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Sometimes presidents have to make things up as they go along.

President Obama's decisions have had an improvisational air these past three weeks. His course on Syria kept shifting, at times seemingly guided by offhand remarks.

But the results are what count.

"If it works out in the end, the president's allowed to be uncertain," says Tim Naftali, a former director of the Nixon presidential library. "Oftentimes, the judgment you get during the crisis is not the judgment you get at the end."

There's still plenty of opportunity for problems to emerge when it comes to implementing the deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons, announced Saturday by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

No one has tried to dispose of weapons of mass destruction on such an accelerated timetable — and certainly not in the middle of an ongoing civil war. Obama's critics note that this deal does nothing to drive Syrian President Bashar Assad from power.

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called the deal "an act of provocative weakness on America's part." In a statement, they wrote, "It requires a willful suspension of disbelief to see this agreement as anything other than the start of a diplomatic blind alley."

“ If you get under the skin of most crises, they'd have this kind of ad hockery.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Gray has vetoed a controversial "living wage" bill that would have forced large retailers such as Wal-Mart to pay a 50 percent premium on the district's $8.25 per hour minimum wage.

When the bill was approved by the city council in July, Wal-Mart said it would abandon three of the six stores it planned to build in the district, claiming the required minimum $12.50 it would have to pay was too much.

Since then Gray, a Democrat, has been mulling whether to sign the Large Retailer Accountability Act, as the bill is known. On Thursday, he ended weeks of speculation and vetoed it.

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, a supporter of the act, said he was "disappointed" by the mayor's decision, which he said was "not good for workers."

A letter sent by Gray to Mendelson said the bill was "not a true living-wage bill, because it would raise the minimum wage only for a small fraction of the District's workforce," according to The Washington Post.

The Post quotes Wal-Mart spokesman Steven Restivo as saying the veto is "good news for D.C. residents," saying Gray chose "jobs, economic development and common sense over special interests."

He said that if the council fails to override the veto, "all stores are back on."

Other major retailers, such as Target and Home Depot, also opposed the bill.

In a statement from the National Retail Federation, spokesman David French thanked Gray "for his leadership on this important issue. With a stroke of his pen, the Mayor brought power back to D.C.'s 'Open for Business' sign."

More on Rebecca Musser

A complicated salvage operation is set to begin Monday at the site of the Costa Concordia, the luxury cruise ship that ran aground off Italy in 2012. Even if it succeeds, it will be a long time before things return to normal on the island of Giglio, where the ship wrecked last January.

A large team has gathered to try to move the wreck of the ship, which measures 952 feet in length and weighs more than 114,000 tons. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"The old nautical term for the operation is called parbuckling. Over a 10- to 12-hour period, the ship – now slumped on its side on a sloping reef – will be slowly rotated as dozens of pulleys will pull it upright.

"The big unknown is the condition of the side of the ship lying on the jagged reef, which juts into the hull by some 30 feet. But the engineers in charge are confident that the operation will be successful — so confident that there's no plan B.

"The option of breaking up the ship on site was discarded because the shipwreck lies in the Tuscan marine sanctuary, Europe's biggest, a haven for whales, dolphins and the last surviving monk seals.