Monitor Daily News Briefing - September 12, 2013

September 12, 2013 - Daily News Briefing

The one certainty is that an imminent US military strike on Syria – with all the political and military fallout that might have entailed – has been put off.

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The prospect of more US military action in the Middle East hung over President Obama’s observance Wednesday of the Sept. 11 attacks that occurred a dozen years ago. Family members of those killed were among the people gathered at the Pentagon ceremony. The president also paid tribute to the four Americans killed during a 2012 attack on a US compound in Benghazi, Libya, asking the country to pray for those who “serve in dangerous posts” even after more than a decade of war.

A powerful car bomb exploded Wednesday near Libya’s Foreign Ministry building in the heart of the eastern coastal city of Benghazi, security officials said, exactly one year after an attack there killed the US ambassador and three other Americans. The early morning blast targeted a building that once housed the US Consulate under the rule of King Idris, whom former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi overthrew in a 1969 bloodless coup. Several passersby were slightly wounded, officials said. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Police in central Florida have been focusing on a broken iPad in their investigation of a domestic dispute between George Zimmerman and his estranged wife this week. Without video from the iPad or some other piece of independent evidence, legal experts said it will be hard to build a case because Shellie Zimmerman changed her story about her husband threatening her with a gun and decided not to press charges. Lake Mary, Fla., is about seven miles southwest of Sanford, where George Zimmerman fatally shot unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin during an altercation last year, but he was acquitted of all charges.

A recent satellite image appears to show North Korea is restarting a plutonium reactor in a move that could raise renewed international alarm over its nuclear weapons program, the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies said Wednesday. The reactor at the Nyongbyon nuclear facility was shuttered in 2007 under the terms of a disarmament agreement. Pyongyang announced plans in April to restart it amid a litany of threats toward the US and South Korea after it faced tougher international censure.

The Pakistani Taliban and the Army exchanged prisoners Wednesday as a confidence- building measure ahead of possible peace talks, intelligence officials and militant commanders said. The exchange included six militants and two paramilitary Frontier Corps soldiers, the officials and commanders said. It occurred in the Shawal area of the South Waziristan tribal region. The militants were subsequently taken to neighboring North Waziristan, the country’s main Taliban sanctuary.

Humberto grew to hurricane force far out in the Atlantic early Wednesday, becoming the first hurricane of the Atlantic season, while Bermuda shook off a drenching by tropical storm Gabrielle. The record for the latest first-of-the-season hurricane is Oct. 8, 1905, based on records dating to 1851.

Compiled from wire service reports

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