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Around the World: April 13, 2015

Here's what's happening across the United States and around the world today.

Clinton's decision: The long, painstakingly deliberate road back into presidential politics

WASHINGTON (AP) — Around Christmas, Hillary Rodham Clinton set off on her annual holiday vacation at Oscar de la Renta's beachfront estate in the Dominican Republic.

It was a somber and serious time for Clinton. De la Renta, whose relationship with the former first lady had blossomed from dress designer to close friend, had recently died and Clinton wanted to be there to support his widow. She was also wrestling with a final decision on whether to run for president. She arrived at the island compound armed with a binder stuffed with 500 pages of policy memos and analysis.

Clinton had spent nearly two years tiptoeing around a decision that much of the political world assumed was a done deal, a calculated next act in what critics saw as the Clintons' master plan.

Clinton's intensely loyal friends and advisers bristle at the suggestion that a second White House run was inevitable. When she left the State Department in early 2013 and returned to private life for the first time in more than two decades, Clinton told people she just wanted to "walk, sleep and eat." She was more focused on renting office space and figuring out where to receive her mail than on superPAC fundraising and courting Iowa powerbrokers, allies said.

Her decision to run again would be slow, almost painstakingly deliberate, a reflection of Clinton's methodical and cautious nature. She put off much of the process until last fall, around the midterm elections. Only then did she delve deeply into consultations with dozens of policy and political experts, analysis of countless memos, and a reexamination of what went wrong in her failed 2008 campaign.

North Charleston chief's attempts to reach out to black community made tougher after shooting

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Eddie Driggers had been out of active policing for five years when North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey offered him the top job in South Carolina's third-largest city.

Driggers, working as a chaplain for a group that helps police departments, had to pray and talk to his wife before taking the job. Summey's top task was to repair relationships with the black community that had been strained for years by North Charleston's aggressive crackdown on crime through traffic stops that African-Americans viewed as harassment.

After one of his white officers was charged with murder in the shooting of an unarmed black man running from a traffic stop, Driggers is trying to mend an even bigger rift, all under the glare of a spotlight.

"I have been praying for peace," Driggers said Wednesday at a news conference frequently interrupted by angry protesters. "Peace for the family, peace for the community. And I will continue to stand on that as I strive to protect and serve the people I took an oath to help."

Driggers hasn't talked much publicly since. The mayor said after a church service Sunday that Driggers has worked to improve police-community relations in the past two years and that recruiting minority officers is among the department's top priorities.

Ex-security guards convicted in Iraq shooting face long punishments as sentencing day arrives

WASHINGTON (AP) — Four former Blackwater security guards face decades in prison when they are sentenced Monday for their roles in a 2007 shooting of Iraqi civilians.

Three of the guards — Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty and Paul Slough — face mandatory, decades-long sentences because of firearm convictions. A fourth, Nicholas Slatten, faces a life sentence after being found guilty of first-degree murder.

The men were charged in the deaths of 14 Iraqis at Nisoor Square, a crowded traffic circle in downtown Baghdad. The killings caused an international uproar, and the men were convicted in October after a legal fight that spanned years.

Prosecutors have described the shooting as an unprovoked ambush of civilians, though defense lawyers countered that the men were targeted with gunfire from insurgents and Iraqi police, and shot back in self-defense.

The lawyers are expected to argue for mercy Monday by saying that decades-long sentences would be unconstitutionally harsh punishments for men who operated in a stressful, war-torn environment, and who have proud military careers and close family ties.

Preparing for post-survivor era, Holocaust institute in Israel trains children to bear witness

KFAR HAROEH, Israel (AP) — When David Hershkoviz was a child, he used to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of his mother screaming in her sleep, knowing that she was reliving the horrors of the Holocaust.

In time, he learned of the traumatic wartime experience that haunted her most — being torn away from her own mother at the Auschwitz concentration camp's selection line, where at 21 she was forced into work and her mother dispatched to death.

"That separation never left her," said Hershkoviz, 54, his voice quivering as he choked back tears. "She said, 'I think my mother is angry at me because I left her. ... My mother never comes to me in my dreams. I haven't dreamed about her since we parted. How is that possible?'"

When his mother, Mindel, died two years ago, he wanted to carry on her legacy by bearing witness to the Holocaust. He found help in a first-of-its-kind course teaching the children of Holocaust survivors how to ensure their parents' stories live on.

Hershkoviz is one of 18 graduates of the Shem Olam Institute's inaugural four-month "second-generation" course, where children of survivors study the history of the horrors their parents endured and how best to pass it on. The program aims to usher in a new stage of Holocaust commemoration in a post-survivor era.

Impoverished tribe struggles to stop surge in teen suicides after 7 youths end their lives

PINE RIDGE, S.D. (AP) — The people of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation are no strangers to hardship or to the risk of lives being cut short. But a string of seven suicides by teenagers in recent months has shaken this impoverished community to its core and sent school and tribal leaders on an urgent mission to stop the deaths.

On Dec. 12, a 14-year-old boy hanged himself at his home on the reservation, a sprawling expanse of badlands on the South Dakota-Nebraska border. On Christmas Day, a 15-year-old girl was found dead, followed weeks later by a high school cheerleader. Two more teenagers took their lives in February and two more in March, along with several more attempts. The youngest to die was 12.

Students at the reservation's high school and middle school grades have been posting Facebook messages wondering who might be next, with some even seeming to encourage new attempts by hanging nooses near housing areas. Worried parents recently met at a community hall to discuss what's happening. And the U.S. Public Health Service has dispatched teams of mental health counselors to talk to students.

"The situation has turned into an epidemic," said Thomas Poor Bear, vice president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, whose 24-year-old niece was among two adults who also committed suicide this winter. "There are a lot of reasons behind it. The bullying at schools, the high unemployment rate. Parents need to discipline the children."

Somewhere between 16,000 and 40,000 members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe live on the reservation, which at over 2 million acres is among the nation's largest. Famous as the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, in which the 7th Cavalry slaughtered about 300 tribe members in 1890, it includes the county with the highest poverty rate in the U.S., and some of the worst rates of alcoholism and drug abuse, violence and unemployment. Life expectancy for men is below 50 years, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere.

As Shiite militias battle Islamic State group, vast holy cemetery in Iraq grows ever larger

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) — Every chapter of Iraq's modern history can be seen in this great, sprawling city of the dead, its mausoleums stretching across the horizon from one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines. And now, its sandy expanse grows again yet with the war dead killed by the country's latest adversary, the extremists of the Islamic State group.

"I expect that these graveyards will be expanded as more fighting against Daesh looms in the horizon," said Ali Abdul-Aali, the city official in charge of Najaf cemetery, using an Arabic acronym for the group.

Kings, scientists, artists, warriors and millions of others have a final resting place at Wadi al-Salam, or the "Valley of Peace" in Arabic, buried one atop the other in one of the world's largest cemeteries. The roughly 10-square-kilometer (4-square-mile) graveyard radiates out from the tomb of Imam Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and Shiite Islam's most sacred martyr.

In its narrow rows, a visitor can find those killed in Iraq's long war in the 1980s with Iran or those slain in the sectarian bloodletting that followed the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003. Gravediggers shrug off questions about how many people have been buried here since the cemetery's founding a 1,000 years ago, simply saying millions.

But in recent months, the growth of areas set aside for Shiite militias fighting the Islamic State group has been easy to see. Tens of thousands of Shiite men answered a nationwide call-to-arms by a top cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, after the Sunni extremists seized a third of Iraq last year and threatened Shiites and their holy sites. Shiite militias, backed by Iranian advisers, have played a key role in halting the extremist's advance and helped Iraq recently retake the city of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown.

Man says elusive Civil War photo sought by experts really is 30-year-old hoax he did as teen

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — For three decades, the stained and blurry photograph presented a great mystery to Civil War historians.

It was a picture taken of another photo in a peeling, gilded frame. In the foreground stood a man, his back to the camera, wearing an overcoat and a hat. In the center, visible amid stains and apparent water damage, was a ship.

Did this picture show the only known photograph of the ironclad Confederate warship the CSS Georgia?

The 1,200-ton ship armored with strips of railroad iron never fired a shot in combat after it was built to defend the Georgia coast in the Civil War. Confederate sailors sunk their ship in December 1864 as Gen. William T. Sherman's Union troops captured Savannah.

No blueprints survived and period illustrations varied in their details. The photo would confirm details of the Georgia's design, if only it could be authenticated. Records show John Potter donated a copy of the picture of the photo to the Georgia Historical Society in March 1986.

German Nobel laureate Guenter Grass who drew controversy over WWII and Israel, dies at 87

BERLIN (AP) — Guenter Grass, the Nobel-winning German writer who gave voice to the generation that came of age during the horrors of the Nazi era but later ran into controversy over his own World War II past and stance toward Israel, has died. He was 87.

Matthias Wegner, spokesman for the Steidl publishing house, confirmed that Grass died Monday morning in a Luebeck hospital.

Grass was lauded by Germans for helping to revive their culture in the aftermath of World War II and helping to give voice and support to democratic discourse in the postwar nation.

Yet he provoked the ire of many in 2006 when he revealed in his memoir "Skinning the Onion" that, as a teenager, he had served in the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of Adolf Hitler's notorious paramilitary organization.

In 2012, Grass drew sharp criticism at home and was declared persona non grata by Israel after publishing a prose poem, "What Must Be Said," in which he criticized what he described as Western hypocrisy over Israel's nuclear program and labeled the country a threat to "already fragile world peace" over its belligerent stance on Iran.

Traveling blues: More flights are late, customer complaints about US airlines are up

DALLAS (AP) — Think flying is getting worse? A pair of university researchers who track the airline business say it's a fact.

More flights are late, more bags are getting lost, and customers are lodging more complaints about U.S. airlines, government data shows. Dean Headley, a marketing professor at Wichita State and one of the co-authors of the annual report being released Monday, said passengers already know that air travel is getting worse. "We just got the numbers to prove it."

Among the findings in the report:

—LATENESS: The percentage of flights that arrived on time fell to 76.2 percent last year from 78.4 percent in 2013. Best: Hawaiian Airlines. Worst: Envoy Air, which operates most American Eagle flights.

—LOST BAGS: The rate of lost, stolen or delayed bags rose 13 percent in 2014. Best: Virgin America. Worst: Envoy. Airlines lose one bag for every 275 or so passengers, but at Envoy, the rate is one lost bag for every 110 passengers, according to government figures.


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