Experiments in ice breaking

October 13, 2015 - Daily News Briefing

Iran, Cuba, and Myanmar are real-time tests of whether repressive regimes can be coaxed into moderation.

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The Washington Post on Monday denounced the espionage conviction of the newspaper's American-born Tehran correspondent and urged Iran's leaders to overturn it. Jason Rezaian, who was arrested in July 2014, had 20 days to appeal the verdict, the Iranian news service ISNA cited a judiciary spokesman as saying. Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said the paper, Mr. Rezaian's family, and his lawyer in Iran were pursuing an appeal. He said no sentence for Rezaian had been announced.

Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server was "a mistake," said President Obama on Sunday, but not one that endangered national security. "I think she'd be the first to acknowledge that maybe she could have handled the original decision better and the disclosures more quickly," Mr. Obama said. He said public servants have to be careful about how information and personal data are handled online but that the controversy over Mrs. Clinton's email has been "ginned up" by Republicans for political gain.

Paul Ryan, widely seen as the only acceptable candidate for House speaker after John Boehner relinquishes the post, has said repeatedly he doesn't want the job. Members of the Freedom Caucus that helped drive Speaker Boehner toward retirement said they could support Mr. Ryan in the wide-open race for a successor, as long as he will answer to Republicans – even if that leads to such consequences as government shutdowns. Ryan reportedly will only consider serving as speaker if he is selected by unanimous acclamation, not subject to bargaining with the Freedom Caucus.

A prominent Chicago anti-violence program has lost its funding due to a state budget shortfall. Operation CeaseFire deploys former gang members and felons to intervene in confrontations before they turn violent. Researchers say gang involvement, shootings, and retaliatory killings have dropped since the introduction of the program, but the governor froze CeaseFire's allocated funds program when Illinois began running out of money. Chicago is grappling with gun violence nearly unmatched by any other US city, with shootings and homicides up 20 percent since last year.

An appeals court has temporarily blocked a federal clean water rule that would fold temporary waterways into Clean Water Act protections. The Water of the United States rule was intended to clarify which bodies of water are under the supervision of the federal Clean Water Act, after two Supreme Court rulings had created uncertainties. The rule was finalized in May with help from the EPA and the US Army Corps of Engineers, but it faces political and legal opposition across the country.

Pluto has blue skies and water ice, revealed in new color photos of the dwarf planet taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. "Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt?" asked PI Alan Stern. The blue color comes from "tholins," complex organic molecules in Pluto's atmosphere, that are probably gray or red but scatter light in blue wavelengths, say scientists. New Horizons sent back some flyby data during the epic encounter and began transmitting more last month. NASA expects to receive the complete data set before 2017.

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