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Police question Netanyahu for third time in criminal case

By Maayan Lubell

(Reuters) – Israeli police questioned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday for the third time this month as part of a criminal investigation into abuse of office, Israeli media reported.

A police source confirmed the questioning took place but would not provide further details. A Reuters cameraman at Netanyahu’s official residence, where the questioning took place, said investigators were on the scene for three hours.

Police confirm they are questioning Netanyahu as a suspect in two criminal cases, one involving gifts given to him and his family by businessmen and the other related to conversations he held with an Israeli publisher. He has denied wrongdoing.

If charges are brought, political upheaval in Israel would be likely, with pressure on Netanyahu, 67, to step down after 11 years in office, spread over four terms.

The first case — referred to by police as Case 1,000 — involves Netanyahu and family members receiving gifts on a regular basis from two businessmen. Israeli media have reported that the gifts include cigars and champagne.

The second involves a deal Netanyahu allegedly discussed with the owner of one of Israel’s largest newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth, for better coverage in return for curbs on competition from a free paper owned by U.S. casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.

Adelson is a supporter of the prime minister and his newspaper is staunchly pro-Netanyahu.

Israel Radio said Friday’s questioning mainly focused on the second case.

Addressing parliament on Wednesday, Netanyahu said there was nothing wrong with receiving gifts from close friends and that it was common for politicians to hold conversations with newspaper publishers. He accused opponents of trying to overthrow him.

“The goal is to pressure the attorney-general to press charges at any cost. There is no limit to the hounding, the persecution, the lies,” Netanyahu said.

In a research note published this week, Moody’s rating agency said the investigations into Netanyahu “are sufficiently serious that they could end his tenure as prime minister”.

“Should Netanyahu be forced to resign, it is likely that new elections would need to be held, since there is no clear successor in his Likud party.”

Under Israeli law, the prime minister is not obliged to resign even after he is charged, but he could be pressured into stepping down. Opponents are calling for him to do so.

Netanyahu is not the first Israeli leader to have faced criminal investigation: former prime minister Ehud Olmert was convicted of breach of trust and bribery in 2014 and Ariel Sharon was questioned while in office over allegations of bribery and campaign financing illegalities.

Israel Radio and Channel Ten television reported this week that police were investigating two more cases involving Netanyahu. Police did not confirm or deny the reports.

(Editing by Luke Baker and Dominic Evans)

Eight held in Austrian police raids linked to Islamic State

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austrian police took eight people into custody on Thursday in raids linked to potential connections with the militant group Islamic State, prosecutors in the city of Graz said.

Around 800 police officers took part in the raids in Vienna and Graz “due to suspected participation in a terrorist organization (‘IS’),” they said in a statement, adding that the coordinated action had been planned for some time.

The statement gave no more details, but a spokesman said the people taken into custody included three Austrian nationals with a migrant background, two Bosnians and a Syrian. The nationalities of the other suspects were not immediately known.

“There was no acute danger” and no indications of a concrete attack, the spokesman said, adding that the detentions were not connected to the arrest of an Austrian teenager last week on suspicion of planning an Islamist attack in Vienna.

That suspect, a 17-year-old with Albanian roots, was arrested on Friday after tip-offs from unspecified foreign countries. Austria alerted Germany to a related suspect, a 21-year-old who was arrested in the western German city of Neuss on Saturday. A boy thought to be 12 has also been held in Austria.

German authorities have been on high alert since a Tunisian failed asylum seeker rammed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin on Dec. 19, killing 12 people.

Police in Vienna have also been on heightened alert since Friday’s arrest and have increased patrols at transport hubs and busy public places.

(Reporting by Alexandra Schwarz-Goerlich in Vienna and Michael Shields in Zurich; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Hundreds of police trained by Turkey start work in northern Syria

By Khalil Ashawi

JARABLUS, Syria (Reuters) – A new Syrian police force trained and equipped by Turkey started work in a rebel-held border town on Tuesday, a sign of deepening Turkish influence in northern Syria, where it has helped drive out Islamic State militants in recent months.

Casually referred to as the “Free Police”, in reference to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) alliance of moderate rebel groups which Turkey backed in its campaign against Islamic State along the Turkish border, many of the first 450 recruits are former rebel fighters.

The new, armed security force is made up of regular police and special forces, who wear distinctive light blue berets. They are Syrians, but received five weeks of training in Turkey. Some wore a Turkish flag patch on their uniforms at the inauguration ceremony on Tuesday.

It operates out of a newly opened police station in the Syrian border town of Jarablus but hopes to expand into other areas freed from Islamic State militants by Turkey-backed rebels, officials said.

FSA fighters took Jarablus from Islamic State in August, the first town to fall to Turkey’s “Operation Euphrates Shield”. That operation has steadily ousted the jihadists from the Syria-Turkish border, while also preventing Kurdish militias gaining ground in their wake.

Turkey-backed rebels now control a more than 100-km stretch along the Syria-Turkish border.

Turkey has long supported rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a complex, multi-faceted conflict. The war has divided Syria into a patchwork of areas controlled by Kurdish militias, Islamic State and various rebel groups.

The Police and National Security Force is a sign of a deepening Turkish influence in north Syria, with the new police cars and station having both Turkish and Arabic writing on them.

“Our mission is to maintain security and preserve property and to serve civilians in the areas liberated (from Islamic State),” police force head General Abd al-Razaq Aslan told Reuters.

Aslan said Turkey had provided material and logistical support that would make the new security forces highly effective.

The opening ceremony was attended by the governor of Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the border. It has become a hub for opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during the nearly six-year conflict.

Governor Ali Yerlikaya said Turkey will continue to support areas taken from Islamic State militarily and by providing other services.

(Writing by Lisa Barrington in Beirut, reporting by Khalil Ashawi in Jarabus, northern Syria, editing by Larry King)

North Dakota tribe formally calls on pipeline protesters to disperse

By Terray Sylvester

CANNON BALL, N.D. (Reuters) – A Sioux tribal council on Saturday formally asked hundreds of protesters to clear out of three camps near its North Dakota reservation used to stage months of sometimes violent protests against the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on Friday unanimously passed a resolution calling for the camps to be dismantled, it said on its Facebook page on Saturday. The tribe has been encouraging protesters to go home since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers agreed to an environmental review of the $3.8 billion project in December.

Despite earlier discussions about alternative sites, the resolution made no provision for relocating the estimated 600 protesters, which include non-native environmental activists and Native Americans from outside the tribe.

“The pipeline fight has moved beyond the camps and our strategy must evolve with the process,” Standing Rock Tribal Chairman David Archambault II said in a statement dated Saturday.

The council said heavy snowfall in the area had raised the danger of flooding, and this week’s clashes with police could imperil the environmental review process.

“Because we worked together, the federal government will prepare an Environmental Impact Statement,” the tribe said. “Moving forward, our ultimate objective is best served by our elected officials, navigating strategically through the administrative and legal processes.”

Native Americans and environmental activists have said that the pipeline would threaten water resources and sacred lands.

The tribe, which launched the effort to stop the pipeline last year, won a major concession when the government denied Energy Transfer Partners an easement for the pipeline to travel under Lake Oahe, a water source upstream from the reservation.

The tribe’s resolution formally called on protesters to leave the area in 30 days, in part because of the potential for environmental damage and safety issues raised by the encampments.

But a former council member said the tribe was also concerned that recent clashes could delay the reopening of a highway linking the reservation to Bismarck, the state capital, an hour’s drive to the north.

“Our main venture that we have on Standing Rock is the Prairie Knights Casino, and Highway 1806 is the main access road,” said Phyllis Young, who currently serves as a consultant to the tribe on the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Tensions increased this week near the construction site, with repeated clashes between protesters and police ahead of Friday’s inauguration of President Donald Trump, an unabashed supporter of the project.

Police used tear gas and fired beanbag rounds to disperse crowds, and have arrested nearly 40 people since Monday, law enforcement officials said.

One of the main groups representing protesters in the camp signaled a willingness to abide by the tribe’s resolution.

“Our network respects the decision of the Cannon Ball district and the tribal council of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe,” said Tom Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “Vacating the camp does not mean abandoning the resistance.”

But Olive Bias, a Cherokee from Colorado who has been at the camps since September, said she expected some people would refuse to leave camp.

“Some will (leave). Others won’t. It’s pretty inevitable,” she said.

(Writing by Frank McGurty, editing by G Crosse)

Four dead, more than 20 hurt when driver ploughs into Australian pedestrians

Police block off street where truck attack took place

MELBOURNE (Reuters) – A man deliberately drove into pedestrians, killing four and injuring more than 20, in the center of Australia’s second largest city of Melbourne on Friday, but police said the incident was not terrorism-related.

Police eventually rammed the car and shot the 26-year-old driver in the arm, before dragging him from the vehicle and arresting him. Police said the man had a history of family violence and was wanted over a stabbing earlier in the day.

Pursued by police cars, the man had been seen driving erratically before speeding into a pedestrian mall, ploughing into people, police said. A shop video showed several people diving into a convenience store as the car raced along the footpath.

“We witnessed about half a dozen people that ricocheted off the car one way or another. I saw one person fly up almost roof level of the car as they got thrown up against one of the retail stores,” Sharn Baylis, 46, told Reuters by telephone.

“You could hear the gasping and the screaming from people, then you just started hearing the screams and the crying as it sunk in,” she said.

Baylis said she rushed across tram tracks and with other bystanders and gave cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) first aid to a badly hurt man who had been run over.

“I think it was pretty much in vain at that point. The seriousness of his injuries, he was probably the worst I saw.”

One of the dead was a child. Four children, including a three-month-old baby, were taken to Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, said a hospital spokesman.

“We’re not regarding this as a terrorism-related incident,” Victoria state police commissioner Graham Ashton told reporters on Friday.

Police had earlier chased the driver, who was wanted over a domestic assault and driving offences, Ashton said.

‘GUNS DRAWN’

Video from a witness showed a maroon colored car driving around in circles in an intersection outside Flinders St railway station in the city’s central business district, with the driver shouting at people and hanging his arm out the window.

Two people approached the car, apparently trying to stop it before it drove off with police chasing. (For a graphic, click http://tmsnrt.rs/2jTj2Y9)

Witness Maria Kitjapanon told Melbourne’s Age newspaper that police eventually rammed the car.

“There were probably 10 police surrounding that guy’s car, with guns drawn, and they fired into the car. Then they dragged someone out via the passengers side, then all 10 of them sat on top of him,” she said.

Melbourne is hosting the Australian Open tennis grand slam and is packed with thousands of tourists, only a few blocks from where the incident occurred. Police said the tennis tournament continued as normal.

Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, has been on heightened alert for attacks by home-grown radicals since 2014 and authorities have said they have thwarted a number of plots. There have been several “lone wolf” assaults, including a 2014 cafe siege in Sydney that left two hostages and the gunman dead.

Friday’s incident initially raised fears about the possibility of another attack.

Last year, in attacks claimed by Islamic State, trucks were driven into crowded pedestrian precincts in separate incidents in Nice and Berlin, killing scores.

(Reporting by Tom Westbrook and Jamie Freed in Sydney, Sonali Paul in Melbourne; Writing by Michael Perry; Editing by Lincoln Feast)

Tensions rise at North Dakota pipeline as Trump set to take White House

By Terray Sylvester

CANNON BALL, N.D. (Reuters) – Tensions have increased this week near the construction site of the Dakota Access pipeline, with repeated clashes between protesters and police ahead of Friday’s inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, an unabashed fan of the $3.8 billion project.

Police used tear gas and fired bean-bag rounds to disperse crowds, and have arrested nearly 40 people since Monday, many of them on a bridge that has been the site of frequent confrontations, law enforcement officials said.

Demonstrators at the shrinking protest camp have voiced desperation and declining morale, citing weaker support from the local Standing Rock Sioux tribe that launched the effort last year and the backing that Trump, a Republican, will provide the pipeline once he takes office on Friday.

“It’s closing in on the inauguration, and people want to make sure that their voices are heard while they still have a chance,” said Benjamin Johansen, 29, a carpenter from Iowa who has been at the camp for two months. “There’s a very real possibility that once the new president is inaugurated, our voices won’t matter.”

This week’s clashes between protesters and police are the most serious since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied an easement in December for the pipeline to travel under Lake Oahe.

Native Americans and environmental activists have said that the pipeline threatens water resources and sacred lands.

Members of the Standing Rock Sioux, whose reservation is near the pipeline, asked protesters to disperse following the Corps’ decision, but around 600 remain in the main camp, now called Oceti Oyate.

The tribe is asking that the camp be evacuated by Jan. 29, and is offering an alternate site on reservation land that avoids any risk of flooding. Tribal leaders and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum have warned about potential flooding at the protest site in early March.

The call for the protest to end has left those still on site in a darker mood, said Amanda Moore, 20, an activist with Black Lives Matter.

“We’re stressed with Donald Trump’s inauguration coming so soon, and feeling that we have to stop the pipeline now,” she said.

Protesters and law enforcement faced off early Thursday morning on Backwater Bridge for the third straight night, with demonstrators throwing snowballs at officers and climbing onto a barricade before being pushed back.

Law enforcement fired a volley of bean bags and sponges at protesters at around 2 a.m., sending protesters fleeing from the ice- and snow-covered bridge, according to a Reuters witness. Police said they also used pepper spray.

The skirmish came as the Army began the process of launching an environmental study of the pipeline.

At least one protester was taken to the hospital, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. Since Monday, 37 have been arrested, adding up to 624 since August.

“They come and say they want to pray and want us to fall back, then they get aggressive and try and flank our officers and get behind us,” Maxine Herr, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department said. “What they say and what they do are two different things.”

Both Herr and protesters conceded that communication between the two sides had deteriorated in past months.

Kalisa Wight Rock, a volunteers from Georgia working as a medic, said focus shifting away from the protest had left some feeling abandoned after the widespread attention the opposition to the pipeline garnered last year.

“A lot of people think this is over and that we’re not still here,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Timothy Mclaughlin in Chicago; Editing by Ben Klayman and Jonathan Oatis)

Arab Israeli and policeman killed in suspected car ramming attack in southern Israel

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Police in Israel said an Arab Israeli on Wednesday rammed his car into a group of policemen in the southern Negev region, killing one before being shot dead, though a rights activist who was present disputed it was an attack.

Police said the violence sparked a riot in the village of Umm al-Hiran, where an operation was underway to demolish Bedouin dwellings deemed by a court as having been built illegally on state-owned land.

Police spokeswoman Merav Lapidot said the suspect was a local teacher who “surged towards the forces intending to kill” and that riots erupted after he was shot.

But human rights activist Michal Haramati, who had come to Umm al-Hiran to observe the demolitions, said she witnessed the event and that the driver was not heading towards police when he was shot.

“Suddenly the car started to go down the hill, without control, absolutely,” she told Reuters in English. “The driver was obviously dead by the time that he lost control this way. That’s when he hit the cops.”

Most of Israel’s Bedouin, who predominate in the desert area that accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s territory, are nomadic tribes which have wandered across the Middle East from Biblical times. Arab citizens make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population of eight million, and 200,000 of them are Bedouin.

Bedouin leaders in Negev say Israel has long discriminated against their communities, denying them public funds and services. Half of Israeli Bedouin population live in towns and villages recognized as formal communities by the government. Others live rough, in tents and shacks on patches of desert.

Israeli forces have been particularly wary of car ramming attacks since a wave of Palestinian street assaults began in October 2015.

On Jan. 8, four Israeli soldiers were killed in Jerusalem by a Palestinian who drove his truck into them.

In all, 37 Israelis and two visiting Americans have been killed in the past 15 months, while at least 232 Palestinians have been killed in violence in Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the same period. Israel says that at least 158 of them were assailants while others died during clashes and protests.

(Reporting by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Raissa Kasolowsky)

Illinois man sues police over flag burning arrest

By Timothy Mclaughlin

CHICAGO (Reuters) – An Illinois man is suing members of a local police department alleging his rights were violated when he was arrested last year after he posted photos of himself burning an American flag on social media and they were shared widely, according to court documents.

Bryton Mellott, 22, of Urbana, Illinois, a city around 140 miles (225 km) south of Chicago, set an American flag on fire on July 3 in a friend’s backyard to protest the conditions of many Americans’ lives. He then posted photos to Facebook along with an explanation of his actions, according to court documents filed on Wednesday.

Many states, including Illinois, continue to have flag desecration laws on the books, though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that burning of the flag is protected as an expression of free speech.

The Urbana Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Mellott’s lawsuit alleges that four Urbana police officers violated his right to free speech and detained him without reason. The American Civil Liberties Union is representing Mellott. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois.

“I am not proud to be an American. In this moment, being proud of my country is to ignore the atrocities committed against people of color, people living in poverty, people who identify as women, and against my own queer community on a daily basis,” Mellott wrote last year in the caption accompanying his photos, according to court documents.

He ended his post, “#ArrestMe.”

By the following morning, the post had been shared widely and attracted numerous comments. An officer from the Urbana Police Department called Mellott and told him to take the post down, according to court documents. Mellott declined to do so, saying it had already been shared many times.

Later in the day, Mellott was arrested by Urbana officers for violating the state’s flag desecration statue. He was detained for around five hours.

However, Champaign County State’s Attorney Julia Rietz declined to charge Mellott, citing the Supreme Court rulings, and Mellott was released.

President-elect Donald Trump briefly waded into the debate over flag burning last year, when he said in a message on Twitter that there “must be consequences” for burning the flag. He suggested those who do so face loss of citizenship or jail time.

(Editing by Matthew Lewis)

U.S. in deal to reform Baltimore police after Freddie Gray death

By Donna Owens

BALTIMORE (Reuters) – The city of Baltimore will enact a series of police reforms including changes in how officers use force and transport prisoners under an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department filed in federal court on Thursday.

The agreement comes almost two years after the death of a black man, Freddie Gray, of injuries sustained while in police custody sparked a day of rioting and arson in the majority-black city. It also led to an investigation that found the city’s police routinely violated residents’ civil rights.

Outgoing U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the deal, which is subject to a judge’s approval, would be binding even after President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20.

“The reforms in this consent decree will help ensure effective and constitutional policing, restore the community’s trust in law enforcement, and advance public and officer safety,” Lynch told reporters, flanked by recently elected Mayor Catherine Pugh.

The 227-page consent decree agreement is the result of months of negotiations after a federal report released in August found that the city’s 2,600-member police department routinely violated black residents’ civil rights with strip searches, by excessively using force and other means.

The probe followed the April 2015 death of Gray, 25, who died of injuries sustained in the back of a police van. His was one of a series of high-profile deaths in U.S. cities from Ferguson, Missouri, to North Charleston, South Carolina, that sparked an intense debate about race and justice and fueled the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Department of Justice is scheduled to release the findings of its investigation into the Chicago Police Department on Friday in the Midwest city, local media reported. In Philadelphia on Friday, a report on reform efforts by the Philadelphia Police Department will be released, according to a statement from the Department of Justice.

Prosecutors brought charges against six officers involved in Gray’s arrest but secured no convictions.

William Murphy Jr., an attorney who represented the Gray family in a civil suit against the city that led to a $6 million settlement, praised the deal.

“Make no mistake, today is a revolution in policing in Baltimore,” Murphy said.

The head of city’s police union was warier, saying his group had not been a part of the negotiations.

“Neither our rank and file members who will be the most affected, nor our attorneys, have had a chance to read the final product,” Gene Ryan, president of the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police, said in a statement.

City officials said union officials had been involved in talks early on but stopped attending meetings.

(Additional reporting by Timothy McLaughlin in Chicago. Editing by Tom Brown and Andrew Hay)

U.S. police say black killings, protests raised tensions: survey

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Three quarters of American police officers said their interactions with black people have become more tense following police killings of unarmed black men and waves of protests that followed, according to a survey published on Wednesday.

The Pew Research Center survey found a widespread feeling among police that the general public misunderstood them and the public outcry over the deaths in recent years was motivated by anti-police bias rather than a will to hold police accountable.

Police killings of several unarmed black men in 2014 led to nationwide protests and the rise of the grassroots movement known as Black Lives Matter.

Supporters of the movement, including some Democrats, have said it shines a light on a previously overlooked problem of excessive use of force against blacks by police. Critics, including President-elect Donald Trump and other Republicans, have criticized Black Lives Matter as unfairly maligning police doing a dangerous job.

“Within America’s police and sheriff’s departments, the survey finds that the ramifications of these deadly encounters have been less visible than the public protests, but no less profound,” the researchers wrote in a report accompanying the survey results.

Seventy five percent of officers told Pew their interactions with black people had become more tense in the wake of high-profile police killings of blacks and the protests they generated. Two thirds of officers said the protests were motivated “a great deal” by a general bias towards police.

Two thirds of officers saw the killings of unarmed black men as isolated incidents rather than a sign of a broader problem. This was in marked contrast to the sentiment of the general public, 60 percent of whom said in a separate Pew survey the killings pointed to a broader systemic problem.

More than ninety percent of American police officers said they worried more about their safety because of the protests. About three quarters said they or their colleagues were less willing to stop and question people who seemed suspicious or to use force even when appropriate.

Majorities of police officers and the general public supported the wider use of body cameras worn by officers to record interactions, at 66 percent and 93 percent respectively.

Pew based its findings on online surveys with 7,917 officers from 54 police and sheriff’s departments between May 19 and August 14 last year. There is no single margin of error for the results because of the complex, multi-stage way Pew arrived at its sample of police officers, Pew said.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Andrew Hay)

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