not a slow news day in asia!

so, as of this writing, the top story on nytimes.com is about how excited the US basketball team is to compete in the olympics (not really an A1 story on an average day, my friends), the top story on wsj.com is about a somewhat famous private equity investment firm going public (maybe worthy of a front-page headline in a paper's business section), and the WaPo has a piece about theories on the oil spike (certainly interesting and relevant, but not really breaking news).

sure, it's a sunday. but stuff is going down, people! there is news to be reported! get with it, major american newspapers!

let's just look at two really freaking crucial stories that were buried today.

(1) chinese authorities link muslim groups to terrorist bombings; say those groups are planning attacks on the olympics. okay, that one is just a goddamn no-brainer. muslims! terror! bombings! the olympics! where americans will be! americans like the basketball players you seem to care so much about, new york times! and what's more, the chinese government is most likely exaggerating about the attacks, or at least using them to justify the sure-to-be-high levels of repression that are planned for the games. this is pressing stuff! and it's not run-of-the-mill, either: people need to get educated about who the uyghurs are, and what's going down in muslim china.

(2) istanbul blows up. to their credit, the major papers are picking up this story, but obviously not giving it pride of place. look, we're talking about the most populous city in europe (or, if you don't consider it to be part of europe, the third most populous city in the world), a country that is an unstable ally in the iraq war (with its own agenda there), a country with a precarious balance of official secularism and rising religious discontent, a country where kurdish separatists have just recently taken foreign nationals hostage... basically, a powderkeg, and you're talking about sparks being lit in one of its most crowded neighborhoods, then having those sparks linked to kurdish "terrorists." shouldn't we all be getting worried? and not thinking about an american firm known for its buyout strategies?

my point is that it is never, ever a slow news day. any news junkie — or editor of a paper with an international focus — who says it's a slow news day is just not paying attention.