After the Gaza war: Build peace

August 28, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

A vigorous, fair, and serious effort is urgently needed to achieve a two-state solution.

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Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Obama administration, accusing it of illegally manipulating federal grant money and regulations to force states to adopt the Common Core education standards. The US Department of Education has used a $4.3 billion grant program and federal policy waivers to encourage states to adopt uniform education standards and testing. The Republican governor says that "effectively forces states down a path toward a national curriculum" in violation of the state sovereignty clause in the Constitution and federal laws that prohibit national control of education content.

Christine Lagarde, the chief of the International Monetary Fund, was placed under official investigation for negligence in a French corruption probe that dates back to her days as France's finance minister. In a statement Wednesday after a fourth round of questioning before magistrates, Lagarde said she would return to her work in Washington later in the day and said the decision was "without basis." She is the third IMF managing director in a decade to face legal troubles. She and her former chief of staff face questions about their role in a $531 million payment to a businessman.

Time Warner Cable says a problem that occurred during routine maintenance caused a nationwide outage of its Internet service for hours on Wednesday morning. The company says it is still investigating the cause of the problem, which occurred with its Internet backbone, the paths that local or regional networks connect to in order to carry data long distances.The company says the problem affected all of its markets and started at 4:30 a.m. and was largely restored by 6 a.m., and updates continue to bring all customers back online. The outage sparked widespread complaints on social networks.

American Airlines and US Airways are pulling flight listings from Orbitz-run websites in a long-running dispute over fees that the travel company charges to list and sell the flights. American said that it had already dropped its fares from Orbitz and that US Airways listings would be pulled on Monday. Corporate customers of the airlines will still be able to book travel through Orbitz, but individuals will have to go to the airlines' websites or other travel agents, including online rivals of Orbitz such as Expedia Inc.

The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday forecasts that the US economy will grow by just 1.5 percent in 2014, undermined by a poor performance during the first three months of the year. The new assessment was considerably more pessimistic than the Obama administration's, which predicted last month that the economy would expand by 2.6 percent this year even though it contracted by an annual rate of 2.1 percent in the first quarter. The economy did grow by 0.9 percent during the first half of 2014. Looking ahead, the CBO said it expected the economy to grow by 3.4 percent over 2015 and 2016, and predicted that the unemployment rate would remain below 6 percent into the future.

Hurricane Cristobal was expected to pass well west of Bermuda on Wednesday, where a tropical storm watch is in effect and heavy rain is likely, the National Hurricane Center said. Centered about 425 miles west of Bermuda, Cristobal was moving north at 12 miles per hour with maximum sustained winds of 80 mph, the NHC said. It is seen turning northeast with a gradual increase in forward speed over the next two days. The NHC said swells generated by the hurricane were affecting Bermuda and parts of the US coastline from North Carolina to the mid-Atlantic states. It said they would spread north to southern New England on Thursday, and were "likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions."

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