Pilgrims

CAIRO, Egypt -- A stampede at one of Islam's holiest sites crushed to death at least 345 worshippers yesterday, tainting with tragedy the annual hajj pilgrimage to the Muslim religion's birthplace in Saudi Arabia. As thick waves of worshippers made their way through the desert plain of Mina to perform one of the fundamental rituals of hajj, lost luggage piled up underfoot and tripped pilgrims. With thousands of eager Muslims pressing from behind, the bodies quickly piled up - and the crowd trampled over them.

BAGHDAD -Two bombers detonated suicide vests outside a gold-domed religious shrine Friday and killed at least 71 people, raising the toll in two days of attacks on Shiite Muslims in Iraq to 159 and reviving fears of a return to sectarian war. The attacks at the Imam Musa Khadimiyah shrine in northeast Baghdad raise concerns that the Sunni insurgency is regrouping just as U.S. forces are preparing to withdraw from Iraq's cities and President Barack Obama...

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain -- As in the Middle Ages, so at the turn of the millennium: The price of praying with your feet is swollen ankles, tendinitis and blisters.Nevertheless, the Camino de Santiago -- the Way of St. James, a pilgrimage trail across northern Spain -- is enjoying its greatest revival since the Middle Ages.Pilgrims come to Santiago from all continents. They cross the Pyrenees into Roncesvalles, the site of the eighth-century battle immortalized in the "Chanson de Roland" and the start of the main branch of the trail in northern Spain.

NO SUICIDE bomber was lurking on the Tigris River bridge in Baghdad yesterday, but one might as well have been. A crowd of Shiite pilgrims primed to expect the worst from disaffected Sunnis along their route panicked when a man shouted he had seen someone else strapped with explosives, and in the stampede that followed more than 700 people were crushed or drowned or fell to their deaths. It was the deadliest day in Iraq since the war there began. All it took was a rumor to set it off, but those unfortunate pilgrims were every bit as much victims of the sectarian violence in Iraq as those killed by actual bombs or bullets; without the expectation of trouble, there would have been none.

NEW DELHI, India - A religious festival in northern India turned into a horrific deadly crush yesterday as thousands of Hindu pilgrims stampeded at a temple shrine, piling into each other on a treacherous walkway slick with spilled coconut milk. Officials said at least 168 people, most of them men, suffocated. Television images showed dead pilgrims strewn on the narrow walkway near the Chamunda Devi temple, at the southern edge of the 15th-century Mehrangarh fort in Jodhpur, in the western state of Rajasthan.

Just as Chaucer's pilgrims traveled to Canterbury in April, so has the Royal Shakespeare Company chosen this month to journey to Washington's Kennedy Center with its adaptation of The Canterbury Tales. The three-week run is the sole American engagement of this two-part, six-hour Chaucer marathon. Bawdy, brazen, belligerent, and at times tedious, the production is a demanding exercise for the 20-member cast -- and for the audience. THE CANTERBURY TALES / / Through May 7 / / Kennedy Center, Washington / / 800-444-1324 or kennedycenter.

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain - They come sunburned and sore-kneed from Sweden, San Diego and Sri Lanka. They come with boots spattered with mud of the Pyrenees, with blisters hardened into calluses many miles ago. They come to heal suffering. To find faith. To make the hike of a lifetime. Since the Middle Ages, pilgrims have come to this Galician city built, it is said, on the remains of the Apostle James. But they have never been so many, or come from so far. Over the past two decades, the recorded number of pilgrims trekking to Santiago de Compostela has soared from 120 in 1982 - when certification of their journey was reintroduced - to nearly 69,000 last year.

After a year of great sickness and little food, the Pilgrims who had settled in New England were rescued by a good harvest in the fall of 1621. Fifty-two English settlers celebrated the harvest with more than 90 of their Wampanoag Indian neighbors. In later years, the feast would be called the new country's first Thanksgiving, even though the Pilgrims did not have a regular Thanksgiving themselves. Today, their colony in Plymouth, Mass., is commemorated with Plimoth Plantation, a re-creation of the original settlement as it would have been in 1627.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Hundreds of Shiite Muslim pilgrims participating in an annual religious commemoration were crushed to death yesterday as they crossed a bridge leading to a holy site in northern Baghdad. The headlong rush apparently was triggered by fears of an insurgent attack and exacerbated by tight security restrictions. At least 750 were killed, most of them women, children and the elderly, and the Ministry of Health said the toll could exceed 1,000. The loss of life was the largest in any incident in Iraq since well before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and was more than four times as great as in the most deadly insurgent suicide bombing.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi insurgents struck again yesterday in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood, killing a police precinct chief. But Shiite Muslim pilgrims defied threats of violence and marched through the troubled area, waving their flags in pride and beating their chests in piety. The events captured two key aspects of the evolving Iraq conflict: The mostly Sunni insurgents are piling up victims among Iraqi security forces, particularly Shiites. But that has failed to deter the majority Shiites from pressing their religious and political agendas.