Before Sunday morning, the event that had the grave distinction of being the largest massacre of gay people in American history occurred June 24, 1973, at the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans. A fire, which a police and fire investigation eventually deemed arson, killed 32 people during a Sunday beer blast after a church service had been held in the space. The details contain gruesome stuff like bodies being melted together, as well as disgustingly sad anecdotes of love and failed heroism. Bartender Buddy Rasmussen successfully led a group of about 20 men out of a hidden fire exit onto the bar’s roof that provided safe access to the ground. Among the group was a man named George Mitchell. According to Jim Downs’s Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation:

Police identified the man responsible for killing at least three people in a Lafayette movie theater Thursday night as 59-year-old John Russell Houser, a “kind of drifter” who had been living in a nearby motel.

Two years ago, the New Yorker's Mattathias Schwartz documented the brutal massacre Jamaican security forces undertook when they entered the notorious slum Tivoli Gardens to arrest—at the insistence of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency—drug kingpin and local hero Christopher "Dudus" Coke in 2010. They didn't find Coke, but they managed to kill 73 civilians in what the Jamaicans claimed was a pitched street battle with Coke's partisans. After it was all over, they found six guns.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner and icon of resistance against Burma's brutal military dictatorship, was a "V.I.P. guest" of her former captors at a military parade yesterday held in honor of the country's Armed Forces Day—marking the latest in what the Times calls a "fledgling partnership" between Aung San Suu Kyi and the junta that once kept her under house arrest for more than two decades. Her openness to work with the country's president, former general U Sein Thein, may be a shrewd political calculation that recognizes the military's continued hold on power even as the country slowly moves toward democracy, but it leaves many of her former allies troubled, and may end up neutralizing her: "[S]he is essentially making herself irrelevant," Burmese politics expert Josef Silverstein says. Worse, she has largely remained silent as the plight of Burma's ethnic minority Rohingya Muslims worsens. The rise of the 969 group, which exiled dissident Dr. Muang Zarni describes as a "neo-Nazi ‘Buddhist' nationalist movement" has led to brutal violence, genocidal in its intent, against the Rohingya—largely poorer, darker-skinned, and unrecognized by by the state—creating a human rights crisis in the face of which Aung San Suu Kyi's reaction is disappointing at best and infuriating at worst. "When asked if the Rohingyas are Burmese citizens, Aung San Suu Kyi, the moral exemplar of the pro-democracy movement, simply said that she did not know," Min Zin writes at Foreign Policy. "Aung San Suu Kyi has even said that she will refrain from applying any kind of 'moral leadership' by taking sides in the communal unrest. In this respect, her actions reveal quite a bit of continuity with the ruling military." [NYT | Vice | Guardian | FP | image via AFP/Getty]

The New Yorker has just posted Mattathias Schwartz's excellent piece in last week's magazine on the disastrous raid to arrest Jamaican druglord Christopher "Dudus" Coke. At the DEA's insistence, Jamaican authorities reluctantly raided Tivoli Gardens, the West Kingston slum Coke ran as a de facto governor, two years ago. Coke didn't turn up, but Jamaican police officers killed 73 civilians, many of them allegedly in cold blood. A Department of Homeland Security surveillance plane was overhead the whole time.

The most exciting thing to happen to Zanesville, Ohio, like, ever has ended in the tragic massacre of dozens of exotic predators, all of whom escaped into heavy rains last night from a local resident's private, 73-acre reserve. With the lifeless body of that man, Terry Thompson (pictured), lying near their open cages, and no arks docked in nearby Lake Erie, it left something of a mystery as to what exactly had happened.

Libya's National Transitional Council says it's located some 1,270 bodies in a mass grave—victims of a 1996 massacre of rioters at Abu Salim prison (pictured). The NTC has requested international assistance in identifying the bodies.

The dying Washington Times laid off something like 40% of its staff yesterday, including almost all Sports and Metro staffers, most photo staffers, the managing editor, and Wonkette pal Liz Glover. Lean and mean for another decade of domination! [WP]