It hasn't won the merest fraction of the coverage enjoyed by the London Olympics, but last week's massive Chevron oil refinery fire in Richmond, Calif., sent hundreds of people rushing to hospitals, darkened the skies over East Bay, and has gasoline prices headed back up towards $4 a gallon. AP notes this "was just the latest pollution incident at the facility that records show has increasingly violated air quality rules over the past five years. The refinery is one of three such facilities near San Francisco that rank among the state's top 10 emitters of toxic chemicals, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory. Chevron's Richmond refinery...has been cited by San Francisco Bay area regulators for violating air regulations 93 times in the past five years."

Hundreds of pastoralists in the Mopti region of central Mali are trapped between floodplains to the south and armed Islamist rebels to the north. The nomadic herders, mostly of the Peulh (Fulani) ethnicity, fear that their way of life faces an imminent end. "It's all over—it's finished," Ibrahim Koita, head of the Society of Social Welfare in Mopti Region, told UN news agency IRIN in the capital, Bamako, where he is trying to pressure donors for more aid. Pastoralists from the northern regions of Adara, Azawad, Tiilenis and Gourma generally head to southern Mali, and into Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast or as far as Togo in search of pasture before the rainy season, which lasts from June to October. Once the rains arrive, they move north again to avoid the Middle Niger Delta flood zone, finding renewed pasturelands on the edge of the desert. But at the end of July, pasture had yet to appear in the north. 

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Aug. 3 urged Sudan to initiate an investigation into allegations of excessive force by government security forces against protesters in Darfur four days earlier resulting in eight deaths and more than 50 injuries. The OHCHR urged the government to "promptly launch an independent and credible investigation into the violence and the apparent excessive use of force by security forces" and noted that international standards must be respected in order to provide civilians the freedom of speech and assembly. During the July 31 protest more than 1,000 people, mostly students, blocked roads in market area of Nyala, the biggest town in Darfur, to express their opposition against fuel price increases. The OHCHR stated that it received eye witness reports that security forces used tear gas as well as live bullets against protesters.

Amnesty International warned after a visit to Mali July 31 that the country is slipping into "human rights chaos," with abuses documented in the government-controlled south as well as the rebel-held north. Amnesty documented at least one incident in the north in which a couple were stoned to death for pre-marital sex. But in the south, the army has been involved in extra-judicial killings, torture and sexual abuse since staging a coup in March, Amnesty found, demanding an investigation. The military has handed power to a civilian-led interim government, but that government appears to rule at the army's behest. Meanwhile,  the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reports that it has "visited 79 Malian military personnel held by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA)  in the Tinzaouatène area of northeastern Mali." A map indicates that Tinzaouatène is actually just across the border from northern Mali's Kidal region in Algerian territory. All previous reports indicate that MNLA forces have been entirely pushed out of northern Mali by Islamist forces.