A new government for Iraq

IRAQ gets a new government—and it was worth the wait. In Nineveh Plain, the Knights of Columbus signed an agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development to work together on a planned $195 million recovery program targeting Christian and other communities devastated by ISIS. Since 2014, the Catholic charity has donated $20 million to support displaced Christians in Iraq and compiled a report leading to the 2016 U.S. declaration of genocide in the region. Church-based rebuilding efforts already are underway.

TURKEY: Officials reportedly have shared with U.S. and Saudi officials video and audio recordings, along with passports scans of men they say beat and killed Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi inside the office of the Saudi consul general in Istanbul. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s pledge to “reach conclusive results” should be seen in the light of its own record: Turkey is holding dozens of journalists in a massive crackdown on dissent that over the past week included arresting at least 10 journalists and sentencing one to seven years in jail over work with a pro-Kurdish newspaper. There’s a reason Kashoggi’s family is calling for an international commission to investigate the journalist’s disappearance.

CHINA: Officials once denied existence of “reeducation camps” detaining perhaps as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, but in a move to legalize such “vocational training centers” they have acknowledged the camps, meant to push Uighurs into the “modern, civilized world.”

RUSSIA: At least 13 people, mostly teenagers, were killed and 50 more wounded when an explosive device rocked a high school in Crimea, the peninsula Russia annexed from Ukraine four years ago.

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