The futility of disengagement

June 19, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

US air power can help turn the tide in Iraq. But it will be up to Iraqis to halt the ISIS offensive.

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A 1-cent postage stamp from a 19th century British colony in South America has become the world's most valuable stamp – again.

The 1856 British Guiana One-Cent Magenta sold Tuesday at auction in New York for $9.5 million, Sotheby's said. It was the fourth time the stamp has broken the auction record for a single stamp in its long history.

The stamp was expected to bring between $10 million and $20 million. Sotheby's said the buyer wished to remain anonymous. The price included the buyer's premium.

David Redden, Sotheby's vice chairman, called the sale "a truly great moment for the world of stamp collecting."

"That price will be hard to beat, and likely won't be exceeded unless the British Guiana comes up for sale again in the future," Redden said.

Measuring 1 inch-by-1¼ inches (2.5 inches-by-3.2 centimeters), it hasn't been on public view since 1986, and is the only major stamp absent from the British Royal Family's private Royal Philatelic Collection.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis stuck to familiar economic themes Tuesday during her first public speech since replacing her campaign manager.

Speaking in her hometown of Fort Worth, Davis reiterated earlier proposals for new investments in education, roads, water and a range of other issues, while declining to say how much they would cost. She attacked Republican front-runner Greg Abbott on a wide range of issues, from education funding to health care a federal proposal to raise the minimum wage.

She repeatedly accused Abbott of standing against "hardworking Texans," a phrase she repeated more than a dozen times in her 30-minute speech.

"I am the only candidate in this race with a vision that works for all hardworking Texans, not just some," Davis said. Abbott's spokesman Matt Hirsch responded in an email that electing Davis as governor "would make the next four years in Texas look like that last six years under Barack Obama."

Venezuelan and Cuban activists lobbied the United Nations on Wednesday to investigate the deaths of dozens of student protesters in Caracas and the jailing of Cuban dissidents.

The two Latin American powers, led by socialist Presidents Nicolas Maduro and Raul Castro, are members of the 47-member UN Human Rights Council.

"We came to Geneva to ask the UN to send a mission to Venezuela to evaluate the cases of human rights violations that students have been subjected to," Eusebio Costa, a student activist and President of the Student Center at the Catholic University Santa Rosa in Caracas, told a news briefing.

He said 117 students are still being held, some in high-security military prisons, after three months of protests that began in the major oil-producing nation in February. Forty-two people including 38 students were killed in the violence.

The government says the protests were a veneer for a US-backed conspiracy to oust the successor to the late Hugo Chavez.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, in an opening speech to the Human Rights Council on June 10, called for independent UN investigators to have access to Venezuela.

Venezuela last invited a UN human rights investigator in 1996, and Cuba in 2007, whereas 108 countries have extended standing invitations to all investigators, UN officials say.

Georgia and Missouri have carried out the nation's first executions since a botched lethal injection in Oklahoma in April revived concerns about capital punishment.

Neither execution had any noticeable complications. Another execution, the third in a 24-hour span, was scheduled for Wednesday evening in Florida.

Georgia inmate Marcus Wellons, 59, who was convicted in the 1989 rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl, received a single-drug injection late Tuesday night after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his late appeals. About an hour later, John Winfield, 46, was executed in Bonne Terre, Missouri. Winfield was convicted in the 1996 killing of two women.

Nine executions nationwide have been stayed or postponed since late April, when Oklahoma prison officials halted the execution of Clayton Lockett after noting that the lethal injection drugs weren't being administered properly. Lockett died several minutes later.

Georgia, Missouri and Florida all refuse to say where they obtain their drugs, or if they are tested. Lawyers for Wellons and Winfield had challenged the secretive process used by some states to obtain lethal injection drugs from unidentified, loosely regulated compounding pharmacies.

An 89-year-old Philadelphia man was ordered held without bail Wednesday on a German arrest warrant charging him with aiding and abetting the killing of 216,000 Jewish men, women and children while he was a guard at the Auschwitz death camp.

The man, retired toolmaker Johann "Hans" Breyer, was arrested by US authorities Tuesday night. Breyer spent the night in custody and appeared frail during a detention hearing in federal court, wearing an olive green prison jumpsuit and carrying a cane.

Legal filings unsealed Wednesday in the US indicate the district court in Weiden, Germany, issued a warrant for Breyer's arrest the day before, charging him with 158 counts of complicity in the commission of murder.

Each count represents a trainload of Nazi prisoners from Hungary, Germany and Czechoslovakia who were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau between May 1944 and October 1944, the documents said.

A New York man imprisoned for nearly 25 years for a murder he did not commit filed preliminary paperwork this week for a $162 million lawsuit against the city seeking damages for his wrongful conviction, his lawyer said.

After years of appeals and an internal review by the Brooklyn district attorney's office, Jonathan Fleming, 51, was exonerated in April by a judge who cited phone records, receipts, photos and witness accounts placing him in Florida during the murder.

His attorney, Taylor Koss, said the $162 million he would seek in the lawsuit was standard for unjust convictions, based on tabulations including the lengthy time Fleming was locked up and his young age at the time he became incarcerated. But he acknowledged the ultimate settlement with the city would likely be far smaller.

"What I'm looking for is a reasonable settlement that is a fair settlement for Mr. Fleming after losing 25 years of his life," Koss said.

Fleming had always maintained his innocence in the 1989 shooting death of his friend in Brooklyn, but said prosecutors, in a rush to close the case, ignored troves of evidence that would have cleared him.

Fleming left prison with "$92 in his pocket," said Koss. "He's getting by, but it's a struggle."

The lawsuit will seek damages for lost wages, medical expenses and suffering, Koss said.

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.