Globe Trot: Cyclone Phailin kills few but displaces thousands

NDIA: U.S. headlines proclaim Cyclone Phailin a “disaster averted” due to its low death toll. But Gospel for Asia has completed a tour of the affected area, and found 500,000 people homeless and many in desperate need.

AFGHANISTAN: A bomb hidden inside a Quran killed the governor of Logar Province in Afghanistan as he spoke in a mosque. Initial reports said the bomb was hidden inside a microphone.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a close friend of Arsala Jamal, the governor, condemned his assassination, and blamed the Taliban for the incident: “These attacks, which the Taliban do in the name of Islam, cause death and injury to innocent Muslims, and cannot be the work of Muslims, but rather those who have been assigned to kill Muslims.”

MIDDLE EAST: The Chaldean patriarch of Iraq, Louis Sako, says an international forum is needed to discuss the situation for Christians in the Middle East. He also says, “The West should not encourage Christians to leave the region.”

BURMA: The homemade bomb that exploded in one of Yangon’s ritziest hotels on Monday was hidden in the bathroom where an American family was staying. The bombing badly wounded an American tourist but there were no casualties. No one has taken responsibility for the explosion.

BRITAIN: Eleanor Catton, 28, is the youngest person to win Britain’s Man Booker Prize for fiction. The 848-page novel The Luminaries by the Canadian-born, New Zealand-raised Catton is also the longest work to receive the award.