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As you would expect, I am still following the coverage of the Radovan Karadzic case, still looking to see if anyone is going to provide on-the-record information to back up all of those charges that the world’s most infamous war criminal had, at some point, been hiding in Orthodox churches or monasteries.
I know Turkey is a secular state. As a reader of books about the Middle East (such as this fine one) and as someone who got a degree in political science, I have heard all about Kemal Ataturk and the secular founding of the country. But I had never appreciated how secular Turkey was until I read reporter Laura King’s story in The Los Angeles Times.
I don’t know if there is a publication in Russia that is similar to The Onion, but GetReligion reader Lars Doucet sent me a story the other day that had me going, thinking that it was some kind of cruel satire or parody. But this story wasn’t from a Russian publication, it was from The Telegraph.
In recent days, I have continued to comb the coverage of the Radovan Karadzic arrest, looking for clues that might indicate where reporters were getting the tips that this monster had spent parts of the past few decades hiding in Eastern Orthodox monasteries and churches.
Needless to say, I received some interesting emails in the hours after the New York Times and the rest of the world’s mainstream media started running the following story. The words changed a bit, but here is the key info from the Times:
Sorry to have to bring this up again, but the mathematics of this Anglican population thing are not that difficult to master (even though we all know that these statistics are almost certainly inflated across the board).
This is one of those cases where I simply want to point out a story and urge GetReligion readers to check it out.
As you would expect, Pope Benedict XVI’s trip down under for World Youth Day is getting quite a bit of ink, although — perhaps in the age of tight newspaper budgets and high air fares — there is very little American coverage other than wire services (unless I am missing some stories online). Click here for a Google News collection of what is up at the moment.
The rescue of 14 hostages in the Colombian jungle last week could not have been more dramatic. Military intelligence agents infiltrated the leftist rebel organization and tricked them into handing over kidnapped presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors without a shot being fired. My absolute favorite detail in the story was that the Colombian operatives duped the bad guys in part by wearing Che Guevara shirts. If only this could end the scourge of Che Guevara shirts forever!
