Democracy stirs anew

September 02, 2015 - Daily News Briefing

In Baghdad and Beirut, protesters are looking past sectarian division, demanding more effective government.

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Stocks plunged again Tuesday, continuing a rocky ride for Wall Street, after an economic report out of China rekindled fears that the world's second-largest economy is slowing more than previously anticipated. The sell-off adds to what has been a difficult few weeks for US and international markets. US stocks just closed out their worst month in more than three years. Tuesday's drop also dashed hopes that, after some relatively calm trading Friday and Monday, the stock market's wild swings were coming to an end. In the end, the Dow lost 469.68 points, or 2.8 percent, to 16,058.35. The S&P 500 fell 58.33 points, or 3 percent, to 1,913.85 and the Nasdaq composite fell 140.40 points, 2.9 percent, to 4,636.10.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides at the State Department were acutely aware of the need to protect sensitive information when discussing international affairs over email and other forms of unsecure electronic communication, according to the latest batch of messages released by the agency from Clinton's tenure as secretary of state. The State Department made public roughly 7,121 pages of Clinton's emails late Monday night, including 125 emails that were censored prior to their release because they contain information now deemed classified. The vast majority concerned mundane matters of daily life at any workplace: phone messages, relays of schedules and forwards of news articles.

Climate change is bringing small risks that tropical cyclones will form in the Persian Gulf for the first time, in a threat to cities such as Dubai or Doha which are unprepared for big storm surges, a US study said. Tampa in Florida and Cairns in Australia, two places where cyclones already happen, would be increasingly vulnerable to extreme storms this century, according to the report, based on thousands of computer models. The shallow and warm waters of the Persian Gulf, where cyclones have never been recorded, might generate the storms in future as a side-effect of global warming, according to the study in the journal Nature Climate Change.

In two major US cities, Los Angeles and Dallas, some police officers are now equipped with body cameras while on patrol. Elsewhere around the country, more municipalities are adopting body cameras – or actively debating whether the benefits of more transparency are worth the cost.

California agreed Tuesday to end its unlimited isolation of imprisoned gang leaders, restricting a practice that once kept hundreds of inmates in notorious segregation units for a decade or longer. No other state keeps so many inmates segregated for so long, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights. The New York City-based nonprofit center represents inmates in a class-action federal lawsuit settled on behalf of nearly 3,000 California inmates held in segregation statewide.

The US Olympic Committee on Tuesday named Los Angeles as its candidate for the 2024 Games, replacing Boston's soured bid and marking a comeback for LA's dream of becoming a three-time host of the global sports competition. The announcement by USOC CEO Scott Blackmun came under a summer sun at Santa Monica Beach, where the city's plan calls for staging beach volleyball on the site where it was founded. Mayor Eric Garcetti said the city was inspired to bring the games back to the US for the first time in 28 years.

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