Nation and World briefs for October 12

Dakota Access pipeline construction resumes near site of protest

ST. ANTHONY, N.D. (AP) — Construction on the four-state Dakota Access pipeline resumed Tuesday on private land in North Dakota that’s near a camp where thousands of protesters supporting tribal rights have gathered for months.

In turn, protesters said they’re discussing nonviolent opposition measures, including chaining themselves to equipment.

Nine people were arrested Tuesday attempting to shut down pipelines in other states as a show of solidarity with the Dakota Access protesters.

Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners resumed digging trenches and laying pipe, said Morton County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Rob Keller, a move that comes in light of Sunday’s federal appeals court ruling that allowed construction to resume within 20 miles of Lake Oahe. That Missouri River reservoir is the water supply for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation.

Airstrike in Yemen deepens war, puts pressure on US

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — More than 1,000 mourners were packed into the funeral hall, including some of the most powerful figures in Yemen’s rebel movement. Ali al-Akwa, who was just about to start reciting the Quran, heard warplanes overhead — but that wasn’t strange for wartime Sanaa.

Surely a funeral would be safe, he thought.

Moments later, a huge explosion struck, tearing bodies apart. The ceiling collapsed, walls fell in and a fire erupted. As people scrambled frantically to get out, a second missile struck, killing more of them.

Nearly 140 people were killed and more than 600 wounded in Saturday’s airstrike — one of the deadliest since Saudi Arabia and its allies began an air campaign in Yemen in March 2015.

The coalition is trying to uproot the Shiite Houthi rebels who took control of the capital and much of northern Yemen from the internationally recognized government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

The bloodshed eclipsed new U.N. efforts to secure even a brief cease-fire.

Amid popular anger, the coalition lost potential tribal allies. In an attempt to expand the war, the Houthis retaliated by firing rockets into neighboring Saudi Arabia and at U.S. warships.

Unshackled, Trump unleashes aggressive attacks on own party

WASHINGTON (AP) — The “shackles” gone, Donald Trump stepped up his fierce attacks on his own party leaders Tuesday, promising to teach Republicans who oppose him a lesson and fight for the presidency “the way I want to.”

Exactly four weeks before Election Day and with his campaign floundering, the businessman reverted to the combative, divisive strategy that propelled him to victory in the GOP primary: Attack every critic — including fellow Republicans. Those close to Trump suggested it was “open season” on every detractor, regardless of party.

“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump said in a tweet that brought new concern — near panic in some cases — to a party trying to stave off an all-out civil war before Nov, 8.

In another series of tweets, the Republican nominee called House Speaker Paul Ryan “weak and ineffective,” Sen. John McCain “very foul-mouthed” and “disloyal” Republicans “far more difficult than Crooked Hillary.”

“They come at you from all sides,” Trump declared. “They don’t know how to win — I will teach them!”

Leaks show Clinton inner circle grappling with email issue

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hacked emails show Hillary Clinton’s campaign was slow to grasp the seriousness of the controversy about her use of a private home email server and thought it might blow over after one weekend.

Two days after the Associated Press was first to report in March 2015 that Clinton had been using a private server in her home in New York to send and receive messages when she was secretary of state, her advisers were shaping their strategy to respond to the revelation.

Among the emails made public Tuesday by WikiLeaks was one from Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, who optimistically suggested that the issue might quickly blow over.

“Goal would be to cauterize this just enough so it plays out over the weekend and dies in the short term,” Merrill wrote on March 6, 2015.

It did not, and became the leading example of Clinton’s penchant for secrecy, which has persisted as a theme among her campaign critics and rivals throughout this election season. Clinton did not publicly confirm or discuss her use of the email server until March 10 in a speech at the United Nations, nearly one week after AP revealed the server’s existence.

Officials, parents worry Chicago schools deal won’t stick

CHICAGO (AP) — Teachers in the nation’s third-largest school district pulled back from a threatened strike after a tentative last-minute contract agreement that Chicago officials acknowledged Tuesday may amount to a temporary fix and parents worried would fall apart.

“It wasn’t easy, as you all know,” Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said after Monday’s late-night agreement, which now goes to the union’s House of Delegates and all 28,000 members for a final vote. Vice President Jesse Sharkey said Tuesday that he’s “confident that it’ll pass” because it has wins for students and for school workers.

But even as Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who fought bitterly with Lewis before and during the 2012 teachers’ strike, praised the union and the Chicago Public Schools in a speech in which he introduced his 2017 budget proposal, it still isn’t clear how the financially strapped city will pay for the four-year deal.

The proposal includes a 2 percent cost-of-living increase in the third year and 2.5 percent one in the fourth year. It doesn’t require current teachers to pay more toward their pensions — a change CPS had been seeking and the union rejected earlier this year — but future hires will have to pick up that additional pension cost.

A key provision is an agreement by the city to divert about $88 million from a $175 million surplus of the city’s at-times controversial special taxing districts — known as tax increment financing, or TIF, funds — to the schools. That figure is less than the $200 million in additional spending the union had sought.

Justices raise doubts about $399M judgment against Samsung

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court raised serious doubts Tuesday about a $399 million judgment against smartphone maker Samsung for illegally copying parts of the patented design of Apple’s iPhone.

Justices hearing arguments in the long-running dispute seemed troubled that Samsung was ordered to pay all the profits it earned from 11 phone models, even though the features at issue are just a tiny part of the devices.

But some justices struggled over how exactly a jury should be told to compute damages if the case is sent back to a lower court.

“If I were a juror, I wouldn’t know what to do,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Justice Stephen Breyer appeared to embrace a test proposed by a group of internet companies including Facebook and Google that would outline new limits on such damage awards. Other justices seemed to favor a different test proposed by the Obama administration.

North Carolina braces for more flooding in downstream towns

GREENVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A state trooper shot and killed an armed man during a search for flood victims in a tense and dispirited North Carolina, and thousands more people were ordered to evacuate as high water from Hurricane Matthew pushed downstream Tuesday, two days after the storm blew out to sea.

Matthew’s death toll in the U.S. climbed to 30, half of them in North Carolina, in addition to the more than 500 feared dead in Haiti.

In Greenville, a city of 90,000, officials warned that the Tar River would overwhelm every bridge in the county by sundown, splitting it in half before the river crests late Wednesday. Evacuations were ordered there and in such communities as Goldsboro and Kinston, as rivers swelled to some of the highest levels ever recorded.

Tens of thousands of people, some of them as much as 125 miles inland, have been warned to move to higher ground since the hurricane drenched the state with more than a foot of rain over the weekend during a run up the East Coast from Florida.

An angry Gov. Pat McCrory asked people to stop ignoring evacuation orders and driving around barricades on flooded roads: “That is unacceptable. You are not only putting your life danger, you are putting emergency responders’ lives in jeopardy.”

Haitians await aid, help each other regain some normalcy

LES CAYES, Haiti (AP) — People throughout Haiti’s devastated southwest peninsula formed makeshift brigades Tuesday to clear debris and try to regain some semblance of their pre-hurricane lives as anger grew over the delay in aid for remote communities more than a week after the Category 4 storm hit.

A community group that formed in the southern seaside community of Les Anglais began clearing tree limbs from streets and placing them into piles while others gathered scraps of wood to start rebuilding homes destroyed by Hurricane Matthew.

Carpenter James Nassau donned a white construction helmet as he rebuilt a neighbor’s wall with recycled wood, hoping to earn a little money to take care of 10 children, including those left behind by his brother, who died in the storm.

“My brother left five kids, and now I’ve got to take care of them,” he said. “Nobody has come to help.”

The scene repeated itself across small seaside and mountain villages dotting the peninsula, where people pointed out helicopters buzzing overhead and questioned why they haven’t received any help.