Preserving a peaceful Pacific – and planet

July 10, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

China and the United States are at odds on important issues, but both know the importance of peaceful dialog over confrontation.

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Iraqi officials discovered 50 bodies, many of them blindfolded and with their hands bound, in an agricultural area outside a city south of Baghdad on Wednesday. The lightning sweep by the militants over much of northern and western Iraq the past month has dramatically hiked tensions between the country's Shiite majority and Sunni minority. At the same time, splits have grown between the Shiite-led government in Baghdad and the Kurdish autonomous region in the north. In an address on Wednesday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused the Kurdish zone of being a haven for the Islamic extremists and other Sunni insurgents. The bodies, all of them with gunshot wounds, were found in the predominantly Shiite village of Khamissiya outside the city of Hillah, located some 60 miles south of Baghdad, said military spokesman Brig. Gen. Saad Maan Ibrahim.

Severe thunderstorms packing strong winds rolled through central New York, killing four people, destroying or damaging numerous houses and knocking out power to more than 70,000 utility customers, officials said Wednesday. The deaths occurred in the rural town of Smithfield, between Syracuse and Utica, after the storms hit at about 7 p.m. Tuesday, the Madison County Sheriff's Office said. Injuries and damage from fast-moving storms Tuesday were not limited to New York state. In Maryland, a child at a summer camp was killed by a falling tree. Three small tornadoes touched down in Ohio and at least one other was sighted in Pennsylvania, where more than 300,000 lost power at the peak of the storms.

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for bribery, money laundering and other corruption that spanned his two terms as mayor – including the chaotic years after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Nagin was convicted Feb. 12 of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from businessmen who wanted work from the city or Nagin's support for various projects. The bribes came in the form of money, free vacations and truckloads of free granite for his family business.

Ukrainian government forces on Wednesday warned separatists in the eastern town of Donetsk that a plan was now in place to take back the territory they occupy, but defiant rebels reported a steady flow of new recruits who were ready to fight. The Ukrainian military pushed the rebels out of their best-fortified stronghold in the town of Slaviansk on Saturday, but they have regrouped for a stand in Donetsk, a city of nearly a million people. Rebels also still control strategic buildings in Luhansk near the Russian border. Separatists said on Tuesday that Igor Strelkov, a Russian military officer from Moscow who until the weekend led rebels in Slaviansk, had assumed command of the "defense of Donetsk".

North Korea has given Japan a list of some 30 missing Japanese still living in the country, Japan's Nikkei daily reported on Thursday, citing sources - three times as many names as the paper reported a week ago. The list includes known victims of North Korean state-sponsored kidnappings in the 1970s and 80s - believed to have been snatched to train spies - and, as of Wednesday, Tokyo had matched about two-thirds of them with domestic records of missing persons, the Nikkei said. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made the abductees' fate a focus of his political career, and proof that some of them are alive would almost certainly boost his popularity.

Faced with potentially hungry – and grumpy – passengers, a Frontier Airlines pilot treated them to pizza when storms diverted a Denver-bound flight to Cheyenne, where the plane was stuck for a couple of hours. Cheyenne Domino's Pizza manager Andrew Ritchie told The Associated Press that he got a call about 10 p.m. Monday just as he was about to send employees home. Ritchie said the pilot told him he needed to feed 160 people – fast. In all, Ritchie said his crew made about 35 pizzas and delivered them to the airport, where the driver handed the food off to flight attendants.

An Ohio man who turned to a crowd-sourcing Internet site to help him pay for a batch of potato salad has raised at least $35,000 from the effort and says he's now considering a huge public potato-salad party. Zack "Danger" Brown of Columbus says he turned to Kickstarter to help him finance the initial $10 effort. But six days into the campaign, he's raised money from at least 3,000 backers worldwide, and the whole thing has taken on a viral life of its own on the Internet.

“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.

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