Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Sex, drugs and toxic shrubs: the best reads of March
Cubans indulge baseball mania at Havana’s “Hot Corner”
For all the shouting and nose-to-nose confrontations, visitors to Havana’s Parque Central might think they had walked into a brawl or counter-revolution … but here in the park’s Hot Corner, the topic almost always under discussion is baseball, Cuba’s national obsession.
Iraq’s orphans battle to outgrow abuse
At night, Salah Abbas Hisham wakes up screaming. Sometimes, in the dark, he silently attacks the boy next to him in a tiny Baghdad orphanage where 33 boys sleep on cots or on the floor. Salah, who saw both his parents blown apart in a car bomb, can never be left alone at night.
Colombian soccer club tries to forget cocaine past
Colombian soccer champions America de Cali are first to admit cocaine dollars had a hand in their sporting heyday. But after years of paying the price, they’re trying to wipe the slate clean … Cali’s mayor is leading a campaign to have the team removed from a U.S. anti-drugs blacklist.
Big French press find brand power helps online
In a grimy part of eastern Paris an editorial conference is underway, similar to planning meetings in newsrooms everywhere, except this is being blogged live and readers can join in … The meeting is at Rue89 … one of the interactive sites to have appeared as a global crisis in the press squeezes French newspapers.
Twittering from the front-lines
Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?
It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.
Bono writes op/ed ode to Sinatra
U2 lead singer Bono dropped the mike to take up the pen. 
The Irish rocker’s first opinion column for The New Times appeared on Sunday, and it wasn’t about debt, poverty or Aids in Africa — causes on which he has long been outspoken.
No, his initial incursion onto the op/ed pages is an ode to the Chairman of the Board.
Breaking the news in Mumbai – literally
The concept of a televised war was born in January 1991, when news networks reported live on the missiles slamming into Baghdad and millions watched from the comfort of their living rooms as tracer fire lit the sky above Iraq’s capital. A decade later, the world watched in minute-by-minute horror as the twin towers came crashing down in New York.
Now, with the ferocious militant attacks in Mumbai, we have arrived in “the age of celebrity terrorism“. Paul Cornish of Chatham House argues that apart from killing scores of people, what the Mumbai gunmen wanted was “an exaggerated and preferably extreme reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion”.
