A month to watch

October 01, 2013 - Daily News Briefing

How October 2013 unfolds likely will be crucial to what voters decide in November 2014.

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The Democratic-led Senate has rejected conditions that House Republicans attached to a temporary spending bill. On the brink of a government shutdown, the Senate voted 54 to 46 on Monday to strip a one-year delay in President Obama’s health-care law from the bill that would keep the government operating. The Senate also stripped a provision that would have eliminated the tax on medical devices.

The leader of Norway’s Conservative Party announced on Monday that she is forming a right-wing minority government. Erna Solberg said the two-party coalition will include the anti-immigration Progress Party, which has never been in a governing coalition in oil-rich Norway before. The new government is expected to tighten immigration policies, cut the inheritance tax, and increase private health care.

Lawyers for BP, the London-based oil giant, denied accusations Monday that it withheld information about the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico after its well blew out in 2010. There was no way to prepare for such a unique blowout a mile below the sea floor, they argued in New Orleans during opening statements of the second phase of a trial over the worst offshore oil spill ever in the US.

Standing just steps from the heavily armed border with North Korea, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Monday that Pyongyang is closely watching the international response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its own people.

The Florence, Italy, appellate court hearing US student Amanda Knox’s third trial in her roommate’s murder agreed Monday to run additional DNA tests on the presumed weapon, but rejected more than a dozen other defense requests for new testimony or evidence. On the trial’s opening day, the presiding judge said the court agreed to test one DNA trace not previously examined on the knife that prosecutors allege killed British student Meredith Kercher; the trace had previously been deemed too small to test.

Despite soothing assurances from Iran’s new leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored President Obama on Monday to keep punishing sanctions in place against Tehran – and even tighten them if the Islamic republic advances its nuclear programs while negotiating with the US. Netanyahu nevertheless signaled he would not block Obama’s efforts to seek a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear impasse.

North Carolina’s Republican governor and GOP lawmakers are vowing to fight a lawsuit filed by the US Justice Department challenging the state’s tough new elections law on the grounds it disproportionately impacts minority voters. Gov. Pat McCrory says the federal complaint filed Monday is an overreach. McCrory says he has hired private lawyers to help defend the new law from what he suggested was a partisan attack by President Obama’s Democratic administration.

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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