Freeing Syria's people

August 27, 2015 - Daily News Briefing

After 4-1/2 years of conflict, Syria would be better off without both Islamic State and the Assad regime.

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The man who unleashed a murderous attack on a packed Colorado movie theater was ordered Wednesday to serve life in prison without parole plus 3,318 years — the maximum allowed by law — before the judge told deputies, "Get the defendant out of my courtroom, please." The gallery applauded the remark by Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. as he gaveled the hearing to a close, ending a grueling three-year wait to see the gunman brought to justice. Samour ordered 28-year-old James Holmes to serve 12 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, one for each of the people he killed in the July 20, 2012, attack on a crowded movie theater. He then added another 3,312 years for 70 convictions of attempted murder, and six years for an explosives charge.

South Sudan's president signed a peace deal on Wednesday to end a 20-month conflict with rebels, but he told regional African leaders at the ceremony that he had "serious reservations." President Salva Kiir, who has led South Sudan since it seceded from Sudan in 2011, had asked for more time for consultations last week, drawing threats of United Nations sanctions if he failed to ink it within a two-week deadline. His long-time rival and rebel leader Riek Machar, who is expected to become the First Vice President under the deal, put his pen to the document last week in the Ethiopian capital.

Wall Street racked up its biggest one-day gain in four years on Wednesday as fears about China's economy gave way to bargain hunters emboldened by expectations the Federal Reserve might not raise interest rates next month. Led by Silicon Valley stalwarts Apple, Amazon and Google, the surge put the brakes on a six-day losing streak that saw the S&P 500 surrender 11 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose over 600 points on the day.

More jobs and cheaper gasoline come with a big, honking downside: US roads are more clogged than ever now that the recession is in the rearview mirror. Commuters in Washington, D.C., suffer the most, losing an average of 82 hours a year to rush-hour slowdowns, a new study finds. Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York come next on the list of urban areas with the longest delays. Overall, American motorists are stuck in traffic about 5 percent more than they were in 2007, the pre-recession peak, says the report from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and INRIX Inc., which analyzes traffic data.

An Ohio zoo that has the last Sumatran rhino in the United States announced plans to send him to Southeast Asia on a mission to mate and help preserve his critically endangered species. Conservation experts at the Cincinnati Zoo say 8-year-old Harapan could be on his way within several weeks to Indonesia, where nearly all of the estimated 100 remaining Sumatran rhinos live. Numbers of the two-horned descendants of Ice Age woolly rhinos have fallen by some 90 percent since the mid-1980s as development of their Southeast Asia forest habitat and poachers seeking their prized horns took their toll.

Amelia Boynton Robinson, a civil rights activist who nearly died while helping lead the "Bloody Sunday" civil rights march in 1965, championed voting rights for blacks and was the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama, died early Wednesday at age 104, her son Bruce Boynton said. Boynton Robinson was among those beaten during the voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965 that became known as "Bloody Sunday." State troopers tear gassed and clubbed the marchers as they tried to cross the bridge. A newspaper photo showing Boynton Robinson, who had been beaten unconscious, drew wide attention to the movement. Fifty years later, Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, pushed her across the span in a wheelchair during a commemoration.

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