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But women may also have been the majority because the attack took place on Sunday, a working day in Egypt. The primary day of worship for most churches is Friday, the Muslim day of communal prayers.
However, this Sunday was also a national holiday, as Egyptian Muslims celebrated the birthday of Muhammad.
Al Azhar, the leading religious institution in the Sunni Muslim world, condemned the attack.
“Targeting houses of worship and the killing of the innocents are criminal acts that violate Islamic principles,” the Cairo-based institution stated, expressing full solidarity with the Egyptian church and Egyptian Copts.
Egypt has been facing an Islamist insurgency since the 2013 removal of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated President Mohamed Morsi. Retaliatory attacks have damaged or destroyed dozens of churches throughout the country.
But last month, Egypt witnessed calm when a planned protest against economic conditions, supported by the Brotherhood, failed to mobilize the population.
Egypt recently floated its national currency, and the resulting 20 percent inflation is the highest in seven years. The tourism industry has still not recovered since the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai last year.
And two days ago, six policemen were killed when a bomb exploded at a checkpoint in Cairo’s Haram district, on the road toward the Giza pyramids.
Egyptian Christians overwhelmingly support the current government and President Sisi, who as defense minister overthrew Morsi following large-scale popular protests. But some have grown frustrated that sectarian incidents have continued over the past three years, and the state has not responded adequately.
Youssef Sidhom, editor-in-chief of the Coptic newspaper Watani, wrote in a recent op-ed before Sunday’s attacks, “Does this authority … grasp the magnitude of the responsibility it shoulders where the dignity, sovereignty, and clout of the State is concerned?
Sisi has vowed to bring the criminals to justice, but CNN reported that hundreds of protestors gathered outside the Coptic cathedral after the bombing. They called for the resignation of the minister of the interior, and minor scuffles took place with police.
But for now, Egypt and its Christians are in mourning.
Aftermath of Cairo church bombing.Aftermath of Cairo church bombing.Aftermath of Cairo church bombing.Aftermath of Cairo church bombing.
Don’t expect General Motors CEO Dan Akerson to go meekly back to Flyover Country after his resolute defense of the Chevrolet Volt before Congress last week. His appearance will rank as the high-water mark for the car’s critics, not for the car.
While U.S. car buyers remain uninterested at best in all-electric vehicles and only tepid about hybrids, even after they’ve been pushed in their faces for a decade, Volt still makes more street sense than any of the others. It can get better mileage than regular hybrids because it can operate in all-battery mode. Yet Volt has a huge leg up on its competition to date because it vanquishes “range anxiety” with an onboard small engine.
All of that means as gradually higher numbers of consumers inevitably consider the EV proposition — and Millennials certainly will — they’re likely to trust Volt over others because they know they’ll never be marooned.
In the meantime, congressional critics are likely to begin holstering their fire at Volt after yesterday’s hearing. They may or not be correct in saying that Obama administration footdragging since last summer shielded Volt from attention over the fire concerns until late last year, because of the potential political sensitivities around the government’s bailout of GM.
But that’s largely moot now.
Why? Because most Americans don’t care about that allegation, especially without hard evidence. Because most taxpayers have moved far beyond their initial skepticism about the GM and Chrysler bailouts if only because the companies have recovered nicely and the government will regain most of its investment.
And in Midwestern political swing states like Michigan, where manufacturing employment finally is rising again, most voters don’t want to hear that’s a bad thing because in a free market events would have unfolded differently. Even Mitt Romney doesn’t knock the GM bailout anymore.
Critics are right to point out the huge federal tax break of $7,500 that a buyer gets for purchasing a Volt that is priced at a whopping $40,000: Those amount to subsidies of Obama’s clean-energy fixation, directly out of the pockets of taxpayers, at a time when neither individual taxpayers nor the federal government can afford it — not that there would be a good time.
And for justifiable criticism of Obama’s fixation with “green jobs,” critics have much easier targets. Solyndra is still ripe for the knocking.
Instead of setting a wildly optimistic sales goal and not meeting it as GM did last year, and suffering push-back from frustrated dealers, GM executives finally have gotten realistic about just how quickly Americans will warm up to Volt. Akerson has said that Volt production will be adjusted to market demand, and that likely means making and selling a lot fewer of the cars than the 45,000 initially projected sales for 2012.
That’s true in ways most viewers won’t recognize. But it’s one more thing Volt will move past.
Four hundred weeping Poles took to the streets on April 23 in a symbolic funeral parade to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.
The volunteer thespians in full Elizabethan attire, weeping dramatically in Shakespeare's honour, wove through the streets of the city of Gdansk pretending to pull their hair and tear at their clothes in grief.
Dressed in sombre black with their faces painted white, they made their way to the Shakespeare Theatre, an ultra-modern building built on the site where English travelling players performed four centuries ago.
"It was difficult at the beginning to get in the mood, but after a while, when everyone was mourning, crying and shouting, it all came together," mourner Sara Warzynska told AFP.
"You really wanted to let out all your emotions," she added.
Jerzy Limon, director of Gdansk's Shakespeare Theatre, said they had organised the "happening" to contribute to events the world over marking the death of the great British playwright.
Some 10,000 people turned out for a parade in Shakespeare's birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, while famous actors including Judi Dench and Ian McKellen were set to perform some of his most loved works.
"What makes me happy is that the theatre has gone out onto the street," said Limon.
Rail passengers are facing delays after a vehicle struck a bridge in Southwick.
Traffic reports say the vehicle struck the bridge between the A259 Brighton Road and Saint Julian’s Lane.
Kingston Lane is reportedly partially blocked northbound.
Sensors also suggest that traffic is able to pass the lorry, which is wedged under the bridge.
Southern has said on Twitter that services between Brighton and Worthing are running at a reduced speed.
Benjamin Black of Sycamore is escorted into Kane County Judge James Hallock's courtroom in Geneva, Ill., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013. Black is accused of having opiates in his system during a crash that killed 11-year-old Matthew Ranken of Sycamore and severely injured Teale Noble, 18, of Sycamore. Black was driving a Ford Expedition that smashed into the back of a Chevrolet Cavalier carrying the two, causing a crash that involved two other vehicles, police said. Ranken and Noble were passengers in the vehicle, which was stopped in traffic along Route 64 in Kane County.
The personal information for almost 4,300 patients at Mass General was exposed when a hospital vendor’s database was hacked earlier this year.
The hospital said in a statement it learned of the third-party vendor’s data breach, which included access to patient Social Security numbers and birthdays, in early February. Law enforcement investigators required patient and public notification of the incident be delayed while the investigation was conducted, according to the hospital.
“This incident did not involve any unauthorized access to any of MGH’s systems or to any files maintained by MGH,” the hospital said.
With permission of investigators, the hospital said it began notifying patients on May 26, mailing letters to affected individuals on June 29.
Following the hack, Mass General said the third-party vendor, Patterson DEntal Supply Inc., enhanced security of its systems. The vendor manages dental practice information for the hospital.
“We regret any inconvenience caused by this incident,” the hospital said.
A number of readers of my novel Mexico Way , published a couple of months ago by Chronicles Press, apparently expected to find in it a portrait of Mexico at odds with the Mexico the book presents.
I can't blame them. The Mexico of Mexico Way is a hard irreducible place, at once harshly real and hauntingly sympathetic. Those who have read my reports from south of the border in Chronicles will not be surprised by my treatment of the country and its people in the novel. But people familiar only with my writing on the immigration issue may be struck between what might seem a clear discontinuity between the attitudes toward Mexicans and Mexico suggested in Mexico Way and those directly expressed in my political articles and in my book criticizing immigration policy, The Immigration Mystique .
This confusion, though understandable, suggests a failure to appreciate the distinctions between the literary and political, or the imaginative and rhetorical. As a traveler and a novelist, I have quite different responses to Mexico than I do in my capacity as a U.S. citizen and journalist confronted with the critical issue of Mexican immigration.
I personally see no contradiction here. Advocates of immigration restriction are regularly attacked for being "anti-immigrant", "anti-Mexican", and "racist". Of course, there is no connection, except in the minds of cynical ethnic politicians and liberal ideologues. The fact that I do not wish to see my country overrun by an alien people from the south does not mean that I am "against" them, or anybody.
Truth be told, I have a fondness for Mexico and Mexicans, and have had for at least as long as I have been writing on the subject of Mexican immigration. Indeed, there is much in Mexican society and its people that I find superior to modern American society and to modern Americans.
Among them is that existential quality of irreducible reality, of an unflinching recognition of the human condition in respect of its relation to both the natural and the supernatural worlds, that we Americans too once had, but have since lost. It is this quality that I've attempted to realize in my book—preceded of course by such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Graham Greene, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Charles Bowden, and Cormac McCarthy.
Mexico Way recounts the grueling adventures of a naïve and sheltered white-bread American male who arrives at a belated coming-of-age through a terrifying ordeal that exposes him, in his quest for physical survival, not only to the rigors of nature, but also to the existence of the power of evil—and of good. [Read Chapter One here.] On another level, the novel is a billet doux addressed to the people of Mexico.
It is by no means, however, an apology for my views regarding Mexican immigration. The two attitudes are entirely separate, and need to be understood as such.
Sixty-five miles south of Tucson, the two Nogaleses—Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora—are exotic and interesting communities. Also, they are one of the chief regional gateways to northern Mexico. And so I spent a good deal of time that winter of '93 poking around down there—which is how the idea of a story about a U.S. Customs Inspector kidnapped into Mexico by drug smugglers after double-crossing them on a drug deal he'd entered into with them occurred to me.
Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay Mexico is that going there makes me want to write. So Mexico Way came to be written.
The typed first draft of the novel was 183 pages long. (The printed book comes to 130 pages.) I brought it back, half-completed, with me to Wyoming in May, and finished it over the summer. When I had a strong second draft, I mailed it to Tony Outhwaite, my agent in New York, who showed the manuscript round to a number of publishing house editors.
No takers; not even, as I recall, a response, as is commonplace in publishing nowadays.
Meanwhile, I began writing my "Hundredth Meridian" column, about life in the modern American West, for Chronicles, as a kind of extension of the expired Arizona one.
When Tom Fleming expressed enthusiasm for "Hundredth Meridian", I made a copy of Mexico Way and left it for him to read on one of my trips east to Rockford, Illinois. Following my return to Wyoming, Tom placed the manuscript at the corner of a side-table in his office where it remained for years, quietly gathering dust and gesturing feebly to me with its ruffled topsheet each time I visited the magazine.
I remained pleased with the book, but went on to write others, each of which Tony circulated in turn in New York, occasionally with happy result. Several years ago, I removed the manuscript from my files and gave it to a secretary to keyboard for an electronic copy. This copy also I sent to Tony, who tried gamely once again to make a sale to New York.
No go. One publishing house, which had produced an earlier novel of mine, stonewalled him for over a year, and then tried to convince him they'd never received the book.
Meanwhile, Tom Fleming and I traveled by bus together from Ciudad Juárez to Ciudad Chihuahua on a fact-finding trip related to the preparation of Immigration and the American Future, edited by me and published by the Rockford Institute last year.
We had a fine time in northern Mexico, which made a huge impression on Tom. Although the U.S. Senate was concurrently debating the amnesty bill and getting huge coverage on Mexican television, we were received warmly and shown many interesting things, the best of which perhaps was Casa Villa, the former official home of the Governor of Chihuahua that today houses the Pancho Villa museum.
On the bus back to Juárez, I reminded Tom of the Mexico Way manuscript and suggested that, since he'd become so interested in Mexico, he might find the book of interest. He read it soon after, and made an offer on behalf of Chronicles Press.
Today, a well-known director is interested in making a film from the book. We have our fingers crossed.
I've attempted to put everything I know about Mexico into Mexico Way. Nothing could please me more than to learn that some Mexican reader here and there read and enjoyed the book, while saying to himself, "¡Sí! ¡Ése es México!"
Chilton Williamson Jr. [email him] is an editor and columnist for Chronicles Magazine, where he writes The Hundredth Meridian column about life in the Rocky Mountain West. You can buy his books Mexico Way , Immigration and the American Future, The Hundredth Meridian and The Conservative Bookshelf: Essential Works That Impact Today's Conservative Thinkers on line.
This week's Late Late Show is choc-full of entertainment.
Mark Kellett, CEO of Magnet Networks. Photo: Conor McCabe.
Seven town centres are to become free public wi-fi zones under a new iniative.
High-speed broadband will be installed in Sligo, Westport, Monaghan, Knock and Carrick-On-Shannon town centres, with two further locations in Kerry and Donegal yet to be announced.
Magnet Networks will install access points on the premises of local businesses, providing free, unlimited access to broadband with speeds of up to 100mps.
Carrick-On-Shannon is the first of the towns to go live this week with Sligo, Knock and Monaghan commencing in June and the remaining towns going live by August.
The scheme has been operating in Galway city for more than a year.
Magnet Networks CEO Mark Kellett said: “The beauty of Magnet Networks’ free wi-fi is that you only need to register once, so tourists coming to different towns along the Wild Atlantic Way, for example, will automatically enjoy free connectivity at no cost in a range of towns.
As the project is financed by giving local businesses the opportunity to sponsor the wi-fi and send promotional offers, tourists can then be directed to attractions or places to eat and drink.
“For example, if a local restaurant sponsored the wi-fi, they would be able to send out a coupon at a set time to everyone who has logged on that day giving them 10% off,” said Mr Kellett.
The Danish company has used mean comments about the taste of the old beer to launch a new recipe.
Household incomes are at record levels, according to a new report from business group IBEC.
Research commissioned by the Irish Tourism Industry Confederation (ITIC) said Government had to match the level of private investment in tourism in the regions post-Brexit.
The way is now clear for Intel to get the go-ahead for its planned $4bn (€3.53bn) manufacturing fabrication (FAB) facility at its Leixlip plant from Kildare County Council.
Some Ulster Bank customers are reporting difficulties receiving payments this morning.
Paramount's monster movie "Cloverfield" smashed January box office records on Friday, taking in close to $17 million from 3,411 theaters.
Not only is that figure the highest opening day of all-time for the month, outstripping the $10.2 million posted by "Underworld: Evolution" in 2006, it's also the top Friday for the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. Previous Friday champ was "Black Hawk Down," which earned $9.9 million from its wide expansion in 2002.
Even though the weekend is still not over, it is unlikely that "Cloverfield" will lose its top spot. The closest competition is "27 Dresses," which grossed a respectable $7.7 million or the fifth highest Friday over the Martin Luther King weekend.
Click here to read more about "Cloverfield."
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are to marry on Saturday 19 May, Kensington Palace has announced.
The couple had already indicated they planned a May wedding at St George’s Chapel in the grounds of Windsor Castle.
Confirmation of the exact date was made on the Kensington Palace Twitter feed.
The 33-year-old prince and his 36-year-old fiancee announced their engagement on 27 November and a few days later the royal introduced his bride-to-be to the public during a series of official events in Nottingham.
Markle, who is best known for her part in the US legal drama Suits, will join the Queen and other members of the royal family at Sandringham, the Queen’s private estate in Norfolk, on Christmas Day.
Her Christmas invitation is a break with tradition. She is the first royal fiancee invited to Sandringham before officially becoming a member of the royal family, an invitation not extended to the Duchess of Cambridge until after marriage.
With other members of the royal family she will attend the traditional Christmas Day church service at St Mary Magdalene church. It is thought she and Harry will stay with the Cambridges at their Norfolk retreat, Anmer Hall, over the festive period.
Saturday weddings are a rarity for senior royals; the Queen’s was on a Thursday, the Cambridges’ on a Friday. Harry’s father, Prince Charles, did marry Camilla on a Saturday, but their nuptials were originally planned for a Friday then delayed for one day to allow Charles to represent the Queen at the funeral of Pope John Paul II that day.
The wedding falls on the same day as the 2018 FA Cup final, at which, as president of the Football Association, Harry’s brother and likely best man, Prince William, usually presents the trophy.
On 19 May 1536, Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII and mother of Elizabeth I, was executed on Tower Green for alleged adultery.
Custom Consoles has completed the second of two major contracts to supply studio furniture for Malaysia-based broadcaster Astro All Asia Network, a content creation, aggregation and distribution company.
Both orders were placed in partnership with UK-based systems integrator ATG Broadcast. The first was for a total of 30 desks installed in 2006 at Astro’s Cyberjaya Broadcast Centre (CBC). The latest contract is for an additional 30 desks, which have been installed at Astro's All Asia Broadcast Centre (AABC) at Kuala Lumpur. All 60 desks are from Custom Consoles' Module-R range.
The newly installed furniture at Astro’s Kuala Lumpur facility includes three ingest control desks with VTR racks, two editing desks with a 22RU acoustic rack, 10 compliance desks with divider screens, subtitling and ingest supervisor desks. It also features a six-position transmission control desk, transmission supervisor desk, 13-position master control desk, four reactive-suite dual desks, four voiceover desks, a lines desk and a large number of auxiliary fittings (including 55 Ergotron adjustable monitor arms).
Custom Consoles’ Module-R product range is a mix and match control room furniture system combining aesthetically pleasing style with high durability. The desk pods are available as single-bay sections with up to 10RU chassis capacity.
Located in the Studio Three sound control room, the monitor wall replaces a former stack of CRT monitors and is designed to house space-efficient flat-panel displays.

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