Globe Trot: Obama to send more troops to help Iraq fight ISIS

IRAQ: The Obama administration will send “up to 450” more troops to Iraq’s Anbar Province to boost training of local forces against ISIS. Inside the Pentagon, “strategists are scrambling to assess whether there is any viable plan of action still available to the U.S.,” according to Orient Advisory Group. Keep in mind, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was our man, after we decided former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had been our man, was no longer our man.

EGYPT: A foiled terrorist attack on the Karnak temple in Luxor ended with the deaths of two attackers and injuries to four Egyptians. In 1997, militants killed 60 people nearby in the largest terrorist attack in Egypt to date.

EUROPE: Impressively experimental new churches are appearing in European cityscapes at a time when Christian observance is at an all-time low.

IRELAND: Mathew Parris’ commentary in The Spectator following Ireland’s vote to legalize same-sex marriage is a pithy pronouncement on the church, coming from a gay atheist, and pertains to America as the church dominoes begin to fall:

“Even as a (gay) atheist, I wince to see the philosophical mess that religious conservatives are making of their case. Is there nobody of any intellectual stature left in our English church, or the Roman church, to frame the argument against Christianity’s slide into just going with the flow of social and cultural change?”

SUDAN: The two pastors awaiting a June 15 trial over criminal charges stemming from their preaching have been moved to a high-security prison in Khartoum and denied visitors.

HAITI: Those six housing units built by the American Red Cross with the $488 million it raised for relief following Haiti’s 2010 earthquake were actually built by a Christian housing charity, The Fuller Center.

CORRECTION: Following the lead of The New York Times and other sources, I erroneously reported that the owner of Triple Crown winner American Pharaoh, Ahmed Zayat, was “a Muslim who claims to be Jewish.” On good authority from sources in California who know the Zayat family, he is from an Egyptian Jewish family and has always been an Orthodox Jew. He is married to an Orthodox Jewish American. He has never been a Muslim.