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Wisconsin Shooting Sparks Protests

By Karen Brooks

(Reuters) - Activists plan more protests in Madison, Wisconsin, this week after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman, the latest in a string of killings that highlighted concerns of racial bias in U.S. law enforcement.

Tony Robinson Jr., 19, was shot in Wisconsin's capital on Friday evening after Officer Matt Kenny responded to calls reporting a man was dodging cars in traffic and had battered another person, Police Chief Mike Koval said.

Kenny, 45, followed the suspect into an apartment, where he was struck in the head, according to Koval. The officer then shot the unarmed teen, who died later in hospital.

Demonstrators marched on Saturday evening from the Capitol building to the neighborhood where Robinson was shot, carrying a banner reading "Black Lives Matter" and signs that read "Justice 4 Tony."

The community group called Young, Black and Gifted plans a demonstration on Wednesday afternoon at the Wisconsin Department of Corrections building in Madison, according to the group's Facebook page.

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A makeshift memorial pays tribute to a 19-year-old black man killed by police, in front of a home co …

"There's no doubt about the fact that we have to be clear about this. I want to be very transparent: He was unarmed," Koval said at a news conference on Saturday.

Last year, the deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City triggered a nationwide wave of demonstrations against the use of excessive force by law enforcement.

Kenny is on paid administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Justice conducts an investigation instead of local authorities, as mandated under a law enacted in 2004.

In a statement on the city's website, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin called the shooting "a tragedy beyond description" and said the city will be "open and transparent" in communicating results of an investigation into the shooting.

He noted that the incident occurred on the same weekend as the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday" march in Selma, Alabama, a turning point in the U.S. civil rights movement. Kenny, a 12-year veteran of the Madison Police Department, was exonerated in a police shooting in 2007 and even earned a commendation in the incident, Koval said.

"The circumstances of that case were concluded to be a suicide-by-cop sort of predilection," Koval said.

According to media reports, a 48-year-old man in that instance was shot to death after he pointed a gun at officers and refused to drop his weapon. The weapon was later determined to be a replica of a .38-caliber handgun.

Wisconsin court records show that Robinson pleaded guilty to armed robbery last year and received a probated six-month sentence.

Koval declined to comment on Robinson's record.

"I'm not here to do a character workup on someone who lost his life less than 24 hours ago," he said.

(Reporting by Karen Brooks in Austin, Texas; Editing by Alan Crosby)

Tensions in Wisconsin town after police shooting

Activists are planning more protests in Madison after an unarmed black teen was fatally shot by a white cop.
'Justice 4 Tony'

JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel will not cede any territory due to the current climate in the Middle East, appearing to rule out the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu's comments, which came as he sought to appeal to hard-liners ahead of national elections next week, rejected a key goal of the international community and bode poorly for reviving peace efforts if he is re-elected.

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that any evacuated territory would fall into the hands of Islamic extremism and terror organizations supported by Iran. Therefore, there will be no concessions and no withdrawals. It is simply irrelevant," read a statement released by his Likud party.

Netanyahu's office said the statement reflected the prime minister's long-held position.

The international community has long pushed for the creation of a Palestinian state on lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war. In 1993, Israel and the Palestinians signed an interim agreement that was to lead to the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Numerous rounds of peace negotiations have been held since then, with the most recent talks breaking down last year.

Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said Netanyahu was using regional strife as an excuse.

"Today Netanyahu revealed his true face," Erekat said. "Since 1993, he worked hard for the destruction of the option of peace and the option of a two-state solution."

Ahead of national elections, centrist and leftist political parties in Israel have said they support the resumption of peace efforts with the Palestinians.

There was no immediate U.S. reaction.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi fears that "no army in the region" can stand in the way of ISIS “if they are allowed to continue,” telling ABC’s “This Week” in an exclusive interview that the terror group must be stopped for “our own sake.”

Speaking from Baghdad, al-Abadi called ISIS "a very, very dangerous organization." The terror group has millions of Iraqi citizens living in areas under its control.

"If they are not stopped on time, I can assure you, no army in the region can stand in their own way,” he told ABC News'Martha Raddatz. "We have to stop them for our own sake."

Earlier this week, the Iraqi governmentlaunched its largest military offensive yet against ISIS in an attempt to retake Tikrit, which was seized by the group last summer.

Al-Abadi said Iraqi troops are “ahead of planning” in their push towards the city and preparing for an urban fight. While headed for meetings in Iraq this week, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed optimism that the Iraqi force of 23,000 military and Shiite militia fighters will defeat the several hundred ISIS fighters inside the city.

There is no U.S. involvement in the Tikrit offensive and U.S. officials have said the Iraqis have not requested airstrikes to support the operation.

Instead, the offensive has been helped by Iranian planning and Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Al-Abadi did not say if Iranian Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani was playing a major role in the operation.

Al-Abadi acknowledged that Soleimani “comes and goes” to Iraq, but that he does not stay long.

"He just comes for a visit and he goes," he said.

Al-Abadi added that he had not personally seen Soleimani during a visit earlier this week to Samarra in Saladin Province, close to the fighting.

Al-Abadi said it was “not entirely true” that American military commanders did not know beforehand that the Iraqi military was launching the Tikrit offensive, noting that the U.S. and Iraqi military coordinate plans at a Baghdad Joint Operations Center.

“I know probably some are surprised and unhappy in - in Washington - because they haven't taken a full control over these operations,” he said. “We have to take charge of what we are doing because it's Iraqi lives which has been sacrificed.”

Al-Abadi said Iran is helping Iraq "in a lot of ways," including providing military advisers for the offensive on Tikrit, adding that Iran too feels threatened by ISIS. He said that overall the number of Iranian advisers inside Iraq “is not more than 50 or 60.”

Al-Abadi claimed the U.S. does not see the Iranian help as a problem as the Iraqis have “the right to use all capabilities available to defend our own forces, our own land.”

The U.S. currently has 2,600 military personnel in Iraq to advise and train Iraq’s military, but al-Abadi did not expect them to someday be needed in combat operations.

“It doesn't help whether I wish or not. I don't think that's going to happen,” he said. “This administration and I understand the U.S. public are not eager - or they don't want to - send their own sons and troops outside [the] U.S.”

The Iraqi prime minister said the country's military plans to push ISIS out of other areas of Iraq, including Anbar Province, before trying to retake Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul.

Though he expects an Iraqi offensive on Mosul to take place in early summer "just to repay the people," al-Abadi acknowledged it could be delayed. He was unable to describe how Iraqis live in areas controlled by ISIS, only saying it was "very rough."

"That's why we are very eager to liberate these areas as soon as possible," al-Abadi said.

But al-Abadi also wants an offensive to take place when Iraq’s military has received enough training and has access to supply routes and air cover.

“Our timetable is not only time-linked, it's factual-linked,” he said. “We have to achieve certain things on the ground before we can take back Mosul.”

Al-Abadi believes that taking Mosul from ISIS could deal a fatal blow to the terror group and its symbolic claims that it has established a caliphate.

“This is the center of their state," he said. "We would have killed their own ambition to establish that state on the other countries, as well, in the region."

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Within hours of a white officer shooting an unarmed black man, the police chief of Wisconsin's capital city was praying with the man's grandmother, hoping to strike a conciliatory tone and avoid the riots that last year rocked Ferguson, Missouri.

Chief Mike Koval said he knows Madison is being watched across the nation since 19-year-old Tony Robinson's death Friday evening, and he has gone out of his way to avoid what he once called Ferguson's "missteps."

"Folks are angry, resentful, mistrustful, disappointed, shocked, chagrined. I get that," Koval said Saturday. "People need to tell me squarely how upset they are with the Madison Police Department."

The contrasts with Ferguson are many.

While Ferguson police initially gave little information about the shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old, unarmed black man, Koval rushed to the home of Robinson's mother. She didn't want to meet with him, he said, but he talked and prayed with Robinson's grandmother in the driveway for 45 minutes.

It took a week for Ferguson to release the name of the officer who shot Brown. Koval announced the name of the officer involved in Madison, Matt Kenny, the day after the shooting. He volunteered to reporters that the officer had been in a previous fatal shooting in 2007, and that he had been cleared of wrongdoing.

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Madison Police investigate the scene of a shooting on Williamson Street, late Friday, March 6, 2015 …

On the day that Ferguson police named the officer who shot Brown, they also released video showing what they said was Brown robbing a store. When Koval was asked about Robinson's past criminal record Saturday, he declined to comment, saying it would be inappropriate to do so a day after the man died.

"We have a police chief who genuinely feels for a family's loss. It should be abundantly clear to anyone following this incident that Madison, Wisconsin, is not Ferguson, Missouri," said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, the state's largest police union.

But the chief's measured approach hasn't impressed some demonstrators. Koval angered some of them earlier this year with a blog post demanding they stop blaming police for their problems.

"There are no apologies that can repair the loss or deal with the loss of (Robinson)," said Brandi Grayson, an organizer with Young, Gifted and Black, a Madison group that has demonstrated against what it says is mistreatment of blacks by the justice system. "This was bound to happen. There's nothing the chief can say short of changing the system."

No one answered the door at Robinson's mother's home on Sunday. A reporter left a note in the door asking her to contact The Associated Press but she had not done so as of late Sunday afternoon.

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This undated photo provided by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections shows Tony Robinson. Robinson …

Robinson died Friday night after Kenny shot him in an apartment during a confrontation. Kenny had responded to a call of a man jumping in and out of traffic. Kenny forced his way into the apartment after hearing what Koval described as a "disturbance."

The state Justice Department's Division of Criminal Investigation has taken over the investigation under a new state law passed last year that requires an outside agency to lead probes of officer-involved shootings. DOJ spokeswoman Anne Schwartz declined to comment on Sunday.

The shooting comes against a backdrop of multiple instances of white police officers killing unarmed black men around the country over the last year. The highest-profile incident was the death of Brown in Ferguson last August.

Days of violence ensued, marked by looting, fires, police firing tear gas into a crowd and officers pointing weapons at demonstrators. Another round of riots broke out in November after a grand jury chose not to indict the officer who shot Brown, Darren Wilson. Last week the U.S. Justice Department declined to charge Wilson with civil rights violations but issued a scathing report accusing the Ferguson police department of racism and using policing to fund the city's budget.

Koval, who is white, took over as Madison's chief in April, replacing retiring black Chief Noble Wray. In September he told the Wisconsin State Journal he believed his department could deal with a racially charged shooting better than Ferguson, saying his agency is more diverse and more invested in the community than Ferguson's "rent-a-cops."

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Madison Police investigate the scene of a police involved shooting late Friday at a home in Madison, …

"I see in Ferguson a series of missteps and miscues where they're always reacting and, in fact, over-reacting to every set of facts that is thrown in their midst, frankly," Koval said in the interview.

Two months ago, Koval wrote a blog post criticizing Young, Black and Gifted for blaming his officers for "everything from male pattern baldness to global warming." The entry came in response to the group staging protests over officer-involved deaths during rush-hour traffic, demanding jail officials release 350 black inmates and imploring police to stay out of black neighborhoods.

Koval tried to be diplomatic when asked about the post on Saturday, saying he and the group have agreed to disagree on policing black neighborhoods.

Grayson said Koval has had plenty of time to prepare for a racially charged shooting after watching what unfolded in Ferguson.

"He had a perfect response — perfect for white people," she said.

___

Associated Press writer Jeff Baenen in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

London (AFP) - Around half the estimated 700 Britons who have gone to fight with Islamic State jihadists in Syria have returned home, The Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported.

The weekly broadsheet's figures, in a story about a leaked draft of the Home Office interior ministry's new counter-extremism strategy, go further than previous estimates, of around 500 individuals leaving and 250 returning.

Around 320 "dangerous" jihadists have come back to Britain, the newspaper said.

The new counter-extremism plan involves targeting Muslim Sharia courts, a ban on radicals working unsupervised with children, and a requirement that job centres identify welfare claimants who may become radicalisation targets, the report said.

There would also be welfare penalties to encourage people to learn English, in order to improve integration, and tighter rules on granting citizenship to ensure newcomers embrace "British values", the broadsheet said.

The Home Office declined to comment on the report when contacted by AFP.

The Sunday Telegraph said it understood that the draft will be published before parliament is dissolved at the end of the month before the May 7 general election.