Around the World: March 2, 2015

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — This was never happily-ever-after waiting to happen.

 

When President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office early in 2009, there were plenty of reasons to expect their relationship would be difficult.

 

The cerebral president and the brash prime minister have stark differences in personality, politics and worldview.

 

Still, few could have predicted the downward spiral of backbiting, lecturing and outright name-calling that has occurred.

 

Start with the differences between Obama and Netanyahu, add in disagreements over Iran's nuclear program, a Republican-led Congress trying to assert itself and the coming Israeli elections, and it becomes "the perfect storm of potential broken crockery in the U.S.-Israeli relationship," says the Wilson Center's Aaron Miller, who was a Mideast adviser and negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations.

 

 

BAGHDAD (AP) — Backed by allied Shiite and Sunni fighters, Iraqi security forces on Monday began a large-scale military operation to recapture Saddam Hussein's hometown from the Islamic State extremist group, state TV said, a major step in a campaign to reclaim a large swath of territory in northern Iraq controlled by the militants.

 

The city of Tikrit, 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad, fell into the hands of the Islamic State group last summer along with the country's second-largest city of Mosul and other areas in the country's Sunni heartland after the collapse of national security forces. Tikrit is one of the largest cities held by the Islamic State group and sits on the road to Mosul.

 

Security forces have so far been unable to retake Tikrit, but momentum has begun to shift after soldiers, backed by airstrikes from a U.S.-led coalition, recently took back the nearby refinery town of Beiji. Any operation to take Mosul would require Iraq to seize Tikrit first because of its strategic location for military enforcements.

 

U.S. military officials have said a coordinated military mission to retake Mosul will likely begin in April or May and involve up to 25,000 Iraqi troops. But they have cautioned that if the Iraqis aren't ready, the timing could be delayed. Past attempts to retake Tikrit have failed, and Iraqi authorities say they have not set a date to launch a major operation to recapture Mosul. Heavy fighting between Islamic State and Kurdish forces is taking place only outside the city.

 

Al-Iraqiya television said that the forces were attacking Tikrit from different directions, backed by artillery and airstrikes by Iraqi fighter jets. It said the militants were dislodged from some areas outside the city. Several hours into the operation, it gave no details.

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Six months after 18-year-old Michael Brown died in the street in Ferguson, Missouri, the Justice Department is close to announcing its findings in the racially charged police shooting that launched "hands up, don't shoot" protests across the nation.

 

The federal government has undertaken two separate investigations. One looks at whether criminal charges should be filed against the officer involved in the shooting, Darren Wilson. The other is a broader examination of the city's police department, including a search for discriminatory practices by officers.

 

Attorney General Eric Holder, the nation's first black official to hold that office, has made civil rights a cornerstone of his six-year tenure. He says he expects to announce results in both investigations before he leaves office, and announcements could be coming within days.

 

 

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Two airplane catastrophes put Malaysia on the map in a bad way in 2014. But they didn't hurt the country's tourism, and the higher visibility may even have helped: visitor numbers had their strongest growth in years.

 

For the past decade, Malaysia has run an elaborate campaign to market itself abroad as an ideal Asian destination, touting a multiethnic culture, lush rainforests and pristine beaches. Despite the effort to internationalize, its tourism industry still relies heavily on tightly-packed neighboring Singapore and in a renewed push the government had designated 2014 as "Visit Malaysia Year."

 

So when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, it put the global spotlight on Malaysia and seemingly dealt a blow to its tourism strategy. A double whammy came four months later when a Malaysia Airlines jet was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

 

Tourism, however, grew at its fastest pace since 2008.

 

Figures for all of 2014 haven't been released yet but the January-October data shows 22.9 million visitors, a jump of nearly 10 percent from a year earlier. That far outpaced 2.5 percent growth for the same period in 2013 and a 0.7 percent rise in 2012. The full year growth rates for those two years are close to the 10-month figures.

 

 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — In a fatal encounter captured on video, three Los Angeles police officers shot and killed a man on the city's Skid Row during a struggle over one of the officers' guns, authorities said.

 

The graphic video widely circulated on social media within a few hours of the incident Sunday brought attention to the death of the man who wound up wrestling with police amid the tents, sleeping bags and trash of Skid Row, where many of the city's homeless stay.

 

The three officers, one of whom is a sergeant, shot the man as they struggled on the ground for control of one of the police officer's weapons, after a stun gun proved ineffective, LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said. The officers had been responding to a report of a robbery.

 

Police said they planned to use the video in their investigation.

 

Smith said the department would attempt to amplify the video's sound and pictures to figure out exactly what happened.

 

 

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — As Florida's housing market tanked seven years ago, construction worker David Rager saw jobs dry up. So he left construction, along with 2.3 million others nationwide during the economic downturn, and got a job installing traffic signals and street lights.

 

"I couldn't afford to sit at home for a month here and a month there," said Rager, 53.

 

Now Rager is back in construction, working with a crew on a custom-built home in Orlando, framing walls "and doing a little bit of everything." In the past four years, hundreds of thousands of workers have returned to construction, making it among the nation's fastest growing job sectors.

 

In the busiest markets, there aren't enough construction workers to keep up with the pace of building. In a recent survey of more than 900 contractors by Associated General Contractors of America, 83 percent said they were having trouble filling craft positions. The most difficult positions to fill were carpenters, roofers and equipment operators.

 

Given the amount of building going on, "it's going to be interesting because we're going to have a labor shortage here in South Florida," said Scott Moss, president of Moss & Associates, a South Florida-based construction firm with offices in California, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and Hawaii.

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a reversal of the usual worries about political influence on electoral map-making, the Supreme Court is being asked to let raw politics play an even bigger role in the drawing of congressional district boundaries.

 

The court hears argument Monday in an appeal by Republican lawmakers in Arizona against the state's voter-approved independent redistricting commission for creating the districts of U.S. House members. A decision striking down the commission probably would doom a similar system in neighboring California, and could affect districting commissions in 11 other states.

 

The court previously has closed the door to lawsuits challenging excessive partisanship in redistricting, or gerrymandering. A gerrymandered district is intentionally drawn, and sometimes oddly shaped, to favor one political party.

 

Independent commissions such as Arizona's "may be the only meaningful check" left to states that want to foster more competitive elections, reduce political polarization and bring fresh faces into the political process, the Obama administration said.

 

The court fight has one odd aspect: California Republicans are rooting against Arizona Republicans.

 

 

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine's president has a signed a decree opening the way to a formal request for international peacekeepers to be stationed in eastern regions where government forces are battling Russian-backed separatists.

 

President Petro Poroshenko's office said Monday the appeal for a contingent of peacekeepers will be addressed to the United Nations and the European Union. His office gave no specific details on the mission's composition or any timetable for it but Russia is strongly against the idea.

 

Fighting has waned substantially in eastern Ukraine in recent days as a cease-fire deal forged last month increasingly takes effect, but both sides have complained of sporadic violations.

 

The U.N. human rights office on Monday raised its toll of the fighting, saying more than 6,000 people have died since the conflict began in April.

 

 

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Afghan army is waging its largest-ever solo offensive against the Taliban, hoping to strike a decisive blow ahead of the spring fighting season and prove it can rout the insurgents without the aid of U.S. and NATO combat troops.

 

Afghan troops have been slowly pushing up through a fertile river valley in the southern Helmand province, with special forces mounting nighttime helicopter raids into mud brick compounds and ground troops gradually advancing across the poppy fields that in past years have furnished the insurgents' main cash crop.

 

U.S. and British troops suffered some of their biggest losses of the decade-long war here, seizing territory that was later lost by ill-equipped and poorly trained Afghan forces. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has vowed to break the grim cycle, and the latest offensive is widely seen as a test for his efforts to overhaul the army and police since taking office in September.

 

Ghani was personally involved in planning the operation, which is codenamed Zolfiqar — meaning double-edged sword — and which began on Feb. 10, according to Maj. Gen. Kurt Fuller, deputy chief of staff for U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan. Ghani heads to Washington later this month, where he is expected to seek enhanced U.S. military backup, particularly air support.

 

"This is an incredibly important operation," said a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the secret operation. "This is Ghani's attempt to demonstrate to the U.S. and the U.S. Congress that Afghan ground forces are able to take the lead and conduct offensive operations if they have the right enablers to support them."

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