The narrowness of nationalism

March 04, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

Vladimir Putin is working at cross purposes.

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European Union leaders Monday called a special summit for Thursday, where they are expected to freeze visa liberalization and economic cooperation talks with Russia if Moscow hasn’t taken steps to calm the crisis in Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. EU foreign ministers said they also have stopped preparation for the G8 summit, which is set for June in the Russian resort of Sochi.

Seeking to salvage an elusive Middle East peace plan, President Obama pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday at the White House to make the “tough decisions” needed to move forward on talks with the Palestinians. But facing a US-imposed April deadline, the Israeli leader declared pessimistically that “Israel has been doing its part and, I regret to say, the Palestinians have not.”

A group of armed men, including two suicide attackers, stormed a court complex in the Pakistani capital on Monday in a rare terror attack in the heart of Islamabad that killed 11 people and wounded dozens. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the assault, which came just days after the Pakistani Taliban announced a one-month cease-fire, raising questions about the group’s ability to control its various factions.

Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights Monday as the latest winter storm hit the US East Coast. The hardest-hit cities were Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore.

The first witness in the Oscar Pistorius murder trial in Johannesburg, South Africa, testified Monday to hearing a woman’s screams before the sound of four gunshots on the night the double-amputee Olympian killed his girlfriend. Michelle Burger, a woman who lives on an estate next to Pistorius’s gated community, said she and her husband were awakened by the screams in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 14 last year, when Pistorius killed Reeva Steenkamp by shooting four times through a door in his bathroom. Pistorius says he killed Steenkamp by mistake thinking she was an intruder.

The US Supreme Court indicated Monday that states should look beyond an intelligence test score in borderline cases of mental disability to determine whether a death row inmate is eligible to be executed. Twelve years after the Supreme Court barred execution of mentally disabled people, the justices heard arguments about how states evaluate claims of mental disability that, if substantiated, protect inmates from being put to death.

Croatia on Monday accused its Balkan neighbor Serbia of genocide in the early 1990s as the former Yugoslavia shattered in spasms of ethnic violence, in a case at the United Nations’ highest court that highlights lingering animosities in the region. Croatia is asking the International Court of Justice to declare that Serbia breached the 1948 Genocide Convention when forces from the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia attempted to drive Croats out of large swaths of the country.

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.

Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights Monday as the latest winter storm hit the US East Coast. The hardest-hit cities were Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore.

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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