In Brief: Nation & World: 11-18-16

Snow off to a slow start in Rockies, delaying some skiers

DENVER (AP) — Autumn snow has been scarce in the Rocky Mountains, forcing some ski areas to push back opening day and causing some nervousness about how much water will be available next spring for the Colorado River, the lifeblood of the Southwest.

But the first significant storm of the season that moved into Colorado, Utah and Wyoming on Thursday is expected to bring 8 inches of snow or more at higher elevations, forecasters said. Water managers and climate experts say it’s too early in the season to predict a dry winter.

“This doesn’t mean at all that the winter is going to be dry,” said Klaus Wolter, a climate scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colorado.

“It’s kind of a nervousness-inducing late onset,” he said.

A lot can happen between the fall and spring, said Marlon Duke, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages multiple reservoirs on the Colorado River.

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Trump reassuring the world he’s focusing on foreign policy

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump sought to reassure nervous leaders around the globe with his most public foray into foreign policy since the election, welcoming Japan’s prime minister to Trump Tower on Thursday. On Capitol Hill, his incoming vice president aimed to project unity at home.

Trump planned a face-to-face meeting late Thursday with Shinzo Abe, his first with a world leader since last week’s vote, after consulting with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and sitting down with South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a potential contender to lead the State Department.

In Washington, Vice President-elect Mike Pence huddled with Republican leaders in Congress. He then met with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the newly elected leader of the Senate Democrats, seeking to convey respect as Democrats prepare for Republican rule of both chambers and the White House for the first time in a decade.

“We look forward to finding ways that we can find common ground and move the country forward,” Pence said outside Schumer’s Senate office.

In a separate gesture of reconciliation with establishment Republicans, Trump planned to meet with 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who lambasted Trump as a “con man” and a “fraud” in a stinging speech last March. Trump responded by repeatedly referring to Romney as a “loser.”

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Trump ally Sessions could face tough Senate confirmation

WASHINGTON (AP) — As one of President-elect Donald Trump’s closest and most consistent allies, Sen. Jeff Sessions is a likely pick for a top post in his administration. But when Sessions faced Senate confirmation for a job 30 years ago, it didn’t go well.

Nominated for a federal judgeship in 1986, Sessions, R-Ala., was dogged by racist comments he was accused of making while serving as U.S. attorney in Alabama. He was said to have called a black assistant U.S. attorney “boy” and the NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired.”

Sessions was the first senator to back Trump during the campaign and is an architect of Trump’s immigration, counterterrorism and trade policies. His name has been floated for attorney general and secretary of defense. The Trump transition team released a statement Thursday saying the president-elect is “unbelievably impressed” with Sessions, citing his work as a U.S. attorney and state attorney general in Alabama.

But confirmation for the four-term lawmaker, even in a Republican-controlled chamber, is not guaranteed.

Sessions had been confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate in 1981 to be the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama.

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Obama, nudging Trump, says he must ‘stand up’ to Russia

BERLIN (AP) — President Barack Obama prodded Donald Trump on Thursday to take a tougher approach toward Russia, urging the president-elect to “stand up” to Moscow when it violates global norms. The Kremlin accused Obama of trying to lock in bad relations before Trump takes office.

In Europe for his last time as president, Obama said he doesn’t expect Trump to mirror his own strategy on Russia, and hopes his successor will work constructively with the superpower where appropriate. Yet he insisted the U.S. mustn’t gloss over deep disagreements over Syria, Ukraine and basic democratic values.

“My hope is that he does not simply take a realpolitik approach,” Obama said, using a German term for a foreign policy driven by expediency. He said he hopes the businessman won’t cut deals with Russia if it hurts other countries or “just do whatever is convenient at the time.”

Obama’s remarks in a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel marked his most explicit attempt since the election to influence the policies Trump will pursue as president. Obama has privately urged Trump not to obliterate the efforts of the last eight years, but in public he has tried to avoid boxing in his successor.

Yet Trump’s unexpected victory has put Obama in the unwelcome position of having to reassure foreign leaders that Trump won’t follow through on alarming positions he staked out in his campaign, such as the notion the U.S. might not defend its NATO allies. NATO members and other European countries are worried that under Trump, the U.S. will stop trying to police Russia’s behavior the way it has under Obama.

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Justice Alito rallies conservatives in tribute to Scalia

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a rallying cry to conservatives Thursday amid newfound strength following Donald Trump’s election.

Alito told the Federalist Society conference of conservative lawyers, judges and legal thinkers that religious freedom and gun rights are among “constitutional fault lines,” important issues at stake in the federal courts.

The conference of 1,800 of conservatism’s leading lights took on a new air of importance with Trump’s victory, and included a list of judges the president-elect has named as candidates to fill the vacancy created by the death last February of Justice Antonin Scalia.

In his remarks, Alito didn’t mention the election or the vacancy, rather using the platform to pay tribute to Scalia, a longtime colleague and conservative ally in high court battles on hot-button social and political issues.

He said Scalia, a hero to many of the group’s 40,000 members, is sorely missed on the court. “We are left to ask ourselves WWSD,” what would Scalia do, Alito said. The lettering is a play on the phrase “WWJD,” for what would Jesus do.

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1 month in, Iraq still faces grueling urban combat in Mosul

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — Layers of hastily erected barricades built from rubble and twisted metal trace Mosul’s eastern front line where Iraqi forces and Islamic State group fighters are facing off in the dense neighborhoods and narrow alleyways of the country’s second largest city.

As the operation to retake Mosul enters its second month on Thursday, Iraqi forces are preparing for prolonged, grueling urban combat.

They have slowed the tempo of their operations, advancing just a few hundred meters at a time. Iraqi forces have gathered troops many times the estimated 5,000 IS fighters in the city.

But hundreds of thousands of civilians still remain in the city. And the ferocity and magnitude of IS counterattacks and defenses in Mosul is unlike anything Iraqi forces have confronted in the fight against the militant group so far. As a result, overwhelming force can’t bring swift victory, and the campaign is likely to take weeks.

THE EASTERN FRONT

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Man accused of killing 2 officers had called police ‘heroes’

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Days before he allegedly killed two Iowa police officers, Scott Michael Greene sent a note to one of their departments apologizing for prior run-ins, saying his “dark days” were over and praising police as “absolute heroes.”

In an online compliment form addressed to the “many officers” of the Urbandale Police Department, the unemployed 46-year-old father wrote Oct. 29: “I love you folks.”

“I love the fact that you will give your life for my daughter and myself. You guys are absolute heroes and I mean that from the bottom of my heart,” Greene wrote in the note from his Gmail account. “I’m so proud to have you guys around. I respect each and every one of you with all my heart. I really do.”

Four days after the laudatory email, authorities say Greene shot and killed first-year Urbandale police officer Justin Martin, 24, and Des Moines Police Sgt. Antony Beminio, 38. The ambush-style attacks took place about two miles apart within minutes of each other as both officers were sitting in their patrol cars. Greene is in jail awaiting trial on two counts of first-degree murder, which would put him in prison for life if convicted.

The Associated Press exclusively obtained the document and dozens of others about Greene on Thursday from the Urbandale Community School District under the open records law. The district had initially refused to release them at the urging of Urbandale police, arguing they were part of a police report and confidential. The district reversed course after the AP argued that exemption did not apply to school records.

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Experts: Video evidence isn’t slam dunk in police shootings

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — When Philando Castile was shot by a Minnesota police officer, his girlfriend broadcast his final moments live on Facebook. But experts say the footage from a squad car camera was probably a bigger factor in prosecutors’ decision to charge the officer with manslaughter.

And that footage, which has not been made public, is still no guarantee that Jeronimo Yanez will be convicted, as other police shootings have shown.

“There have been cases that had video that resulted in either an acquittal or a hung jury, so sometimes the video may raise more questions,” said Philip Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University who tracks fatal police shootings. “It’s very hard to convict in these cases.”

Since the beginning of 2005, a total of 78 officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter. Of that number, about a third of the defendants were convicted — 14 by juries and 13 through guilty pleas, Stinson said.

Of the 18 police officers charged with murder or manslaughter last year, at least 11 cases involved video evidence, he said.

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US Jews grapple with election-year eruption of anti-Semitism

NEW YORK (AP) — American Jews gathered Thursday to wrestle with how they should confront an election-year surge in anti-Semitism, a level of bias not seen in the U.S. for decades.

At a national meeting of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights group, about 1,000 people listened to talks expressing shock at the hatred expressed during the presidential campaign and questioned what they thought was a high-level of acceptance by other Americans.

“I’m struggling right now in this American moment,” said Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, an education and research organization, in his talk at the event. “I wonder whether I have been — and I think the answer is probably yes — a little bit naive.”

During this past year, anti-Semitic imagery proliferated on social media, Jewish journalists were targeted and longstanding anti-Jewish conspiracy theories got a fresh airing. Much of the bias originated with the alt-right, or alternative right, a loose group espousing a provocative and reactionary strain of conservatism. It’s often associated with far right efforts to preserve “white identity,” oppose multiculturalism and defend “Western values.”

In addition to the online intimidation, reports of anti-Semitic vandalism and other attacks have risen. Last week, the day after the election, a Philadelphia storefront was sprayed with a swastika and the words “Sieg Heil 2106,” which means “Hail Victory,” a common Nazi chant, and the word “Trump,” with a swastika replacing the “T.”

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Wave of ethnic killings engulfs town in South Sudan

YEI, South Sudan (AP) — Infants hacked with machetes. Charred bodies with their arms bound. Women who were gang-raped. Men who were spared death but arbitrarily detained.

These are the tales of horror told in Yei, a formerly peaceful town surrounded by farms in southern South Sudan near its border with Uganda and Congo.

Once a beacon of coexistence, Yei is now a center of the country’s renewed civil war, gripped by a wave of killings among South Sudan’s dozens of different ethnic groups.

And things could get worse.

“The signs are all there for the spread of this ethnic hatred and targeting of civilians that could evolve into genocide, if something is not done now to stop it,” said Adama Dieng, the U.N.’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, after visiting Yei last week.