Saintly deeds ... but not sainthood

December 11, 2013 - Daily News Briefing

Mandela often reminded people that he was no saint – “unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

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Armed conflicts killed at least 95,000 people and wounded hundreds of thousands more last year but few of them led to any punishment for war crimes because the laws are unclear, a Swiss-based think tank said Tuesday. In a new analysis aimed at clearing the way for more war crimes prosecutions, the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law determined there were at least 38 armed conflicts in 24 nations and territories in 2012, including Syria’s civil war, based on their interpretation of international humanitarian law.

It’s not the vision of a world-class city that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel typically likes to portray. More teachers losing their jobs, thousands fewer police and firefighters on duty, less frequent trash collection and miles of potholed roads going unrepaired – all as property taxes soar. But that’s the scenario Emanuel and others have said could befall the nation’s third largest city if the state Legislature – which passed a landmark measure last week to address Illinois’s severe public pension shortfall – doesn’t deal with Chicago’s own multibillion-dollar pension problem.

Even as Silicon Valley speaks out against the US government’s surveillance methods, technology companies are turning a handsome profit by mining personal data and peering into people’s online habits. The industry’s profit machine has become tarnished by revelations that the National Security Agency trolls deep into the everyday lives of Web surfers. As a result, companies including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are becoming more aggressive in their attempts to counter any perception that they voluntarily give the government access to users’ e-mail and other sensitive information.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said Tuesday she would not resign ahead of national elections set for Feb. 2, her voice filling with emotion as she discussed her family’s role in Thai politics. Yingluck spoke one day after she announced elections – and one day after the main opposition leader ended a massive protest rally of 150,000 people by insisting his movement had now assumed broad political power. The streets of Bangkok were quiet Tuesday, a national holiday, after weeks of sometimes violent political turmoil as protesters demand Yingluck give up power to an unelected “people’s council.”

While the rest of North Korea’s top brass leaped to their feet before Kim Jong-un, clapping wildly in a requisite show of respect at high-level meetings, his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, often seemed nonchalant, at times even bored. Once considered the force behind the young leader, he displayed a bold insouciance that seemed calculated to show he was beyond reach. So by purging his own uncle, Kim has delivered a more chilling message: No one is beyond reach, not even family. During a Cabinet Council meeting Tuesday, South Korean President Park Geun-hye called Kim’s purging of Jang and his followers a “reign of terror” that could deepen uncertainty about ties between the rival Koreas, according to media pool reports.

Federal officials said 18 current and former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies saw themselves as being “above the law” when they engaged in crimes that included beating inmates and jail visitors, falsifying reports, and trying to obstruct an FBI probe of the nation’s largest jail system. The investigation into corruption and civil rights abuses led to the arrests Monday of 16 of the 18 defendants. At least two no longer work for the department.

Narrowly beating a midnight deadline, Congress voted Monday to renew an expiring ban on plastic firearms that can evade airport detection machines. But Republicans blocked an effort to toughen the restrictions – the latest defeat for gun-control forces in the year since the grade-school massacre in Newtown, Conn. President Obama signed the law before midnight, using an auto pen as he traveled to Africa for ceremonies honoring the late South African President Nelson Mandela. The device Obama used to sign the bill has been used for the signatures of traveling presidents since the administration of President George W. Bush. By voice vote, the Senate gave final congressional approval to a 10-year extension of the prohibition against guns that can slip past metal detectors and X-ray machines.

Croatia’s prime minister says his government is considering taking part in the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, but only if there is no opposition from the public. Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said Tuesday there are “consultations” throughout the Mediterranean states about Syrian weapons possibly being sent to one of their ports before being destroyed by the US military “probably somewhere in the Atlantic.”

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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