Has nation-building built a nation?

April 04, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

After 13 years of nation-building, the future of Afghanistan is in the hands of Afghans.

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Coastal residents of Chile’s far north spent a second sleepless night outside their homes early Thursday after a major aftershock rattled an area hit a day earlier by a magnitude-8.2 earthquake that caused some damage and six deaths. No new major damage or casualties were reported. After the magnitude-7.6 aftershock struck just before midnight Wednesday, a precautionary evacuation was ordered of low-lying areas along the country’s entire 2,500-mile Pacific coastline.

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to release parts of a hotly contested secret report that harshly criticizes CIA terror interrogations after 9/11, and the White House said it would instruct intelligence officials to cooperate fully. The panel voted 11 to 3 to order the declassification of almost 500 pages of a 6,300-page review that concluded waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation methods” were excessively cruel and ineffective.

The United Nations refugee agency said Thursday it is registering an average of more than one refugee a minute in Lebanon, a country of 4.5 million that is seeing its resources strained by the 1 million new arrivals fleeing the conflict in Syria.

Interim authorities in Ukraine on Thursday accused ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s government of using a network of hired killers, kidnappers, and gangs of thugs to terrorize and undermine the opposition.

A bomb struck along a route used by Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, going off shortly after he drove by it on his way home from the hospital, a police official and the former ruler’s spokeswoman said Thursday. Musharraf was not harmed in the explosion and there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing. When he returned to the country last year, the Pakistani Taliban vowed to kill him.

China’s leaders have unveiled a mini-stimulus aimed at shoring up sputtering growth in the world’s No. 2 economy. Small businesses will get bigger tax breaks, social housing will be built to replace shantytowns, and railway construction will be sped up.

House Republicans renewed their election-year assault on President Obama’s health-care law Thursday. The GOP-led chamber voted 248 to179 to change the law’s definition of full-time work from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week. The result would be that fewer workers would get employer-sponsored health coverage. Republicans, backed by the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, said the change would restore the traditional definition of full-time work while providing needed relief to businesses that are struggling with increased costs from the health-care law.

The federal government on Thursday reached a $5.15 billion settlement with Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the largest ever for environmental contamination, to settle claims related to the cleanup of thousands of sites tainted with hazardous chemicals for decades.

Compiled from wire service reports

“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.

Compiled from wire service reports

“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.

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