Reporters on the Job

from the October 29, 2007 edition

• YouTube News: Correspondent Yigal Schleifer says that he was struck by the access to a variety of news sources in southeastern Turkey, which is home to a large Kurdish population (see story). In one Internet cafe he visited, Yigal says, a young boy was watching a Youtube scene of PKK guerrillas in the mountains in Iraq. In another cafe, "I noticed the guy next to me had a picture on his screen of eight soldiers drinking tea," Yigal says, a picture Yigal has not seen elsewhere. At the time, the Turkish government was saying that eight soldiers were unaccounted for – not that they were hostages – from an attack by PKK guerrillas. "The guy told me the picture was of the missing soldiers, and that it came from a Kurdish news agency."

"For Turkey, there's certainly a divide to bridge with the southeast. Kurds can now get at sources that glorify the elements the Turks want to get rid of."

Yigal notes it wasn't hard to meet someone who had lost a loved one in earlier fighting between the PKK and Turkish forces. "People are tired of the conflict," he says, "but there is a deep reserve of loyalty, too, for the PKK."

• Go Inside: Ilene Prusher says that she has walked through the Old City in Jerusalem hundreds of times and often passes through the Armenian Quarter.

"I never had reason to go inside the patriarchate's buildings and never visited the community's museum (see story). I felt fortunate to get a tour from Archbishop Aris Shirvanian. The building dates to 1853, he told me, and was once the patriarchate's seminary and the dorm for clergy in training. He pointed out his one-time room."

Eventually, in addition to the genocide monument opening in the quarter next spring, the community would like to build a museum dedicated exclusively to the genocide issue. One thing that might be included: Shirvanian's father, a young survivor of the violence, who Shirvanian says he did a video interview with before he died. It is currently, he says, at an Armenian-American archive in Boston."

– Amelia Newcomb

Deputy World editor

Rat Race: Participants in the charity event scurried along in Hong Kong Sunday. The original Rat Race, organized by the New York Stock Exchange, was started in 1984. Vincent Yu/AP More cultural snapshots

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