit by "seeing the teacher's lips."

"Teachers handling Arabic Language and Islamic Values Education (ALIVE) are requested to remove the veil covering the face -- 'niqab' -- when teaching in the classroom," said Education Department Secretary Armin Luistro in an Official Gazette announcement dated July 24.

"This is to promote better teacher-pupil relationship, and to support effective language teaching since seeing the teacher's lips helps in the correct production of letter sounds," Luistro said.

"Inside the classroom, she [the teacher] is requested to remove" any veil covering her entire face, "for proper identification of the teacher by the pupils," the Education Department had said in the Gazette one day earlier on July 23.

The Education Department expressed concern that its ban may be misunderstood as also including the Islamic female head scarf, known

North Carolina — once poster child for the New South — now displays the nightmares spawned by the Tea Party right no longer restrained by the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court’s conservative gang of five disemboweled it in the Shelby case.

In North Carolina, Republicans took the General Assembly in 2010 and the governorship in 2012. The takeover received rather unprecedented support from one right-wing multimillionaire, Art Pope — who, according to progressive publication The American Prospect, singlehandedly provided about 80 percent of the funding for the state’s conservative groups.

When we think about a secret drone strikes, we often imagine remote and mountainous North West Pakistan, where Taliban fighters flee from neighboring Afghanistan in order to rest, recruit and regroup. Although the majority of America’s robotic death rains down there, other parts of the world are on the receiving end of this superpower’s displeasure.

Yemen is one such place. There the US supported government struggles against rebels and, according to diplomatic cables, allegedly acquired by Bradley Manning and released by Wikileaks, the Yemeni government pretends US drone strikes are its own. The puppet state imprisons journalists at the direct request of President Obama, and the military actions are approved by him at a weekly meeting that the White House staff and others call “Terror Tuesday.”