A city on a hill

October 19, 2015 - Daily News Briefing

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict must not escalate. The path to peace is clear.

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At least four Israeli cities, including the commercial capital Tel Aviv, have banned Arab laborers from their schools, struggling to calm public fears fueled by the worst surge of Palestinian street attacks in years. Israel's Interior Ministry, which oversees municipalities, declined immediate comment on Sunday on the decision, condemned by a party representing the country's Arab minority as racist. Israel's cabinet also imposed more security measures on Sunday after further Palestinian stabbings on Saturday, widening police stop-and-frisk powers that will effectively allow them to search anyone on the street.

The U.S. military is confirming that an airstrike in Syria by the U.S.-led coalition has killed a top al-Qaida commander. The Pentagon says a Saudi national known as Sanafi al-Nasr was "a longtime jihadist experienced in funneling money and fighters" for the terrorist network. A statement from the U.S. Defense Department says coalition forces conducted the airstrike on Thursday over northwest Syria.

Slow-moving Typhoon Koppu weakened after blowing ashore with fierce winds in the northeastern Philippines on Sunday, leaving at least two people dead, displacing 16,000 villagers and knocking out power in entire provinces, officials said. Army troops and police were deployed to rescue residents trapped in flooded villages in the hard-hit provinces of Aurora, where the typhoon made landfall early Sunday, and Nueva Ecija, a nearby rice-growing province where floodwaters swamped rice farmlands at harvest time.

A shooting at a Florida Zombicon event killed one person and injured four others, the Fort Myers Police Department said on Sunday in a social media post. Police asked attendees to share smartphone video from the incident at an event expected to draw more than 20,000 people. The shots were fired shortly before midnight on Saturday at the festival in downtown Fort Myers on the state's west coast, according to the News-Press newspaper. The shooter remained at large on Sunday morning, the newspaper reported, noting that crowds of people were seen running through the area immediately after the shooting.

Russian hackers had infiltrated Dow Jones & Co to steal information to trade on before it was made public, and the breach was "far more serious than a lower-grade intrusion" disclosed by the company, Bloomberg reported, citing sources. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Secret Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission are leading an investigation, which began at least a year ago, Bloomberg reported. Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, disclosed last week a breach of its systems that put payment card and contact information of about 3,500 individuals at risk.

Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are on course for a collision. There once was mutual public deference. But that has eroded as the Florida Republicans battling for the presidential nomination have come to see the other as the main threat to lofty ambitions: Bush claims the party establishment's mantle, Rubio wants be the party's fresh national face. The rise of GOP outsiders such as Donald Trump and Ben Carson has increased the stakes for Bush and Rubio as they try to become the mainstream alternative. Whoever wins this internal contest will show whether experience or fresh leadership is the bigger priority for GOP centrists.

The sun has sprung a leak: A hole in the topmost layer of the sun and its magnetic field, the size of 50 Earths, is letting loose an ultrafast solar wind that has kicked off several nights of auroras down on Earth. A new image, from NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, reveals the enormous hole as it was Oct. 10, taken at an ultraviolet wavelength unseen by the human eye. To an ordinary observer, the gaping hole would be invisible, though you should NEVER stare at the sun because serious eye damage can result. The gap in the sun's magnetic field lets out a stream of particles traveling at up to 500 miles (800 kilometers) per second, kindling a days-long geomagnetic storm upon hitting Earth.

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