Here it is, Rants! & Raves!, your weekly opportunity to sound off about the week past.

Remember the rules:

• A Rave! is something that happened during the past week that you’re pleased about and is signified by the word “Rave!” and/or an appropriately peppy emoticon (see Website Help to learn how to use emoticons, aka “smileys”).
• A Rant! is something that happened during the past week that you’re ticked off about and is signified by the word “Rant!” and/or an appropriately grumpy emoticon.
• You may Rant! about something a person said, did, or wrote, but you may not Rant! about generally disliking a person. IOW, no personal attacks allowed.

Have fun!

Hello!

Random question of the day: On a scale of 1 to 10, how messy would you rate yourself? (1 being “so clean you can eat off the floor” and 10 being “so messy I can’t see the floor anymore)

My answer to yesterday’s question: Sound of Music, Phantom of the Opera, Wicked

Remember: This is our daily (except for Sundays) open thread, where you can 1) answer my question, 2) talk about something else, or 3) say something truly encouraging to the commenter before you.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer asked legislators to consider whether they should change the state’s immigration law Friday, in the wake of a judge’s ruling blocking the enforcement of parts of it.

Brewer spokesman Paul Senseman confirmed Friday that the governor called top legislative leaders to broach the possibility of changing provisions of the law.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday, putting on hold sections of the new law that would have required officers to become more rigorous in the fight against illegal immigration.

Senseman said the possibility of having legislators meet in special session to consider changing the law is merely being explored. He said Brewer is still pressing ahead with her appeal of Bolton’s order.

“The governor believes that the law is constitutional and she is obviously going to pursue the appeal,” Senseman said. “What she is looking at are legislative improvements that can be made . . . given the current ruling for an injunction.”

Senate President Bob Burns, R-Peoria, said he’d need to know a lot more “of the political and legal ramifications” before he supports holding a special session.

The legislature’s next regular session starts in January.

Despite a clear victory for critics of the law, passions among hundreds of immigrant rights supporters flared at demonstrations near the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix after the law took effect Thursday.

In total, 71 people were arrested during the Thursday protests, officials said Friday.

Brewer’s lawyers already have appealed the judge’s ruling so they can fight back against what the Republican calls an “invasion” of illegal immigrants. The state of Arizona has received more than $1.6 million in a fund to help defend the new law, including $75,000 on Wednesday, the day parts of the law were blocked.

Brewer said Friday she would “absolutely” take the judge’s decision all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Soldiers killed a top leader of the Sinaloa cartel in a raid on his posh hideout, dealing the biggest blow yet to Mexico’s most powerful drug gang since President Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive against organized crime in 2006.

Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, a reputed founder of Mexico’s methamphetamine trade, was gunned down trying to escape soldiers in the western city of Guadalajara. Mexican authorities say he fired on soldiers, killing one and wounding another, as helicopters hovered overhead and troops closed in.

Coronel was a close associate of Mexico’s most wanted man, Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and was No. 3 in the organization after Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.

Coronel’s downfall came amid persistent allegations that Calderon’s administration not hitting the Sinaloa cartel as hard as other drug gangs.

The mysterious Coronel was believed to be “the forerunner in producing massive amounts of methamphetamine in clandestine laboratories in Mexico, then smuggling it into the U.S.,” according to the FBI, which offered a $5 million reward for the 56-year-old.

Coronel allegedly controlled trafficking through the Mexican states of Jalisco, Colima, and parts of Michoacan, the “Pacific route” for cocaine smuggling.

“The scope of its influence and operations penetrate throughout the United States, Mexico, and several other European, Central American, and South American countries,” according to an FBI statement.

During Thursday’s raid, soldiers appeared to search at least two homes and arrested Francisco Quinonez Gastelum, alleged to be Coronel’s right-hand man and the only associate allowed to accompany him to his mansion.

Coronel was born in the northern state of Durango, the home state of many of Mexico’s drug traffickers and was groomed to be a drug lord from an early age.

He rose up under Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the so-called “Lord of the Skies” and leader of the Juarez drug cartel who died in 1997. After Carrillo’s death, Coronel joined the Sinaloa cartel and rose through the ranks to become the cartel’s No. 3.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

BP’s incoming CEO said Friday that it’s time for a “scaleback” of the massive effort to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but stressed the commitment to make things right is the same as ever.

But Bob Dudley added that there is “no pullback” in BP’s commitment to clean up the spill. Dudley was in Biloxi, Miss., to announce that former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief James Lee Witt will be supporting BP’s Gulf restoration work.

Meanwhile, efforts to permanently plug the gusher hit a snag when crews found debris that settled in the bottom of the relief well when crews popped in a plug to keep it safe ahead of Tropical Storm Bonnie. The debris must be fished out before crews can pump mud into the well in a procedure known as a static kill. They had hoped to start the procedure as early as Sunday, but the process of removing the debris will likely push the kill to Tuesday.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s oil-spill response chief, spoke Thursday with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and coastal parish officials who are concerned that Coast Guard and BP PLC officials will order workers to pull back from the spill response once the oil flow is stopped permanently.

Allen said it has become harder to find oil on the surface of the Gulf, but Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said Thursday that reports of less oil have been exaggerated, noting that in his parish “there is oil all over.”

Whether or not BP and Coast Guard officials begin to pull back, Jindal is ratcheting up clean-up efforts, ordering workers in Louisiana to continue contructing a controversial sand beam project to which BP officials are contributing $360 million. Jindal said Tuesday that the beams have facilitated the removal of 1,200 pounds of oiled debris to date.

Many critics of the project fear it will take too long and do little good at a big price.

Allen told CNN that while “we’re not averse to attempting this as a prototype,” there are “a lot of doubts about whether this is a valid oil-spill-response technique.”

Although Allen has said little oil remains on the water, scientists working with spill clean-up crews are still worried that the chemical dispersants used to break up the oil and save the shorelines has left oil trapped below the surface.

In practice, the use of the dispersants, which had never been tested, that far beneath the surface has made the oil much more difficult to track than it would have been in a single, massive slick. Environmentalists and marine biologists still aren’t convinced the chemicals are safe for sea life.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

NATO announced Friday that six more U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan—three on Thursday and three on Friday—bringing the death toll for July to at least 66 and surpassing the previous month’s record as the deadliest for American forces in the nearly nine-year-old war.

Hidden roadside bombs killed five of the U.S. service members and the sixth died following an insurgent attack, NATO said in statements.

After a dip in American deaths last spring following the February capture of the southern town of Marjah, U.S. fatalities have been rising—from 19 in April to 34 in May to 60 in June. Last month’s deaths for the entire NATO-led force reached a record 104, including the 60 Americans. This month’s coalition death count stands at 89, including the 66 Americans.

Some U.S. military officers speculated that the spring drop in fatalities was due in part to the fact that many Taliban fighters in the south were busy harvesting the annual opium poppy crop, a major source of funding for the insurgents.

U.S. commanders say American casualties are mounting because more troops are fighting—and the Taliban are stiffening resistance as NATO and Afghan forces challenge the insurgents in their strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, areas they can’t afford to give up without a fight.

Currently there are 95,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and by the end of August the figure is expected to swell to 100,000.

President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan last December to turn back a resurgent Taliban. Since then, 286 U.S. service members have died, making up almost one-fourth of all the U.S. fatalities in the nearly nine-year war.

The anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan is still strong as a riot broke out in Kabul Friday after four Afghans were killed in a traffic accident involving an SUV that was driven by U.S. contract employees, according to the capital’s criminal investigation chief, Abdul Ghaafar Sayedzada. Police, some carrying riot shields, fired weapons into the air to disperse a crowd of angry Afghans who shouted “Death to America,” hurled stones, and set fire to two foreigners’ vehicles.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The uproar over Arizona’s immigration law has spread across the nation, but nowhere is it more present than in metropolitan Phoenix, causing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to become the undisputed poster boy for local immigration enforcement.

A ruling Wednesday by a federal judge put on hold parts of the new law that would have required officers in Arizona to dig deeper into the fight against illegal immigration. Arizona says it was forced to act because the federal government isn’t doing its job to fight immigration.

Before Gov. Jan Brewer signed the controversial bill into law, the Arizona Legislature had already enacted a series of tough-on-immigration measures in recent years. The measures culminated in Brewer’s April signing of SB170.

State and local authorities have carried out crackdowns in the state for years. Arpaio routinely performs sweeps, some in Hispanic neighborhoods, to arrest illegal immigrants.

“It’s my job,” said Arpaio, standing beside a sheriff’s truck that has a number for an immigration hotline written on its side. “I have two state [immigration] laws that I am enforcing. It’s not federal, it’s state.”

In addition to Arpaio’s crackdowns, other efforts include a steady stream of busts by the state and local police of stash houses where smugglers hide illegal immigrants. The state attorney general has taken a money-wiring company to civil court on allegations that smugglers used their service to move money to Mexico.

The immigration law hearings led to demonstrations across the country Thursday, including one directed at Arpaio in Phoenix, where protesters beat on the metal door of a jail and chanted, “Sheriff Joe, we are here. We will not live in fear.”

Arpaio, a 78-year-old ex-federal drug agent, launched his latest sweep Thursday afternoon, sending about 200 sheriff’s deputies and trained volunteers out across metro Phoenix to look for traffic violators who may be here illegally.

Sixty percent of the nearly 1,000 people arrested in the sweeps since early 2008 have been illegal immigrants. Thursday’s dragnet led to 13 arrests for warrants or other criminal charges, but it wasn’t clear if any of them were illegal immigrants.

Critics say deputies racially profile Hispanics, but Arpaio says deputies approach people only when they have probable cause.

Arpaio feels no reservations about continuing to push the sweeps, even after the federal government stripped his power to let 100 deputies make federal immigration arrests.

Unable to make arrests under a federal statute, the sheriff instead relies on a nearly five-year-old state law that prohibits immigrant smuggling. He has also raided 37 businesses in enforcing a state law that prohibits employers from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.

“Just look at the record,” Arpaio said. “I’m doing what I feel is right for the people of Maricopa County.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The leaders of Syria and Saudi Arabia, once bitter rivals, made an unprecedented show of cooperation Friday, traveling together to Lebanon with the hope of preventing any violence if members of a militant group are indicted in the 2005 assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister.

Saudi King Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar Assad met with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman and pledged to stabilize Lebanon. In a joint statement, the three countries urged all parties to put Lebanon’s interests above all else and refrain from violence.

The visit underscored the depth of Arab concern that new violence between Lebanon’s Shiite and Sunni communities could break out if the international tribunal investigating Hariri’s death implicates the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which is Syria’s main ally in Lebanon.

Hariri was a Sunni leader who took part in the anti-Syrian opposition near the time of his assassination, which many in Lebanon blame on Syria. Hariri and 21 others were killed on February 14, 2005, when explosives were detonated as his motorcade drove down the streets of Beirut.

An international tribunal investigating Hariri’s death opened in March 2009, the first time a UN-based international criminal court tried a “terrorist” crime committed against a specific person. The tribunal has yet to announce who will be charged, but the leader of Hezbollah said last week members of his group will be among those indicted.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah made clear that he would not accept any indictments made by the tribunal and accused the tribunal of being part of an “Israeli plot.”

Hariri’s death sparked anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon, called the “Cedar Revolution,” which led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon in 2005, ending an almost three decades of Syrian domination.

The blast deepened a rift between Assad and Abdullah, who each backed rival sides in the ensuing power struggle that nearly tore Lebanon apart since 2005: Syria backing a Hezbollah-led coalition, and Saudi Arabia and the United States supporting a Sunni-led coalition.

But in recent years, Assad and Abdullah have repaired ties, and the joint visit was a sign of how far the rift has healed. It was Assad’s first visit to Lebanon in eight years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click here for a look back at the news of the week, colorfully illustrated by some of the best editorial cartoonists in the business: Chip Bok, Steve Breen, Steve Kelley, Michael Ramirez, and Gary Varvel.

These creative cartoonists offer a unique, colorful, often humorous, and sometimes poignant perspective of politics, the economy, world events, and more.

Every other Friday we post links to movie reviews fresh from the latest issue of WORLD Magazine.

Here are this week’s films:

FEATURED FLICK:
Action Angie: In Salt, Jolie plays another tough, vengeful warrior, a type as popular with young males as it is untethered from female reality  | Megan Basham

ALSO REVIEWED:
Charile St. Cloud | Rebecca Cusey

Get Low | Sam Thielman

The Last Station (DVD) | Megan Basham

Box Office Top 10 | For the weekend of July 23-25, according to Box Office Mojo.