'Nuff said

(Occasional item taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes.)

How has the world's leading democracy, a model for the ideal that power and decency reinforce one another, become the place where torture is debated rather than outlawed? How is it that a religiously devout president has justified torture by American hands?

-- Karen J. Greenberg (above), Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law and co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (2005), in "Scars and stripes," a Financial Times review of Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law (2008) by Philippe Sands QC, law professor at University College London.

On June 2

On this day in ...
... 1953 (55 years ago today), Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in Westminster Abbey, London, England. Approximately 3 million people lined the streets to catch glimpses of the ceremony in person, while millions more watched in the 1st-ever coronation to be televised live. The New York Times gushed:

[F]or all her glorification she is first of all a wife and mother of two charming children.

Elizabeth had become queen a year earlier, at age 26, upon the death of her father, but the ritual took an additional year to plan.
... 1998 (10 years ago today), "Californians decisively rejected bilingual education" when they "approv[ed] a mandate for English-only instruction known as Proposition 227," by a vote of "61 to 39%." (credit for image by Margaret Scott)