On July 4, clashes again broke out between protesters and security forces in Cairo after a court released on bail seven police officers accused of killing 17 protesters in Suez during the uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak in February. After an initial outburst of violence at the Cairo courthouse, protesters blocked the highway linking the Egyptian capital to the city of Suez. (Bikyamasr, July 5) As popular patience is growing short with Egypt's interim military rulers, comes word that the White House has sought contacts for dialogue with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Reuters on June 30 quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Syrian troops are reported to have shot dead at least six anti-government protesters in the city of Hama on July 5, the second day of street clashed in the city center, with residents erecting barricades and burning tires to prevent tanks from advancing. The tanks have been deployed in a ring around the city, with government forces attempting to close the circle on protesters in the downtown area. "Tens of people are being arrested in neighborhoods on the edges of Hama. The authorities seem to have opted for a military solution to subdue the city," Rami Abdel-Rahman, president of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Reuters Hama was the scene of the 1982 bloody repression of an Islamist-led uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez Assad, in which an estimated 30,000 were killed and parts of the city razed. (BBC News, July 5; Reuters, July 3)

Oil that spewed from an offshore drilling rig in the North China Sea (Yellow Sea) for more than two weeks last month spread 320 square miles, government officials acknowledged July 5, amid public outrage over why it took so long for fishermen and local residents to be informed of the spill. News of the spill emerged in late June on the microblogging site Sina Weibo and was not confirmed by the authorities until July 1. China's State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said July 5 that US energy giant ConocoPhillips is responsible for the spill. The leak took place at the Penglai 19-3 oilfield in Bohai Bay, a field being exploited by ConocoPhillips China under a joint development agreement with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. (NYT, Xinhua, July 5)

A driver's license is a license to kill. James Bond has nothing on NYC auxiliary cops. From MyFoxNY, July 3:

Officer Identified In Police Van Incident
The driver of the auxiliary police van who accidentally hit a [sic] killed a pedestrian on Friday has been identified.

During the last week of June several Haitian social organizations called on the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) to pay reparations to the victims of a cholera epidemic that appeared to originate at the international occupation force's base near Mirebalais in the Central Plateau. Representatives of Haitian Women's Solidarity (SOFA), the Haitian Platform Advocating an Alternative Development (PAPDA) and other groups said MINUSTAH should pay out to the Haitian people 25% to 30% of its annual operating budget of $853 million. SOFA made similar demands in January. The epidemic, which started in October, has killed some 5,500 people to date and sickened about 300,000. (AlterPresse, Haiti, July 1)

Chileans celebrated LGBT Pride in Santiago on June 25 with a march from the central Plaza Italia to the La Moneda presidential palace. Organizers said 30,000 people joined the march, while the police gave a crowd estimate of 12,000. Participants carried signs with such slogans as: "Marriage and civil union law for all couples" and "Antidiscrimination law for everyone." The march came one day after New York became the largest state in the US to allow same-sex marriage. Rightwing president Sebastián Piñera announced on May 28 that he would send Congress a proposal for a law to legalize civil unions for the country's more than two million couples, including same-sex couples, but he insisted that the law wouldn't permit same-sex marriage. Chilean LGBT activists are pushing for full marriage equality. (AFP, June 25, via Terra.com)

At least five Central American immigrants were forcibly removed from a freight train by about 10 armed men wearing hoods on June 24 near the village of Medias Aguas in the east central Mexican state of Veracruz, according to two immigrants who managed to escape. The number of people kidnapped could be as high as 80, according to the well-known immigrant rights activist Father Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, coordinator of the Brother and Sister Migrants on the Road (Hermanos en el Camino) shelter in Ciudad Ixtepec in the southern state of Oaxaca. Solalinde reported the kidnappings to the authorities after talking to the two witnesses.

With chants of "An educated people will never be deceived" and "We want a free, quality education," tens of thousands of Chilean students, parents and teachers took to the streets on June 30 in the latest protest against the privatized education system set up under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Giorgio Jackson, president of the Federation of Catholic University Students (FEUC), estimated that 200,000 people took part in the demonstration in Santiago, while Federation of University of Chile Students (FECH) president Camila Vallejo put the number at more than 300,000. By most accounts the Santiago protest was twice the size of a June 16 march that local media had called the largest since the return of democracy 21 years ago.