Tens of thousands have taken to the streets in Niger to protest President Mamadou Tandja's plan for a new constitution that would abolish term limits and give him more power after 10 years as president. Tandja has also dissolved a high court that ruled against his bid to remain in office, dismissed a fractious Parliament, shut down a critical radio and TV station, and arrested opposition leaders. Opposition leader Mohamadou Issoufou calls the plan "a coup d’état in its first phase." (NYT, July 13)

Police arrested 13 women in a raid on a cafe in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, and flogged 10 of them in public for wearing trousers. The women were detained July 10 by officers of the public order police, who enforce Sudan's strict Islamic law in public places. One of those arrested, Lubna Hussein, a journalist, said she is challenging the charges, which can be punishable by up to 40 lashes. "I didn't do anything wrong," she said. (AP, July 13)

The Nigerian government freed militant leader Henry Okah July 13, meeting a demand by Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), who have been attacking the country's oil installations and kidnapping oil workers. The insurgents have said that his release would not lead them to end their attacks. On July 12, rebels set fire to an oil depot and loading tankers in Lagos, killing five—MEND's first attack outside the Delta region. (AP, July 13)

A police officer who was reported missing July 12 was found dead the next day near a mine operated in West Papua by the US conglomerate Freeport. The death followed fatal ambushes over the weekend of a security guard and an Australian mining expert working for Freeport in the same area. Indonesian authorities blamed Papuan separatists. (NYT, July 13)

Two Uighur men were shot dead and a third wounded after an apparent attack on police in Urumqi, Xinjiang, July 13. The next day, authorities raised the death toll in the recent Urumqi violence to 192 people and 810 injured. The rise in the toll had been expected as authorities earlier said many of the critically injured were near death. The previously announced death toll was 184, of whom more than 130 were Han Chinese. Uighurs say up to hundreds of their dead are not being counted. (UPI, July 15; BBC World Service, July 14; The Telegraph, July 13)

Iran executed 13 members of the Sunni militant group Jundallah in Zahedan, Sistan-Baluchistan province, July 14. Jundallah, which reportedly has up to 1,000 armed fighters, claims to fight against the Shi'ite regime's marginalization of Iran's 2 million ethnic Baluchis, who are mostly Sunni. Tehran blames the group for attacks including a mosque bombing in May that killed 25. Amnesty International had appealed for a stay of execution. (AFP, BBC News, July 14)

The National Court of Spain July 14 dismissed charges against three US soldiers who were accused of being involved in the death of Spanish cameraman José Couso. The soldiers allegedly opened fire on a Baghdad hotel frequented by Western journalists in 2003 without provocation, killing two cameramen.

At least nine were killed—including seven children—and more than 70 wounded July 13 in a bomb blast at at the home of a cleric Hafiz Riaz in central Pakistan, where children had gathered for religious education. Several houses were destroyed in the blast, on the outskirts of Mian Channu, 250 kilometers east of Lahore in Punjab province. It is not known if the blast was a terror attack, or if explosives the cleric himself had stored at the house accidentally detonated. (The Hindu, AKI, July 13)