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rity Council and raised new questions about the relevance of the United Nations.
• Anyone willing to look closely, however, might spot a few glints of movement: the new international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi saying he saw an "opening" for a solution and was working on a new approach after visiting Syria, the Emir of Qatar and other leaders in the region calling for some kind of Arab-led intervention. But as the fighting in Syria raged on, and there was no sign of action that could end the escalating war, details on these few nuggets were hard to come by.
• Talk about Syria, however, was heard everywhere.
• Over seven days of speeches, Syria was discussed by one country after another, from Albania: Syrians "are suffering a primitive bloodshed by a regime that has irreversibly lost its legitimacy to lead;" to Zambia: "Humanity has again been embarrassed by this unnecessary carnage."
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• MIAMI (AP) -- It's not just the collection plate that's getting passed around this fall at hundreds of mainly African-American and Latino churches in presidential battleground states and across the nation.
• Exhorting congregations to register to vote, church leaders are distributing registration cards in the middle of services, and many are pledging caravans of "souls to the polls" to deliver the vote.
• The stepped-up effort in many states is a response by activists worried that new election rules, from tougher photo identification requirements to fewer days of early voting, are unfairly targeting minority voters -- specifically, African-Americans who tend to vote heavily for Democrats. Some leaders compare their registration and get-out-the-vote efforts to the racial struggle that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
• "In light of all this, we are saying just let our people vote," said the Rev. Dawn Riley Duval, social justice minister at the Shorter Community A.M.E. Church in Denver. "The people are being oppressed by these measures. It has ignited a sense of urgency and collective power that we can take by engaging in the process."
• In key swing states such as Florida and Ohio, proponents of the new election rules deny they are aimed at suppressing the minority vote in hopes of helping Republicans win more races. Reasons for their enactment vary between rooting out fraud and purging ineligible voters to streamlining the voting process.
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