Several hundred unaccompanied migrant boys in the Canary Islands are being accommodated by the authorities in improvised, emergency care centers that are inadequate for their well-being and put them at risk of violence and ill-treatment. Since 2006 an unprecedented number of unaccompanied migrant children, mainly boys, have arrived in the Canaries by boat from sub-Saharan Africa and Morocco. The government of the Canary Islands opened a number of emergency centers to provide immediate care for these children. Conceived as a temporary solution, these centers have now become permanent. Children as young as 10 find themselves in facilities where they are without access to public schooling, have little opportunity for recreation, and are rarely permitted to leave. Housed in overcrowded conditions with much older children, they are at increased risk of violence by other boys as well as by staff in charge of their care. This report documents severe abuses and ill-treatment of children in two emergency centers.

The view of things in Europe today, as the ostrich sees them, is bright. He sees an open market of 450 million people with an amazing potential. He sees a thriving economy and the free movement of people, goods, money and services. Immigration, to the ostrich, can only be viewed as an opportunity for an aging native population. Borders are better open than closed. Islam is a faith like Christianity, and Muslims shall adapt their religion to life in Europe.

In August 2006, the EU launched the first of two projected joint border patrols at its southern border in responce to mass inflows of irregular migration from Africa.

Guillermo Martínez could see the promised land of Southern California from the cramped three-bedroom house he shared here with his mother, his wife and two small children.

Immigration is a national problem that too many local governments have mistakenly tried to fix.

Europe's failure to integrate a growing population of immigrants, many of them Muslims, starts desperately early: in education systems that still systematically neglect these and other disadvantaged children, trapping them in uneducated poverty and depriving them of a sense of worth and belonging.

President Vicente Fox of Mexico has said it best: the immigration bill passed last week by the House of Representatives is "shameful" -a reflection of the power of xenophobic politicians who want to fence in America, lock up illegal immigrants and send them back where they came from.

An analysis of Census Bureau data shows that the nation's foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal) reached a new record of more than 35 million in March of 2005. The data also indicate that the first half of this decade has been the highest five-year period of immigration in American history. This Backgrounder provides a detailed picture of both numbers and the socio-economic status of immigrants.

The French political response to the continuing riots has focused most on the need for more multicultural "understanding" of, and public spending on, the disenchanted mass in the country's grim banlieues (suburbs).

With police declaring a "nearly normal" situation in France's housing projects, where does the country go from here?

The blunt exchange is contained in an 182-page official Italian police report that has not been made public, but is widely available in court circles and frames the judicial case against the two men. "The Madrid attack was my project, and those who died as martyrs were my dearest friends," Mr. Ahmed boasted in one intercepted conversation.

For the past three weeks, young first- and second-generation immigrants, mostly Arabs from North Africa, have torched cars and schools and shops in some 300 towns, forcing the government to declare a state of emergency well into next year. No, there's probably nothing quite like screaming "I told you so!" to the whole world to warm this old bruiser's heart.

Jean-Marie Le Pen has a twinkle in his right eye. (The left, replaced with glass, was lost in a fight during a political campaign 40 years ago.) And why shouldn't the populist founder of France's National Front be in good spirits?

For France, the good news is that these problems can be solved, principally be deregulating labor markets, reducing taxes, reforming the pension system and breaking the stranglehold of unions on economic life. The bad news is the entrenched cultural resistance to those solutions -not on the part of angry Muslim youth, but from the employed half of French society that refuses to relinquish their subsidized existences for the sake of the "solidarity" they profess to hold dear.

France could also help itself by dispatching troops to help battle the radical Islamists in Iraq, thereby sending a message to Muslims at home and abroad that France is on the side of those Muslims, the majority no doubt, who want to live in peace.