Iraq's center isn't holding

June 12, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

Increasingly, Iraq looks headed for civil war, if not outright breakup.

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As Congress moves to help thousands of military veterans enduring long wait times for VA medical care, the FBI revealed Wednesday that it had opened a criminal investigation into a Department of Veterans Affairs reeling from allegations of falsified records and inappropriate scheduling practices. FBI Director James Comey told the House Judiciary Committee that the investigation was being led by the FBI’s field office in Phoenix.

Palestinian officials say the Israeli air force carried out an airstrike in the northern Gaza Strip, killing one person and wounding three others. The airstrike Wednesday night came in response to a rocket attack out of Gaza earlier in the day. It was the first rocket attack on Israel since the new Palestinian unity government took office last week.

Unaccompanied children arrested by US border authorities are packed in frigid cells and sleep on hard floors without enough food or medical care, advocacy groups said in a complaint Wednesday that alleges widespread abuses amid a surge of illegal crossings by young immigrants from Central American countries. The Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project produced 116 allegations of abuse of children who were in Customs and Border Protection custody.

A 15-year-old gunman who killed a student at an Oregon high school had an assault rifle, a handgun, and several magazines of ammunition hidden in a guitar case and duffel bag when he rode a school bus to the campus, police said Wednesday. The attacker, Jared Michael Padgett, a freshman at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, entered a boys locker room on Tuesday at a gymnasium, where he “murdered a fellow student,” Police Chief Scott Anderson said.

An Egyptian court on Wednesday convicted a prominent activist from the 2011 uprising of organizing an unauthorized protest and assaulting a policeman, sentencing him to 15 years in prison, in the latest blow to liberal activists at a time of rapidly eroding freedoms. The sentence against Alaa Abdel-Fattah is the toughest against any of the secular activists behind the 18-day uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak’s 29-year reign.

An Uzbek militant group operating in Pakistan’s northwest tribal areas says it played a role in the attack on the Karachi airport earlier this week, in a disturbing sign of the increased cooperation between militant groups in Pakistan. The news came the same day that the US broke its five-month hiatus on drone strikes with a strike in the Pakistan tribal areas that killed three militants, officials said.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told lawmakers Wednesday that last month’s prisoner swap with the Taliban may have been the “last, best” chance to secure the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only US soldier held captive in Afghanistan. He said mediators indicated time was slipping away to get Bergdahl out safely.

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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