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March 30, 2016 - Daily News Briefing

A Supreme Court deadlock and a minimum wage proposal in California.

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An Egyptian man who hijacked an EgyptAir plane Tuesday and forced it to land on the island of Cyprus, was arrested. During the incident, most passengers were eventually freed, though four crew members and three passengers remained on board with the hijacker until his arrest, Egyptian and Cypriot officials said. The man's motivation was unclear, but Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades said the hijacking was "not something that has to do with terrorism" and a Cyprus government official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said the man "seems (to be) in love."

The FBI has successfully hacked into San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook's iPhone without Apple's help, the government said Monday, ending a contentious privacy vs. security case but leaving larger questions unanswered. Agents were able to use an unknown method provided by an "outside party" to gain access to Mr. Farook's phone, which they hoped would provide more information about planning for the December attacks in California, which killed 14 people.

Global leaders constantly ask "What is happening in America?" about the 2016 presidential campaign, President Obama told journalists at an awards dinner Monday evening. "It's not because around the world people have not seen crazy politics," he said, lamenting the campaign's frequent superficiality and hateful rhetoric. "It is that they understand America is the place where you can't afford completely crazy politics." But the media needs to hold itself to a higher standard to help reverse the damage, he said, delivering a keynote address at Syracuse University's Robin Turner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting.

The American Southwest may be parched, but it's still inviting for Saudi Arabia's agriculture industry, thanks to loose water restrictions for farming. Almarai Co., the kingdom's largest dairy company, has bought about 14,000 acres of farmland in California and Arizona to grow alfalfa for its 170,000 cows in the face of tightening Saudi laws. This move ignites a fresh debate over water rights in the western United States, as farms across the region tap underground water reserves and people in cities shorten their showers and skip watering their lawns.

News that 95 percent of the northern Great Barrier Reef is suffering extreme coral bleaching may be the Australian government's final wake-up call, climate scientists warned Tuesday, if it is to preserve the Earth's largest single structure made by living organisms. Although the northern sections are considered most pristine, only four reefs out of the hundreds they studied between Cairns, Australia, and Papua New Guinea had escaped bleaching, making it the worst bleaching event on record. Previous events in 1998 and 2002 did not impact more than 20 percent. The National Coral Bleaching Taskforce will try to determine the southern limit of bleaching this week.

Though nitrogen is an important component in biological processes and a plant fertilizer, too much of it is toxic to plants and threatens their diversity across the United States, says a new study from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Plants absorb nitrogen through the soil or air. In limited amounts, it is a nutrient, but if there is too much to absorb, the nitrogen becomes a pollutant and could kill whole ecosystems. As global emissions of nitrogen into the atmosphere by agriculture and other industries have tripled in the last century, say researchers in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they worry about the environmental damage this could cause.

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