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Sweet reasonableness and censorship in Jakarta

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The Jakarta Post — Indonesia’s chief English-language newspaper — has run two articles on the conflicts within Islam percolating in Java. The articles give a crisp account of the disturbances amongst the various religious groups; but there appears to have been a sharp swing in the authorial voice between the first and second story. I feel the fell hand of self-censorship at work in these reports.


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Chen Guangcheng and his faithful supporters

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Let’s face it, gentle readers, if I am going to be corrected — something that happens to all of us from time to time — it really helps to be corrected by one of the best in the business. I am referring to Pamela Constable of the foreign desk at The Washington Post.


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Chen Guangcheng, generic activist (corrected)

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Anyone who has been following the news in recent days has almost certainly read numerous stories about the remarkable blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng and his dark-of-night escape from house arrest.


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Fighting forced marriage in Scotland

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I’ve been kind of bummed out with news recently. With all the bloodshed in Nigeria (read this excellent Associated Press report about a pastor who was killed by Muslim extremists as he prepared communion) the bombing in Kabul right after President Obama signed a pact in Afghanistan, what the Chinese government is doing to the family and friends of Chen Guangcheng and all the torture in North Korea, sometimes the news is just hard to handle.


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Did the philanthropy beat disappear?

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You would think major media outlets might have someone focused on philanthropy, a reporter who can read 990s and spot new trends. Instead, The New York Times eliminated the philanthropy beat, one of the last daily newspapers to employ a full-time reporter to cover national nonprofits, according to a piece in the Chronicle of Philanthrophy.


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Ghost in the synagogue foreclosure case

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A story with a strong religious element showed up today in The Baltimore Sun business pages, of all places. This is precisely where this religion-news story should have been, methinks, but this does not mean that the editorial team needed to leave out a few highly relevant religious facts.


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