Along with hundreds of others, Geremy Faulkner was swept up in one of the haphazard mass arrests that are overwhelming the courts.

An overwhelmed system struggles to meet President Obama’s order to fast-track deportation hearings on 62,000 lone child migrants.

Seven years after Katrina, poor people accused of crimes are being denied their right to counsel and left to languish behind bars.

 Five years after alerting authorities that she was gang-raped in Iraq, KBR/Halliburton employee Jamie Leigh Jones will finally get her day in court

Domestic violence cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute.

But every once in a while, prosecutors get handed the tools for a conviction on a silver platter: An impartial eyewitness who just happens to be a police officer.

Such was the case in a domestic violence trial that made the local papers here in Maryland last week. A cop pulling into an Exxon station saw a man hit his girlfriend in the face three times, called in back-up and had the man arrested.

Why is it that when a man leaves his wife and she retains custody of the kids we say, simply, "he is divorced?"

Yet when a woman, say Doris Lessing, leaves her husband and he retains custody of the kids we say "she abandoned her family?"

…just something to mull over as we read the New York Times tribute to Doris Lessing, the fabulous feminist writer and 87-year-old winner of the Nobel prize for Literature....Just something to consider, lest us feminists get too cocky and drift toward any you've-come-a-long-way-baby reflection on The Golden Notebook.

When it comes to this whole scandal regarding graft in US military contracts, I like to muse over the strange mea culpa put forward by military brass who admitted to The New York Times yesterday that officers in Kuwait may have been a little under-trained.

That's why they accepted bribes when they shouldn't have. They should have had more contracting experience and training, military officials explained, then they would have learned that skimming approximately $6 billion off the top of awards was the wrong thing to do. (Apparently, this is not covered in Contracting 101.) Further, brass says, they should have annual ethics training to...what? Remind them that 365 days may have passed, but that stealing is still wrong?

I live in Baltimore, Maryland.

At the moment, that is slightly more dangerous than being an American soldier in Afghanistan.

In Afganhistan, just over eighty US soldiers have been killed so far this year. In Baltimore, we're up to 215 murders in 2007.