World Briefly: 9-25-16

Charlotte police video: new details of shooting of black man

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Charlotte police released dramatic video footage Saturday that shows officers surrounding a black man with his hands at his side before shots are fired and he buckles to the ground. It’s unclear if there was anything in the man’s hands.

The footage of the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott was released after several days of demonstrations that coalesced around demands that the public see the video. Police said Scott had a gun, though residents have said he was unarmed.

In the police dashboard camera video released Saturday night, Scott could be seen backing away from his SUV with his hands down, and it’s unclear if there’s anything in his hands. Four shots are heard, and he falls to the ground.

Police also released photos of a gun that they said was retrieved at the scene, adding that it contained Scott’s DNA and fingerprints. They said the gun was loaded and Scott was wearing an ankle holster. They also said Scott also had marijuana.

Videos from the dashboard camera and the body camera also show events leading up to the shooting.

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Black history finds home on National Mall with new museum

WASHINGTON — Black history officially has a new, prominent place in America’s story.

With hugs, tears and the ringing of church bells, the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture opened its doors Saturday to help this nation understand, reconcile and celebrate African-Americans’ often-ignored contributions toward making this country what it is today.

President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, wiped away a tear as he formally opened the Smithsonian’s 19th museum with an impassioned 31-minute speech on the National Mall. His audience included two former presidents, leaders from all branches of the federal government, and first lady Michelle Obama, whose lineage has been traced back to slaves in the South. She too shed a tear as her husband spoke.

Obama noted one artifact in the museum: a stone marker from a slave block where Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay spoke in 1830. This item, Obama said, chronicles not just the fact that two powerful men spoke, but also that multitudes of slaves were “bought and sold, and bid like cattle.”

“This national museum helps to tell a richer and fuller story of who we are,” Obama said. “It helps us better understand the lives, yes, of the president, but also the slave. The industrialist, but also the porter; the keeper of the status quo, but also of the activist seeking to overthrow that status quo; the teacher or the cook, alongside the statesman. And by knowing this other story, we better understand ourselves and each other.”

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Syrian troops advance in Aleppo amid war’s heaviest bombing

BEIRUT — Syrian troops captured a rebel-held area on the edge of Aleppo on Saturday, tightening their siege on opposition-held neighborhoods in the northern city after what residents described as the heaviest air bombardment of the 5 ½-year civil war.

The U.N. meanwhile said that nearly 2 million people in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and onetime commercial center, are without running water following the escalation in fighting over the past few days.

Government forces captured the rebel-held Palestinian refugee camp of Handarat as airstrikes pounded rebel-held eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo, killing 52 people, including 11 children and six women, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Local Coordination Committees, another monitoring group, said 49 were killed on Saturday alone.

The Observatory said the death toll in Aleppo is expected to rise since many people are in critical condition and rescue workers are still digging through the rubble.

Residents say the latest bombardment is the worst they’ve seen since rebels captured parts of the city in 2012. Activists reported dozens of airstrikes on Friday alone.

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Shooting sows terror at Washington mall; shooter on loose

BURLINGTON, Wash. (AP) — The first 911 call came in just before 7 p.m. on a busy Friday night at the Cascade Mall: A man with a rifle was shooting at people in the Macy’s Department Store.

By the time police arrived moments later, the carnage at the Macy’s makeup counter was complete. Four people were dead and the shooter was gone, last seen walking toward Interstate 5. A fifth victim, a man, died in the early morning hours Saturday as police finished sweeping the 434,000-square-foot building.

“There are people waking up this morning and their world has changed forever. The city of Burlington has probably changed forever, but I don’t think our way of life needs to change,” Burlington Mayor Steve Sexton said Saturday at a news conference. “This was a senseless act. It was the world knocking on our doorstep and it came into our little community.”

As the small city absorbed the news, critical questions remained, including the identity of the shooter, his motive and his whereabouts. A massive manhunt continued and police broadcast a plea for tips. The FBI said terrorism was not suspected.

The gunman was described by witnesses to police as a young Hispanic man dressed in black. Surveillance video captured him entering the mall unarmed and then recorded him about 10 minutes later entering the Macy’s with a “hunting type” rifle in his hand, Mount Vernon police Lt. Chris Cammock said.

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Ted Cruz calls his decision to back Trump ‘agonizing’

AUSTIN, Texas — Ted Cruz appears uncomfortable defending the man he says he’ll vote for in November, Donald Trump.

Addressing a policy forum organized by The Texas Tribune, the Texas senator said Saturday it was “agonizing” making the decision to back Trump, whom he once called a “pathological liar” and “serial philanderer.” He denied he caved in to pressure from top Republicans nationally and in his home state, saying he would have faced an outcry no matter what.

“Any path we took, if I supported Donald, if I didn’t support Donald, the criticism was going to be there,” Cruz told a packed auditorium.

Cruz offered little defense of Trump’s past comments on Muslim-Americans. He also said his two young daughters, while campaigning with him in the primaries, had felt the sting of Trump’s comments about women. Asked whether he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin was a better leader than President Barack Obama, as Trump suggested, Cruz said, “I have no intention of defending everything Donald Trump says or does.”

Cruz rocked the Republican National Convention in Cleveland by avoiding an endorsement of the nominee and instead urging delegates to “vote your conscience.” He held out for several months afterward, even as some polls suggested his popularity was slipping nationally and in Texas, where he could face a Republican primary challenge for re-election to the Senate in 2018.

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Clinton, Trump look to overcome weaknesses on debate stage

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump needs to prove to voters that he has the policy depth and gravitas to serve as commander in chief. Hillary Clinton needs a moment to connect with Americans who question whether she can be trusted.

In an election year that has upended political convention, the candidates’ best opportunity to conquer their weaknesses will come in the most traditional of campaign forums: Monday’s 90-minute, prime-time debate.

Both campaigns expect a record-setting television audience for the high-stakes showdown, which could help tip the balance in a tight White House race.

The visuals alone will be striking as the candidates step behind their podiums at Hofstra University in suburban New York. Clinton will be the first woman to take the stage in a presidential general election debate. Trump has spent years on Americans’ television screens as a reality show host, but it can still be jarring to see him at politics’ upper echelons.

Six weeks from Election Day, and with early voting already underway, the opening debate is one of the few opportunities left for the candidates to motivate supporters and sway a narrow band of undecided voters. According to a new Associated Press-Gfk poll, more than 85 percent of likely voters backing Clinton or Trump say their minds are completely made up. About 13 percent said they were undecided.

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War crimes tribunal for IS detainees lacks support

WASHINGTON — War crimes investigators collecting evidence of the Islamic State group’s elaborate operation to kidnap thousands of women as sex slaves say they have a case to try IS leaders with crimes against humanity but cannot get the global backing to bring current detainees before an international tribunal.

Two years after the IS onslaught in northern Iraq, the investigators, as well as U.S. diplomats, say the Obama administration has done little to pursue prosecution of the crimes that Secretary of State John Kerry has called genocide. Current and former State Department officials say that an attempt in late 2014 to have a legal finding of genocide was blocked by the Defense Department, setting back efforts to prosecute IS members suspected of committing war crimes.

“The West looks to the United States for leadership in the Middle East, and the focus of this administration has been elsewhere — in every respect,” Bill Wiley, the head of the independent investigative group, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, told The Associated Press.

Officials in Washington say that the Defense Department and ultimately the administration were concerned that court trials would distract from the military campaign. But the diplomats say that justice is essential in a region whose religious minorities have been terrorized. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue.

The U.S. has no legal obligation to take on the genocide of the Yazidis, but President Barack Obama has said that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America.”

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Priests’ murders rattle Mexican city gripped by violence

POZA RICA, Mexico — In this eastern Mexican oil town already weary of rising gangland violence and extortion, the abduction and murder of two priests this week sank many residents only deeper into despair.

The killings in Poza Rica, in the troubled Gulf state of Veracruz, also came at a moment of heightened tension between the Roman Catholic Church and Mexico’s government.

Church leaders are increasingly frustrated by authorities’ inability to protect their priests under President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration, and the church is openly opposing his proposal to legalize gay marriage by encouraging the faithful to join demonstrations around the country.

“This, in combination with the recent protests of gay marriage coordinated by the church, I think we’re seeing a new low point in the relationship between the church and the PRI,” said Andrew Chesnut, chairman of Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, referring to Pena Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. “I think the overarching picture is that … the open-season on priests has just proliferated with the intensification of the drug war.”

When Alejo Nabor Jimenez and Alfredo Suarez de la Cruz were found bound and shot to death outside Poza Rica on Monday, it brought to 14 the number of priests slain in Mexico since Pena Nieto took office in late 2012. At least 30 have been killed since 2006. And on Thursday church officials made a public plea for the life of yet another priest, who was reportedly kidnapped from his parish residence in the western state of Michoacan and has not been heard from since.

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Savior or disaster? UK’s Labour divided on Corbyn victory

LIVERPOOL, England — Soft-spoken socialist Jeremy Corbyn is the antithesis of Donald Trump.

But the British politician — resoundingly re-elected leader of the opposition Labour Party on Saturday — is riding the same wave of anti-centrist sentiment that’s propelling the brash U.S. Republican presidential candidate.

Both are political outsiders who have unsettled their parties and energized their large fan bases, but whose ability to win power remains unproven.

To supporters like Carel Buxton, a retired school principal from London, the 67-year-old longtime leftist Corbyn is “authentic.”

“People in this country are sick to death of well-spoken, booted-and-suited slimy politicians,” she said.

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Anthem protests spread to colleges, WNBA player sits

NEW YORK — Liberty guard Brittany Boyd sat on the bench with her head bowed during the national anthem before a WNBA playoff game.

Hours earlier, college football players for Michigan and Michigan State, along with a group of students at North Carolina, raised their fists during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner on Saturday.

Since 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the anthem before NFL preseason games, citing racial injustice and police brutality, his movement has slowly spread across fields and courts in the U.S. On Saturday, college athletes and professional athletes joined together to follow his lead after a week punctuated by riots in Charlotte, North Carolina , and the killing of an unarmed black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma .

Boyd had sat on the bench during the anthem at the team’s last home game on Sept. 13, too. Her New York teammates stood, arms locked with their heads bowed before their WNBA playoff game with Phoenix. Mercury players Mistie Bass and Kelsey Bone kneeled, just as they had done during their first-round playoff game. Bass was inspired that younger athletes were joining an effort that until this weekend, had been mostly led by the pros.

“I think it shows that the younger generations are about this and they did it together,” she said. “They are understanding what is going on in our society. It’s perfect because they are so caught up in their phones. To see them standing up for social injustices and wanting things to be right in their communities I think is awesome.”