Consider the events GlobalPost correspondents reported just this week:

In Indonesia, Peter Gelling provided authoritative coverage of the country’s elite counter-terrorism force killing Noordin Top, the leader of Indonesia’s answer to Al Qaeda.

In Somalia, six US attack helicopters swept over a convoy of the Al Qaeda-inspired Al Shabaab fighters and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a leader who has long been wanted by the US in connection with the 1998 attack two US embassies in East Africa. GlobalPost correspondent Tristan McConnell reported from Kenya on how the attacks reveal a dramatic shift in US policy to confront Al Qaeda in the failed state of Somalia.

In Yemen, GlobalPost’s Laura Kasinof reported on the air strikes that killed scores of civilians fleeing fighting in Northern Yemen where the government forces appear to be succumbing to American pressure to step up the fight against “an increasingly active branch of Al Qaeda in the country,” as she wrote.

The US intelligence community is buzzing about evidence emerging over the summer that Al Qaeda leaders are gathering in Somalia and Yemen and trying to establish a new nexus for operations after Pakistan’s military finally stepped up the pressure on Al Qaeda in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

CIA director Leon E. Panetta publicly revealed this in briefings over the summer.

An early warning about this came from Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke at the Brookings Institute in the late spring, saying, “I am very worried about growing safe havens in both Somalia and Yemen, specifically because we have seen Al Qaeda leadership, some leaders, start to flow to Yemen.”

The concentration of violent jihadist campaigns in Yemen and Somalia illustrate that Al Qaeda is a movement not an organization, and the fact that they are scrambling to move base and being hit even as they do so is a sign that they are greatly weakened now eight years after the September 11th attacks.

And yesterday, opening day for the Red Sox, represents a kind of religious holiday in this baseball-obsessed town. One of the high priests of the temple is David Ortiz, “Big Papi.” He is one of the greatest home-run hitters in the game and like approximately 10 percent of the players in Major League Baseball he hails from the Dominican Republic. The tiny Caribbean nation has developed a booming export market for baseball talent.

And so in celebration of opening day, GlobalPost began a continuing series titled “Dominican Dreams: El Barrio to the Big Leagues.” It is GroundTruth on the desperate race by teenage talent to make it out of the poverty of the Dominican Republican to win a coveted spot in the baseball academies where the lucky and the talented will be groomed for a lucrative contract in Major League Baseball. Follow the characters in the series — the talented recruit, the hard-ball agent, the corporate brokers for MLB — all through the summer on the chase for the Dominican Dream. The series is written and produced by the very talented documentary team of Casey Beck and Trevor Martin.

Caryle Murphy’s piece out of Afghanistan

We have stories from Italy and India and Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Jean MacKenzie’s piece out of Afghanistan offers readers a chance to glimpse life behind the veil and outside the parameters of war and politics. She has four beautifully written vignettes of Love in the time of the Taliban.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

The global economic crisis is the story. And it will be the story for years to come.

By every estimate, we are only seeing the beginning of an historic downturn in the global economy.
And so GlobalPost assigned 20 correspondents to write on the 20 countries in which they live to assess the extent of the damage.

It is ground truth on the global economic crisis.

The project was headed up by GlobalPost’s Thomas Mucha, our Managing Editor for Correspondents and Commerce columnist. His keen insights into the economy and his profound understanding of how to unearth the truths we need to know are right there in every word of this project. Think of the country-by-country graphic as a navigation tool for you to use to get your head around the enormity of what we are facing.

But Israel voiced a nearly unanimous agreement that the punishing military offensive in Gaza was the right thing to do.

Now as the real votes are counted in Israel’s national parliamentary election, it’s results are more mixed and more nuanced.

Until a government is formed, it’s hard to see what this pivotal election will mean for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the struggle to reassemble a peace process that lies buried under the rubble in Gaza.

It looks like the current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is ahead in the early returns.

But it remained very unclear as to whether Livini’s party would have enough seats in the Knesset to put together a government. And most analysts put their money on the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu as the candidate most likely to build the coalition that will land him back in the Prime Minister’s office.

The king maker in all this might well be the far-right Israeli nationalist and former minister Avigdor Liberman who is widely viewed among Israeli Arabs and many left leaning Israeli Jews as a seething anti-Arab racist.

Nadav Tamir, the Israeli Consul General for New England, came by GlobalPost headquarters here in Boston today and we spent the late morning discussing the election and what it all means. Tamir is a wise observer and a very skilled diplomat who avoids talking the raw math of politics. But he offered these observations:

“Right now the fear in Israel is very real … Israelis saw that incremental steps in the peace process did not work. They saw that a bold approach only created the intifada. A unilateral pullout from Gaza also failed. … So there is fear of what to do next. And when there is fear, Israel usually turns to the right,” he said.

“Eighty percent of Israelis see a two state solution as the only way to go in the future,” he said. “But the problem is they don’t know how to get there. As Shimon Peres said recently, “There is light at the end, but there is no tunnel.”

It was there that he came of age as Joseph Ratzinger and served in Hitler Youth during the rise of the Third Reich.

Shining a light on that history offers a glimpse of the context underpinning the Vatican’s current crisis, which results from the pope’s decision last month to rescind the excommunication of a renegade, ultra-conservative bishop who actively denies the Holocaust.

The decision unleashed a firestorm of controversy, with the German government weighing in last week, Israel’s chief rabbinate severing ties with the Vatican, and Catholics and Jews worldwide feeling that decades of hard work and goodwill in improving relations between the two faiths had been undermined.

So can we draw a line from this oversight by the pope, this inability to see how much his decision would insult so many, back to his German past and a decision as a 14-year-old boy to join the Hitler Youth?

Most thoughtful Catholics and many Jewish historians I know would say, no, that is not a line that can be drawn, nor is it fair.

But one man who knows some of the hidden truths in the pope’s hometown of Traunstein is Father Rupert Berger, and his story deserves telling.

Berger, now 81, was ordained a Catholic priest alongside Joseph Ratzinger and his brother, Georg, in 1951 in the beautiful church in the center of the town where they all grew up together.
But there was something that set their two families apart.

Berger’s family sympathized with the Catholic resistance to Nazism in the town. Rupert was the same age as Joseph Ratzinger and at 14 years old he refused to join Hitler Youth. His family suffered as a result. He told me in an interview in 2005 that his father was sent to Dachau. He returned after the war and became the mayor.

Ratzinger’s father was a policeman. The family was never affiliated with the Nazi party. But the Ratzingers chose to go with the vast majority of Germany and acquiesce to the regulations requiring 14 year olds to join Hitler Youth. They wanted to survive and allow their two sons to focus on academics in the seminary. So Ratzinger and his brother joined at 14 and went through with the parades and the salutes to the Fuehrer. Ratzinger also served briefly with a German army anti-aircraft unit just before the end of the war.

When I interviewed Berger in April 2005, just after Ratzinger had been elevated to the papacy, he spoke well of Ratzinger’s intellect and discipline as a young man. But he said he couldn’t understand why Ratzinger had insisted for so long in so many public statements that no one had a choice but to join Hitler Youth.

”It was a hard time to live, and there were hard choices to make,” Berger said.

He was too modest or polite, or perhaps uncertain about what to tell a reporter who landed on his doorstep, to state his opinion about the new pope’s choices any more clearly.

But what I took away from the interview and my research in the town was that the pope’s repeated assertion that he had no choice but to join Hitler Youth was simply not true.

In fact, the statement is an insult to the memory and the lives of those who did resist Nazism and those who did refuse to join the organizations that were formed to perpetuate its power.
The pope’s poorly-thought-out edict to reinstate the Holocaust-denying bishop — from which the Vatican is now vigorously back peddling — was also an insult to those who resisted Nazism and to Jews and Catholics alike around the world.

At the end of the day, it shouldn’t surprise us that this pope overlooked — or failed to adequately investigate — the dangerous and virulent strains of anti-Semitism that ran through British Bishop Richard Williamson’s research that denied the Holocaust.

Nor should it surprise us that the pope failed to give careful enough consideration to what lies behind the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, which refuses to adhere to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, including an important theological rejection of the idea of collective guilt on the part of Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus.

Pope John Paul II had excommunicated Williamson and three other bishops from the Society of St. Pius X in 1988. On Jan. 21, Pope Benedict rescinded that excommunication and later claimed he was not aware of Williamson’s Holocaust denial.

It shouldn’t surprise us that this pope rescinded the excommunication without sufficient attention to how such an act would be received, because it fits in with a lack of transparency and communication that is turning out to be a hallmark of Benedict’s papacy.

Even Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, who worked closely with Ratzinger and who was a very strong supporter of the conclave that elected Benedict, said: “There must be also a certain criticism of the Vatican’s staff practice, which obviously did not examine the matter carefully.”

John Allen, a columnist for National Catholic Reporter and the author of a biography of the pope, said that Schonborn’s statement was significant because “even papal loyalists are coming to see that the meltdown illustrates a twin failure in transparency: One within the Vatican itself, in the sense that the proper people were not consulted, and the other in communication with the outside world.”

To deny the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, and yesterday German Chancelor Angela Merkel discussed the issue with the pope directly.

After the German government demanded on Feb. 3 that the Vatican reconsider its position, the Vatican issued a statement Feb. 4 that Williamson must recant his denial of the Holocaust before he can be admitted into the Roman Catholic Church as a bishop. Williamson has refused to do that and now remains in limbo and leaves the Vatican in a moral twilight on the issue.

Jason Berry, an author of several books on the Catholic church and the producer of the acclaimed documentary Vows of Silence, believes it is unfair to think Ratzinger as a young boy could have resisted joining the Hitler Youth.

He believes the current crisis points more to a lack of leadership, saying, “Ratzinger is not being true to his position as a moral fundamentalist; he should have excommunicated Williamson when this news broke. Instead this lame response of asking him to retract is a day late and a dollar short.”

There’s wide agreement that this much is true.

But there is still the larger question as to whether this failure of judgment on some level mirrors the way in which this pope as a young man and his family found a way to shut out the enormity of the evil of Nazism and instead focus on his own internal world of intellectual intensity and the passion that he holds for the well being of his church.

When I interviewed Father Berger in 2005, it was just days after the white puff of smoke emanated from the Vatican and confirmed that Ratzinger had been elevated to the papacy.

When he came to the door, he was holding a broom. Father Berger stood in the doorway and occasionally dragged the broom back and forth while we stood there talking. He remembered much of the detail of those early teenage years when he and Joseph Ratzinger were confirmed as Catholics and when he rejected Hitler Youth and he saw his classmate accept membership.

When I asked him why he thought Ratzinger obeyed the rules and joined the Hitler Youth, Berger replied: ”You could ask the majority of Germans this question. There was such high pressure on everyone. He was too young to do a conscious resistance.”

That was certainly true then, but it is certainly not true now.

And for this German pope, a more clear act of “conscious resistance” to denying the Holocaust is now required. He should immediately excommunicate Williamson again and end the ambiguity.

This pope has a unique teaching moment in which he can openly discuss how he feels about his own moral failings as a young man in not challenging the enormity of evil that was Nazism. And he can speak out about the need to remember accurately just how evil Nazism and the Holocaust was, and remind us all of the need to reject anyone who wants to deny the historical record that documents that evil.

Pierre Vimont, French Ambassador to the United States, sat down with GlobalPost this week to talk about the global economic crisis, President Barack Obama’s dramatic shift in U.S. policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan and what the future holds for U.S.-French relations.

In a week in which French labor unions held strikes across the country to protest the way working people are bearing the burden of the financial crisis, Vimont articulated the French view on what is meant by President Sarkozy’s desire for the “reform” of capitalism.

“By reform we are talking about more accountability. We should allow for an entrepreneur to succeed but if an entrepreneur fails he should not take bonuses or retain salary. President Sarkozy has been very outspoken on this,” said Vimont.

Another aspect of correcting the global economy, Vimont said, will have to include “more coordination internationally, particularly with emerging economies.”

“We need much more participation from Brazil, India, and other emerging economies. We have to find a way for them to have more of a voice,” he said.

“If we don’t show to people a coherence in our principals then the French people will lose faith in the system,” he explained, speaking directly to a global sense of unrest amid the dramatic downturn in the economy.

Vimont is a career diplomat who was appointed U.S. ambassador by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 when the new French president began a distinctly warm tone toward America and President Bush.

So where will U.S.-French relations stand now with the new administration of President Barack Obama?

“We were working very closely with America before in many ways. And with President Obama relations will improve even more,” said Vimont.

He said he welcomed the “excellent choice” of Sen. George Mitchell as U.S. special envoy to the Middle East and believed President Obama’s announcement that Guantanamo would be closed within a year was “something the world applauds.”

He was asked about the fraying of relations between the U.S. and France in the run up to the war in Iraq. That unique moment in history when French fries became Freedom fries, French wine sales plummeted and Bart Simpson coined the moniker “Cheese-eating, surrender monkey.”

At that time in 2003 and 2004, Vimont was serving as the chief of staff to then-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, the silver haired Gaul who, to Americans, embodied French arrogance.

Given just how costly in terms of human lives and dollars the U.S.-led war in Iraq has been for all those involved, it would be so easy for the French to say they told America so.

But you would never hear that from Vimont. Not only because he is a seasoned diplomat, but because he has a distinctly down-to-earth, almost humble and I would even dare to say un-French bearing about him.

“There is a passionate relationship between our two countries. When we disagree it causes great anger. … I think it comes from a closeness. It is something very special, but at the same time we like to be critical, no?” said Vimont with a slight smile.

And so today will mark the first truly global inauguration with an estimated 2 to 3 billion people turning their eyes to witness how Obama will capture this moment — more viewers than any World Cup, or Super Bowl, or Olympics or any other event in the history of television.

The world will tune in to hear what words he might choose to begin a presidency that sets out to restore not only the “hope” that Obama spoke of for Americans, but the hope the whole world holds that America might live up to its greatest ideals.

It is a moment that comes with high expectations that Obama can indeed change or “reboot,” as he put it, the way America deals with the world. And there are many observers who believe these expectations for change — from climate change to controlling AIDS in Africa, from terrorism to tariffs on trade — will be virtually impossible for the new president to live up to.

To gauge those expectations, GlobalPost’s 65 correspondents in some 45 countries have set out in this series “For Which It Stands” to listen to people in the countries they cover and to document what this day means for them.

And, based on their reporting, it seems every corner of the earth feels a connection to the new president in a way they have never connected to an American president before.

People across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe all feel Obama is one of their own. And in so many ways, he is.

In Ireland, relations from the village of Monegal on his mother’s side have transformed the spelling of his name to O’Bama and a catchy, new Irish song proclaims, “There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama!”

In Kenya, the country proclaimed a national holiday when he was elected and his extended family is being treated akin to royalty. His paternal step-grandmother, “Granny” Sarah Onyango Obama, 87, will be at the inaugural in the full traditional dress of the Luo tribe. Back home cousins and distant cousins in a small village called Kogelo all claim a connection to the First Family.

In the Arab world, Obama’s Muslim middle name has become the basis for a term of endearment. They call him “Abu Hussein,” a moniker which would roughly translate as “Papa Handsome.”

In Indonesia, school kids giggle with glee before television cameras there to record the same classroom where the next president once sat as a school child and took his lessons in the Koran just as they do now.

In Venezuela, there is a new name for a cup of black coffee mixed with cream, the “Obama.” Such a remark might smack of racism in another country. But in Venezuela, a place of many races and a sophisticated understanding of shades of white, black and brown, it is meant as a compliment to the president, an assertion that he is a kindred soul for Venezuelans.

And yes, in Kansas they celebrate Obama as a native son as well.

His American grounding in Kansas seems almost secondary to his experience in the world.

When Obama is sworn in today, millions of Americans will watch, but the event will be viewed via satellite dishes in small villages in Kenya, on static-filled televisions in crowded alleys in Jakarta, in cafes across Europe and in the sprawling apartment blocks of Beijing.

The world looks on at this event with some sense of what would have to be called envy.

At least that was a theme that came through the powerful reporting of our correspondents who asked one question in the countries where they live: What does the idea of America mean to the world?

Gershom Gorenberg, writing from Jerusalem, wrote how Israelis and Palestinians —once again locked in a brutal conflict — look at the United States on this day with a jealous recognition that America knows how to write its own history. America can redefine itself anew, and Gorenberg wrote how Israelis and Palestinians can only look on and wonder why they cannot seem to do the same.

A similar sentiment — for very different reasons — was also heard among the youth of Italy. Our correspondent Angelica Marin found them longing for a political process that might engage them in the way American youth were in electing Obama, and that they, too, might transform their political landscape in a new way.

Even in France our Paris correspondent Mildrade Cherfils found her neighbors pondering the issue of race in a way they never had before, and it’s not often that the French offer a self-effacing moment of recognition to America for living up to its promise of equality.

In Africa, there is unbridled faith that a president whose father hails from Kenya will embrace the desperate need to not just continue but enhance funding to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar), which was started by President George W. Bush.

In the Middle East, the Arab street holds out hope that a president whose middle name is Arabic and who was clearly opposed to the war in Iraq might finally establish a reputation for America as an even-handed broker in the region and help bring about a lasting and just peace for the Palestinians and Israelis.

But at the end of the day, Obama is the president of the United States, not the world. And that reality will inevitably confront him very soon.

It will no doubt be an extraordinarily difficult task for this administration to manage down the expectations the world holds for Obama.

With an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression, he may not be able to fund Pepfar at the levels that President Bush has proposed.

With a need to turn his attention to Afghanistan and begin his promised draw down of troops in Iraq, it is not certain that he will be able to focus his diplomatic efforts on the boiling tensions of the Israelis and Palestinians anytime soon.

The domestic needs for energy may undercut his promises to address global concerns on climate change.

And so these questions loom large before Obama as he enters the Oval Office: If he truly is the first global president, will his worldwide constituents be patient with his promise for change? And will he ever be able to live up to all that the world expects from the United States of America?

Our correspondents are closer relations in the family. And we decided to brand our correspondents’ blogs as “Reporter’s Notebook” because we believe they are a chance to glimpse inside the daily scribblings of a journalist who is well trained and talented and edited and living in a far-off corner of the world where they want to share what they know.

So please be sure to check out Jason Overdorf in India and Patrick Winn in Thailand and Royal Ford in his world auto beat called “Wheels” and Seth Kugel in Brazil. Each of these correspondents has been great at contributing to their Notebooks and offering the kind of writing and GroundTruth that you won’t see anywhere else. You can always get to a “Reporter’s Notebook” by clicking on the correspondents name or picture which will take you to their bio page where their Notebook resides. You can also call up any correspondent’s bio through the navigation bar. Let them know what you think. Start the conversation.

We are a work in progress and there are definitely going to be places where we can improve. We value your input and feedback. Please let me know how you think the site is working and what we can do better.

Our goal at GlobalPost is to tell great stories from all over the world.













And in the lead up to the Jan. 20th inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, we are organizing our storytelling around a single question: What does the idea of America mean to the world? The special project is called “For Which It Stands.”

We wanted to find stories in every corner of the globe at a time when new leadership is setting out — at least in the resonant speeches of the campaign — to redefine or “reboot,” as Obama put it, America’s relationship with the world. We do not believe in partisan journalism and we vow to be as tough and fair in our reporting on this president as any other. But we do believe this is a moment in our country that transcends party politics and offers an opportunity for America to engage with the world in a new way. We very much want to be a news organization that taps into that new energy in this new administration.

So please go to the guide to our series For Which It Stands to navigate all of the great stories and multimedia that make up the series. There are more than 50 stories reported by more than 40 reporters as well as a handful of photographers, videographers and multi-media producers.

Today, you will see a lyrical and poignant photo essay accompanied by a strong piece of writing by a friend and colleague, Seamus Murphy. It is titled Seeing America: From Kennedy to Obama and I invite you to see and read his work. He is an extraordinary storyteller. I also hope you have time to read Matt McAllester’s piece on Guantanamo about the former guard and former prisoner who are coming together to try to find some common ground in their anger over what happened there. Matt is also a friend and colleague and an incredibly talented and principled reporter. And there is HDS Greenway comparing Obama to Wilson; Joshua Hammer in Berlin on Kennedy, Reagan and Obama and the historic speeches they made there; Royal Ford introducing his new column Wheels or Jack Farrell on foreign policy in Washington. There are also guest writers including NPR’s acclaimed reporter Deb Amos and the brilliant Israeli author Gershom Gorenberg. The list is just too long. But the guide will serve you well in finding out what’s there, so please use it.

One of the more engaging multimedia stories that I hope you will see has a back story that involves Johnny Cash and I think captures the spirit of GlobalPost. You see, we at GlobalPost want to be the Johnny Cash of international news.

I was joking with a few friends back in the summer about that. Off the cuff, I said how we wanted to be like The Man in Black telling stories in the world that are honest and true and that come from the street and have an ear for the music of America.

But what I didn’t realize then was that there was a great story teller out there named Greg Warner who was playing Johnny Cash on his accordion in Afghanistan. Someone sent me a YouTube video of his performance of “Ring of Fire” in Mazar-e-Sharif and it was a good laugh. But then I heard one of his reports from the Congo on NPR and I immediately called him and now he is doing a few multimedia columns for us. He is on his way to Kenya now.

One of his columns is about his “Accordion Journey” as he calls it through Afghanistan. It’s the kind of story telling we want to do at GlobalPost. And since today is the 50th Anniversary of the release of the Folsom Prison Blues single and the 40th anniversary of his concert inside the prison. I thought it was fitting to do a shout out and invite you to watch the video which has a great tribute to Johnny at the end. It even had a public viewing tonight at the “Cash Bash” at the Milky Way Lounge in Jamaica Plain, Boston in a night celebrating “the Man in Black.”