Obama, Netanyahu minimize differences, renew call for peace

Obama, Netanyahu minimize differences, renew call for peace

President Barack Obama shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, Nov. 9, 2015. The president and prime minister sought to mend their fractured relationship during their meeting, the first time they have talked face to face in more than a year.

   

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Minimizing sharp differences, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed their commitment to seeking elusive Middle East peace on Monday, though prospects for an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians appear ever further out of reach.

The U.S. and Israeli leaders' meeting at the White House marked the first time they had talked face-to-face in more than a year. They have long had a frosty relationship, and tensions peaked earlier this year amid Obama's pursuit of an Iran nuclear deal that Netanyahu vigorously opposed.

Monday's meeting was an attempt to reset ties for the final year of Obama's presidency.

In comments to reporters before their private talks, they sidestepped their disagreement on Iran, with Obama calling it a "narrow issue."

"We don't have a disagreement on the need to making sure Iran does not get a nuclear weapon, and we don't have a disagreement about us blunting destabilizing activities in Iran that may be taking place," Obama said. "So we're going to be looking to make sure we find common ground there."

Netanyahu didn't mention the Iran matter at all in his public comments. But in their two-hour-long private session, Obama and Netanyahu discussed ways to cooperate to ensure Iran lives up to its commitments under the deal, said a senior Obama administration official, who wasn't authorized to comment by name and requested anonymity.

In public, the leaders emphasized areas of shared interest, including negotiations on a new security arrangement and the goal of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, even as the two sides grapple with fresh outbreaks of violence.

Obama said he was focused on "how we can get back on a path toward peace, and how we can make sure that legitimate Palestinian aspirations are met through a political process, even as we make sure that Israel is able to secure itself."

Netanyahu declared, "We have not given up our hope for peace." He reaffirmed his support for a two-state solution, though he gave no ground on the Israelis' longstanding conditions for achieving that outcome.

The prime minister's statement followed his apparent backtracking during Israeli elections earlier this year. At the time, U.S. officials said there would be policy ramifications for a Netanyahu shift on statehood, including potentially easing opposition to Palestinians turning to the U.N. Security Council to create a state.

On Monday, however, White House officials said Obama focused more on getting Netanyahu to outline ways to keep confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians to a minimum in the absence of a long-term solution.

"This is certainly an opportunity for Prime Minister Netanyahu to put forward some ideas to move this process toward a two-state solution," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said of the meeting.

Netanyahu was said to be offering a series of confidence-building measures toward the Palestinians, including easing restrictions on communications, water usage and work permits in Israel and on Palestinian development in the West Bank.

However, Israel has given gave preliminary approval for a new settlement project in the West Bank, territory Palestinians are demanding as part of a future state, documents revealed Monday. Most nations, including the U.S., view Israeli settlements there as illegal or illegitimate and hindering efforts for Palestinian statehood.

A new round of violence broke out in the region about two months ago. Israel has accused Palestinian political and religious leaders of inciting the violence, while Palestinians say it's due to a lack of hope for gaining independence after years of failed peace efforts.

Obama and Netanyahu also discussed the renewal of a 10-year security agreement that could result in increased U.S. military assistance to Israel. The two leaders agreed Monday that a U.S. team will travel to Israel in early December to start discussions on the agreement, officials said. In the immediate aftermath of the nuclear deal, Netanyahu had refused to discuss the security agreement with the U.S.

"The security of Israel is one of my top foreign policy priorities," Obama said. Netanyahu said he appreciated what Obama has done.

"Israel has shouldered a tremendous defense burden over the years, and we've done it with the generous assistance of the United States of America," the Israeli leader said.

Monday's meeting was clouded by the controversy following Netanyahu's appointment of a new spokesman who has spoken derisively about Obama. Ran Baratz, a conservative commentator, has suggested in Facebook posts that Obama is anti-Semitic and Secretary of State John Kerry cannot be taken seriously.

While White House officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, have expressed displeasure over the appointment, Obama was not expected to have brought the matter up in the meeting. Baratz is not on the trip, and Netanyahu has said he will decide his fate after returning to Israel.

REPORT: Investigators '90 Percent Sure' Bomb Downed Russian Plane

REPORT: Investigators '90 Percent Sure' Bomb Downed Russian Plane

   

CAIRO, Nov 8 (Reuters) - Investigators of the Russian plane crash in Egypt are "90 percent sure" the noise heard in the final second of a cockpit recording was an explosion caused by a bomb, a member of the investigation team told Reuters on Sunday.

The Airbus A321 crashed 23 minutes after taking off from the Sharm al-Sheikh tourist resort eight days ago, killing all 224 passengers and crew. Islamic State militants fighting Egyptian security forces in Sinai said they brought it down.

"The indications and analysis so far of the sound on the black box indicate it was a bomb," said the Egyptian investigation team member, who asked not to be named due to sensitivities. "We are 90 percent sure it was a bomb."

His comments reflect a much greater degree of certainty about the cause of the crash than the investigation committee has so far declared in public.

Lead investigator Ayman al-Muqaddam announced on Saturday that the plane appeared to have broken up in mid-air while it was being flown on auto-pilot, and that a noise had been heard in the last second of the cockpit recording. But he said it was too soon to draw conclusions about why the plane crashed.

Confirmation that militants brought down the airliner could have a devastating impact on Egypt's lucrative tourist industry, which has suffered from years of political turmoil and was hit last week when Russia, Turkey and several European countries suspended flights to Sharm al-Sheikh and other destinations.

It could also mark a new strategy by the hardline Islamic State group which holds large parts of Syria and Iraq.

Asked to explain the remaining 10 percent margin of doubt, the investigator declined to elaborate, but Muqaddam cited other possibilities on Saturday including a fuel explosion, metal fatigue in the plane or lithium batteries overheating.

He said debris was scattered over a 13-km (8-mile) area "which is consistent with an in-flight break-up."
 
"GAME CHANGER"
"What happened in Sharm al-Sheikh last week, and to a lesser extent with the ... (Germanwings) aircraft, are game changers for our industry," Emirates Airlines President Tim Clark said, referring to the crash of a Germanwings airliner in the French Alps in March, believed crashed deliberately by its co-pilot.

"They have to be addressed at industry level because no doubt the countries -- U.S., Europe -- I would think will make some fairly stringent, draconian demands on the way aviation works with security," he said at the Dubai Airshow.

Clark said he had ordered a security review but was not suspending any flights as a result of the disaster. Emirates does not operate regular flights to Sharm al-Sheikh.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond also said the incident could lead to changes in flight security.

"If this turns out to be a device planted by an ISIL operative or by somebody inspired by ISIL, then clearly we will have to look again at the level of security we expect to see in airports in areas where ISIL is active," Hammond told the BBC.

Islamic State, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Middle East, is also called ISIS or ISIL.

Islamic State militants fighting security forces in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula have said they brought down the aircraft as revenge for Russian air strikes against Islamist fighters in Syria. They said they would eventually tell the world how they carried out the attack.

If the group was responsible, it would have carried out one of the highest profile killings since al Qaeda flew passenger planes into New York's World Trade Center in September 2001.

Russia has returned 11,000 of its tourists from Egypt in the last 24 hours, RIA news agency said on Sunday, a fraction of the 80,000 Russians who were stranded by the Kremlin's decision on Friday to halt all flights to Egypt.

In St Petersburg, where the flight was headed on Oct. 31, the bell of St Isaac's Cathedral rang 224 times and a service was held in memory of the victims.

Russia has sent specialists to conduct a safety audit of Egypt's airports and to provide recommendations on additional measures, Arkady Dvorkovich, deputy prime minister, was quoted as saying by Russian agencies.

Dvorkovich, the head of a government group created on Friday to deal with suspended flights to Egypt, added a second group was going to Egypt on Sunday and a third would be sent later.

Britain, which has 3,000 nationals waiting to return home, has sent a team of 70 people, including 10 aviation specialists working at Sharm al-Sheikh airport to make sure security measures are being followed.

Eight flights were expected to take British tourists back home on Sunday.

Detective: 'Hero' cop sought hit-man to cover up thefts

Detective: 'Hero' cop sought hit-man to cover up thefts

FOX LAKE, Ill. (AP) -- Months before an Illinois police officer staged his suicide to make it seem like he died in the line of duty, subjecting his community to an expensive and fruitless manhunt, he apparently sought a hit man to kill a village administrator he feared would expose him as a thief, a detective told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Det. Chris Covelli said Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz sent a text in April asking a woman to set up a meeting with a "high ranking gang member to put a hit on the village manager."

Gliniewicz sent another message in May saying he had thought of "planting things," which made more sense after investigators found small packages of cocaine in Gliniewicz's desk after he died, Covelli said.

The drugs were "not linked to any case that we could find," raising the possibility that the lieutenant sought to frame the manager, Anne Marrin, as a drug criminal before she could expose him as an embezzler, the detective said.

"We never found any explanation why those drugs were in his desk at the police station," Covelli said. Investigators also interviewed the gang member, and found no evidence the gang member and Gliniewicz ever talked, Covelli said.

Gliniewicz sent the texts after Marrin, the village's first professional administrator, began auditing Fox Lake's finances, including the Police Explorers program that authorities now say the lieutenant had been stealing from for seven years.

Marrin told reporters Thursday that she believed all of her dealings with Gliniewicz were cordial and never had any sense that he was angry with her. She said she didn't learn about the plots against her until after Gliniewicz's death.

"It's very unsettling. My concern is my family. It's quite unbelievable and almost surreal," she said, adding that police have assured her that she is safe.

Often called "G.I. Joe," Gliniewicz was a respected figure in the bedroom community of 10,000 people 50 miles north of Chicago. His death on Sept. 1, moments after he radioed that he was chasing three suspicious men, prompted an intense manhunt involving hundreds of officers, and raised fears of cop-killers on the loose.

Two months later, authorities announced that he in fact killed himself to cover up his theft of thousands of dollars from a youth program. Now authorities are also investigating his wife, Melodie, and son D.J., an official said Thursday.

Melodie Gliniewicz helped her husband run the Fox Lake Police Explorer Post, which put young people interested in law enforcement careers through sophisticated training exercises. In a newspaper interview weeks ago, D.J. Gliniewicz, an Army soldier in his 20s, angrily dismissed suggestions that his father took his own life.

The official, who was briefed on the investigation, spoke with the AP on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

A second official who was briefed on the investigation told the AP that Melodie and D.J. Gliniewicz were recipients of a separate set of incriminating text messages from the lieutenant that investigators released Wednesday when they announced the staged suicide.

The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

The official said Melodie Gliniewicz was the person identified as "Individual #1" in the messages released Wednesday, who at one point suggests in a message that she and Joseph Gliniewicz may "need to hide the funds some how."

The official said D.J. Gliniewicz was "Individual #2," whom the officer appears to scold for spending money on personal items. At one point, the officer warns that person that not repaying money to an unspecified account means that person "will be visiting me in JAIL!!" In another message, the officer tells Individual #2 that he has thought through many scenarios involving Marrin, "from planting things to the volo bog," a remote swamp in the area.

Authorities have refused to officially identify anyone beyond the lieutenant who is suspected in any crimes. They also declined to identify the woman Gliniewicz texted about the gang-hit in April, other than to say she is not in law enforcement.

The officer's wife and four children issued a brief statement Wednesday through their lawyers, saying they were grieving. It did not mention suicide or thefts. The attorneys, Henry Tonigan and Andrew Kelleher, didn't respond to voicemail and email messages sent Thursday.

As the probe into Gliniewicz's death stretched on, suspicion grew that he had killed himself, but investigators publicly treated it as a homicide investigation until announcing Wednesday that he shot himself. The lieutenant fired first at his cellphone and ballistics vest, then inserted his handgun inside the vest and fired at his heart. 

According to the results of the investigation, he then fell forward as he was dying, scraping his face, which could have been an intentional effort to create the appearance of a struggle.

Lake County Major Crimes Task Force Commander George Filenko, who led the investigation, said the 30-year police veteran clearly intended to mislead investigators and had the kind of intimate knowledge of crime scenes needed to pull it off.

Recovered text messages and other records show Gliniewicz spent the money on mortgage payments, travel expenses, gym memberships, adult websites, withdrawing cash and making loans, Filenko said.

Marrin says she pressed Gliniewicz the day before his death to share an inventory of his program's assets. He responded the next morning, promising to deliver it that afternoon.

Instead, he killed himself.

Just why he tried to make it look like murder remains unclear. Filenko said he didn't know whether a suicide finding would prevent his family from receiving benefits.

The huge outpouring of grief in the village where the 52-year-old officer had long been a role model has been replaced by a sense of betrayal. Many tributes to their slain hero have come down. Some signs praising "G.I. Joe" have been replaced, one by a poster labeling him "G.I. Joke."

Vatican arrests 2 people in latest probe of leaked documents

Vatican arrests 2 people in latest probe of leaked documents
 

FILE - in this Tuesday, May 30, 2012 file photo, Gianluigi Nuzzi, the investigative journalist who published a book of leaked papal documents, is portraited during an interview with the Associate Press, in Rome. A new book about the Vatican by Nuzzi is due out on the Italian bookstores Nov. 5.

  

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- The Vatican said Monday it had arrested a high-ranking priest and another member of a papal reform commission in an investigation into leaked confidential documents - a stunning move that comes just days before the publication of two books promising damaging revelations about the obstacles Pope Francis faces in cleaning up the Holy See's murky finances.

The developments threatened to become a new "Vatileaks" - the 2012 scandal that began with the publication of a blockbuster book by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi detailing corruption and mismanagement in the Holy See. The scandal ended with the conviction of Pope Benedict XVI's butler - and Benedict's resignation a year later.

The latest arrests of two advisers hand-picked by Francis to help in his effort to overhaul Vatican finances threatened to further expose infighting and rifts surrounding the pope's efforts at reform and a church that uses its money to help the poor.

Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, a Spaniard, and Francesca Chaouqui, an Italian public relations executive, had served on a now-defunct financial reform commission set up by Francis in 2013 as part of his drive to clean house at the Vatican, especially in its scandal-tainted economic affairs.

A Vatican statement said the arrests followed a monthslong investigation and that the two had been interrogated over the weekend. It said Vallejo Balda was being held in a jail cell in Vatican City, while Chaouqui was released Monday because she was cooperating with the investigation.

The Vatican's statement stopped short of linking the latest leaks probe to the two potentially bombshell books that go on sale Thursday.

But a clearly irritated Vatican noted that leaking confidential documents was now a crime in the Vatican and contended publication of such expose works risk hurting Pope Francis' clean-up drive.

The Vatican described the books as "fruit of a grave betrayal of the trust given by the pope, and, as far as the authors go, of an operation to take advantage of a gravely illicit act of handing over confidential documentation."

"Publications of this nature do not help in any way to establish clarity and truth, but rather generate confusion and partial and tendentious conclusions," the Vatican said.

Nuzzi's 2012 best-seller, "His Holiness," based on leaked papal correspondence detailing corruption, infighting and intrigue in the Vatican has been cited by some as inspiring Benedict XVI's stunning resignation from the papacy in 2013.

According to the publishers, Nuzzi's new book, "Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis's Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican," promises to reveal "heretofore untold, unbelievable stories of scandal and corruption at the highest levels."

"A veritable war is waging in the Catholic Church," a news release quotes Nuzzi as saying. "On one side, there is Pope Francis' strong message for one church of the poor" and on the other, "there is the opaque and aggressive power systems within the Vatican's hierarchy."

The other book, "Avarice: Documents Revealing Wealth, Scandals and Secrets of Francis' Church," is by Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi. He writes for L'Espresso newsweekly, which has published some of the most damaging leaks of Francis' papacy, including most recently a letter by 13 cardinals warning Francis about his family synod.

According to the publisher, Fittipaldi's book maps out the church's financial empire, from the luxurious lives of the cardinals to the big businesses of Catholic-run hospitals in Italy.

Speaking Monday to Italy's Repubblica TV, Fittipaldi said his book "doesn't talk about Francis, but about a church that seems very distant from the mottoes of the pope."

He said it was his understanding that the arrested pair had been accused of leaking "news for my book and that of my colleague," Nuzzi.'

While Francis is intent on modernizing the Vatican and making its finances more transparent, the arrests were the latest confirmation that scandal and intrigue still swirl, as they have for centuries, through the largely closed world of the Vatican's administrative bureaucracy.

Elected on a mandate from his fellow cardinals to reform the Vatican's bureaucracy and bring order to its haphazard finances, Francis in 2013 created the commission Vallego Balda and Chaouqui served on to gather information from all Vatican offices to try to shed light on the Holy See's overall financial situation and end an entrenched culture of mismanagement, opaqueness and waste.

Francis named the Maltese financier Joseph Zahra to head the commission and Vallejo Balda as his No. 2. Chaouqui was named one of the six other commission members.

The commission was given broad powers to solicit information from traditionally independent Vatican offices that were none too pleased to divulge their assets to a group of outsiders, regardless of their papal mandate. But the commission did its job, coming into possession of thousands of pages of information, such as the existence of "secret" accounts held by the Secretariat of State that had never figured into the Vatican's consolidated balance sheets.

That two of the commission members now have been arrested in an investigation over leaked documents is a remarkable new chapter in the Vatileaks saga, but it's unclear if the investigation will stop with them.

The 33-year-old Chaouqui, who favors slim-fitting jeans and long, bouncy hairdos, cut a figure in sharp contrast to the more somber dress of the relatively few laywomen with roles at the Vatican. She is being defended by Giulia Bongiorno, one of Italy's top criminal lawyers who won acquittal for Amanda Knox's co-defendant in their internationally watched murder trial.

Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic religious movement, expressed "surprise and pain" over Vallejo Balda's arrest, who it described as belonging to a priestly society linked to Opus Dei.

If the allegation turns out to be proven, it will be particularly painful because of the damage done to the church," it said in a statement.

AP: Hundreds of officers lose licenses over sex misconduct

AP: Hundreds of officers lose licenses over sex misconduct
 

A police car drives into the Springlake Police Station in Oklahoma City, on Oct. 7, 2015. Former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, who worked in the department's Springlake Division, is accused of sexual offenses against 13 women he encountered while on patrol. In an investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.

  

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Flashing lights pierced the black of night, and the big white letters made clear it was the police. The woman pulled over was a daycare worker in her 50s headed home after playing dominoes with friends. She felt she had nothing to hide, so when the Oklahoma City officer accused her of erratic driving, she did as directed.

She would later tell a judge she was splayed outside the patrol car for a pat-down, made to lift her shirt to prove she wasn't hiding anything, then to pull down her pants when the officer still wasn't convinced. He shined his flashlight between her legs, she said, then ordered her to sit in the squad car and face him as he towered above. His gun in sight, she said she pleaded "No, sir" as he unzipped his fly and exposed himself with a hurried directive.

"Come on," the woman, identified in police reports as J.L., said she was told before she began giving him oral sex. "I don't have all night."

The accusations are undoubtedly jolting, and yet they reflect a betrayal of the badge that has been repeated time and again across the country.

In a yearlong investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.

The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action. California and New York - with several of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies - offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. And even among states that provided records, some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records.

"It's happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country," said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the problem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "It's so underreported and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them."

Even as cases around the country have sparked a national conversation about excessive force by police, sexual misconduct by officers has largely escaped widespread notice due to a patchwork of laws, piecemeal reporting and victims frequently reluctant to come forward because of their vulnerabilities - they often are young, poor, struggling with addiction or plagued by their own checkered pasts.

In interviews, lawyers and even police chiefs told the AP that some departments also stay quiet about improprieties to limit liability, allowing bad officers to quietly resign, keep their certification and sometimes jump to other jobs.

The officers involved in such wrongdoing represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands whose jobs are to serve and protect. But their actions have an outsized impact - miring departments in litigation that leads to costly settlements, crippling relationships with an already wary public and scarring victims with a special brand of fear.

"My God," J.L. said she thought as she eyed the officer's holstered gun, "he's going to kill me."

The AP does not name alleged victims of sexual assault without their consent, and J.L. declined to be interviewed. She was let go after the traffic stop without any charges. She reported her accusations immediately, but it was months before the investigation was done and the breadth of the allegations known.

She is one of 13 women who say they were victimized by the officer, a former college football standout named Daniel Holtzclaw. The fired cop, 28, has pleaded not guilty to a host of charges, and his family posted online that "the truth of his innocence will be shown in court." Each of his accusers is expected to testify in the trial that begins Monday, including one who was 17 when she said the officer pulled down her pink cotton shorts and raped her on her mother's front porch.

But on a June night last year, it was J.L.'s story that unleashed a larger search for clues.

A nurse swabbed her mouth. A captain made a report. And a detective got to work.

---

On a checkerboard of sessions on everything from electronic surveillance to speed enforcement, police chiefs who gathered for an annual meeting in 2007 saw a discussion on sex offenses by officers added to the agenda. More than 70 chiefs packed into a room, and when asked if they had dealt with an officer accused of sexual misdeeds, nearly every attendee raised a hand. A task force was formed and federal dollars were pumped into training.

Eight years later, a simple question - how many law enforcement officers are accused of sexual misconduct - has no definitive answer. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, which collects police data from around the country, doesn't track officer arrests, and states aren't required to collect or share that information.

To measure the problem, the AP obtained records from 41 states on police decertification, an administrative process in which an officer's law enforcement license is revoked. Cases from 2009 through 2014 were then reviewed to determine whether they stemmed from misconduct meeting the Department of Justice standard for sexual assault - sexual contact that happens without consent, including intercourse, sodomy, child molestation, incest, fondling and attempted rape.

Nine states and the District of Columbia said they either did not decertify officers for misconduct or declined to provide information.

Of those that did release records, the AP determined that some 550 officers were decertified for sexual assault, including rape and sodomy, sexual shakedowns in which citizens were extorted into performing favors to avoid arrest, or gratuitous pat-downs. Some 440 officers lost their badges for other sex offenses, such as possessing child pornography, or for sexual misconduct that included being a peeping Tom, sexting juveniles or having on-duty intercourse.

The law enforcement officials in these records included state and local police, sheriff's deputies, prison guards and school resource officers; no federal officers were included because the records reviewed came from state police standards commissions. 

About one-third of the officers decertified were accused of incidents involving juveniles. Because of gaps in the information provided by the states, it was impossible to discern any other distinct patterns, other than a propensity for officers to use the power of their badge to prey on the vulnerable. 

Some but not all of the decertified officers faced criminal charges; some offenders were able to avoid prosecution by agreeing to surrender their certifications.

Victims included unsuspecting motorists, schoolchildren ordered to raise their shirts in a supposed search for drugs, police interns taken advantage of, women with legal troubles who succumbed to performing sex acts for promised help, and prison inmates forced to have sex with guards.

The AP's findings, coupled with other research and interviews with experts, suggest that sexual misconduct is among the most prevalent type of complaint against law officers. Phil Stinson, a researcher at Bowling Green State University, analyzed news articles between 2005 and 2011 and found 6,724 arrests involving more than 5,500 officers. 

Sex-related cases were the third-most common, behind violence and profit-motivated crimes. Cato Institute reports released in 2009 and 2010 found sex misconduct the No. 2 complaint against officers, behind excessive force.

Cases from across the country in just the past year demonstrate how such incidents can occur, and the devastation they leave behind.

In Connecticut, William Ruscoe of the Trumbull Police began a 30-month prison term in January after pleading guilty to the sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl he met through a program for teens interested in law enforcement. 

Case records detailed advances that began with explicit texts and attempts to kiss and grope the girl. Then one night Ruscoe brought her back to his home, put his gun on the kitchen counter and asked her to go upstairs to his bedroom. 

The victim told investigators that despite telling him no "what felt like 1,000 times," he removed her clothes, fondled her and forced her to touch him - at one point cuffing her hands.

In Florida, Jonathan Bleiweiss of the Broward Sheriff's Office was sentenced to a five-year prison term in February for bullying about 20 immigrant men into sex acts. Because the victims wouldn't testify, Bleiwess' plea deal revolved around false imprisonment charges, allowing him to escape sex offender status. 

Prosecutors said he used implied threats of deportation to intimidate the men.

And in New Mexico, Michael Garcia of the Las Cruces Police was sentenced last November to nine years in federal prison for sexually assaulting a high school police intern. At the time, he was in a unit investigating child abuse and sex crimes. The victim, Diana Guerrero, said in court that the assault left her feeling "like a piece of trash," dashed her dreams of becoming an officer, and triggered depression, nightmares and flashbacks.

"It had never occurred to me that a person who had earned a badge would do this to me or anybody else," said Guerrero, who is now 21 and agreed to her name being published. "I lost my faith in everything, everyone, even in myself."

A 2011 International Association of Chiefs of Police report on sex misconduct questioned whether some conditions of the job may create opportunities for such incidents. 

Officers' power, independence, off-hours and engagement with those perceived as less credible combine to give cover to predators, it said, and otherwise admirable bonds of loyalty can lead colleagues to shield offenders.

"You see officers throughout your career that deal with that power really well, and you see officers over your career that don't," said Oklahoma City Police Chief Bill Citty, who fired Holtzclaw just months after the allegations surfaced and called the case a troubling reminder that police chiefs need to be careful about how they hire and train officers.

The best chance at preventing such incidents is to robustly screen applicants, said Sheriff Russell Martin in Delaware County, Ohio, who served on an IACP committee on sex misconduct. Those seeking to join Martin's agency are questioned about everything from pornography use to public sex acts. 

Investigators run background checks, administer polygraph exams and interview former employers and neighbors. Social media activity is reviewed for clues about what a candidate deems appropriate, or red flags such as objectification of women.

Still, screening procedures vary among departments, and even the most stringent standards only go so far.

"We're hiring from the human race," Martin said, "and once in a while, the human race is going to let us down."

---

In the predawn hours of June 18, 2014, J.L.'s report made its way to Oklahoma City sex crimes detective Kim Davis. By that afternoon, Miranda rights were being read to the suspect, an officer who had arrived out of the academy nearly three years earlier, a seemingly natural move for the son of a career policeman but one borne of deep disappointment.

Holtzclaw was a high school football star in Enid, Oklahoma, and a standout on a middling squad at Eastern Michigan University. He was a 6-foot-1, 246-pound leader to teammates who called him "Claw," and constantly focused on his ultimate goal of the NFL.

"He trained that way. He talked that way," said fellow linebacker Cortland Selman.

But the collegiate record for tackles Holtzclaw chased went unbroken, and the draft came and went.

He found traces of life on the field in his life on the beat, telling a reporter for his hometown paper that he enjoyed high-speed chases and once charged through two fences while pursuing a suspect on foot on a snow-slicked winter day. He hoped to eventually join the police gang squad.

The Oklahoma City Police Department said Holtzclaw had not received any prior discipline that resulted in a demotion or docked paycheck, but both the department and the state declined to release his full personnel record, citing state law making it confidential.

J.L.'s accusations made Davis and a fellow detective curious about an unsolved report filed five weeks earlier in which an unidentified officer was accused of stopping a woman and coercing her into oral sex.

According to pretrial testimony, the detectives reviewed the names of women Holtzclaw had come into contact with on his 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift and interviewed each one, saying they had a tip she may have been assaulted by an officer. Most said they had not been victimized but, among those who said they were, other links to Holtzclaw were found, Davis said in court. The GPS device on his patrol car put him at the scene of the alleged incidents, and department records showed he called in to check all but one of the women for warrants, the detective testified.

By the time the investigation concluded, the detectives had assembled a six-month narrative of alleged sex crimes they said started Dec. 20, 2013, with a woman taken into custody and hospitalized while high on angel dust. Dressed in a hospital gown, her right wrist handcuffed to the bedrail, the woman said Holtzclaw coerced her into performing oral sex, suggesting her cooperation would lead to dropped charges.

"I didn't think that no one would believe me," she testified at a pretrial hearing. "I feel like all police will work together."

All told, Holtzclaw faces 36 counts including rape, sexual battery and forcible oral sodomy.

One additional accuser who came forward after Holtzclaw's arrest later was charged with making a false report. Supporters of the former officer who congregate on social media express hope that others' claims will be proven false, too, and friends wear T-shirts that say "Free the Claw."

Earlier this year, while out on bond, Holtzclaw answered the door of his parents' Enid home, saying of the allegations: "I'm not going to make any comment about it." His attorney, Scott Adams, canceled an interview and did not respond to calls, emails and a letter.

Adams' line of questioning at the pretrial hearing suggests he will raise doubts about the accusers' credibility and portray investigators as having coaxed the women into saying they were attacked. Many of the women had struggled with drugs. Some had been prostitutes or have criminal records. Most lived in the same rundown swath of the city in sight of the state Capitol dome, and they all are women of color.

Many of their allegations are similar, with the women saying they were accused of hiding drugs, then told to lift their shirts or pull down their pants. Some claim to have been groped; others said they were forced into intercourse or oral sex.

The youngest accuser said Holtzclaw first approached her when she was with two friends who were arguing and he learned she had an outstanding warrant for trespassing. He let her go but found her again later that day, walking to her mother's house. She said he offered her a ride and then followed her to the front porch, reminding her of her warrant, accusing her of hiding drugs and warning her not to make things more difficult than they needed to be. She claims he touched her breasts and slid his hand into her panties before pulling off her shorts and raping her.

When it was over, the teen said he told her he might be back to see her again.

"I didn't know what to do," she testified at the pretrial hearing. "Like, what am I going to do? Call the cops? He was a cop."

---

Victims of sexual violence at the hands of officers know the power their attackers have, and so the trauma can carry an especially crippling fear.

Jackie Simmons said she found it too daunting to bring her accusation to another police officer after being raped by a cop in 1998 while visiting Kansas for a wedding. So, like most victims of rape, she never filed a report. Her notions of good and evil challenged, she became enraged whenever she saw patrol cars marked "Protect and Serve."

"You feel really powerless," said Simmons, an elementary school principal in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who works with Pandora's Project, a support group for rape survivors.

Diane Wetendorf, a retired counselor who started a support group in Chicago for victims of officers, said most of the women she counseled never reported their crimes - and many who did regretted it. She saw women whose homes came under surveillance and whose children were intimidated by police. Fellow officers, she said, refused to turn on one another when questioned.

"It starts with the officer denying the allegations - 'she's crazy,' 'she's lying,'" Wetendorf said. "And the other officers say they didn't see anything, they didn't hear anything."

In its 2011 report, the IACP recommended that agencies institute policies specifically addressing sexual misconduct, saying "tolerance at any level will invite more of the same conduct." The report also urged stringent screening of hires. But the agency does not know how widely such recommendations have been implemented.

John Firman, the IACP's research director, said the organization also is encouraging its chiefs to hire more women and minorities as a way to improve the environment inside departments.

"What you want is a culture that's dominated by a bunch of people that reflect the community," he said.

Experts said it isn't just threats of retaliation that deter victims from reporting the crimes, but also skepticism about the ability of officers and prosecutors to investigate their colleagues.

Milwaukee Police Officer Ladmarald Cates was sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2012 for raping a woman he was dispatched to help. Despite screaming "He raped me!" repeatedly to other officers present, she was accused of assaulting an officer and jailed for four days, her lawyer said. The district attorney, citing a lack of evidence, declined to prosecute Cates. Only after a federal investigation was he tried and convicted.

It's a story that doesn't surprise Penny Harrington, a former police chief in Portland, Oregon, who co-founded the National Center for Women in Policing and has served as an expert witness in officer misconduct cases. She said officers sometimes avoid charges or can beat a conviction because they are so steeped in the system.

"They knew the DAs. They knew the judges. They knew the safe houses. They knew how to testify in court. They knew how to make her look like a nut," she said. "How are you going to get anything to happen when he's part of the system and when he threatens you and when you know he has a gun and ... you know he can find you wherever you go?"

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Though initially out on bond, Holtzclaw has been jailed since July after letting the battery in his ankle monitor go dead.

While he and his attorneys have remained mostly silent on the accusations, he has offered glimpses of his life in online postings. A photo montage he shared showed him flexing his muscles, Eminem playing in the background. He wrote of God's blessings and copied Bible verses, and offered photos of him cuddling his dog. He wrote that he had maintained faith, that winners overcome and cowards run. He portrayed himself as David fighting Goliath.

"Behind these eyes and this big heart is pain," he wrote.

Most of Holtzclaw's accusers also have stayed silent outside of court. Most did not respond to requests from the AP to speak or cited fear or a desire for privacy, but two did agree to interviews.

One woman alleges Holtzclaw coerced her into giving him oral sex. She cried as she spoke, sitting on a dirty couch in a rundown apartment where a blanket attached to the wall with thumbtacks blocked the sunlight. 

She talked of how afraid she was to go to police, of how images of her alleged attack haunt her. Enveloped in fear, she said she slipped further into drugs.

"I was getting high, but I wasn't feeling," she said. "I was too upset to feel anything."

In the Oklahoma City neighborhood that prosecutors say served as Holtzclaw's hunting ground, a narrow ribbon of road twists through a canyon of untended growth littered with black bags of stinking trash. Locals call the spot Dead Man's Curve.

It's here that Syrita Bowen contends Holtzclaw took her on May 21, 2014, and told her she could submit to oral sex and intercourse or go to jail. In an interview, she said she was convinced it was the cruel joke of some hidden-camera show until he insisted he was serious. She had been jailed many times before, and knew the math: a 15-minute ride downtown, two hours to be booked, up to a day of waiting to move to a cell, hearings drawn out over weeks or months.

She figured she could give him what he wanted in six minutes.

"God forgive me," she said, "that was the easiest thing for me to do."

Bowen agreed to have her name published, and initially she offered a steely front, contending no fear or sadness lingered from her alleged encounter with Holtzclaw. But, before long, tears flowed.

She has known poverty and addiction and imprisonment, and said she was repeatedly raped by a relative as a little girl. The violation she alleges now doesn't even rank as the worst thing to ever happen to her. But she said she thinks about it daily. There are no nightmares, she said, but reminders come in other ways.

Patrol cars seem to pass more often than they did before. Sirens are more jarring. And when a man in uniform goes by, she wonders what might happen.

Latest migrant tragedy in Aegean highlights EU divisions

Latest migrant tragedy in Aegean highlights EU divisions

A local residents stands over the body of a dead baby in Petra village on the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, Friday, Oct. 30, 2015. The deaths occurred amid a surge of crossings to Greek islands involving migrants and refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries ahead of winter and as European governments weight taking tougher measures to try and limit the number of arrivals in Europe.

  

LESBOS, Greece (AP) -- Drowned babies and toddlers washed onto Greece's famed Aegean Sea beaches, and a grim-faced diver pulled a drowned mother and child from a half-sunk boat that was decrepit long before it sailed. On shore, bereaved women wailed and stunned-looking fathers cradled their children.

At least 27 people, more than half of them children, died in waters off Greece Friday trying to fulfill their dream of a better life in Europe. The tragedy came two days after a boat crammed with 300 people sank off Lesbos in one of the worst accidents of its kind, leaving 29 dead.

It won't be the last.

As autumn storms threaten to make the crossing from Turkey even riskier and conditions in Middle Eastern refugee camps deteriorate, ever more refugees - mostly Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis - are joining the rush to reach Europe.

More than 60 people, half of them children, have died in the past three days alone, compared with just over a hundred a few weeks earlier.

Highlighting political friction in the 28-nation European Union, Greece's left-wing prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, cited the horror of the new drownings to accuse the block of ineptitude and hypocrisy in handling the crisis.

Hungary's right-wing foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, used the same word - hypocrisy - about critics of his country's fencing off its southern border to keep migrants out.

Szijjarto described the influx as the biggest challenge the EU has ever faced. While that may be an over-statement, the crisis has pitted countries like Greece, with well over 500,000 arrivals so far, against eastern Europeans who are unwilling to take in refugees - or, like Hungary, insist that anyone leaving a relatively safe country, such as Turkey or Greece, for a wealthy one like Germany is by definition an economic migrant.

Speaking in Athens, Tsipras accused Europe of an "inability to defend its (humanitarian) values" by providing a safe alternative to the sea journeys.

"The waves of the Aegean are not just washing up dead refugees, dead children, but (also) the very civilization of Europe," he said, dismissing Western shock at the children's deaths as "crocodile tears."

"What about the tens of thousands of living children, who are cramming the roads of migration?" he said. "I feel ashamed of Europe's inability to effectively address this human drama, and of the level of debate ... where everyone tries to shift responsibility to someone else."

Tsipras' government has appealed for more assistance from its EU partners. It argues that those trying to reach Europe should be registered in camps in Turkey, then flown directly to host countries under the EU's relocation program, to spare them the sea voyage. But it has resisted calls to demolish its own border fence with Turkey, which would also obviate the need to pay smugglers for a trip in a leaky boat.

"My opinion is that at this stage - for purely practical reasons - ... the opening of the border fence is not possible," Greek Migration Minister Yiannis Mouzalas said.

"When talking about receiving refugees, it's not under our control - they are coming," he told state ERT TV. 

"So it's a question of how we address this problem. ... We will not put them in jail or try to drown them. 

They will have all the rights that they are allowed under (international) agreements and Greek law."

Greece's Merchant Marine Ministry said 19 people died and 138 were rescued near the eastern island of Kalymnos early Friday, when a battered wooden pleasure boat capsized. Eleven of the victims were children, including three babies.

At least three more people - a woman, a child and a baby - died when another boat sank off the nearby island of Rhodes, while an adult drowned off Lesbos.

On the Turkish side, four children drowned and two were missing after two new accidents Friday involving boats en route to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Samos, Turkey's state-run news agency said.

Nearly 600 people were rescued by the Greek coast guard in the past 24 hours, while thousands more made it safely from Turkey to Greece's eastern islands.

Far to the west in Spain, rescuers found the bodies of four people and were searching for 35 missing from a boat that ran into trouble trying to reach Spain from Morocco.

Jean-Christophe Dumont, head of the migration division at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said more than a million people are expected to reach Europe this year.

"For next year I think it's clear the migration pressure will remain," he said. "It's not a tap that you can turn on and off. Even if the flow would stop, it would actually not stop, because you will see family reunification - the aftermath of the flow of refugees."

The influx has overwhelmed authorities in financially struggling Greece. The country is the main point of entry for people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, after an alternative sea route from Libya to Italy became too dangerous.

Most go to Lesbos, a normally quiet island known as the olive-producing birthplace of the ancient poet Sappho. As residents grappled with Wednesday's latest tragedy, thousands of new arrivals crowded into the main town of Mytilene and makeshift camps nearby, crowding around stalls selling canned food, backpacks, blankets and other basics for their long trek across Europe.

Many slept rough on the waterfront lined with yachts, rescue vessels and the remains of broken up dinghies.

At one of the largest camps, muddy roads were strewn with garbage - shoes, plastic bags, underpants, shreds of clothing - as thousands camped on a hillside. Local residents used vans to sell tents, toiletries, and sandwiches, as camp dwellers hung laundry on olive trees, taking advantage of a break in the rain.

Mustafa Hosab sat with four cousins eating a kebab on the waterfront.

"We're from Idlib, in northern Syria, near Turkey. We left because the fighting was changing all the time and it's not safe," he said. "We'll go wherever we can, maybe Germany or Sweden. We came from Turkey, and the boat was OK. We were lucky."