The Obama administration on Monday laid out a human rights agenda that recognized the limits of American authority: emphasizing the need for change within countries, defending engagement with adversaries like Myanmar and Iran and asserting that differences with big countries like China and Russia are best hashed out behind closed doors. "We must be pragmatic and agile in pursuit of our human rights agenda, not compromising on our principles, but doing what is most likely to make them real," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a wide-ranging address at Georgetown University.

Operation Gatekeeper started in October 1994, focusing federal border security efforts on the five-mile stretch from the Pacific Ocean to San Ysidro. Within three years, the budget of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service -- since split into two agencies -- doubled to $800 million. The number of Border Patrol agents also doubled, along with the miles of fencing. Underground sensors nearly tripled. In the 15 years since its inception, Gatekeeper, now shorthand for all federal enforcement efforts at the Mexican border, has had a range of consequences, some expected and others grimly surprising. For example, attempted crossings and apprehensions where enforcement is heaviest plummeted, just as officials had hoped. But migrants didn't stay home. Instead, thousands attempted to cross in the dangerous desert lands to the east, in Arizona and Texas -- and as many as 5,600 have died, according to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties and Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights. Illegal immigrants are now 17 times more likely to die while crossing the border than they were in 1998, according to the report.

While Israel has a right to protect its citizens, the security barrier separating Israel from the Palestinian territories and checkpoints along the barrier raise human rights concerns, said a U.S. cardinal. "The most tragic thing I have seen is the miles-long wall that separates Jerusalem from Bethlehem and separates families and keeps farmers from the land that has been in their families for generations. It is humiliating and distressing," Cardinal John P. Foley, grand master of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher, told participants at the 11th international conference of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation Oct. 24.

Days after deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya returned secretly to the country, there were signs that the leaders who ousted him were considering negotiations, and the foreign minister said the Vatican might help mediate a solution to the crisis. On Sept. 24, Auxiliary Bishop Juan Pineda Fasquelle of Tegucigalpa spoke with both of the main players in the political standoff. The bishop visited both Zelaya and Roberto Micheletti, who heads the de facto government that ousted Zelaya in a coup June 28.

The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky. Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that's when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, "My babies are burning up!" His children--Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber--were trapped inside.

Hondurans participating in nonviolent demonstrations against the June 28 ouster of Manuel Zelaya as president of the poor Central American country are experiencing human rights violations - including intimidation, beatings and rape -- by government security forces, a small delegation of Catholic religious leaders discovered during a recent fact-finding trip. "We came away with a really deep concern about the level of repression, media control and serious human rights violations that are being perpetrated by official forces," Marie Dennis, co-president of Pax Christi International, told Catholic News Service Aug. 26, a day after the four-member delegation of which she was a part returned to the U.S. following an eight-day visit.

The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a federal trial court in Georgia to consider the case of Troy Davis, who is on death row in state prison there for the 1989 murder of an off-duty police officer. The case has attracted international attention, and 27 former prosecutors and judges had filed a brief supporting Mr. Davis. Seven of the witnesses against Mr. Davis have recanted, and several people have implicated the prosecution's main witness as the actual killer of the officer, Mark MacPhail.

Amnesty International released a report today urging a solution to the political standoff in Honduras, warning that authorities there have resorted to mass arrests and beatings of those who support ousted President Manuel Zelaya. "Mass arbitrary arrests and ill treatment of protesters are a serious and growing concern in Honduras today," said Esther Major, Central America researcher at Amnesty International, in the report."Detention and ill treatment of protesters are being employed as a form of punishment for those openly opposing the de facto government and also as a deterrent for those contemplating taking to the streets to peacefully show their discontent with the political turmoil the country is experiencing," Ms. Major said.

Iraqi militias are reportedly killing and torturing gay or effeminate men in a climate of impunity and even collusion with the Iraqi security services, a leading international rights group said in Beirut on Monday. In a report released in Beirut entitled, "'They Want Us Exterminated': Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq," Human Rights Watch (HRW) detailed over 50 cases of extrajudicial killings, kidnapping, torture and terrorizing of gay men since the start of 2009.

The flap over Professor Gates and Officer Crowley with comments of President Obama is an example of the confusing boundaries between race and class. Moreover, it is a conflict that has resonance with the broad history of anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States. The demons of race and class continually complicate social interactions.