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Slain ISIS Hostage's Dad: U.S. Put Ransom Policy Ahead of Lives

PRESCOTT, Arizona (AP) — The father of Kayla Mueller, the American woman killed after spending months in captivity under Islamic State militants, says the U.S. government "put policy in front of" American lives.

"We understand the policy about not paying ransom but on the other hand ... we tried and we asked. But they put policy in front of American citizens' lives," Carl Mueller told NBC's "Today" show in an interview that will air Monday.

Carl Mueller said he is sure the government will work on somehow changing policy.

"Any parents out there would understand that you would want anything and everything done to bring your child home," he said.

In the interview with "Today" host Savannah Guthrie, Mueller's mother, Marsha, agreed with her husband. She said she believes the U.S. government hoped to do everything possible to get her daughter back.

"I think they wanted to but I think again, the policy and I don't think anyone had any idea how this group would be as powerful as they were," Marsha Mueller said.

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FILE -- In this May 30, 2013 file photo, Kayla Mueller is shown after speaking to a group in Prescot …

Mueller's brother, Eric Mueller, also spoke with Guthrie.

A spokesperson for the family did not immediately respond Sunday to a request for comment. The family has declined repeated requests for an interview from The Associated Press.

Mueller's death was confirmed Feb. 10 by her family and U.S. officials. The Islamic State group claimed she died in a Jordanian airstrike, but U.S. officials have not confirmed that. The Pentagon said it didn't know how she was killed.

The 26-year-old international aid worker, who grew up in Prescott, Arizona, was taken in August 2013 after leaving a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria.

She has been honored in the past week with memorials in her hometown and her alma mater, Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff.

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What killed Kayla Mueller?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The possible shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security threatens the Obama administration's efforts to counter the extremist appeal of the Islamic State group within the U.S. and to respond with emergency aid to communities struggling with winter snowstorms, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson warned on Sunday.

In a round of appearances on network news programs, Johnson said that if Congress fails to agree on a new budget for his department by Friday's end, lawmakers' inaction would lead to staff furloughs that could hamstring U.S. response to terrorist threats and warnings, such as the one late Saturday that names the Mall of America. He said that up to 30,000 DHS workers would have to be furloughed, including up to 80 percent of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers even as that agency contends with two months of devastating snowfall and cold from New England to the Mountain States.

"It's absurd that we're even having this conversation about Congress' inability to fund Homeland Security in these challenging times," he said.

After a week's break, Congress returns to work on Monday, just days before funding for DHS' $40 billion budget ends. Lawmakers have until the end of the week to approve the budget and avoid shutting down the department, but no clear solution is in sight.

"The House has acted to fund the Homeland Security Department," Kevin Smith, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, said in an email on Sunday. "Now it's time for Senate Democrats to stop blocking legislation that would do the same."

A House-passed bill would cover the department through Sept. 30 and overturn President Barack Obama's executive action to limit deportations for millions of immigrants in the United States illegally. But Senate Democrats are preventing a vote on a similar, Senate measure.

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson speaks with Homeland Security and Public Safet …

The issue was further clouded last week when a federal district court judge in Texas temporarily blocked the administration's plans to protect immigrant parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents from deportation. The decision came as part of a lawsuit filed by 26 states claiming Obama had overstepping his authority in taking the executive action. Johnson said the administration will appeal the ruling.

"We should have debate about immigration reform but you should not tie that to funding of the department," Johnson said.

Two prominent Republican senators agreed. South Carolina's Lindsey Graham and Arizona's John McCain said on Sunday they would oppose such a linkage. Graham said he was "willing and ready to pass a DHS funding bill and let this play out in court."

Indeed, of Homeland Security's approximately 230,000 employees, some 200,000 of them would keep working even if Congress fails to fund their agency. They would receive no pay, however, until Congress authorizes funding. It's a reality that was on display during the 16-day governmentwide shutdown in the fall of 2013, when national parks and monuments closed but essential government functions kept running, albeit sometimes on reduced staff.

Johnson linked the purported Mall of America warning from the Africa-based al-Shabaab terror group and other recent terror alerts to what he described as a "new phase" of challenges by extremist groups abroad that have used alarming Internet videos and social media to gain adherents in the U.S. and potentially prod some to action.

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson waits to speaks about the agency's budget …

"This new phase is more complex, less centralized, more diffuse," Johnson said, adding: "It encourages independent actors who strike with very little notice."

Johnson said the U.S. and foreign allies have made progress in tracking thousands of Americans and Europeans who have streamed abroad to join IS and other militant fighters inside Syria. But he said Western countries still need to build better systems to track individuals under suspicion of backing IS and other groups.

Johnson touted the Obama administration's two-pronged approach of striking at IS with military force while partnering with Islamic communities to counter violent extremism inside the U.S. And he defended Obama against conservative critics who say the administration shies away from bluntly taking on Islamic extremism.

"True Islamic faith has nothing to do with what ISIL represents," Johnson said. He added that "to say that ISIL is any part of Muslim theology is to play on their battlefield."

Some Republican critics countered that the Obama administration errs in not playing up Islamic extremism.

In a knock at Obama's recent controversial remarks about abuses during the Crusades, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who is considering entering the growing field of Republican presidential rivals, said Sunday that "the American people are frustrated with a president who lectures us on the Crusades but isn't willing to call Islamic extremism by name."

Pence spoke on "Fox News Sunday;" Graham was on ABC's "This Week"; McCain spoke on CBS' "Face the Nation" and Johnson appeared on CNN's "State of the Union," ABC's "This Week," NBC's "Meet the Press," ''Fox News Sunday" and CBS' "Face the Nation."

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — The death toll from a weekend ferry disaster in central Bangladesh rose to 70 on Monday in the latest shipping mishap in the South Asian nation.

The official search for more bodies by divers at the accident site was called off late Monday morning after the ferry was brought to the surface and towed to the shore.

A local government administrator, Rasheda Ferdousi, said they would continue to monitor the river around the accident site as there were still "some missing." But he would not give an exact figure for the missing.

"Our people are using boats to survey the river for any dead bodies. But here at the scene we are calling off the search as there are no more bodies inside the ferry," Ferdousi said.

Up to 140 passengers were thought to be on the river ferry when it capsized Sunday afternoon after being hit by a cargo vessel.

The accident happened on the Padma River about 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of Dhaka, the capital.

Ferry accidents are common in Bangladesh, which is crisscrossed by more than 130 rivers.

The ferry, the M.L. Mosta, sank in 6 meters (20 feet) under water before a salvage ship pulled it to the surface.

Rescuers recovered 48 bodies on Sunday and another 22 on Monday, according to a police control room at the scene.

Inspector Zihad Mia, who is overseeing the rescue operation, said it was not known how many passengers were missing and how many survived. Ferries in Bangladesh usually do not maintain formal passenger lists.

"We don't have a clear picture about how many were exactly on the ferry when it sank," Mia said. "But I think many have survived."

Jewel Mia, an official from the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority, told reporters at the scene that up to 140 people were on the ferry when it sank.

By Monday morning, police had handed over 58 bodies to their families, said local police chief Mohammaed Rakibuzzman. At least nine were children, he said.

A passenger who survived said many people were trapped inside the ferry when it sank. "The passengers who were on the deck survived, but many who were inside were trapped," Hafizur Rahman Sheikh was quoted as saying by the Prothom Alo newspaper.

Sheikh said the cargo vessel hit the middle of the ferry.

A Ministry of Shipping statement said an investigation had been ordered.

The Padma is one of the largest rivers in Bangladesh, where overcrowding and poor safety standards are often blamed for ferry disasters.

Last August, a ferry with a capacity of 85 passengers was found to be carrying more than 200 when it capsized on the Padma near Dhaka, leaving more than 100 people dead or missing. The ferry's owner was arrested after weeks in hiding on charges of culpable homicide, unauthorized operation and overloading.

At least five people die earlier this month when a ferry sank in southern Bangladesh.

Kiev (AFP) - Pro-Russian forces massing near Ukraine's port city of Mariupol are continuing to attack government troop positions, Kiev said on Monday, fuelling concerns for the fate of an internationally brokered ceasefire.

Tensions were also high following a bomb blast Sunday in the normally peaceful eastern city of Kharkiv. In their latest toll, authorities said that three people had died in the "terrorist" attack.

The West has warned of additional sanctions on Russia if the shaky truce should deteriorate further, especially after rebels last week took the strategic town of Debaltseve in defiance of the ceasefire meant to start February 15.

A withdrawal of heavy weapons from the frontline -- a key step of the truce -- has still not gone ahead despite both sides on Sunday agreeing to start the process.

"As Ukrainian positions are still being fired upon there can be no talk yet of a withdrawal of arms," military spokesman Vladyslav Seleznyov wrote in a statement on Facebook on Monday.

The rebels, meanwhile, have sent mixed messages, alternately saying that they have pulled back some weapons or that they will start on Tuesday.

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Ukrainian servicemen take part in combat drills near the southern city of Mariupol, on February 6, 2 …

- Fighting near Mariupol -

A Ukrainian military commander, Colonel Valentyn Fedichev, said Monday that, while generally across the conflict zone "the intensity of the number of attacks has decreased", troop positions were still fired on 27 times since Sunday. Two Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 10 wounded, he said.

Insurgent fighters "have not halted attempts to assault our positions in the town of Shyrokine and the Mariupol area," Fedichev said.

Other defence officials said the rebels fired mortars into Shyrokine, which neighbours Mariupol, in an apparent attempt to provoke troops into firing back in violation of the ceasefire.

Kiev says Russia has sent 20 tanks and other vehicles and heavy weapons towards Mariupol, a port city of half a million residents on the Azov Sea coast. Ukrainian officials said Sunday two tank attacks were reported there.

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Fighters of the Azov paramilitary battalion, a pro-Ukrainian volunteer armed group, take part in com …

Moscow denies giving military support to the rebels. However it made the same denials over Crimea -- the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula that it annexed last year -- before finally admitting that it had deployed troops.

If Mariupol were to fall to the pro-Russian rebels, it would remove a key obstacle to creating a separatist land corridor stretching from Russia's border with Ukraine to Crimea.

The United States and the European Union, however, have strongly warned against further breaches to the ceasefire.

"An advance on Mariupol would clearly be in breach of the agreements" underpinning the truce brokered by Berlin and Paris, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in an interview with his country's Bild newspaper.

France's European affairs minister Harlem Desir, who was in Kiev on Sunday for a march marking the first anniversary of the overthrow of Ukraine's former pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych, told reporters the ceasefire "must absolutely be respected".

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An old woman gestures near the captured Ukrainian armoured vehicle in the eastern city of Debaltseve …

Otherwise, he said, Western sanctions on Russia would be maintained "and could even be strengthened".

On Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry declared that if the ceasefire continued to be violated, "there will be further consequences including consequences that will place added strains on Russia's already troubled economy".

Russia has already been hit by successive rounds of Western sanctions that are savaging its economy, which is headed for recession because of a collapse in oil prices.

Up to now, the main compliance with the truce has been a prisoner swap conducted on Saturday.

The Ukrainian army and the rebels traded nearly 200 fighters seized during the fighting.

Some of the soldiers released had been taken in the rebel assault on Debaltseve. The insurgents said they were still holding hundreds of others taken during that battle.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Thirty-five-year-old Abdalmalik Wahab had been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for nearly 14 years without charge when he got some good news: The U.S. government was no longer interested in holding him.

A panel made up of representatives of six government agencies, including the Defense Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, determined on Dec. 5 that Abdalmalik was "almost certainly" a member of al-Qaida at one point but it was no longer worth keeping him at the U.S. base in Cuba.

"This is a happy day," he said in a statement released by one of his lawyers, David Remes, after the decision, "but the happiest day will be when I see my wife and daughter."

He may get that chance, along with others who have been languishing at Guantanamo for years.

Despite the fiery rhetoric over Guantanamo in Congress, President Barack Obama has been making progress toward his goal of closing the detention center, reaching some notable milestones.

A surge of releases in recent months has brought the number of men in custody to 122, less than half the number when Obama took office, and the fewest since 10 days after the U.S. began shipping al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, shackled and clad in orange jumpsuits, to the base on Jan. 11, 2002.

The number of prisoners cleared for transfer is now 54, with the remainder still facing indefinite detention.

One result of these efforts, according to military officials, is that Guantanamo is a quieter, more manageable detention center. Army Col. David Heath, who runs day-to-day operations inside the camps, says around 80 percent of the men are now deemed "highly compliant" with the rules to the point that they can live in communal conditions, confined in their cells for only two hours a day. The rest of the time they are free to eat together, pray, play soccer and computer games and watch satellite TV.

Some who have pushed to close the prison say fewer detainees may make that goal more realistic.

"I strongly believe that momentum leads to more momentum," said Clifford Sloan, who served until Dec. 31 as the State Department special envoy on Guantanamo. "The smaller the number, the more manageable the issue is and the more overwhelming the arguments for closure."

But there are plenty, including many Republican members of the new Congress, who don't want to see the facility shuttered and are proposing an end to future transfers. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said there were too many empty beds at Guantanamo. "We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep the country safe," he said, before adding that those there now can "rot in hell."

At its peak, in June 2003, Guantanamo held nearly 700 prisoners, and more than 500 were released under President George W. Bush. Obama came into office pledging to close it in a year, but Congress banned the transfer of any prisoners to the U.S. for any reason, including trial and later imposed restrictions on transfers.

Congress eased the transfer restrictions in December 2013, but the surge of releases didn't begin until November, when Obama directed officials to pick up the pace, resulting in resettlements to Estonia, Oman, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Slovakia, Uruguay and Afghanistan.

That brought a degree of optimism for some of the prisoners, hoping they might be next. "There was definitely a palpable mood change when the transfers went out," said Brian Foster, a member of Abdalmalik's legal team.

The releases haven't been entirely smooth. Foster said a client of his who went to Slovakia doesn't speak the language and feels isolated. Some of the six men sent to Uruguay have complained publicly about not getting enough support from the government while President Jose Mujica questioned their work ethic.

The 68 not cleared for release include prisoners facing trial by military commission, such as the five men charged in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, those who could potentially face charges in the future or men deemed just too dangerous to release.

Their long-term fate remains an unresolved question that could be easier to address once the cleared men are gone, said Benjamin Wittes, a national security expert with the Brookings Institution.

"I think the administration is in a much stronger place if they can say we have gotten it down to a core group of people we're not going to let and we want to hold them somewhere other than Guantanamo," Wittes said.

Most prisoners on the cleared list have been there since 2009, when authorities took a look at the evidence against them and the potential threat they posed. Most cannot return to their homeland, either because they could face persecution or because they are from Yemen, which is considered too unstable, and the U.S. has been trying to persuade other countries to take them.

Last year, the U.S. also began the first releases of Yemenis in several years. The review board agreed to put Abdalmalik on the transfer list only after he agreed to be resettled in a third country with his wife and daughter. His lawyers say they don't have any idea when he will be released, but say he has been studying English, Spanish and business in preparation.

"I want to close this chapter of my life," he told the board, according to a transcript. "I wish to open my eyes and see this nightmare has ended and vanished once and for all."