What just happened in Greece?

July 06, 2015 - Daily News Briefing

Greece appeared to vote 'no' Sunday – but against what? Against being squeezed by the rest of Europe. Now, the rest of Europe will decide if that's OK.

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Nine days into marathon nuclear talks, US Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday said the diplomatic efforts "could go either way," cutting off all potential pathways for an Iranian atomic bomb or ending without an agreement that American officials have sometimes described as the only alternative to war. The EU's top foreign policy official, Federica Mogherini, said agreement was "very close." But Kerry said there was still a ways to go.

Captured prison escapee David Sweat was released on Sunday from a New York hospital where he had been treated for gunshot wounds and moved to a prison more than 250 miles from the one he fled, authorities said. Sweat, captured last Sunday following a three-week manhunt, will be locked up alone in a cell for 23 hours a day and placed on suicide watch at Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus, in the state's Finger Lakes region, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said.

The Syrian army and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters said on Sunday they had entered the rebel-held city of Zabadani on the second day of a major offensive to capture the border area around the Beirut-Damascus highway. The army, backed by Hezbollah, has long sought to wrest control of Zabadani, near the Lebanese border, from the rebels who have held it since 2012, a year after the start of the Syrian civil war.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz and the outside groups supporting his presidential bid have raised more than $51 million in the three months since he launched his campaign for president, according to a statement from his campaign on Sunday. Cruz, who announced his candidacy on March 23 in a speech at the conservative school Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, has raised far less in donations directly to his campaign than his supporters have collected for the four outside spending groups supporting him.

The embattled president of FIFA, the governing body for world soccer, told a German newspaper the presidents of France and Germany tried to exert political pressure before the World Cup was awarded to Russia and Qatar. Sepp Blatter has become entangled in a corruption investigation of the sport's governing body, which involves the decision to hold the World Cup in the two countries. Blatter has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but he has retained an attorney.

History's first Latin American pope returned to Spanish-speaking South America for the first time on Sunday, bringing a message of solidarity with the region's poor, who are expected to turn out in droves to welcome their native son home. "The pope of the poor" chose to visit Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay specifically because they are among the poorest and most marginal nations of a region that claims 40 percent of the world's Catholics. He's skipping his homeland of Argentina, at least partly to avoid papal entanglement in this year's presidential election.

“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.

To send a comment to the Editor, email editor@csmonitor.com.

“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.

To send a comment to the Editor, email editor@csmonitor.com.

Subscribe Now to read this post!

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