Breaking terror news from 2004?

On Saturday night, Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly tried to murder as many Swedes as possible by blowing up his car and himself in crowded areas where people were busy shopping for Christmas gifts. Amazingly, and perhaps due to an inadvertent early detonation, he was the only person killed. Two others were severely injured. All signs point to radical Islam as the motivator for the deadly violence. It’s interesting to see how different media outlets lead their early stories on the terrorist once his identity was established. Here’s the Telegraph:


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Predicting '12 presidential picks

When reporters talk about the 2012 presidential election this early, it can generate the same feeling as when stores start putting up Christmas decorations before Halloween: too soon. It’s as if there aren’t any other major events going on in the world to report on, right?


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Yearning for suicide, glory or both?

The topic of this Boston Globe magazine piece could not be more explosive — literally. It’s about suicide bombers and the controversial issue of why they do what they do.


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Got news? Hate crime edition

This was the year when the media took a keen interest in what they termed “Islamophobia.” This was all the craze for a while, with Time running a cover story headlined “Is America Islamophobic?” The actual text of the story acknowledged no evidence to substantiate the charge, but had paragraphs like this:


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Um, Wallis represents the new Christian right?

Jim Wallis has been calling the religious right dead for a while now. I can’t imagine his surprise when he was included in Newsweek‘s new list on “faces of the Christian right.” It is as if the editors at Newsweek are saying, “Ha ha, you thought it was dead, but you’re actually the leader of it — joke’s on you!”


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Rome's Tea Party pioneer?

So, set the way-back machine for about a year ago and remember the early coverage of this movement. The key was that the tea party core, the top leaders, were all about economics, not social issues. Their movement represented a chance for the Religious Right era to come to an end in God’s Own Party, with the drive for theocracy being crushed under a kind of brash grassroots Libertarian assault. The goal was to blend pickup-truck populists with the kind of rich country-club Republicans who went hunting with Dick Cheney.


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