The high price of aggression

March 06, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

Mr. Putin has lost his campaign to construct a Eurasian Union as an alternative to the European Union.

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Western diplomats couldn’t bring together the Russian and Ukraine foreign ministers for a meeting Wednesday in Paris. The hope was that such a meeting could have helped start resolving the crisis in Ukraine’s Crimea region. But US Secretary of State John Kerry says he feels some small successes were made in negotiations with each side. Meanwhile, the European Union prepared a $15 billion aid package to Ukraine and froze the assets of 18 people blamed for looting the treasury of the nearly bankrupt country.

President Obama’s choice to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was blocked by bipartisan opposition Wednesday in an emotional postscript to the long-ago murder of a Philadelphia policeman and the legal help his killer received. The vote against advancing Debo Adegbile toward confirmation was 47 to 52, shy of the majority needed under new procedures Democrats put in place late last year to overcome Republican stalling tactics.

Oscar Pistorius asked a friend to take the blame after a pistol was accidentally fired in a Johannesburg, South Africa, restaurant weeks before the double-amputee runner fatally shot his girlfriend, a witness testified Wednesday at Pistorius’s murder trial in Pretoria. The testimony by boxer Kevin Lerena relates to firearms charges against Pistorius, and raises questions about the character of a man who insists he accidentally shot dead Reeva Steenkamp in his home in the early hours of Feb. 14 last year.

Under pressure from gun-control advocates, Facebook agreed Wednesday to delete posts from users seeking to buy or sell weapons illegally or without a background check. A similar policy will be applied to Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing network, Facebook said. The measures will be put into effect over the next few weeks at the world’s largest social network, with 1.3 billion active users.

Former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner once again refused to answer questions at a congressional hearing on the targeting of tea party groups. Lerner headed the IRS division that improperly targeted tea party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status from 2010 to 2012. She appeared at a Wednesday hearing by the House Oversight Committee and invoked her constitutional right not to incriminate herself.

Mounting a show of support from like-minded governors, President Obama put a spotlight Wednesday on a minimum wage push that Democrats hope will appeal to economically squeezed voters in November’s midterm elections. At a packed college gymnasium in New Britain, Conn., Obama said raising hourly wages to $10.10 would pull millions of Americans out of poverty. Although one of Obama’s top priorities, the proposal is more likely to serve as a rallying cry for Democrats in the approaching election than to be adopted by Congress in the foreseeable future.

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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