In Brief | Nation & World | 12-21-15

Analysis: Sanders struggles to gain edge in presidential bid

MANCHESTER, N.H. — The third Democratic presidential debate opened with an apology and ended with compliments.

For months, the Democratic primary contest has been a relatively civil affair — offering a tone that party leaders see as a much-needed contrast to the raucous Republican field.

A day after a rancorous dispute over a breach of private campaign data by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign roiled the Democratic Party, a political truce between Hillary Clinton and Sanders largely held — even as Sanders’ aides seemed itching for a more aggressive confrontation with the front-runner.

“I apologize to Secretary Clinton,” said Sanders. “This is not the type of campaign that we run.”

Mindful of the grassroots support she’ll need to fuel a general election bid should she capture the nomination, Clinton accepted his apology, instead, keeping her criticism carefully aimed at her GOP rivals — particularly businessman Donald Trump.

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Fake bomb prompts emergency landing of Air France flight

NAIROBI, Kenya — A fake explosive rigged with cardboard, sheets of paper and a household timer forced an Air France flight into an emergency landing in Kenya on Sunday, sending hundreds of passengers down emergency slides in what the airline’s CEO said was the fourth bomb hoax against the airline in recent weeks.

The homemade apparatus was discovered around midnight hidden in a lavatory cabinet behind a mirror where it was apparently placed during the approximately 11-hour flight to Paris from the island of Mauritius, said the airline’s CEO, Frederic Gagey. He said the airline has had heightened security checks around the world since the Nov. 13 attacks that left 130 people dead in Paris.

“It was an ensemble of cardboard, papers and something that resembled a kitchen timer. Nothing that presented a danger to the plane, to the passengers or to the crew,” a visibly irritated Gagey told a news conference in Paris. He said it contained no explosives.

With France in a state of emergency since the Paris attacks and the United States on high alert since the attack in San Bernardino, California, that left 14 dead, hoaxes present a particular conundrum for security officials, who must choose between feeding mass fear and keeping the public in potential danger. On Tuesday, the two biggest school systems in the U.S. — New York City and Los Angeles — received threats of a large-scale jihadi attack. LA reacted by shutting down the entire district, while New York dismissed the warning as an amateurish hoax and held classes.

Air France has been the target of three prior hoaxes, all in the United States, Gagey said. The fourth came on board the flight from Mauritius, a popular winter vacation spot for French tourists.

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Notorious Lebanese militant killed in Syria airstrike

BEIRUT — A Lebanese man convicted of one of the most notorious attacks in Israel’s history and who spent nearly three decades in an Israeli prison has been killed by an Israeli airstrike near the Syrian capital, the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah group said Sunday.

Hezbollah officials have pledged to avenge the killing of Samir Kantar, sparking fears of escalation in an already volatile region. In a possible first response, three rockets were fired into Israel from Lebanon late Sunday.

Kantar had said that he had been working, with the backing of Hezbollah, to set up “the Syrian resistance” to liberate the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and annexed 14 years later.

Hezbollah said Kantar was killed along with eight others in an airstrike in Jaramana, a suburb of the Syrian capital Damascus, on Saturday night. According to Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, two Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace and fired four long-range missiles at the residential building in Jaramana. It aired footage of what it said was the building, which appeared to be destroyed. Kantar’s brother, Bassam, confirmed his “martyrdom” in a Facebook post on Sunday.

In Lebanon Kantar is known as “the dean of Lebanese prisoners,” a reference to his long jail sentence.

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AP FACT CHECK: Clinton’s video claim doesn’t hold up

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton had no evidence to back up her claim in the latest Democratic presidential debate that the Islamic State group is using video of Donald Trump to recruit Muslims to its cause.

It’s an assertion reminiscent of Trump’s insistence that video showed thousands of Muslims in the U.S. cheering the 9/11 attacks, which has been debunked for weeks. During Saturday’s debate, Clinton stated that the Republican presidential contender is “becoming ISIS’s best recruiter,” with the group attracting people by showing videos of him. Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri acknowledged Sunday the campaign is aware of no such IS video and that jihadis are capitalizing on Trump’s comments about Muslims through social media.

Here’s a look at some of the claims in the debate Saturday night and how they compare with the facts:

CLINTON: “He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.”

THE FACTS: What’s true is that Trump’s provocative comments about Muslims, including his call to ban them from coming to the U.S., have been widely played across the Middle East — in the hothouse of social media and beyond. Plenty of people — his Republican rivals among them — see his positions as playing into the hands of terrorists and raising the risk of radicalizing Muslims in the West as well as in the Middle East. It’s also true that IS has a sophisticated propaganda operation and it can’t be ruled out that the group has spread such videos under the Western radar.

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‘Star Wars’ blasts opening weekend record with $238 million

LOS ANGELES — To say that the force is strong with this one is an understatement.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” brought in a galactic $238 million over the weekend, making it the biggest North American debut of all time according to studio estimates on Sunday.

The Walt Disney Co. earnings destroy the previous opening record set by Universal’s “Jurassic World,” which drew $208.8 million this summer.

Internationally, the film brought in $279 million, bringing its global gross to $517 million — second only to “Jurassic World’s” global bow of $525 million. But the dinosaurs had the added benefit of China — “Star Wars” won’t open there until Jan. 9.

This is just the latest in a laundry list of records set by J.J. Abrams’ film, the seventh in the franchise, which had analysts anticipating a debut anywhere from $150 million to $300 million.

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In budget deal, health law foes took a different path

WASHINGTON — Republican foes of President Barack Obama’s health care law may be able to get more by chipping away at it than trying to take the whole thing down at once.

That’s one lesson of the budget deal passed by Congress and signed by the president last week.

It delayed a widely criticized tax on high-cost employer health insurance plans that hasn’t taken effect yet. And it temporarily suspended two taxes on industry already being collected, which are also part of the health law.

In contrast to frontal attacks on “Obamacare” that have repeatedly failed, this tactic could well succeed. Delays and suspensions have a way of becoming permanent.

Polls show that the public remains deeply divided over the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. Opponents are already looking for other provisions that could be separated from the law.

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New rules bringing kidneys to hardest-to-transplant patients

WASHINGTON — A shake-up of the nation’s kidney transplant system means more organs are getting to patients once thought nearly impossible to match, according to early tracking of the new rules.

It’s been a year since the United Network for Organ Sharing changed rules for the transplant waiting list, aiming to decrease disparities and squeeze the most benefit from a scarce resource: kidneys from deceased donors. Now data from UNOS shows that the changes are helping certain patients, including giving those expected to live the longest a better shot at the fittest kidneys.

The hope is to “really level the playing field,” said Dr. Mark Aeder, a transplant surgeon at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland who is chairman of the UNOS’ kidney committee.

In Abingdon, Virginia, 8-year-old Marshall Jones was one of the lucky first recipients. A birth defect severely damaged his kidneys and a failed transplant when he was younger left his immune system abnormally primed to reject kidneys from 99 percent of donors.

Then last January, after four years of searching, organ officials found a possible match, hours away by plane but available under the new policy — and it worked.

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Firefighters sue siren maker over their hearing loss

NEW YORK — There were times by the end of his shift that firefighter Joseph Nardone’s head would be pounding, his eyes crossing from the noise of the siren on his truck.

“The siren was so loud inside the cab that it actually physically hurt,” said the former New York City fire battalion chief. Even though he’s been retired for over a decade, he said, the effects of the sirens linger in hearing loss that has left him unable to understand rapid conversation or follow along in church.

Nardone is among about 4,400 current and former firefighters nationwide who are suing Federal Signal Corp., an Oak Brook, Illinois-based company that makes sirens, claiming it didn’t do enough to make them safer for those on fire trucks who have to listen to them nearly every day.

They say the company could have designed them in a way that directs the volume away from areas where firefighters sit in the engines, shielding them from sound blasts that lawyers say reach 120 decibels, roughly equivalent to a rock concert. Said the 73-year-old Nardone: “The manufacturer had the means and ability to do something about it and they didn’t.”

Federal Signal argues that directing the sound defeats one of the main purposes of a siren — to warn motorists and pedestrians that a truck is coming. And it says it has long supported what many departments have advised its firefighters to do: wear ear protection.