Around the World: March 16, 2015

 

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The arrest of Robert Durst, a wealthy eccentric linked to two killings and his wife's disappearance, came just before the finale in an HBO show about his life in which he said he "killed them all."

 

Durst was arrested on a murder warrant just before Sunday evening's showing of an HBO serial documentary about his links to three sensational killings.

 

In the finale, Durst was asked about similarities in handwriting in a letter he wrote and another linked to one of the killings. Later, filmmakers said Durst wore his microphone into the bathroom.

 

What followed was a bizarre rambling in which Durst said, apparently to himself, "There it is. You're caught" and "What the hell did I do? Killed them all of course."

 

The show ended, and it wasn't clear whether producers confronted Durst about the secretly recorded words, or what Durst meant by them.

 

 

CLAYTON, Mo. (AP) — Authorities said a man charged in the shooting of two police officers last week during a demonstration outside the Ferguson Police Department had attended the protest earlier that night, although multiple activists said he wasn't a consistent fixture in their tight-knit group.

 

St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch said Sunday in announcing the charges that 20-year-old suspect Jeffrey Williams told authorities he was firing at someone with whom he was in a dispute.

 

"We're not sure we completely buy that part of it," McCulloch said, adding that there might have been other people in a vehicle Williams is accused of firing from.

 

Williams is charged with two counts of first-degree assault, one count of firing a weapon from a vehicle and three counts of armed criminal action. McCulloch said the investigation is ongoing.

 

The police officers were shot early Thursday as a late-night demonstration began to break up following the resignation of Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson in the wake of a Justice Department report that found widespread racial bias in the police department.

 

Israeli candidates on last day of campaign before election to determine Netanyahu's future

 

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli election candidates are making their final appeals to voters on Monday, the eve of an election that will determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can secure another term in office.

Latest polls have shown Netanyahu's Likud party trailing the centrist Zionist Union by about four seats.

 

The numbers do not necessarily rule out Netanyahu's chances of forming the next government after Tuesday's election but have rattled Likud, which began the campaign all but assured that it would stay in office.

 

In recent days it has been on a get-out-the-vote blitz with Netanyahu warning against the rise of a left-wing government in a series of interviews and before tens of thousands of hard-line supporters at a Tel Aviv rally on Sunday evening.

 

"This is a fateful struggle, a close struggle. We must close this gap. We can close this gap," Netanyahu said to roaring applause at the rally.

 

 

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) — The United States and Iran are plunging back into negotiations in a bid to end a decades-long standoff that has raised the specter of an Iranian nuclear arsenal, a new atomic arms race in the Middle East and even a U.S. or Israeli military intervention.

 

Two weeks out from a deadline for a framework accord, some officials said the awesomeness of the diplomatic task meant negotiators would likely settle for an announcement that they've made enough progress to justify further talks.

 

Such a declaration would hardly satisfy American critics of the Obama administration's diplomatic outreach to Iran and hardliners in the Islamic Republic, whose rumblings have grown more vociferous and threatening as the parties have narrowed many of their differences. And, officially, the United States and its partners insist their eyes are on a much bigger prize: "A deal that would protect the world," Secretary of State John Kerry emphasized this past weekend, "from the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran could pose."

 

Yet as Kerry arrived in Switzerland for several days of discussions with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, no one was promising the breakthrough. One diplomat said new differences surfaced only in the last negotiating round of what has been a 15-month process, including a sudden Iranian demand that a nuclear facility buried deep underground be allowed to keep hundreds of centrifuges that are used for enriching uranium — material that can be used in a nuclear warhead. Previously, the Iranians had accepted the plant would be transformed into one solely for scientific research, that diplomat and others have said.

 

The deal that had been taking shape would see Iran freeze its nuclear program for at least a decade, with restrictions then gradually lifted over a period of perhaps the following five years.

 

Washington and other worldpowers would similarly scale back sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy in several phases. Iran says it is only interested in peaceful energy generation and medical research, but much of the world has suspected it of maintaining covert nuclear weapons ambitions. And the U.S. and its ally Israel have at various times threatened military action if Iran's program advances too far.

 

 

CHICAGO (AP) — Young adults have a reputation for being connected to one another and disconnected from the news. But a survey has found that mobile devices and social networking are keeping them more engaged with the broader world than previously thought.

 

They want news, they say, though they don't always aggressively seek it out — perhaps simply happening upon it on a friend's online feed. And they want it daily.

 

The survey of Americans ages 18 to 34, sometimes called the millennial generation, found that two-thirds of respondents said they consume news online regularly, often on a social networking site. Of those, 40 percent do so several times a day, according to the poll, conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute.

 

It's been a slowly building trend in news consumption that experts say is trickling up to older generations — and that young people say helps them stay current, even if they never read an actual newspaper or watch the evening news on TV.

 

"I don't think people would expect us to know what we know," says Erica Quinn, a 24-year-old college student in Gainesville, Florida, who participated in the survey. The findings were to be presented Monday in Nashville at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America.

 

 

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Tears welling in her eyes, Sam Somaly looked into the camera and pleaded to three siblings she had not seen in nearly 40 years — family lost to a nightmare that still haunts Cambodia today.

 

"I am your sister. I am looking for you," she said, clasping her palms tightly together. "If you hear this ... please come to me. I miss you so much. I'm getting sick because I miss you so much."

 

The Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia in 1975 and literally broke families apart as they forced this Southeast Asian nation's entire population to work in the countryside in a bizarre attempt to construct an ultra-communist agrarian society.

 

Somaly knew her parents and one brother were among the nearly 2 million people who succumbed to overwork, starvation and execution during four years of Khmer Rouge rule. But the fate of two remaining brothers and a sister was a mystery she likens to "finding a needle at the bottom of the sea."

 

She has no photos, no birth certificates, no other clues. Two siblings were very young when they were separated. Today, Somaly probably couldn't even recognize them.

 

 

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Once upon a time, Mexican marijuana was the gold standard for U.S. pot smokers. But in the new world of legal markets and gourmet weed, aficionados here are looking to the United States and Europe for the good stuff.

 

Instead of Acapulco Gold, Mexican smokers want strains like Liberty Haze and Moby Dick — either importing high-potency boutique pot from the United States, or growing it here in secret gardens that use techniques perfected abroad.

 

It's a small but growing market in a country where marijuana is largely illegal, unlike the U.S. states of Colorado and Washington that have legalized recreational use, and others where medicinal pot is available.

 

A text message will bring a Mexico City dealer to the customer's doorstep with a menu of high-end buds for sale at the swipe of a credit card through a smartphone reader. Hydroponic shops have sprung up that supply equipment to those who want to cultivate potent strains in sophisticated home-grown operations. Some even are setting up pot cooperatives to share costs like high electrical bills and swap what they grow with each other.

 

"I know people who are architects, executives, lawyers ... who went to the United States or Europe," said Antoine Robbe, the 35-year-old, French-born proprietor of Hydrocultivos, one of the shops. They say, "'Man, why don't we have this in my country?'"