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But if the Times news editors can be faulted for not knowing their religious history, or even reading their own columnists, other newspaper editors who picked up the story deserve some mockery for not reading it before writing a headline. The story is clearly on international human rights, but some editors seem to think it was about the influence of evangelicals on the White House. The San Francisco Chronicle titled the story: Religious coalition walks the corridors of power: Groups an influence on foreign policy of Bush administration, officials say." Wow. That would be even less shocking news. Likewise, the International Herald Tribune heads the story, "Religious lobby finds a good friend in Bush." That paper gets extra bad marks since it's actually owned by the Times.

The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram sees the story as less on evangelicals' influence on Bush than the other way around: "Religious groups give high marks to Bush administration." (Now there's a reusable headline.)

But the award goes to The State of Columbia, South Carolina, which just gave up trying to make sense of the article and went with the jibberish, "Religious groups White House's ear."

Persecution:

• Rebel priests held in Chinese crackdown | Twelve underground Roman Catholic priests and seminarians have been arrested in China in a crackdown prompted by government fears of a religious revival (The Daily Telegraph, London)
  
  
• Also: China arrests a dozen Roman Catholic priests, seminarians | Church demolished, too (AFP)
  
  
• Also: Chinese Catholics 'detained' (BBC)
  
  
• Pastor fatally shot in southern Mexico | Authorities found the body of Mariano Diaz Mendez, a Pentecostal pastor of Indian descent, shot twice inside the car in a roadside ditch in San Juan Chamula, a majority Catholic township (Associated Press)
  
  
• U.S. Senate ties Malaysia aid to religious freedom | The US Senate voted unanimously to tie religious freedom to 1.2 million dollars in military aid to Malaysia, after that country's prime minister sparked a row by claiming Jews rule the world (AFP)
  
  
• Afghanistan weighs use of Islamic laws | A constitutional commission has been laboring over a draft for months, and its much-delayed release is expected in the coming days (Associated Press)
  
  
• Arson attack on church | An 18th Century church organ may have been destroyed after vandals set fire to a 160-year-old church in Shropshire (BBC)
  
  

Abortion:

• The war over abortion moves to a smaller stage | The ban on the procedure that critics call partial-birth abortion may represent a kind of equilibrium in the national conflict over Roe v. Wade (The New York Times)
  
  
• A firefight over abortion | In a dramatic move, Congress votes to ban 'partial birth' procedures, setting the stage for a judicial showdown (Newsweek)
  
  
• Behind an antiabortion victory | By passing a measure that seems likely to be struck down by the current court, social conservatives are increasing pressure on the President to nominate a strongly antiabortion candidate for the next Supreme Court vacancy (Time)
  
  
• Home abortions soar in Iraq as unwanted pregnancies rise | Women in Baghdad are turning to backstreet abortionists to avoid the risk of family honour killings (The Daily Telegraph, London)
  
  
• What's the value of a fetus? | With the Senate's passage last week of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, supporters of abortion rights face an increasingly conspicuous problem: they still don't know how to articulate the value of unborn human life (William Saletan, The New York Times)
  
  

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October (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47