The quiet power of moderation

June 25, 2014 - Daily News Briefing

Just as fundamentalism oversteps with harshness, authoritarianism oversteps with restrictiveness.

Subscribe Now to read this post!

To read this post and thousands more articles, subscribe today!

Two powerful British political insiders met starkly different fates Tuesday as former News of the World editor Andy Coulson was convicted of phone hacking but fellow editor Rebekah Brooks was acquitted, after a monthslong trial centering on illegal activity at the heart of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire.

A jury at London's Old Bailey unanimously found Coulson, the former spin doctor of British Prime Minister David Cameron, guilty of conspiring to intercept communications by eavesdropping on mobile phone voicemails. Brooks was acquitted of that charge and of counts of conspiring to bribe officials and obstruct police.

The nearly eight-month trial — one of the longest and most expensive in British legal history — was triggered by revelations that for years the News of the World used illegal eavesdropping to get stories, listening in on the voicemails of celebrities, politicians and even crime victims.

The scandal led Murdoch to shut down the 168-year-old tabloid and spurred criminal investigations in which dozens of journalists and officials have been arrested.

Mismanagement by the pilots of Asiana Flight 214, including confusion over whether one of the airliner's key controls was maintaining airspeed, caused the plane to crash while landing in San Francisco last year, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded Tuesday.

But the board also faulted the complexity of the Boeing 777's autothrottle, as well as training materials provided by the aircraft maker that fail to make clear under what conditions the automated system doesn't automatically maintain speed, saying they contributed to the accident.

And the board's acting chairman, Chris Hart, warned that the accident underscores a problem that has long troubled aviation regulators around the globe — that increasingly complicated automated aircraft controls designed to improve safety are also creating new opportunities for error.

The Asiana flight crew "over-relied on automated systems that they did not fully understand," Hart said.

"In their efforts to compensate for the unreliability of human performance, the designers of automated control systems have unwittingly created opportunities for new error types that can be even more serious than those they were seeking to avoid," he said.

The South Korea-based airline's pilot training also was faulted.

A Christian woman sentenced to death in Sudan and later freed has been detained at an airport while trying to leave the country Tuesday, her lawyer said.

Lawyer Eman Abdul-Rahim told The Associated Press that Meriam Ibrahim was held along with two children and her husband at the international airport in Khartoum, the country's capital. Abdul-Rahim did not elaborate and security officials did not respond to requests for comment.

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.

Harf said the Sudanese have assured the US that the family is not under arrest and that they are safe. She said US officials are continuing to work on getting them out of the country.

Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim but who was raised by her Christian mother, was convicted of apostasy for marrying a Christian. Sudan's penal code forbids Muslims from converting to other religions, a crime punishable by death.

Nearly 170 victims of child sex trafficking, many of whom had never been reported missing, were rescued in the last week as part of an annual nationwide crackdown, the FBI said Monday.

Besides the 168 children rescued from the sex trade, 281 pimps were arrested during the same period on state and federal charges.

"These are not faraway kids in faraway lands," FBI Director James Comey said in announcing the annual enforcement push known as Operation Cross Country. Instead, he added, "These are America's children."

This is the eighth such week-long operation, which this year unfolded in 106 cities. The FBI says nearly 3,600 children have so far been recovered from the street.

"I hate that we have to do this work – hate it," Comey said. "I love the people who've devoted their lives to doing this work. There is no more meaningful work that the FBI participates in than rescuing children."

Islamic extremists have abducted 60 more girls and women and 31 boys from villages in northeast Nigeria, witnesses said Tuesday.

Security forces denied the kidnappings. Nigeria's government and military have been widely criticized for their slow response to the abductions of more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped April 15.

There was no way to safely and independently confirm the report from Kummabza, 95 miles from Maiduguri, capital of Borno state and headquarters of a military state of emergency that has failed to curtail near-daily attacks by Boko Haram fighters.

Kummabza resident Aji Khalil said Tuesday the abductions took place Saturday in an attack in which four villagers were killed. Khalil is a member of one of the vigilante groups that have had some success in repelling Boko Haram attacks with primitive weapons.

A senior local councilor from the village's Damboa local government told The Associated Press that abductions had occurred but insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to give information to reporters. He said elderly survivors of the attack had walked some 15 miles to the relative safety of other villages.

A draft of one of the most popular songs of all time, Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," sold Tuesday for $2 million, which the auction house called a world record for a popular music manuscript.

A working draft of the finished song in Dylan's own hand went to an unidentified bidder at Sotheby's. The selling price, $2.045 million, included a buyer's premium.

The manuscript is "the only known surviving draft of the final lyrics for this transformative rock anthem," Sotheby's said.

The draft is written in pencil on four sheets of hotel letterhead stationery with revisions, additions, notes and doodles: a hat, a bird, an animal with antlers. The stationery comes from the Roger Smith Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Dylan was 24 when he recorded the song in 1965 about a debutante who becomes a loner when she's cast from upper-class social circles.

A debris field at the bottom of Lake Michigan may be the remains of the long-lost Griffin, a vessel commanded by a 17th-century French explorer, said a shipwreck hunter who has sought the wreckage for decades.

Steve Libert told The Associated Press that his crew found the debris this month about 120 feet from the spot where they removed a wooden slab a year ago that was protruding from the lake bottom. Libert believes that timber was the bowsprit of Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle's ship, although scientists who joined the 2013 expedition say the slab more likely was an abandoned fishing net stake.

"This is definitely the Griffin — I'm 99.9 percent sure it is," Libert said. "This is the real deal."

He described the bottomland area as littered with wooden planks that could belong to a ship's bow, along with nails and pegs that would have fastened the hull to the rest of the vessel and what appeared to be sections of a mast.

“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.