An immigration 'reform' all can agree on

August 24, 2015 - Daily News Briefing

Donald Trump's plain-spoken style is a big part of his appeal. But in talk about 'anchor babies,' that frankness can come across as a callous.

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Thousands of protesters poured into central Beirut on Sunday demanding that the country's top politicians resign, hours after Prime Minister Tammam Salam hinted he might step down following violent protests triggered by a monthlong trash crisis. The demonstrations, the largest in years, railed against the corruption and dysfunction that has brought about Lebanon's current political crisis. The country does not have a functioning Cabinet or parliament, and hasn't had a president for more than a year.

U.S. officials knew of the potential for a catastrophic "blowout" of toxic wastewater from an inactive gold mine, yet appeared to have only a cursory plan to deal with such an event when government contractors triggered a 3-million-gallon spill, according to internal documents released by the Environmental Protection Agency. The Aug. 5 spill came as workers excavated the entrance to the idled Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado, accidentally unleashing a torrent of pent-up, toxic water that fouled rivers in three states.

Britain reopened its embassy in Tehran on Sunday, a striking signal of how Western ties with Iran have thawed since protesters stormed the compound nearly four years ago. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond watched the British flag being raised in the garden of the opulent 19th century building while the national anthem played. In 2011, the attackers burned the Union Jack and ransacked the ambassador's residence. "Today's ceremony marks the end of one phase in the relationship between our two countries and the start of a new one - one that I believe offers the promise of better," he said.

Senior officials from North and South Korea on Sunday were in their second day of marathon talks meant to pull the rivals back from the brink, even amid reports of unusual North Korean troop and submarine movement that Seoul said indicated continued battle preparation. The first round of talks, which started Saturday evening and finished just before dawn Sunday, came to nothing, but the second day of diplomacy has, for the time being, pushed aside the heated warnings of imminent war. These are the highest-level talks between the two Koreas in a year.

As people search for words to describe New Orleans' recovery a decade after Hurricane Katrina, they sometimes use words verging on the Biblical - an economic and cultural resurrection, a rising from the ashes. Helped by billions of dollars in recovery money, buoyed by volunteers and driven by the grit of its own citizens, New Orleans has rebounded in ways few thought possible in the decade since Hurricane Katrina. Reforms are evident everywhere, from schools to policing to community engagement and water management, all aimed at buttressing its people against the next monster storm. But even people who talk about a renaissance speak in the same breath about those who didn't recover.

Two experiments on Earth are helping to shine light on the hidden characteristics of dark energy and dark matter — elusive phenomena that make up nearly 95 percent of the universe but remain hidden from direct detection. In search of the mysterious "chameleon particle" — a potential source of dark energy — a team of scientists, led by Paul Hamilton, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, measured the forces acting on a falling cesium atom. In a separate study, researchers with the Xenon Collaboration of universities investigated how dark matter might interact with the electrons of an atom. Although neither team found the mysterious particle they sought, they were able to better constrain the characteristics of dark energy and dark matter.

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