Despite the perhaps negative tone of many things I post about here, I am, on the whole, convinced that the trend line of humanity is going in the right direction. Today's example:
Prosecutors in Italy have issued arrest warrants for 140 people over a decades-old plot by South American dictatorships called Operation Condor.
One man - 60-year-old Uruguayan former naval intelligence officer Nestor Jorge Fernandez Troccoli - has already been arrested in Salerno, south Italy.
Under Operation Condor, six governments worked together from the 1970s to hunt down and kill left-wing opponents.
Italian authorities have been looking into the plot since the late 1990s.
The investigation followed complaints by relatives of South American citizens of Italian origin who had disappeared.
A judge issued the arrest warrants on Monday, following a request from state prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo.
One of the true, positive achievements of the last two decades has been an unwillingness to let old crimes against humanity simply rest. In a very real way, there should be no statute of limitations on wanton cruelty, and more and more often, that is the case. It's never a wasted effort prosecuting these people, even decades and decades after the fact.