Globe Trot: Boko Haram kills 32 with Nigerian marketplace blast

Name: WORLD
Price range: $

NIGERIA: A blast at a street market in Yola has killed 32 and injured more than 80. “The bomber enticed children to gather around him for money and he then detonated his bomb,” Mark Lipdo of Stefanos Foundation told me. Suspected members of Boko Haram have killed about 1,000 people since President Muhammadu Buhari took office in May.

SYRIAN REFUGEES: Federally designated refugee resettlement agencies in the United States are largely Christian-based, and yesterday they spoke out about their concern over state governors trying to refuse entry to Syrian refugees. Linda Hartke, president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, called the governors’ response “small-minded panic.”

By the numbers: While President Barack Obama first raised panic by saying the United States would take in 10,000 Syrian refugees in the coming year, in the last three years (with a similar quota) the United States has taken in 1,900 Syrian refugees—about 650 per year, which would translate into mere dozens or a few hundred per state refusing them. It’s unlikely this administration will do more. If our system is so incompetent it can’t vet a few hundred refugees per state, we have more problems than accepting Syrians. What would be constructive: Congress and the executive branch could set up a vetting process apart from the UN system, as the U.S. used to follow its own rules in the past. The Obama administration, with a paltry record of taking in any refugees—good, bad, or otherwise—has moved to relying too much on the UN’s vetting process. At points of entry, like Turkey and even Greece, Syrian refugees are vetted by UN workers who likely are Muslims and may be sympathetic to militant groups. Also constructive: A comprehensive strategy with the European Union to begin turning back refugees and providing safe havens for them in the Middle East until they can be resettled in or near their homes. More to come on that.

FRANCE: By way of recap, two people died in an overnight raid by French police on suspected terrorists in a Paris apartment, one of them a woman who detonated her suicide vest. Two planes bound for Paris from the United States were diverted after bomb threats, and the Germany-Netherlands soccer match was canceled and the stadium evacuated over a bomb threat. Importantly, the two suspects believed key to the planning and execution of Friday’s ISIS attacks on Paris remain at large.

Some non-alarmist historians are seeing the end of Europe as we know it.

“Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged,” wrote Ward-Perkins. “They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”

SINAI: The Islamic State has released a picture of the bomb it says brought down a Russian airliner at Sharm el Sheikh, and the Russians are going out of their way to credit Britain, not the United States, with intel leading to confirmation the plane was blown up.

WHAT YOU’RE READING, MORE … includes a fascinating array of fiction and non-fiction. A sampling includes The Victory Over the Darkness by Neil Anderson, The Search For Significance by Robert S. McGee, Red Notice by Bill Browder, and Miracles by Eric Metaxas.

Mindy Belz

Mindy, a former senior editor for WORLD Magazine, wrote the publication’s first cover story in 1986. She has covered wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Africa, and the Balkans and is author of They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run From ISIS With Persecuted Christians in the Middle East. Mindy resides in Asheville, N.C.

@MindyBelz