In a few weeks, children as young as 12 will start leaving schools in south Texas to work in the summer harvest, taking on the difficult and sometimes even dangerous work of picking fruits and vegetables. Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of kids this year will cut the roots off onions, hoe cotton, climb tall ladders to pick oranges and apples, and drive tractors. If the past is a guide, some will be injured, some will be maimed, and some will die.

Since the 1990s South Africa has not reduced the number of women who die needlessly each year from preventable and treatable causes linked to pregnancy and childbirth.

The US Labor Department's withdrawal of proposed rules to shield hired child farmworkers from the most dangerous tasks condemns children to be killed and maimed, Human Rights Watch said today. The proposed regulations would have updated for the first time in decades the list of tasks too dangerous for employed children under age 16. The regulations would not have applied to children working on family farms. The Labor Department withdrew the proposal on April 26, 2012.

Some valuable truths underlie Oplan Bayanihan, the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ 16-month-old internal peace and security plan. Chief among them are that the various insurgent groups in the Philippines are unlikely to be beaten by force alone, that better standards of living can curb the roots of the rebellions, and that the military could do more to “win the sentiment” of the general population. But in translating these truths into practice, something seems to have gotten warped along the way. The AFP’s practice of mixing soldiers with schools amply illustrates this misguidedness.