Middle East
5:41 pm
Wed December 5, 2012

Israel, Christians Negotiate The Price Of Holy Water

Originally published on Fri December 14, 2012 9:13 am

One of the holiest sites in Christendom has also been one of the most contested. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem lies on the site where Jesus Christ is said to have been crucified and buried.

Multiple Christian denominations share the church uneasily, and clerics sometimes come to blows over the most minor of disputes. The Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox and the Syriac Orthodox all have a presence in the church.

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International Correspondent Anthony Kuhn is currently based in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he opened NPR's first bureau in that country in 2010. From there, he covers Southeast Asia, and the gamut of natural and human diversity stretching from Myanmar to Fiji and Vietnam to Tasmania.

Prior to Jakarta, Kuhn spent five years based in Beijing as a NPR foreign correspondent reporting on China and Northeast Asia. In that time Kuhn covered stories including the affect of China's resurgence on rest of the world, diplomacy and the environment, the ancient cultural traditions that still exert a profound influence in today's China, and the people's quest for social justice in a period of rapid modernization and uneven development. His beat also included such diverse topics as popular theater in Japan and the New York Philharmonic's 2008 musical diplomacy tour to Pyongyang, North Korea.

In 2004-2005, Kuhn was based in London for NPR. He covered stories ranging from the 2005 terrorist attacks on London's transport system to the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. In the spring of 2005, he reported from Iraq on the formation of the post-election interim government.

Kuhn began contributing reports to NPR from China in 1996. During that time, he also worked as an accredited freelance reporter with the Los Angeles Times, and as Beijing correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review.

In what felt to him a previous incarnation, Kuhn once lived on Manhattan's Lower East Side and walked down Broadway to work in Chinatown as a social worker. He majored in French literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He gravitated to China in the early 1980s, studying first at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute and later at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing.

Politics
5:06 pm
Wed December 5, 2012

The Daily Breaks Down McConnell-Judd in Chart Form

Credit TheDaily.com

More to say about the Ashley Judd vs. Mitch McConnell for Senate speculation, which is becoming Kentucky's political version of Pacquiao-Mayweather -- an interesting idea that may never happen.

(You decide who's who. I'm not going there.)

The Daily's blog posted a handy charticle:

Click here to see the whole thing.

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Politics
4:28 pm
Wed December 5, 2012

Kentucky Social Justice Groups Join White House to Avoid Fiscal Cliff

A delegation of activists representing several social justice groups in Kentucky visited the White House on Wednesday for a meeting on how to avoid the fiscal cliff.

The discussion was hosted by President Obama’s director of public engagement, and was organized to build support for his plan that includes raising taxes on the wealthy. Leaders from the Louisville NAACP, Fairness Campaign and Planned Parenthood of Kentucky attended the session, along with a delegation from Tennessee.

ACLU of Kentucky Executive Director Michael Aldridge also attended the meeting. He says going over the fiscal cliff will not only hurt the economy, but would set back civil liberties issues as well.

"When Congress is preoccupied with having to tend these budgetary concerns they’re not taking up a lot of civil liberties issues that we would like them to be focusing on such as immigration reform, which the Obama administration has stressed they’re going to be taking up in the second term," he says. "They’re not going to be able to move forward until they get their fiscal house in order."

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Local News
4:14 pm
Wed December 5, 2012

Pence Names Three to Cabinet Posts

Indiana Governor-elect Mike Pence has announced three cabinet appointments.

All three appointees work in the current administration of Governor Mitch Daniels.

Pence announced today that Ron Wynkoop will continue as commissioner of the Department of Administration and Mike Alley will stay on as commissioner of the Department of Revenue.

Anita Samuel, who has been serving as Daniels’ general counsel, will become director of the Department of Personnel in the Pence Administration.

Pence will be publicly sworn in as Indiana’s next governor on January 14.

Arts and Humanities
4:00 pm
Wed December 5, 2012

A Wide Umbrella: Weber Gallery's Exhibit Awarded NEA Access Grant

Credit Council on Developmental Disabilities
An exhibit at the Weber Gallery.

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Louisville’s Council on Developmental Disabilities a Challenge America Fast-Track grant to help fund a group art exhibit, The Striped Show, in the spring.  The $10,000 grants, which receive an expedited application review, are intended to increase access to the arts for underserved communities. 

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The Two-Way
3:47 pm
Wed December 5, 2012

Activists Tell Damascus Residents To Prepare For The 'Zero Hour'

Credit HOPD / AP/SANA
A Syrian soldier aims his rifle during clashes with rebel forces in the Damascus suburb of Daraya on Sunday. The recent fighting around Damascus has raised fears of a looming battle for control of the capital.

Originally published on Wed December 5, 2012 3:14 pm

The Two-Way
3:46 pm
Wed December 5, 2012

China's Communists Declare War ... On Boring Meetings

Originally published on Wed December 5, 2012 9:14 pm

Suffer from insomnia? The droning rhythm of a Chinese Communist official reading a work report out loud will likely do the trick.

It certainly does for many party members: Just 10 minutes into any party meeting, look down the serried ranks of the attendees, and you'll spot the dozers and snoozers, napping away, heads lolling lazily toward their neighbors.

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Based in Beijing, NPR foreign correspondent Louisa Lim finds China a hugely diverse, vibrant, fascinating place. "Everywhere you look and everyone you talk to has a fascinating story," she notes, adding that she's "spoiled with choices" of stories to cover. In her reports, Lim takes "NPR listeners to places they never knew existed. I want to give them an idea of how China is changing and what that might mean for them."

Lim opened NPR's Shanghai bureau in February 2006, but she's reported for NPR from up Tibetan glaciers and down the shaft of a Shaanxi coalmine. She made a very rare reporting trip to North Korea, covered illegal abortions in Guangxi province, and worked on the major multimedia series on religion in China "New Believers: A Religious Revolution in China." Lim has been part of NPR teams who multiple awards, including the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, a Peabody and two Edward R. Murrow awards, for their coverage of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and the Beijing Olympics. She's been honored in the Human Rights Press Awards, as well as winning prizes for her multimedia work.

In 1995, Lim moved to Hong Kong and worked at the Eastern Express newspaper until its demise six months later and then for TVB Pearl, the local television station. Eventually Lim joined the BBC, working first for five years at the World Service in London, and then as a correspondent at the BBC in Beijing for almost three years.

Lim found her path into journalism after graduating with a degree in Modern Chinese studies from Leeds University in England. She worked as an editor, polisher, and translator at a state-run publishing company in China, a job that helped her strengthen her Chinese. Simultaneously, she began writing for a magazine and soon realized her talents fit perfectly with journalism.

NPR London correspondent Rob Gifford, who previously spent six years reporting from China for NPR, thinks that Lim is uniquely suited for his former post. "Not only does Louisa have a sharp journalistic brain," Gifford says, "but she sees stories from more than one angle, and can often open up a whole new understanding of an issue through her reporting. By listening to Louisa's reports, NPR listeners will certainly get a feel for what 21st century China is like. It is no longer a country of black and white, and the complexity is important, a complexity that you always feel in Louisa's intelligent, nuanced reporting."

Out of all of her reporting, Lim says she most enjoys covering stories that are quirky or slightly offbeat. However, she gravitates towards reporting on arts stories with a deeper significance. For example, early in her tenure at NPR, Lim highlighted a musical on stage in Seoul, South Korea, based on a North Korean prison camp. The play, and Lim's piece, highlighted the ignorance of many South Koreans of the suffering of their northern neighbors.

Married with a son and a daughter, Lim recommends any NPR listeners travelling to Shanghai stop by a branch of her husband's Yunnan restaurant, Southern Barbarian, where they can snack on deep fried bumblebees, a specialty from that part of southwest China. In Beijing, her husband owns and runs what she calls "the first and best fish and chip shop in China", Fish Nation.

Education
3:30 pm
Wed December 5, 2012

Kentucky Education Department Wants Legislators to Try Again to Raise Dropout Age

Credit Wikipedia Commons
duPont Manual High School

Changing the high school dropout age from 16 to 18 is a legislative priority once again for the Kentucky Board of Education. During the board's regular meeting Wednesday, board members approved a legislative agenda for the upcoming session that starts in January.

Previous attempts to change the dropout age have been unsuccessful because of questions about how alternative education programs to help at-risk students would be funded.

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