The hard lesson of Sarajevo

June 27, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

The conflict touched off by an assassin in Sarajevo 100 years ago tomorrow underscores the danger of national pride and overconfident militarism.

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Ukrainian separatist rebels have agreed to take part in further peace talks on Friday to end the conflict in Ukraine's eastern regions, Interfax news agency said on Thursday.

"There is an agreement to hold a round of consultations on June 27 in Donetsk," Andrei Purgin, a senior figure in the leadership of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, was quoted as saying.

Earlier, speaking in Strasbourg, France, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he had just heard of the rebels' readiness to meet again with the so-called "contact group" which includes former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, Moscow's envoy to Kiev and a high-ranking official from the OSCE security and rights watchdog.

But Ukrainian media quoted him as hinting heavily that there would be no extension of a government ceasefire, which officially ends at 10 p.m. on Friday, unless Kiev was satisfied with the results of Friday's talks.

"It (Friday) is a very important day: if our conditions for the peace plan are not accepted, then we will make a very important decision," he was quoted as saying by Ukrainska Pravda online newspaper.

Howard Baker's question sliced to the core of Watergate: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

Repeated over and again in the senator's mild Tennessee drawl, those words guided Americans through the tangle of Watergate characters and charges playing daily on TV to focus squarely on Richard Nixon and his role in the cover-up.

Baker, who later became Senate majority leader, chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and one of the GOP's elder statesmen, died Thursday at his Tennessee home of complications from a stroke suffered days earlier, according to an email distributed at the law firm where Baker was senior counsel.

Baker emerged as an unlikely star of the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973.

When chosen as vice chairman — and therefore leading Republican — of the Senate special committee, he was a Nixon ally who thought the allegations couldn't possibly be true. Democrats feared he would serve as the White House's "mole" in the investigation of the break-in at Democratic headquarters and other crimes perpetrated in service to Nixon's re-election.

"I believed that it was a political ploy of the Democrats, that it would come to nothing," Baker told The Associated Press in 1992. "But a few weeks into that, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought, and more to it than I liked."

He said Watergate became "the greatest disillusionment" of his political career.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was most likely on autopilot when it crashed into the Indian Ocean further south than previously thought, Australian officials said on Thursday, as they charted the next phase of a so far fruitless search.

The new analysis comes more than 100 days after the Boeing 777, carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared on March 8 shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing.

Investigators say what little evidence they have to work with suggests the plane was deliberately diverted thousands of miles from its scheduled route before eventually plunging into the Indian Ocean.

"The new priority area is still focused on the seventh arc, where the aircraft last communicated with satellite. We are now shifting our attention to an area further south along the arc," Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss told reporters in Canberra.

Truss said the area was determined after a review of satellite data, early radar information and aircraft performance limits after the plane diverted across the Malaysian peninsula and headed south into one of the remotest areas of the planet.

The next phase of the search is expected to start in August and take a year, covering some 60,000 sq km at a cost of $56 million or more. The search is already the most expensive in aviation history.

The new priority search area is around 2,000 km west of Perth, a stretch of isolated ocean frequently lashed by storm force winds and massive swells.

A Sudanese Christian woman whose death sentence for apostasy was overturned has been freed again Thursday after being detained on accusations of forging travel documents.

Eman Abdul-Rahman, the lawyer for 27-year-old Mariam Ibrahim, told The Associated Press that she was released on Thursday from a police station after foreign diplomats pressed the government to free her. She was detained Tuesday at Khartoum's airport while trying to leave the country with her family.

On Tuesday, US State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters in Washington that the Sudanese government had informed American officials at the embassy in Khartoum that Ibrahim and her family were "temporarily detained" over issues relating their travel documents.

CNN reported that Sudan's National Intelligence and Security Services said that she had South Sudanese travel documents, despite not being a citizen of South Sudan, and she was heading to the United States, which is not her native country.

"This was considered illegal by the Sudanese authorities, who have summoned both the US and South Sudanese ambassadors," the agency said in a message posted on its media Facebook page early Wednesday.

Uruguay striker Luis Suarez was banned for nine matches by FIFA on Thursday after being found guilty of biting Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini.

Suarez was also suspended from any football-related activity for four months and fined $111,000.

"Such behavior cannot be tolerated on any football pitch, and in particular not at a FIFA World Cup when the eyes of millions of people are on the stars on the field," Claudio Sulser, chairman of the FIFA Disciplinary Committee, said in a statement.

The incident occurred 10 minutes before the end of Uruguay's 1-0 win over Italy in their final Group D match in Natal on Tuesday.

Suarez will miss Uruguay's last-16 match against Colombia in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday and will play no further part in the tournament if they progress.

New York State's highest court refused to reinstate New York City's ban on the sale of big sodas, ruling that the city's health department overstepped its bounds when it approved a cap on sugary beverages.

The unprecedented ban was championed by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his successor Mayor Bill de Blasio, who vowed to fight a lower court's decision to overturn it while campaigning last year.

The court largely ignored the merits of the ban on the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces (453 grams). In a 20-page ruling it determined the city's Board of Health engaged in policy-making, and not simply health regulations, when it imposed the restrictions on restaurants, delis, movie theaters, stadiums and street cart vendors.

"The Board of Health engaged in law-making beyond its regulatory authority," the opinion reads. "... It is clear that the Board of Health wrote the Portion Cap Rule without benefit of legislative guidance."

The city had hoped Thursday's ruling would overturn a lower court's decision that blocked the restrictions after restaurants, theater owners, beverage companies and small stores sued.

Oklahoma residents whose homes and nerves have been shaken by an upsurge in earthquakes want to know what's causing the temblors – and what can be done to stop them. At least five earthquakes rattled many Oklahomans early Thursday morning.

Earthquakes used to be almost unheard of on the vast stretches of prairie that unfold across Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, but they've become common in recent years.

Oklahoma recorded nearly 150 between January and the start of May. Though most have been too weak to cause serious damage or endanger lives, they've raised suspicions that the shaking might be connected to the oil and gas drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing, especially the wells in which the industry disposes of its wastewater.

Now after years of being harangued by anxious residents, governments in all three states are confronting the issue, reviewing scientific data, holding public discussions and considering new regulations.

GoPro has climbed mountaintops and dived to ocean bottoms. Now it's headed somewhere only slightly tamer: Wall Street. The maker of wearable sports cameras, loved by mountain climbers, divers, surfers and other extreme sports fans, said late Wednesday it sold 17.8 million shares at $24 each in its initial public offering of stock.

The IPO was priced at the high end of GoPro's expected range and raised $427 million, valuing the whole company at about $3 billion. The proceeds from the IPO could rise to $491 million if underwriters use their option to buy more shares. The stock began trading on the Nasdaq stock market Thursday under ticker symbol "GPRO."

GoPro wants to go beyond cameras. It has hinted that it wants to be a media company, too, by making money off the videos created by the cameras. However, it hasn't laid out concrete plans to do that yet.

“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.