NEW YORK (AP) — Federal prosecutors sued New York City on Thursday to speed the pace of reforms at the Rikers Island jail complex and address what a Justice Department investigation found was a "deep-seated culture of violence" against young inmates.

The move comes a day after Mayor Bill de Blasio visited the 10-jail lockup to announce the end of solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year-old inmates, a policy change initiated after the 2 1/2-year federal probe released in August.

But the end of solitary was just one of 73 recommendations made by federal prosecutors to curb violence, improve investigations, strengthen accountability and reduce the use of solitary confinement for inmates who break jailhouse rules.

In court papers, Attorney General Eric Holder and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara wrote that despite four months of negotiations with the city, federal prosecutors "have been unable to reach agreement as to lasting, verifiable, and enforceable reforms."

The lawsuit seeks a court-enforceable consent decree is issued by a judge to ensure the reforms take place and notes that the city has now agreed to such intervention.

Emails seeking comment from the mayor's office and city lawyers weren't immediately returned.

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Mayor Bill de Blasio meets with youth at Second Chance Housing which now serves as alternative housi …

The court papers show federal prosecutors are hoping to join a federal class-action lawsuit that similarly claims widespread guard brutality in facilities that house adult inmates. They argued that combining the two actions "will facilitate much needed reforms at Rikers in the fastest and most efficient manner."

De Blasio and his reform-minded commissioner, Joseph Ponte, have recently touted measures they say point to a change in direction for the nation's second-largest jail system. Those include capping solitary stints to 30 days from 90 days, decreasing the staff-to-inmate ration in juvenile facilities from 33-to-1 to 15-to-1 and the securing of funds to add surveillance videos over the next two years.

But the federal complaint says those reforms have yet to reach 18-year-olds. It noted there have been 71 reported use-of-force incidents against 18-year-olds between September and November in facilities without surveillance cameras. As of last month, at least 40 of them were being held in solitary confinement.

Jail officials have been "deliberately indifferent to harm" of the young inmates by failing to make sure incidents are properly reported, failing to appoint enough supervisors, failing to conduct thorough investigations and failing to discipline staff for using excessive force, the lawsuit says.

New York's 11,000 daily inmate jail system has come under increased scrutiny this year since The Associated Press first reported the deaths of two seriously mentally ill inmates at Rikers and other problems.

Subsequent investigations by the news media, city investigators and lawmakers have drawn attention to the jails, whose problems de Blasio has said were decades in the making and will not be changed overnight.

Bharara's lawsuit seeks immediate cultural change at Rikers. The culture described in the complaint is one in which jail guards will yell "stop resisting" when beating an inmate, use abusive language to provoke inmate fights, intimidate inmates into not reporting beatings by pressuring them to "hold it down," and failing to employ even basic investigative steps to verify incident report forms.

"To date, defendants have failed to take sufficient and effective measures to remedy these deficiencies," the suit says.

Wochit
Vladimir Putin Faces Public Amid Economic Crisis

MOSCOW (AP) — From a Western perspective, Vladimir Putin's days as president of Russia should be numbered: The ruble has lost about half its value, the economy is in crisis and his aggression in Ukraine has turned the country into an international pariah.

And yet most Russians see Putin not as the cause, but as the solution.

The situation as seen from a Russian point of view is starkly different from that painted in the West, and it is driven largely by state television's carefully constructed version of reality and the Kremlin's methodical dismantling of every credible political alternative.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Thursday found that 81 percent of Russians still support him, hours before Putin vowed in a live news conference to fix Russia's economic woes within two years, voiced confidence the plummeting ruble will recover soon and promised to diversify Russia's economy.

But the poll also showed that confidence in the economy is slipping. This is particularly true in Moscow, where people have become accustomed to imported goods and foreign travel, now once again off-limits for many because of the fall of the ruble and Western sanctions over Ukraine.

The poll was conducted between Nov. 22 and Dec. 7, when the ruble was steadily declining. But this week's catastrophic collapse is likely to have a much greater effect on consumer prices and the standard of living.

For Putin, the question is whether he will be able to convince Russians to tighten their belts, and not just for a few months but possibly for years to come.

"The Russian people have a sense that they are under sanctions, they are a fortress under siege," said Maria Lipman, an independent analyst. "This kind of mentality is disseminated consistently and steadily by Russian television: Who else is there to rely on except Putin? Putin is seen as the savior of the nation, and I think he sees himself in this fashion."

Putin addressed his countrymen's concerns over three hours at Thursday's news conference, sending a message that he's in charge and all will be fine.

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In this Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009 file photo people walk past a huge Christmas tree installed in Red S …

An advertisement before the news conference showed Putin surrounded by Sochi Olympic athletes, petting a baby tiger and greeting cosmonauts. "We are absolutely capable of doing everything ourselves," he promises the audience.

How Russians view Putin is associated with how they get their news, the poll showed. Those who identified state television as their main source of news are more likely to approve of Putin (84 percent) than those who have other sources (73 percent), while those who tune into the news often also have a more favorable opinion of him.

After becoming president in 2000, Putin benefited from high prices for oil, the mainstay of Russia's economy. In the past decade, Russians saw their living standards rise faster than at any other point in modern history, transforming many average citizens into car owners and globe-trotters for the first time ever.

The suppression of opposition politicians and independent media, widely criticized by outside observers, was tacitly accepted by many as a compromise worth making for economic stability after the roller coaster years of the 1990s.

"I very much support Putin — who else is there to support?" said Valentina Roshupkina, a 79-year-old resident of Gryaz, a town several hours' drive south of Moscow. "The country is moving in the right direction, I believe, because he lifted up the army, he made the government stronger. People started to be a little bit afraid of us."

Poll respondents were asked whether they would be willing to speak with an AP reporter, and Roshupkina was among the many who agreed.

With the Russian economy buffeted by Western sanctions and the fall in oil prices, Putin has relied even more on his image as a tough leader capable of standing up to the West. He appears to be betting that this will help him weather the economic storm.

So far he's been right: The presidency and the military are the country's most trusted institutions, according to the poll, with three out of four Russians saying they trust the presidency and two out of three expressing faith in the military.

Putin: Russian Economy to Recover Within Two YearsPlay video

"We've revived the army and that's very important," said Ivan Savenko, a 50-year-old driver in the southern city of Stavropol who also took part in the poll. "For us, the most important thing is the army and then everything else. It's important for us that our country is a power. If we are not a power, we do not exist."

Of those surveyed, 81 percent said they strongly or somewhat approve of the way Putin is handling his job, a dramatic increase of more than 20 percentage points from an AP-GfK poll conducted in 2012.

While Russia has become more authoritarian under Putin, the support for him appears genuine. The significant fluctuation in Putin's ratings in recent years also indicates that Russians feel able to respond freely in anonymous surveys about their views on the president. The 81 percent approval rating is only slightly higher statistically than the 74 percent measured during the same time period by the Levada Center, Russia's most respected independent pollster.

Many analysts question, however, whether the high ratings have any significance, given the Kremlin's control over information.

"There is a total, effective, monopolistic propaganda campaign, and if there is an information monopoly, how can you talk about ratings?" said Georgy Satarov, a former Kremlin adviser who heads a research institute that studies corruption.

"The thing you have to pay attention to is not the fact that 80 percent support him, but that despite that information monopoly 15 percent don't support him," he said.

Support for Putin soared after he moved to seize the Russian-speaking Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in March.

"A source of pride for the overwhelming majority of Russians is the victory of World War II, but that was already 70 years ago," Lipman said. "(In Crimea) Putin gave the sense that we are victorious and triumphant and resurgent today."

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In this Friday, March 20, 1998 file photo people walk along Moscow's Red Square with St. Basil C …

The Russia-backed separatists who took up arms against government troops in eastern Ukraine also have been portrayed as heroes on state television. Of the Russians polled, 69 percent said that many or some parts of Ukraine rightfully belong to Russia.

But some, like 37-year-old librarian Yelena Shevilyova, said that although she approves of Putin, she believes Russia's involvement in Ukraine may have come at too high a cost.

"I think we lost a lot in our lives because of this," said Shevilyova, another poll participant, referring to Crimea.

"I think that it is right to bring all of these (Russian-speaking regions) back, but we need everything to be good here too. ... You can't have everything at once," she said, speaking from the far northern region of Perm.

Growing worries about a worsening economy and the impact of sanctions are more keenly felt in major cities. In Moscow, more than 6 in 10 said they had been negatively affected by the sanctions and most said their family's finances were worse than three years ago. Less than half felt that way elsewhere.

"I am afraid that Russia isn't going anywhere," said Dmitry Uryupin, 48, a sound director in a small production firm in Moscow who was among those surveyed. "It's unlikely that wages will be raised. In fact, it's quite likely the opposite will happen, unemployment will rise and it will all affect the most economically insecure people as well as us, the creative class."

After Putin was inaugurated for a third term in 2012 after a wave of protests in Moscow driven by the creative class, he clamped down even harder on the opposition and focused on his core electorate: people in the provinces and those more dependent on the state for their income.

The disgruntled in Moscow have proved easy to discredit in the eyes of what is known as the Putin majority: "Look at these poor Muscovites. ... Oh my God, they complain because they cannot go to Italy on vacation and they can no longer afford to buy Parmesan cheese!" Lipman said.

Whether discontent not just with the economy but with Putin's leadership will grow, Lipman said, depends on "how badly this will hurt, and for how long."

The AP-NORC Center poll of Russia was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago with fieldwork for the in-person survey by GfK Russia from Nov. 22-Dec. 7. It is based on 2,008 in-person interviews with a nationally representative random sample of Russians age 18 and older.

Funding for the survey came from NORC at the University of Chicago.

Results for all adults have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

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Online:

AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research: http://www.apnorc.org

Kurdish forces backed by US-led warplanes have recaptured a large area in Iraq near the Syrian border in an offensive against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a top US commander has said.

More than 50 air strikes in recent days by coalition aircraft "have resulted in allowing those [Kurdish] forces to manoeuvre and regain approximately 100 square kilometres of ground" near Sinjar, Lieutenant General James Terry, head of the US-led campaign against the ISIL group, told reporters on Thursday.

Kurdish peshmerga forces said earlier that they had captured several villages and were rolling back the ISIL fighters around Sinjar in the country's northwest.

The capture of Sinjar by ISIL fighters in early August and the plight of the mostly Yazidi minority population there was cited by President Barack Obama as one of the reasons for the US military intervention.

The US and allied aircraft have carried out 1,361 raids against the ISIL group since bombing began on August 8, Terry said.

Yazidi volunteer fighters see the fight in Sinjar as 'personal' (video)

The advance of the ISIL fighters had been halted and the group was having difficulty moving and communicating as a result of the air campaign, he said.

"I think we've made significant progress in halting that progress [by ISIL]," Terry said.

More than a thousand American troops are expected to move into Iraq in a few weeks to train local forces on top of about 1,700 already stationed in the beleaguered country.

However, Terry said it would take at least three years to build the capabilities of the Iraqi military.

He said the challenge is to get Iraqi units trained and back into the fight so they can plan operations to regain contested areas.

The Iraqi army wants to launch a counter-offensive to retake Mosul - northern Iraq's largest city - likely aided by the US support and coordination.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev says little but fascinates court spectators

He wore baggy gray khakis and a black zip-up sweater, with a white button-down shirt that peeked out from underneath — an outfit that seemed to overwhelm his slight frame. He rubbed his beard and the left side of his face, and his left eye appeared to be a little droopy.

There was little in his appearance that seemed out of the ordinary. Yet with every slight move he made, people behind him sat up straight in their seats and stared at him — some tilting their heads to get a better look. Even when the action shifted to the other side of the room, they kept their eyes locked on him.

The scene that unfolded in a federal courtroom in Boston was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s first public appearance in 17 months. The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings said only five words in the final hearing before his trial begins in January, on charges that he, along with his older brother, set off two deadly bombs near the marathon finish line in April 2013.

Had he been kept apprised of the proceedings in the case? “Yes,” the 21-year-old politely told the judge, quietly and with a slight accent. Had he been in regular communication with his lawyers? “Yes, sir,” he said, a little louder. Was he satisfied with his legal representation? “Very much,” he replied, with a slight nod. And then he lowered back into this seat, where he sat for another 22 minutes, rubbing his eyes, stretching his legs and shifting around in his chair.

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A motorcade carrying Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev rolls away from federal court in Boston …

Tsarnaev occasionally offered brief hints of a smile to his team of defense attorneys, but not once did he look at the spectators behind him, perhaps aware of the microscope he was under.

The brief exchange with Tsarnaev made for a strangely surreal moment in an otherwise routine hearing in the marathon bombing case. Last July, Tsarnaev had pleaded not guilty to the bombings, which killed three people and injured several hundred. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

In court on Thursday, William Fick, one of Tsarnaev’s attorneys, told the judge the defense would soon be filing for a continuance —a delay of the Jan. 5 trial date that he said was necessary because of a slew of government disclosures in the case in recent days. The filings were all listed in court records, but they remain under seal from the public because of a gag order in the case. Neither side hinted at what the filings were.

At the same time, there was wrangling between prosecutors and Tsarnaev’s attorneys over a proposed defense witness, a mental health expert who is expected to testify about Tsarnaev and his relationship with his family as well as her findings about the family’s history. His defense team has hinted that they will portray Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspect’s older brother, who was killed during an altercation with police four days after the attacks, as the plot’s mastermind and cast their own client as someone from an intensely troubled family who was unduly influenced by his sibling. But prosecutors said Thursday they wanted to know more about whom the expert has talked to, and they questioned whether her testimony should be barred as hearsay.

As the attorneys went back and forth, Tsarnaev quietly sat at the defense table, rubbing his face and his eyes. There was a notepad in front of him, and it appeared at one point that he was writing a note to one of his attorneys, Miriam Conrad, a federal public defender in Boston. He took occasional sips of water and looked tired.

Tsarnaev had arrived at the federal courthouse in Boston around 6:15 a.m., transported from a medical prison outside the city in a motorcade of black SUVs with heavily tinted windows and flashing police lights. He was kept in a basement holding cell until he was escorted to a third-floor courtroom upstairs about three minutes before the 10 a.m. hearing.

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Protesters hold up signs outside federal court in Boston, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2014, where the final hearing for …

Outside the courthouse, members of the so-called Free Jahar movement, which uses the defendant’s nickname, waved signs proclaiming Tsarnaev’s innocence. Shortly before the hearing began, Marc Fucarile, who lost the lower part of his right leg when the second bomb went off, paused and removed his prosthetic leg and waved it at a woman holding a sign that said, “Got proof?” “That’s proof,” he told her.

Upstairs, the hearing lasted 26 minutes and unfolded without drama, save for the final seconds before Tsarnaev left the room. Just after he was handcuffed and U.S. marshals began to escort him away, a woman stood up and yelled something in Russian and then in English. “Don’t kill an innocent boy!” she screamed, as she was quickly ushered out of the room.

Meanwhile out in the hallways, people debated Tsarnaev’s appearance, including several supporters who said his sedate demeanor suggested that he had been “drugged.”

Shortly before noon, Tsarnaev’s motorcade left the building. A half-hour later, a television news helicopter hovering overhead captured him emerging from the vehicle in handcuffs, escorted back into jail wearing an orange prison jumpsuit.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The detective work blaming North Korea for the Sony hacker break-in appears so far to be largely circumstantial, The Associated Press has learned. The dramatic conclusion of a Korean role is based on subtle clues in the hacking tools left behind and the involvement of at least one computer in Bolivia previously traced to other attacks blamed on the North Koreans.

Experts cautioned that hackers notoriously employ disinformation to throw investigators off their tracks, using borrowed tools, tampering with logs and inserting false references to language or nationality.

The hackers are believed to have been conducting surveillance on the network at Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. since at least the spring, based on computer forensic evidence and traffic analysis, a person with knowledge of the investigation told the AP.

If the hackers hadn't made their presence known by making demands and destroying files, they probably would still be inside because there was no indication their presence was about to be detected, the person said. This person, who described the evidence as circumstantial, spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk openly about the case.

Still, the evidence has been considered conclusive enough that a U.S. official told the AP that federal investigators have now connected the Sony hacking to North Korea.

In public, White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Thursday declined to blame North Korea, saying he didn't want to get ahead of investigations by the Justice Department and the FBI. Earnest said evidence shows the hacking was carried out by a "sophisticated actor" with "malicious intent."

All this has led to a dilemma for the Obama administration: How and whether to respond?

An earlier formal statement by the White House National Security Council also did not name North Korea but noted that "criminals and foreign countries regularly seek to gain access to government and private sector networks" and said "we are considering a range of options in weighing a potential response. " The U.S. official who cited North Korea spoke on condition of anonymity because that official was not authorized to openly discuss an ongoing criminal case.

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This photo provided by Columbia Pictures - Sony shows, Randall Park, center, as North Korean leader …

U.S. options against North Korea are limited. The U.S. already has a trade embargo in place, and there is no appetite for military action. Even if investigators could identify and prosecute the individual hackers believed responsible, there's no guarantee that any who are overseas would ever see a U.S. courtroom. Hacking back at North Korean targets by U.S. government experts could encourage further attacks against American targets.

"We don't sell them anything, we don't buy anything from them and we don't have diplomatic relations," said William Reinsch, a former senior U.S. Commerce Department official who was responsible for enforcing international sanctions against North Korea and other countries. "There aren't a lot of public options left."

Sony abruptly canceled the Dec. 25 release of its comedy, "The Interview," which the hackers had demanded partly because it included a scene depicting the assassination of North Korea's leader. Sony cited the hackers' threats of violence at movie theaters that planned to show the movie, although the Homeland Security Department said there was no credible intelligence of active plots. The hackers had been releasing onto the Internet huge amounts of highly sensitive — and sometimes embarrassing — confidential files they stole from inside Sony's computer network.

North Korea has publicly denied it was involved, though it has described the hack as a "righteous deed."

The episode is sure to cost Sony many millions of dollars, though the eventual damage is still anyone's guess. In addition to lost box-office revenue from the movie, the studio faces lawsuits by former employees angry over leaked Social Security numbers and other personal information. And there could be damage beyond the one company.

Sony's decision to pull the film has raised concerns that capitulating to criminals will encourage more hacking.

"By effectively yielding to aggressive acts of cyberterrorism by North Korea, that decision sets a troubling precedent that will only empower and embolden bad actors to use cyber as an offensive weapon even more aggressively in the future," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who will soon become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said the Obama administration has failed to control the use of cyber weapons by foreign governments.

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A poster for the movie "The Interview" is taken down by a worker after being pulled from a …

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said on MSNBC that the administration was "actively considering a range of options that we'll take in response to this attack."

The hacking attack could prompt fresh calls for North Korea to be declared a state sponsor of terrorism, said Evans Revere, a former State Department official and Northeast Asia specialist. North Korea was put on that American list of rogue states in 1988 but taken off in 2008 as the U.S. was involved in multination negotiations with the North on its nuclear weapons program.

Evidence pinning specific crimes on specific hackers is nearly always imprecise, and the Sony case is no exception.

Sony hired FireEye Inc.'s Mandiant forensics unit, which last year published a landmark report with evidence accusing a Chinese Army organization, Unit 61398, of hacking into more than 140 companies over the years. In the current investigation, security professionals examined blueprints for the hacking tools discovered in Sony's network, the Korean language setting and time zone, and then traced other computers around the world used to help coordinate the break-in, according to the person with knowledge about the investigation.

Those computers were located in Singapore and Thailand, but a third in Bolivia had previously been traced to other attacks blamed on North Korea, the person told the AP. The tools in the Sony case included components to break into the company's network and subsequently erase all fingerprints by rendering the hard drive useless.

"The Internet's a complicated place," said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike Inc., a security company that has investigated past attacks linked to North Korea. "We're talking about organizations that understand how to hide themselves, how to appear as if they're coming from other places. To that end, they know that people are going to come looking for them. They throw things in the way to limit what you can do attribution on."

Another agreed. "If you have a thousand bad pieces of circumstantial evidence, that doesn't mean your case is strong," said Jeffrey Carr, chief executive of Taia Global Inc., which provides threat intelligence to companies and government agencies.

An FBI "flash" bulletin sent to some companies with details of the hacking software described it as "destructive malware, a disk wiper with network beacon capabilities." The FBI bulletin included instructions for companies to listen for telltale network traffic that would suggest they had been infected.

Other movie studios aren't taken chances. Warner Bros. executives earlier this week ordered a company-wide password reset and sent a five-point security checklist to employees advising them to purge their computers of any unnecessary data, in an email seen by The Associated Press.

"Keep only what you need for business purposes," the message said.

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Abdollah reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Raphael Satter in London and Ted Bridis and Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed to this story.

Related video:

Gov. Bill Richardson on North Korea, Technology and the Sony Hack