Navigate to News section

Daybreak: March 14 Is Their Day

Plus Gross sentenced in Cuba, and more in the news

by
Marc Tracy
March 14, 2011
The crowd in Beirut yesterday.(Salah Malkawi/ Getty Images)
The crowd in Beirut yesterday.(Salah Malkawi/ Getty Images)

• Today is March 14, and yesterday supporters of Lebanon’s March 14 movement rallied to supported outsed ex-prime minister Saad Hariri and to demand that Hezbollah give up its weapons. [AP/NYT]

• Alan Gross, the 61-year-old American contractor who was helping Cuba’s Jewish community and was accused of being a spy, was sentenced to 15 years in jail over the weekend. The United States condemned the punishment. [JTA]

• Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that if Israel didn’t quickly move to help establish a Palestinian state, it would face “a diplomatic tsunami.” Holy innapropriate metaphors, Batman! [Haaretz]

• The sides are gearing up in Egypt for next Saturday’s constitutional referendum. Hosni Mubarak’s old party and the Muslim Brotherhood support the proposed reforms; most of the other parties do not. [NYT]

• Foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that the U.S. should maneuver the Security Council into authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya—something which the Arab League endorsed over the weekend. [NYT]

• Tawfik Toubi, 88, the last surviving member of Israel’s first parliament, died. Somehow it’s fitting that he was also the founder of the Israeli Communist Party. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.