Globe Trot 11.28

Operation World is a great resource—loaded with demographic information about religious and ethnic groups around the world—but it’s also a daily prayer guide. Today’s prayer focus in the latest (2010) edition is Tuvalu, a tiny string of nine coral atolls in the central Pacific. For geography nerds it has the best capital to pronounce: Funafuti. On the serious side, it has a strong Christian population makeup that faces challenges from offshore corruption, illegal immigrants (how?), poverty, and drought. So pray.

Wondering why airfares to Europe are so high? Watch to see if they will come down now that President Barack Obama has signed into law a bill that exempts U.S. air carriers from European carbon emission fees. The president signed the measure over the objection of environmentalists.

The Pentagon didn’t say too much when China landed its first fighter jet on an aircraft carrier earlier this week. But Navy Secretary Ray Mabus is in Beijing to meet with his counterparts—the first U.S. Navy secretary to visit China in 28 years.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s attempt yesterday to backpedal from a power grab did little to quell protesters in Tahrir Square today and a looming constitutional crisis. Today some courts have shut down in protest of his move to overrule the judiciary.

One Egyptian court today convicted in absentia seven Coptic Christians and a U.S.-based pastor and sentenced them to death on charges linked to an anti-Islam video clip, Innocence of Muslims, that some believe sparked riots in parts of the Muslim world. Already one of the alleged filmmakers, Californian Mark Basseley Youssef, has been jailed in the United States over probation violations.

In Goma, the eastern Congo city overrun by rebels last week, one man’s plea: “I have to ask you—you the international community—why do you keep coming here and just installing idiots to run Congo?”

The conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the longest-running, and oft-overlooked. In eight years more than half-a-million people have been killed. Philip Gourevitch, who reported so compellingly about the Rwandan genocide, is there.