Dealing with a dangerous neighborhood

August 27, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

Qatar's foreign policy is about hedging, shifting, and trying to survive.

Subscribe Now to read this post!

To read this post and thousands more articles, subscribe today!

The Veterans Affairs Department says investigators have found no proof that delays in care caused any deaths at a VA hospital in Phoenix, deflating an explosive allegation that helped expose a troubled health care system in which veterans waited months for appointments while employees falsified records to cover up the delays. Revelations that as many as 40 veterans died while awaiting care at the Phoenix VA hospital rocked the agency last spring, bringing to light scheduling problems and allegations of misconduct at other hospitals as well. The scandal led to the resignation of former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. In July, Congress approved spending an additional $16 billion to help shore up the system.

Egypt and the United Arab Emirates secretly carried out airstrikes against Islamist militias inside Libya, a State Department spokeswoman said Tuesday, decrying the intervention as an escalation of the North African country's already debilitating turmoil. US officials said the United States had no prior notification of the attacks. One official said the two countries and Saudi Arabia have been supporting for months a renegade general's campaign against Libyan militant groups, but that the Saudis don't appear to have played a role in recent strikes. Another official said Washington knew about Egyptian and U.A.E. plans for a possible operation and warned them against going through with the effort.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index closed a hair above 2,000 points Tuesday, 16 years after it closed above 1,000 points for the first time. The milestone added to the market's gains from the day before and extended the stock index's record-shattering run this year. The S&P 500 index, a widely followed barometer of the stock market, has closed at a new high 30 times this year. By this time last year, it had done so 25 times.

Jellyfish were a nuisance to swimmers in the Atlantic Ocean off New Smyrna Beach, Florida over the weekend. Volusia County's Beach Safety Ocean Rescue reported 406 jellyfish stings on Saturday and Sunday. Capt. Tammy Marris says purple flags were placed on the beach to warn beachgoers about the jellyfish.

A new report concluded Tuesday that some 1,400 children were sexually exploited in one northern England town – a damming account of the collective failure by authorities to prevent children as young as 11 from being beaten, raped and trafficked. Report author Alexis Jay cited appalling acts of violence between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, a town of some 250,000. The independent report came after a series of convictions of sex offenders in the region and ground-breaking reports in the Times of London that prompted the local council to launch an inquiry.

The UN health agency recommended Tuesday that nations regulate electronic cigarettes and ban them from use indoors until the exhaled vapor is proven not to harm bystanders. In a report to its 194 member nations, the World Health Organization also called for a ban on sales to minors of the popular nicotine-vapor products, and to either forbid or keep to a minimum any advertising, promotion or sponsorship. The Geneva-based agency said the "apparently booming" $3 billion global market for more than 400 brands of e-cigarettes is increasingly becoming a competition between independent companies and transnational tobacco companies aggressively muscling for market share.

Amazon is hoping to become the ESPN of video games. The e-commerce giant is buying streaming platform Twitch Interactive for $970 million in cash as it seeks to take part in video gaming's growth as an online spectator sport. Twitch is a multi-channel online network built for a generation of people who not only enjoy playing video games, but find it entertaining to watch others who might impart tricks and tips for excelling at their favorite games.

Global warming is here, human-caused and probably already dangerous – and it's increasingly likely that the heating trend could be irreversible, a draft of a new international science report says. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday sent governments a final draft of its synthesis report, which combines three earlier, gigantic documents by the Nobel Prize-winning group. There is little in the report that wasn't in the other more-detailed versions, but the language is more stark and the report attempts to connect the different scientific disciplines studying problems caused by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas.

“The object of the Monitor is to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” – Mary Baker Eddy

The Daily News Briefing is published Monday through Friday by The Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston, Massachusetts.

“The object of the Monitor is to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” – Mary Baker Eddy

The Daily News Briefing is published Monday through Friday by The Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston, Massachusetts.

Subscribe Now to read this post!

Are you sure?

Forgot to add folder?

Tags Error