Finding a natural balance

November 12, 2013 - Daily News Briefing

Like the 2004 East Asian tsunami and the 2011 Tohoku quake/tsunami in Japan, the scale of destruction wrought by Typhoon Haiyan is hard to comprehend.

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Typhoon-ravaged Philippine islands faced a daunting relief effort that had barely begun Monday, as bodies lay uncollected and uncounted in the streets and survivors pleaded for food, water and medicine. Police guarded stores to prevent people from hauling off food, water and such non-essentials as TVs and treadmills, but there was often no one to carry away the dead — not even those seen along the main road from the airport to Tacloban, the worst-hit city along the country’s remote eastern seaboard.

One of the four Westgate Mall attackers once lived in a refugee camp of 50,000 Somali refugees in northwestern Kenya, two security officials said, highlighting Kenya’s interest in speeding up the return of nearly 500,000 Somali refugees to their home country. Very little is known about the four gunmen that sprayed bullets into men, women and children inside Nairobi’s Westgate Mall on Sept. 21, a busy Saturday afternoon. Al-Shabab, a Somali Islamic extremist group affiliated with Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the four-day siege of the mall that killed 67 people.

The US’s newest state, if rural Colorado residents had their way, would be about the size of Vermont but with the population of a small town spread across miles of farmland. There wouldn’t be civil unions for gay couples, new renewable energy standards, or limits on ammunition magazines. After all, those were some of the reasons five counties on the state’s Eastern Plains voted on Election Day to approve the creation of a 51st state in the first place.

Iran and the UN’s nuclear chief reached a deal Monday to allow expanded monitoring of the country’s nuclear sites, including at a planned reactor. The agreement could boost wider negotiations over Tehran’s atomic program. Although the deal is a step forward in Iran’s cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the initial “roadmap” for deeper inspections does not mention some of the sites most sought by U.N. teams, notably a military facility outside Tehran, to probe suspicions of nuclear-related work.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are flocking to US colleges and universities, helping to drive the number of international students studying in America to record levels. Similarly, all-time high numbers of American students are studying abroad, although there are far fewer and they tend to do much shorter stints than students coming to the United States. The findings are in an analysis released Monday that was conducted by a nonprofit group that worked with the State Department.

The Vatican ambassador to the United States says American bishops should make Roman Catholics feel more at home in the church. Archbishop Carlo Vigano says Pope Francis wants bishops to act more fatherly and not follow any particular ideology. Vigano made the remarks at the start of a national bishops meeting in Baltimore. It’s the first such assembly since Pope Francis was elected.

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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