A suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up and injured 13 Algerian troops in an attack on an army convoy in Lakhdaria July 23. On June 8 a French engineer and his Algerian driver were killed in a bomb attack in the same area that was claimed by the North African wing of al-Qaeda network. (AFP, July 24) At the village of Beni Djemaa, Blida wilaya, jihadist insurgents ransacked a farmhouse and beheaded its 66-year-old owner, after demanding money the family had received under an agricultural aid program. (Magharebia, July 23)

Misha Glenny writes for the New Statesman, July 24:

Looking a little like God in a Cecil B DeMille film, Radovan Karadzic was genuinely unrecognisable when he was arrested on a Belgrade bus last Monday evening. Yet even more astonishing was the news that he had been working as a crystal-rubbing therapist promoting well-being to audiences around Serbia. The killer as New Age healer - you couldn't make it up.

In the third incident this month at a French nuclear plant, 100 employees were "slightly contaminated" July 23 at the Tricastin plant in the southern Vaucluse region, according to the EDF power company. EDF insisted the exposure was well below legal limits and the incident rated at "level zero" on the seven-point nuclear accident scale. But the Commission de Recherche et d'Information Indépendantes sur la Radioactivité (CRIIAD) said the legal annual limit for exposure to radioactivity was not "a level at which risk begins but a level of maximum permitted risk." Annie Thebaud-Mony, a researcher at France's INSERM medical research institute, said that "emphasising that the accident is minor...is a way of downplaying the fact that the employees are exposed to radioacitivity."

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his Colombian counterpart Juan Manuel Santos share a joint op-ed in the New York Times July 23, "Colombia's Gains Are America's, Too," shamelessly trading off the apparent hostage rescue operation to shill for the pending US-Colombia free trade agreement. Let's deconstruct this exercise in sinister propaganda:

There's a lesson here. But how many people are going to get it? From AP, July 23:

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Rising prices at the gas pump appear to be having at least one positive effect: Traffic deaths around the country are plummeting, just as they did during the Arab oil embargo more than three decades ago.

From AP, July 23:

Republican John McCain on Wednesday credited the recent $10-a-barrel drop in the price of oil to President Bush's lifting of a presidential ban on offshore drilling, an action he has been advocating in his presidential campaign.

From the Uyghur American Association, July 21:

Bus Blasts Kill Two in Southwestern China
BEIJING — Two public buses exploded during the Monday morning rush hour in the city of Kunming, killing at least two people and injuring 14 others in what the authorities described as deliberate attacks as China is tightening security nationwide and warning of possible terrorist threats in advance of next month's Olympic Games.

The 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals in Richmond, VA, issued a 5-4 ruling July 15 finding that if the government's allegations against Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri are true, the president is empowered by Congress to hold al-Marri in a military prison without charge as an enemy combatant, under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The ruling overturned the 4th Circuit's prior decision holding that the military cannot seize and imprison as "enemy combatants" civilians lawfully residing in the US. (Jurist, July 16)