LOS ANGELES (AP) — The California Highway Patrol has vowed to carry out a thorough investigation after a video emerged of one of its officers repeatedly punching a woman he had pinned down on the side of a Los Angeles freeway.

The woman had been walking on Interstate 10 west of downtown Los Angeles, endangering herself and people in traffic, and the officer was trying to restrain her, CHP Assistant Chief Chris O'Quinn said at a news conference. O'Quinn said the woman had begun walking off the freeway but returned when the confrontation occurred.

The video shows the woman struggling and trying to sit up while the officer punches her in the face and head until an off-duty law enforcement officer appears and helps him handcuff her.

Passing Driver David Diaz recorded the Tuesday incident and provided it to media outlets including The Associated Press. He told the AP in a phone interview Friday that he arrived as the woman was walking off the freeway. He said she turned around only after the officer shouted something to her.

"He agitated the situation more than helped it," said Diaz, who started filming soon after.

Los Angeles attorney Caree Harper said the woman's family wants authorities held accountable for "beating a great-grandmother in broad daylight." She declined to disclose the woman's name or answer questions about what the woman was doing along the edge of one of the city's busiest freeways.

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In this July 1, 2014 image made from video provided by motorist David Diaz, a California Highway Pat …

She is undergoing psychiatric evaluation, authorities said.

"We want the focus to be what he was doing to her, not what she was doing" prior to the confrontation, said Harper, who said she is representing the family. "She was getting beat like an animal. No one should ever be beat like that."

The officer is on administrative leave while the patrol investigates. He has not been identified.

The video caught the attention of local civil rights leaders, who expressed shock and outrage at their own news conference.

"Speaking for the women of this community, we are angry, we are upset," said Lita Herron of the Youth Advocacy Coalition.

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In this July 1, 2014 image made from video provided by motorist David Diaz, a California Highway Pat …

O'Quinn said the CHP would answer community concerns and that an investigative team already has been assembled and has begun its work.

"We are known as an agency that really polices itself," O'Quinn said.

Community activist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, speaking at the local leaders' news conference, agreed.

"Over the years, CHP has had a very good track record in terms of community relations," Hutchinson said. "That's why this was so shocking."

O'Quinn said the incident report listed no injuries for the woman, who would not give her name.

O'Quinn said he could not say what prompted the officer to act as he did. But he noted California Highway Patrol officers have a heightened sense of the dangers of being on the freeway compared with a citizen "who is not accustomed to the speed and conditions," especially outside of a car.

"The most dangerous thing that we face is traffic," O'Quinn said.

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Associated Press photographer Reed Saxon contributed to this report.

Video of freeway beating sparks investigation

An attorney representing the woman’s family says "no one should ever be beat like that."
Authorities: Woman endangering herself

Washington (AFP) - A "profoundly troubled" United States condemned reports Saturday that an American teenager detained in Israel was "severely beaten" while in police custody, amid heightened tensions with Palestinians.

The parents of Tariq Abu Khder, a 15-year-old cousin of a Palestinian youth murdered earlier this week, have told AFP that their son was arrested in Shuafat after being beaten by police on Thursday during his holiday stay in the area.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the United States "strongly condemn(s) any excessive use of force," referring to the alleged beating.

Clashes have erupted in recent days, sparked by the abduction and murder of Tariq's cousin Mohammed Abu Khder, 16, as autopsy reports showed he was burned alive.

Palestinians said Jewish extremists killed him in revenge for the kidnapping and murder in the West Bank last month of three Israeli teenagers.

Tariq was still in Israeli custody, Psaki confirmed, adding that a US consulate official had visited him Saturday.

"We are profoundly troubled by reports that he was severely beaten while in police custody," Psaki said in a statement.

"We are calling for a speedy, transparent and credible investigation and full accountability for any excessive use of force."

Rocket fire targeting Israel from Gaza has also increased, raising fears of an escalation with the Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Palestinian enclave.

"We reiterate our grave concern about the increasing violent incidents, and call on all sides to take steps to restore calm and prevent harm to innocents," Psaki said.

A video circulating on social media (www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDENWwEDGr4) shows what appears to be Israeli border police beating and kicking a handcuffed semi-conscious figure -- believed to be Tariq -- before dragging him away.

The parents, who saw their son in an Israeli hospital, said they were told Tariq had been arrested for being masked.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri could not confirm it was Tariq in the video, but said the footage was from the arrest of a group of six Palestinians, including Tariq.

The justice ministry, meanwhile, said it was investigating the video.

Samri said police found a sling on Tariq, who had attacked police and resisted arrest, while others were throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, wounding six police.

Tariq is due to appear before a Jerusalem court on Sunday.

The head of the country's Western-backed rebel group calls for international help in the fight against militants.
'Time is a slashing sword'

Report: Ordinary Americans caught up in data sweep

Wochit

NSA's Internet Monitoring Said To Be Legal

WASHINGTON (AP) — When the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the online accounts of legally targeted foreigners over a four-year period it also collected the conversations of nine times as many ordinary Internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, according to a probe by The Washington Post.

Nearly half of those surveillance files contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents, the Post reported in a story posted on its website Saturday night. While the federal agency tried to protect their privacy by masking more than 65,000 such references to individuals, the newspaper said it found nearly 900 additional email addresses that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or residents.

At the same time, the intercepted messages contained material of considerable intelligence value, the Post reported, such as information about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

As an example, the newspaper said the files showed that months of tracking communications across dozens of alias accounts led directly to the capture in 2011 of a Pakistan-based bomb builder suspected in a 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali. The Post said it was withholding other examples, at the request of the CIA, that would compromise ongoing investigations.

The material reviewed by the Post included roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts. It spanned President Barack Obama's first term, 2009 to 2012, and was provided to the Post by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden.

The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted were catalogued and recorded, the Post reported. The newspaper described that material as telling "stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes." The material collected included more than 5,000 private photos, the paper said.

The cache Snowden provided to the newspaper came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to the Post.

By law, the NSA may "target" only foreign nationals located overseas unless it obtains a warrant based on probable cause from a special surveillance court, the Post said. "Incidental collection" of third-party communications is inevitable in many forms of surveillance, according to the newspaper. In the case of the material Snowden provided, those in an online chat room visited by a target or merely reading the discussion were included in the data sweep, as were hundreds of people using a computer server whose Internet protocol was targeted.

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Online:

Washington Post: washingtonpost.com

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Activists are pointing to the delayed deportation of a mother and her children as the kind of compassion they hope President Barack Obama will pursue in the wake of his announcement that he'll act on his own to address immigration problems.

Garland resident Ana Cañenquez and four of her seven children were originally ordered to leave the United States and return to El Salvador by March 21. That date was pushed back, and now there's no specific deadline for them to leave.

The extra time allows her to save money to afford a home back in El Salvador, both she and immigration officials say.

Advocates hope that kind of discretion is something Obama will expand.

"Many in the community hope the president will use more prosecutorial discretion," Proyecto Latino de Utah director Tony Yapias said. "It makes sense for ICE (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) to focus on serious criminals rather than to separate families or target people who keep out of trouble here. That is a wiser use of resources."

Cañenquez said her family would face a life of extreme poverty in her native El Salvador, and she fears gangs in that country could mean death for her four sons should they be sent there.

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In this April 16, 2014 photo, Ana Cañenquez, center, and her sons Erick Ramirez, 13, and Geovanny Ra …

Before she first entered the U.S. illegally in 2003, Cañenquez lived in a two-room shack in El Salvador with her children and an alcoholic spouse. She earned $6 a day by selling treats in a marketplace, struggling to afford food for her family.

After one son died of malnutrition, she came to the U.S. hoping to earn enough for her family.

She spent some time in the U.S. Then, four years ago, Cañenquez and four of her children from El Salvador were caught by Border Patrol agents as they tried to enter the country.

Her partner in Utah, a Mexican national with whom she has two children, won't have permission to go back to El Salvador with her, and she doesn't have permission to go to Mexico. If she returns, he will stay in the U.S. with their two children.

"They told me they are giving us time to save money to afford a home in El Salvador," she told The Salt Lake Tribune (http://bit.ly/1mO0QHO) in Spanish. "We would have nothing there if we return now."

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In this April 16, 2014 photo, Ana Cañenquez talks about the possibility of being deported at her hom …

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Andrew Muñoz said the family's case has been reviewed by multiple immigration courts and there's no legal basis for her to remain in the country.

She's now in violation of an order to leave by March 21, but there's no firm date by which she must leave or be forcibly removed.

The federal agency is using its discretion to delay the removal "to permit a reasonable amount of time for Ms. Cañenquez to save money in order to secure housing for her and her family in El Salvador," Muñoz said.

That discretion is something Yapias said many immigrants hope Obama will expand.

"We hope they will look at the threat posed by people on a case-by-case basis and target criminals who have done truly bad things — but not those who maybe didn't pay a traffic ticket, or whose families would be separated," he said.

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In this April 16, 2014, photo, Ana Canenquez, left, and her sons Geovanny Ramirez, center, 17, and M …

Obama has not outlined specific plans he has in mind since announcing Monday that he would act on his own to address immigration because the U.S. House of Representatives wouldn't take up an immigration overhaul this year.

Possible actions could include trying to focus deportations on those with serious criminal records, something the administration has seen mixed results with in the past.

Two Cabinet secretaries are expected to present recommendations to Obama by the end of summer.

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Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com

Deportation of Utah mom, children delayed

Activists point to the delay as the kind of compassion they hope President Obama will pursue.
What extra time means to family