The Egyptian Health Ministry is slaughtering pigs in Cairo's Mokattam slum, in a precaution against swine flu. No cases, suspected or otherwise, triggered the crackdown, other than general pandemic fears these days.

The authorities are being met with rioters, who say they're having their livelihood taken away. Mokattam Slum, of course, has a lengthy relationship with Urbana.org: several Global Urban Treks have spent the summer there.

Scott Bessenecker writes of pig butchers in Mokattam here.

Mokattam is a Christian slum. 250,000 mostly-Coptic Christians live there, having been segregated away over the centuries by the authorities. (These are, Philip Jenkins has recently reminded us, some of the oldest Christians in the world.) So we can't understand this story without keeping in mind the religious angle.

Anyway, here's the Beeb, who barely mention religion:

I’ve always been a secret fan of big diplomatic events like the G-20 summit in London. Perhaps it’s a nerdy version of the World Cup, including needy divas, loose cannons, and people in the streets.

But it’s also important. The leaders of the 20 leading economic powers will be looking at ending the global recession and fixing the creaking mechanisms of global finance. Hugely significant ideas are on the table, from re-doing global regulatory structures, to replacing the dollar as the global reserve. This is no mere circus.

Al Jazeera English has a decent 2:43 breakdown of the issues, players, and tensions in the G-20 summit, which has begun today:

Patriotism is, Jorge Borges said, the “least discerning of passions.” People don’t appreciate uncertainty in matters of love of country.

That’s the problem with Martin Luther King Day. A national holiday in the US, it celebrates a man who had anything but a simple relationship with his country. He also had a moving set of opinions: over the course of his 13-year public career, he incurred the hostility, not just of racists, but also of racially-oriented (at least in the 1960s) organizations like the NAACP (who resented King’s advocacy of people outside the African-American community—including Vietnamese peasants and white poor).

He also treaded dangerously close to treason, as when he requested the United Nations pressure the US to end the Vietnam War. That’s not conduct becoming a national hero, of course, so the only way we can celebrate King at the level of government, is to focus on less controversial moments, like dreaming that his children would be judged by the content of their characters.

MLK Day, then, really forces us to cut away some of MLK’s more interesting moments. While I don’t agree with King that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” is my own Government, neither do I believe, with John McCain, that the US is the "greatest force for good in the history of the world."

Neither statement is accurate enough.

I also don’t agree with King’s political stunt at the UN, but I would like King to be more fully known than as the dreamer.

Here, then, are a few of King’s quotes I’ve put together, along with a newsreel from the United Nations rally.

I’d love to hear your opinions. Because it does King’s memory no good to pretend he was simple patriot; nor does it serve our country to ignore his full message.