Around the World: March 4, 2015

 

BOSTON (AP) — Two dramatically different portraits of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are expected to emerge when prosecutors and Tsarnaev's lawyers give their opening statements at his federal death penalty trial.

 

Was he a submissive, adoring younger brother who only followed directions given by his older, radicalized brother? Or was he a willing, active participant in the attacks?

 

The trial that begins Wednesday is expected to be one of the most closely watched terror cases in years.

 

Tsarnaev's lawyers have made it clear they will try to show that at the time of the bombings, Tsarnaev, then 19, looked up to his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, and was heavily influenced by him.

 

They plan to portray Tamerlan as the mastermind of the attack. He died following a shootout with police days after the bombings.

 

But prosecutors say Dzhokhar was an equal participant who acted of his own free will. He faces 30 charges in the bombings and the fatal shooting days later of a police officer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Seventeen of the charges carry the possibility of the death penalty.

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Clinton's emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

 

The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton's secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

 

Most Internet users rely on professional outside companies, such as Google Inc. or their own employers, for the behind-the-scenes complexities of managing their email communications.

 

Government employees generally use servers run by federal agencies where they work.

 

In most cases, individuals who operate their own email servers are technical experts or users so concerned about issues of privacy and surveillance they take matters into their own hands.

 

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account — hdr22(at)clintonemail.com, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym — for official State Department business.

 

 

Probate judges must again decide whether to issue wedding licenses to gay couples after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled the state's ban on same-sex marriage is legal, despite a federal court's decision to the contrary.

 

The all-Republican court sided with a pair of conservative groups Tuesday night and ordered Alabama's 68 probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.

 

A previous ruling by U.S. District Judge Callie Granade that gay-marriage bans violate the U.S. Constitution does not preclude the judges from following state law, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, the court ruled.

 

It was not immediately clear what effect the court's ruling would have, or what probate judges would do after opening their doors Wednesday.

 

While a six-member majority of the nine-member court did not explicitly invalidate the marriages of hundreds of same-sex couples who obtained licenses in the state in recent weeks, the decision used the term "purported" to describe those licenses.

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Justice Department report says blacks in Ferguson, Missouri, are disproportionately subject to excessive police force, baseless traffic stops and citations for infractions as petty as walking down the middle of street.

 

City officials said Tuesday they were reviewing the report, which they expect to be released Wednesday.

 

With scathing findings of a months-long investigation being released, attention now turns to Ferguson as the city confronts how to fix racial biases that the federal government says are rooted in the police department, court and jail.

 

The full report could serve as a roadmap for significant changes by the department, which commanded national attention after one of its officers shot and killed an unarmed black man, 18-year-old Michael Brown, last summer.

 

Similar federal investigations of troubled police departments have led to the appointment of independent monitors and mandated overhauls in the most fundamental of police practices. The Justice Department maintains the right to sue a police department if officials balk at making changes, though many investigations resolve the issue with both sides negotiating a blueprint for change known as a consent decree.

 

 

JERUSALEM (AP) — With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu facing a tough re-election fight in two weeks, the U.S. Congress has handed him an unprecedented boost with its effusive welcome to a message that resonates at home: Iran cannot be trusted as a threshold nuclear state.

 

Which way it goes for Netanyahu may hinge on whether Israel is in some perceptible way punished by the White House for its leader's extraordinary offensive against a U.S. president. If he is seen as having bravely spoken truth to power and escaped consequences, the episode will likely help him at the polls.

 

That could deeply affect the Middle East for years to come on issues far beyond Iran, most notably the conflict with the Palestinians, which some consider even more important than the nature of any future deal on Iran's nuclear program.

 

At home and abroad, Netanyahu is seen by many as a leading obstacle to peace with the Palestinians and perhaps the Arab world. And his insistence on continuing Jewish settlement of the occupied West Bank has many fearing the country will never be able to extricate itself from the territory and its millions of Palestinians — with or without peace — destroying Israel's character as a Jewish state.

 

For this and other reasons, Netanyahu has found himself at increasingly toxic loggerheads with the country's elites — from the security establishment to academics, journalists, cultural figures and much of the businessworld. This has been recently compounded by scandals involving his expenses, and rage from middle-class Israelis who struggle to make ends meet and can no longer afford to buy homes.

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a major test of President Barack Obama's health overhaul that threatens insurance coverage for millions of people.

 

The justices are meeting Wednesday to try to determine whether the law makes people in all 50 states eligible for federal tax subsidies to cut the cost of insurance premiums. Or does it limit tax credits only to people who live in states that created their own health insurance marketplaces?

 

A ruling that limits where subsidies are available would have dramatic consequences because roughly three dozen states opted against their own marketplace, or exchange, and instead rely on the U.S. Health and Human Services Department's healthcare.gov. Independent studies estimate that 8 million people could lose insurance coverage.

 

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act failed to kill the law in an epic, election-year Supreme Court case in 2012. Chief Justice John Roberts joined with the court's liberal justices and provided the crucial vote to uphold the law in the midst of Obama's re-election campaign.

 

The new case, part of a long-running political and legal fight to get rid of the law also known as Obamacare, focuses on four words — "established by the state" — in a law that runs more than 900 pages. The challengers say those words are clear and conclusive evidence that Congress wanted to limit subsidies only to those consumers who get their insurance through a marketplace, or exchange, that was established by the state.

 

 

HONG KONG (AP) — When the owners of embattled Malaysia Airlines went looking for a new CEO to lead its restructuring, they chose a German turnaround specialist known as "The Terminator" to take on what's been dubbed the toughest job in aviation.

 

Christoph Mueller, 52, comes to the post fresh from a stint reviving Ireland's Aer Lingus. He'll be the first foreigner to head the Malaysian state-owned company. Analysts say he's an industry veteran "battle-hardened" from his work carrying out corporate restructurings at other state-owned airlines, including failed Belgian carrier Sabena.

 

Mueller will be facing his biggest challenge yet at Malaysia Airlines. The company was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by the disappearance of Flight 370 on March 8 with 239 people on board and the shooting down mere months later of Flight 17 over Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew.

 

Khazanah, the sovereign investment fund that owns Malaysia Airlines, declined an interview request for Mueller, who started his job on Sunday. But clues about his management philosophy can be found in a video interview he gave to Cambridge University's business school last year.

 

"The first year of a restructuring is really like a war situation," Mueller told his interviewer, exuding a polite, polished and firm manner that is in stark contrast with the brash charisma of the bosses at his former and present discount rivals: Michael O'Leary of Ryanair and AirAsia's Tony Fernandes.

 

 

NEW DELHI (AP) — When a rapist and killer said the woman brutally attacked on a New Delhi bus was responsible for what had happened to her, it sounded shocking around the world. But not in India.

 

Here, blaming women for rape is what hundreds of millions of men are taught to believe.

 

And the code for women in this country is simple: Dress modestly, don't go out at night, don't go to bars and clubs, don't go out alone. If you break the code, you will be blamed for the consequences.

 

When one of the four men sentenced to death for the high-profile gang rape of the woman in 2012 was quoted in a new documentary as saying "a girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy," he was repeating something community and religious leaders in this nation of 1.2 billion routinely say.

 

"A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night. ... Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes," Mukesh Singh said in the documentary, "India's Daughter," meant to be shown on Sunday, International Women's Day, in India and several other countries.

 

 

DONETSK, Ukraine (AP) — An explosion ripped through a coal mine before dawn Wednesday in war-torn eastern Ukraine, killing one miner and trapping over 30 others underground, rebel and government officials said.

 

The explosion took place at the Zasyadko mine in Donetsk, an eastern city under the control of separatist rebels, but rebel authorities said it was not caused by shelling.

 

Eastern Ukraine has been wracked by fighting between government forces and Russian-backed rebels for almost a year, during which more than 6,000 people have been killed.

 

The speaker of Ukraine's parliament, Volodymyr Groysman, said Wednesday he can confirm only one death, pedaling back on an earlier claim that 32 miners had died. It was unclear what his source for the information was, since rebel authorities do not answer to the government in Kiev.

 

The blast occurred at a depth of more than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet deep) as 230 workers were in the mine, separatist authorities in Donetsk said in a statement, adding that the explosion was caused by a mixture of gas and air — a common cause of industrial mining accidents.

 

 

IRVINE, Calif. (AP) — Women who come to the U.S. from China to give birth to automatic American citizens may not be breaking the law by doing so, but it's illegal to lie about why they're coming into the country.

 

That was the clear message federal agents sought to send when they searched three dozen California homes Tuesday in what may have been the biggest federal crackdown yet on so-called maternity tourism.

 

The raids came as homeland security agents investigated three rings catering to such women, who must tell the truth about their visits on visa applications, authorities said.

 

Recent cases in California have catered to wealthy Chinese visitors, most likely due to the country's large population, economic boom and ties to the region. Their numbers are unclear, and no arrests have been made or charges filed.

 

"It is fertile ground for this kind of scheme," said Claude Arnold, special agent in charge for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's homeland security investigations in Los Angeles. "These people were told to lie, how to lie, so that their motives for coming to the U.S. wouldn't be questioned."