Monitor Daily News Briefing - September 4, 2013

September 04, 2013 - Daily News Briefing

To all appearances, the leader of Syria is a person most people wouldn’t mind having as a neighbor.

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President Obama won critical support from House Speaker John Boehner for a punitive strike against Syria on Tuesday, and senior cabinet officials labored to convince Congress that Bashar al-Assad’s government must be punished for a suspected chemical weapons attack the administration blames for more than 1,000 dead. The leader of House Republicans, Boehner emerged from a meeting at the White House and said the United States has “enemies around the world that need to understand that we’re not going to tolerate this type of behavior.”

The gleaming white and newly built $6.4 billion eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge handled its first morning commute Tuesday. Vehicles have begun crossing it after more than a decade of construction delays. The new span replaces a structure that was damaged during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It is designed to withstand the strongest earthquake estimated by seismologists to occur at the site over a 1,500-year period.

Microsoft is buying Nokia’s lineup of smart phones and a portfolio of patents and services in an attempt to mount a more formidable challenge to Apple and Google as more people pursue their lives on mobile devices. The $7.2 billion deal announced late Monday marks a major step in Microsoft’s push to transform itself from a software maker focused on making operating systems and applications for desktop and laptop computers into a more versatile and nimble company that delivers services on any kind of Internet-connected gadget.

An investigator testified Tuesday that the woman at the center of a Naval Academy sexual assault case said in an interview that she couldn’t remember whether sexual encounters with the men charged in the case were consensual or not. Special Agent Michelle Robinson spoke from Bahrain by video teleconference in the Article 32 hearing at the Washington Navy Yard to help determine whether three US Naval Academy midshipmen will face a court-martial. The former football players are accused of sexually assaulting or abusing the woman at an off-campus party in 2012.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday warned that any “punitive” action taken against Syria for an alleged chemical weapons attack last month would be illegal without Security Council approval or a sound case for self-defense.

India plans to subsidize wheat, rice, and cereals for some 800 million people under a $20 billion scheme to cut malnutrition and ease poverty. The Food Security Bill, sent this week by India’s parliament to the president for approval, guarantees citizens a legal right to food. India has some of the world’s worst poverty and malnutrition with two-thirds of its 1.2 billion people poor and half of the country’s children malnourished.

Motorists may want to think twice about parking in front of the half-built London skyscraper known as the Walkie-Talkie because of its distinctive shape. That’s because the glare off the skin of the new building is so intense that at least one Jaguar owner says it caused part of his vehicle to melt. In a joint statement, developers Land Securities and Canary Wharf said they are taking the complaints seriously and looking into how the building reflects sunlight. The 37-story tower in London’s financial district is expected to be completed in 2014.

An Egyptian court on Tuesday ordered Al Jazeera’s local affiliate and three other stations to stop broadcasting, part of an expanding government crackdown against media seen as supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and the country’s ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. In another legal move, a military tribunal issued the first verdicts against backers of Morsi, sentencing one to life in prison and handing sentences of five to 15 years in prison to 51 other defendants for assaulting troops during riots in the port city of Suez last month.

A series of coordinated evening blasts in Baghdad and other violence killed at least 67 people in Iraq on Tuesday, officials said, the latest in a months-long surge of bloodshed that Iraqi security forces are struggling to contain. Many of those killed were caught up in a string of car bombings that tore through the Iraqi capital as residents were out shopping or heading to dinner.

Former National Basketball Association star Dennis Rodman landed Tuesday in North Korea and said he plans to hang out with authoritarian leader Kim Jong-un and maybe bridge some cultural gaps – but not be a diplomat. Rodman was greeted at Pyongyang’s airport by Son Kwang-ho, vice chairman of North Korea’s Olympic Committee, just days after Pyongyang rejected a visit by a US envoy who had hoped to bring home Kenneth Bae, an American missionary jailed there.

Compiled from wire service reports

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