B6
AREA • NATION •
kpcnews.com
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2014
Israeli settlers detained, injured Obama’s Mideast policies strained
KARYOUT, West Bank (AP) — Palestinians on Tuesday chased and grabbed more than a dozen Israeli settlers who witnesses said had attacked Palestinian farmers near a West Bank village. The settlers were held for about two hours at a house under construction before being handed over to the Israeli military. During the standoff, the settlers huddled near a wall of the house, several bleeding from the head, and one was lying on the ground. By the time Israeli soldiers arrived, the crowd surrounding the settlers had grown to about 200 people, an AP photographer said. People kicked and spit at the settlers as they were led away by soldiers. Human rights groups have reported an increase in attacks by militant settlers on Palestinians and their property in the West Bank in recent years. However, Tuesday’s incident appeared to mark the first time settlers were captured and held by Palestinians. The Israeli military said it had received word of a stone-throwing clash between settlers and Palestinian farmers and that it later evacuated 11 settlers with light and moderate injuries from the building. The incident began at about 10:30 a.m. near the West Bank village of Qusra,
AP
Injured Israeli settlers are detained by Palestinian villagers in a building under construction near the West Bank village of Qusra, southeast of the city of Nablus, Tuesday. Palestinians held more
southeast of the city of Nablus, said Ziad Odeh, the Muslim prayer leader in Qusra and a member of the village council. He said about 25 to 30 settlers, many of them masked, attacked Qusra farmers in an olive grove with sticks and stones, injuring a Palestinian boy in the head. A clash ensued, farmers called for reinforcements and about 100 youths
than a dozen Israeli settlers for about two hours Tuesday in retaliation for the latest in a string of settler attacks on villages in the area, witnesses said.
arrived from the village, Odeh said. The settlers ran away and the villagers gave chase, said Odeh and another witness, village resident Abdel Hakim Wadi. They said several of the settlers sought cover in the building under construction, located on the edge of the village of Karyout, about four kilometers (2.5 miles) from Qusra.
Villagers grabbed them however and turned the building into a holding area where they also put other settlers they chased down in the area, Odeh said. Some of the settlers were tied up, and most had signs of beating injuries, according to an AP photographer at the scene. Odeh said the beatings stopped after the settlers were seized.
One dies, three hurt in avalanche VAIL, Colo. (AP) — One person was killed and three others were injured Tuesday in an avalanche in the backcountry near Vail. The slide happened at around 11:30 a.m. in East Vail Chutes, an area between Vail Mountain and Vail Pass, Eagle County sheriff’s spokeswoman Jessie Mosher said. The three survivors were
expected to recover from their injuries. The death is the fifth in the Rocky Mountain region and the second in Colorado in the last two weeks. The avalanche danger where the latest deadly slide occurred is rated as considerable at or above the tree line for two main reasons. New snow over the weekend was pushed
into slabs by wind, and those more cohesive layers of snow are resting on top of the relatively weak early season snowfall, said Spencer Logan of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. The combination of a weak base layer under cohesive slabs tends to create slides that break in very wide pieces.
Such dangerous conditions are possible each winter, but last year they didn’t develop until late January because significant snowfall didn’t develop until later in the season, Logan said. East Vail Chutes has had a series of slides in the last few weeks, including one that trapped a skier.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is confronted with a recent burst of strength by al-Qaida that is chipping away at the remains of Mideast stability, testing his hands-off approach to conflicts in Iraq and Syria at the same time he pushes to keep thousands of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida-backed fighters have fought hard against other rebel groups in Syria, in a sideshow to the battle to unseat President Bashar Assad. Across the border in Iraq, they led a surprisingly strong campaign to take two of the cities that U.S. forces suffered heavy losses to protect. This invigorated front highlights the tension between two of Obama’s top foreign policy tenets: to end American involvement in Mideast wars and to eradicate insurgent extremists — specifically al-Qaida. It also raises questions about the future U.S. role in the region if militants overtake American gains made during more than a decade of war. In Afghanistan, Obama already has decided to continue the fight against extremists, as long as Afghan President Hamid Karzai signs off on a joint security agreement. Obama seeks to leave as many as 10,000 troops there beyond December, extending what already has become the longest U.S. war. But officials say he would be willing to withdraw completely at the end of this year if the security agreement cannot be finalized. That would mirror the U.S. exit from Iraq, the other unpopular war Obama inherited. A spike in sectarian violence followed the U.S. withdrawal at
the end of 2011, and now followed by the recent, alarming takeover of Ramadi and Fallujah by an al-Qaida affiliate known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Marina Ottaway, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said the extremists taking hold in Iraq are a spillover from the conflict in neighboring Syria and have been bolstered by Obama’s reluctance to arm the more moderate rebels fighting Assad. “There is no doubt that the U.S. policy helped create a vacuum in which the only effective forces were the radical forces,” Ottaway said Tuesday. Syria’s bloody civil war had not yet begun when the U.S. was making plans to withdraw from Iraq. But White House officials contend that keeping American troops in Iraq would have done little to stop the current violence. “There was sectarian conflict, violent sectarian conflict, in Iraq when there were 150,000 U.S. troops on the ground there,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. “So the idea that this would not be happening if there were 10,000 troops in Iraq I think bears scrutiny.” Still, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, a former top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said al-Qaida and other insurgents are seeking to take advantage of sectarian tensions across much of the Mideast. “This is not just about Iraq,” Odierno told reporters Tuesday. “It’s something that we have to be cognizant of as we look across the Middle East: What’s going on in Syria, what’s going on in Lebanon, what’s going on inside of Iraq.”
Ex-New York City workers charged in disability scam NEW YORK (AP) — Scores of retired New York City police officers, firefighters and prison guards were charged Tuesday with faking psychiatric problems to get federal disability benefits — with some falsely claiming their conditions arose after the Sept. 11 attacks, prosecutors said. Four ringleaders coached the former workers on how to falsely describe symptoms of depression and other mental health problems that allowed them to get payouts as high as $500,000, said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. The ringleaders made tens of thousands in dollars in secret kickbacks, Vance said. Among the retirees arrested were 72 city police officers, eight firefighters, five corrections officers and one Nassau County Police Department officer. Investigators said the scam stretched back more than two decades, with
the ex-officers and other workers collecting years’ worth of benefits for citing mental health problems so severe that they couldn’t work at all. The workers were coached on how to portray their problems, reporting that they were so psychologically damaged that they couldn’t take care of themselves, prosecutors said. Many of the officers legitimately had physical disabilities that would have entitled them to state disability pensions, but would not have entitled them to federal Social Security disability insurance, which requires a complete inability to work. Internal Affairs Chief Charles Campisi said many of the officers exaggerated their psychological trauma to gain the Social Security benefits. Most claimed post-traumatic stress disorder and many said it was because of the Sept. 11 attacks, he said. The NYPD has no information
that they weren’t actually working after the terrorist attack, just that they overstated the effect, he said. One of the defendants who said he couldn’t work taught martial arts. Another former police officer who claimed he couldn’t leave the house worked at a cannoli stand at a street festival. Another claimed depression so crippling that it kept him house-bound but was photographed aboard a Sea-Doo watercraft. Many said they could not use a computer but had Facebook pages, Twitter handles and YouTube channels, prosecutors said. “The brazenness is shocking,” Vance said. More than 100 defendants were charged with crimes including grand larceny. Arraignments in the sweeping case began late Tuesday morning, with several of the defendants pleading not guilty and being released without bail.
Ship hauls away first of Syria’s chemical weapons BEIRUT (AP) — The first batch of the most dangerous chemicals in Syria’s arsenal was loaded onto a Danish ship and taken out of the country Tuesday under tight security, an important milestone in the international operation to rid President Bashar Assad of the weapons by midyear. The operation at Syria’s port of Latakia took place against the backdrop of a widening civil war and escalating infighting between a chaotic mix of
Syrian rebel brigades and an al-Qaida linked militant group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. With the rebel-on-rebel fighting now in its fifth day, the shadowy leader of another faction affiliated with al-Qaida pleaded with his comrades to stop the spreading clashes, warning it threatened to upend gains made against Syrian government forces. The chemicals were supposed to have been removed from Syria by Dec. 31, but poor
security, bad weather and other factors meant the deadline was missed by a week. The raw materials — precursor chemicals for poison gas — were moved to the government-held port of Latakia from two sites in Syria and loaded onto the Danish cargo ship, which then set sail, said Sigrid Kaag, the Dutch diplomat coordinating the joint mission by the U.N. and Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.