Globe Trot: Will the 'Mobama' love affair help India's Christians?

INDIA: Here’s how the Indian press covered President Barack Obama’s visit this week, one noting the president “could lose roughly six hours from his expected lifespan after spending three days in India’s capital inhaling the world’s most toxic air.” Obama’s courtship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi—dubbed “Mobama” in the local press—wasn’t lost on Christians, who started a hotline to record the increased harassment they face under Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.

President Obama did give a speech with pointed references to the need to preserve religious freedom under India’s constitution. Side note: Indian press duly highlighted Obama’s references to religious freedom, while Western press referenced his emphasis on “religious tolerance” (a phrase not used in Obama’s speech), gender equality, and climate change.

Two Afghan Christian refugees, jailed in New Delhi since last September without charges, have been freed. We’ve been following the case but agreed not to report on it while they awaited a court decree.

IRAQ: A video clip shows the Hezbollah Brigades, an Iranian-backed militia fighting the Islamic State, transporting American heavy weaponry—including an M1 tank. In the ongoing game of “the friend of my enemy is my … ?” it’s unclear whether Hezbollah acquired the armaments from the Iraqi army or from captured ISIS militants.

SYRIA: Kurds from Kobane are returning after Kurdish forces, with air support from the United States and its allies, forced ISIS from the strategic border town that came under the militants’ control late last year.

GREECE: The new leftist, anti-austerity government is immediately notable for shedding suits in favor of open-collar shirts—and Yanis Varoufakis, the University of Athens professor who today took over as Minister of Finance, is the man to watch.

BRITAIN’s just-opened inquiry into the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko already shows the former KGB officer turned MI6 agent may have been poisoned not once, but twice. For background, WORLD covered the suspicious (and panic-inducing) circumstances surrounding Litvinenko’s death—due to radiation poisoning by polonium-210, a highly rare and lethal element.

POLAND: For today’s 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, 300 Holocaust survivors from the infamous German death camp were on hand—including twins selected as children for unspeakable experimentation by SS commander Josef Mengele.