This is heartwarming in its own way. Homophobia is doubtless equally entrenched among India's Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists. Heaven forfend the fundis should stop blowing each other up long enough to realize how they are united by their mutual irrational prejudices. We say good for the prince for sticking it to those fools. From Gujarat's GG2 News, July 8:

An Indian prince has been disowned by his family after he publicly announced he was gay in a country where homosexuality is outlawed by a 145-year-old law.

Once again, someone feels compelled to prove the intellectual superiority of their position by killing scores of random civilians. Some details from the Financial Times, July 11 (link added):

Within minutes, seven explosions on the railway that forms Mumbai's spinal cord left at least 163 people dead and possibly more than 1,000 wounded in one of the worst terrorist attacks in India.

Yet more sacrifices for the American way of life. From Newsday, July 10:

Five dead in Bronx multiple-vehicle crash

In a deadly crash that killed two half-brothers, their uncle, his 8-year-old daughter and a family friend, and left two others severely injured, an out-of-control sedan jumped the center median of the Bronx River Parkway and caused a three-car pileup on the other side of the highway, officials and witnesses said.

With each horrific escalation they always say the same thing: civil war is "imminent". At what point do we acknowledge that civil war has arrived? As we have noted before, everybody—left, right and center—seems to have an interest in denying the obvious reality. From Newsday, July 10:

Sunnis ID'd, executed
Morning attack on a Baghdad neighborhood thought to be revenge for a mosque bombing; security adviser warns of imminent 'civil war'

Interesting how Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty uncritically accepts Putin's talk of a fight against "terrorism." Basayev was assuredly a bad dude, but the Russian state's counterinsurgency war in the North Caucasus is hardly less terroristic—and, as this report actually notes, really produced Basayev in the first place. From RFE/RL, July 10:

Jose Ramos Horta, winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, is a figure of towering moral authority, and will hopefully be able to restore both stability and real sovereignty to his nation. But it is painful to watch him take power as the East Timor he struggled to liberate from Indonesia is under de facto occupation by Australia and other foreign powers. From Austrialia's The Age, July 11:

Some 60,000 teachers were set to return to their classrooms on July 10 in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, after a seven-week strike that included numerous sit-ins at government buildings and an encampment in the central plaza in the city of Oaxaca. The teachers, members of Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), walked off the job on May 22 to demand cost-of-living adjustments and a larger education budget. On June 14 the strikers--who were also calling for the resignation of PRI governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and were supported by indigenous and other social movements in the state--beat back a violent attempt by state police to remove them from the plaza.

On June 23, US District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles ruled that Palestinian immigrant Aiad Khaled Barakat should be allowed to become a naturalized US citizen. Barakat is one of the so-called "LA 8": seven Palestinians and a Kenyan whom the government arrested in 1987 and sought to deport for alleged associations with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). All eight have denied being PFLP members. The government initially tried to deport all eight of them, but in 1997 Barakat and another of the group were granted legal residency. Barakat's lawyers had appealed to the federal court after US immigration officials rejected his petition for citizenship last year; they claimed he lied in his citizenship interview about an association with PFLP leader Ali Kased.