ITEMS OF INTEREST February 27, 2006 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

with contributions from Cathleen Falsani, David Ian Miller, Matthew Davies

" 'I CAN'T EVEN LOOK AT THAT, it's too awful,' my editor said, turning her head away from a bank of television monitors and covering her eyes with her hands earlier this week when coverage of a car chase in Houston gave way to photos of Jill Carroll, our 28-year-old colleague from The Christian Science Monitor who was kidnapped January 7 in Iraq....

"I don't know Jill. In fact, I'd never seen her byline or read anything she'd written before last weekend. But she is my sister, my colleague, a fellow idealist who believes that what she writes might have the power to make the world a better place. For someone. For everyone....

"For reasons I won't spend time and space deconstructing right now, sometimes it's easier to feel empathy for someone with whom you share a commonality, be it gender, race, religion, age, culture, or, in this case, vocation.... How must our friends at The Christian Science Monitor be feeling? How would I feel if those were images of Annie or Maudlyne or Lori or Monifa flashing across CNN, Fox News, and Al-Jazeera? What would I do? What could I do?

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