He was already elderly when we moved into this house in 1984. For almost a quarter century he was a part of our lives, although in recent years he was fading. Yesterday I went out to the car to put a bag in of someone I was taking to Union Station in DC, and realized he was finally gone. The heavy rain had been too much, and as the soil loosened, he gave up the ghost and keeled over, into the driveway.

Supporters of the law that allows same-sex couples in Maine to marry announced today that they have formed a political action committee to protect marriage for all Mainers. The new organization, "Maine Freedom to Marry," will draw on resources that were crucial to the legislative victory this spring, and will also free up the campaign to raise and spend money for the statewide referendum expected this fall.

While the professional journalists in Iran have been locked down in their hotels, prohibited from taking photographs or interviewing Iranians, ordered out of the country and even arrested, a new breed of citizen journalists have taken their places, successfully sending news, photographs and videos of Iranian events to the outside world. The camera phone has replaced the Uzi as a guerrilla weapon.

Fahreed Zakaria is a smart political analyst, who doesn't just yap to hear himself talk like most of the political bloviators on CNN. I get the feeling he actually knows -- and understands -- history! He gives his take this morning at CNN.com on whether or not the Islamic Republic can sustain itself: "One of the first things that strikes me is we are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy."

It may not be fair, but the news coming out of Southwest Asia on a regular basis via the Air Force's airpower summaries remind this reader of nothing so much as stories about hunting wolves with helicopters in Alaska. There's just no sense of proportionality.

You should read Global Voices Online. You should write for them. You should re-publish Global Voices stories from around the world in whatever medium you produce.

In an important development for class action suits in the United States and internationally, the Amsterdam Court of Appeals recently upheld a settlement between Royal Dutch Shell and a group of more than 150 institutional investors from 17 European countries, Canada, and Australia. The proposed settlement originally emerged in 2007 after Royal Dutch Shell side-stepped a class action filed in U.S. District Court that sought to include claims from both U.S. and non-U.S. investors, by independently pursuing a settlement in The Netherlands with the non-U.S. claimants.

In about 49 states (Hawaii being a notable exception), public schools are run by local districts. The districts may be units of city/town government, or of a county, or be independent districts. But they're always smaller than the state. This is an old American tradition that people treat as a good thing, but which is really incredibly expensive and harmful in many ways. It's not just education that suffers, either.

Over the last sixty years, Iranians have demanded human rights, democracy and freedom. They have done it repeatedly, and the U.S. government has failed to craft a policy to respond to this genuine and deep-seated demand. The Obama administration, if it pitches its message in terms of universal human rights standards, and seeks to work through multilateral channels, can bring the world along in rejecting an Iranian regime that denies human rights, freedom and dignity to its people.

Growing up poor in America increases one's chance for a variety of diseases -- like asthma, chronic bronchitis, coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure -- all of which can keep Johnny from breathing and our society from prospering.

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