CHICAGO — After people were horrified by video of a passenger getting dragged off a full United Express flight by airport police, the head of United’s parent company said the airline was reaching out to the man to “resolve this situation.”

Hours later on Monday, his tone turned defensive. He described the man as “disruptive and belligerent.”

By Tuesday afternoon, almost two days after the Sunday evening confrontation in Chicago, CEO Oscar Munoz issued his most contrite apology yet as details emerged about the man seen on cellphone videos recorded by other passengers at O’Hare Airport.

“No one should ever be mistreated this way,” said Munoz, who also pledged to conduct a wide-ranging review of company policies.

The passenger was identified as physician David Dao, 69, of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, who was convicted more than a decade ago of felony charges involving his prescribing of drugs and spent years trying to regain his medical license.

SPOKANE, Wash. — Some Northwest Indian tribes would be allowed to kill a limited number of sea lions that prey on endangered salmon in the Columbia River under a bill introduced in Congress.

The bipartisan bill was introduced last weekend by U.S. House members Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Washington Republican, and Kurt Schrader, an Oregon Democrat.

If passed, the bill would allow the Warm Springs, Umatilla, Yakama, and Nez Perce tribes to kill some sea lions that are decimating endangered salmon runs during their return from the ocean to inland spawning grounds. Currently only the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho can kill sea lions along the river.

Last year, approximately 190 sea lions killed over 9,500 adult spring chinook within sight of Bonneville Dam, according to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission in Portland, Oregon.

That represented a 5.8 percent loss of the 2016 spring chinook run in just a quarter mile from Bonneville Dam, the commission said. The federal government estimated that up to 45 percent of the 2014 spring chinook run was potentially lost to sea lions in the 145 river miles between the Columbia River estuary and Bonneville Dam.

“The spring chinook loss, coupled with the growing sea lion population, has placed us in an emergency situation,” said Leland Bill, chairman of the commission.

Sea lion populations have surged since the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972. There were about 30,000 California sea lions when the act passed, but the population has since grown to over 300,000.

SALEM — In Oregon — where its first-in-the-nation automatic-voter registration system has been hailed as a pioneer in knocking down voter-access barriers — it takes just five years of failing to participate in an election before a registered voter gets knocked from the active voter rolls and no longer receives a ballot in the mail.

Roughly 400,000 registered Oregonian voters have been flagged as inactive at some point in time, a number that this year is expected to grow by another 30,000 who registered during the 2012 general election when President Barack Obama was up for re-election.

For Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, five years isn’t long enough. So this year, he’s doubling that timeline to 10 years.

Richardson, the state’s first Republican secretary of state in more than 30 years and the first Republican to hold a statewide elected office in 14 years, says that will immediately preserve the statuses of those soon-to-be-inactive voters this year. The change will also be applied retroactively, potentially reactivating another 30,000 or so currently inactive voters by leveraging DMV databases that Richardson’s agency already uses to administer the so-called Oregon Motor Voter program.

“This change will protect or restore the voting rights of Oregonians serving our country on military deployments, college students and voters frustrated with the political system,” said Richardson, who made the announcement during his first press conference Tuesday at the state Capitol in Salem.

MOSCOW — Early expectations of an easy rapport between the Trump administration and Russia are crashing into reality as U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has a fraught meeting in Moscow beset by escalating allegations over Syria.

The first Trump Cabinet official to visit Russia, Tillerson is on a thus-far-futile mission to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to abandon support for Syrian President Bashar Assad. The fallout from Assad’s chemical attack last week and the U.S. airstrikes that followed have plunged the United States and Russia into tensions rarely seen since the Cold War.

As Tillerson arrived in Moscow, President Donald Trump declared Assad “an animal.”

“Frankly, Putin is backing a person that’s truly an evil person. I think it’s very bad for Russia,” Trump told the Fox Business Network. “I think it’s very bad for mankind.”

Tillerson planned to meet today with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, a seasoned diplomat whose strident defense of Putin’s agenda has frustrated several previous U.S. secretaries of state. It was unclear whether Putin, who typically doesn’t announce high-level meetings in advance, would grant Tillerson an audience while he is in Russia.

WASHINGTON — Last August, a handwritten ledger surfaced in Ukraine with dollar amounts and dates next to the name of Paul Manafort, who was then Donald Trump’s campaign chairman.

Ukrainian investigators called it evidence of off-the-books payments from a pro-Russian political party — and part of a larger pattern of corruption under the country’s former president. Manafort, who worked for the party as an international political consultant, has publicly questioned the ledger’s authenticity.

Now, financial records newly obtained by The Associated Press confirm that at least $1.2 million in payments listed in the ledger next to Manafort’s name were actually received by his consulting firm in the United States. They include payments in 2007 and 2009, providing the first evidence that Manafort’s firm received at least some money listed in the so-called Black Ledger.

The two payments came years before Manafort became involved in Trump’s campaign, but for the first time bolster the credibility of the ledger. They also put the ledger in a new light, as federal prosecutors in the U.S. have been investigating Manafort’s work in Eastern Europe as part of a larger anti-corruption probe.

Separately, Manafort is also under scrutiny as part of congressional and FBI investigations into possible contacts between Trump associates and Russia’s government under President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The payments detailed in the ledger and confirmed by the documents obtained by the AP are unrelated to the 2016 presidential campaign and came years before Manafort worked as Trump’s unpaid campaign chairman.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — In the ruins of a tropical hideaway where jetsetters once sipped rum under the Caribbean sun, the abandoned children tried to make a life for themselves. They begged and scavenged for food, but they never could scrape together enough to beat back the hunger, until the U.N. peacekeepers moved in a few blocks away.

The men who came from a far-away place and spoke a strange language offered the Haitian children cookies and other snacks. Sometimes they gave them a few dollars. But the price was high: The Sri Lankan peacekeepers wanted sex from girls and boys as young as 12.

“I did not even have breasts,” said a girl, known as V01 — Victim No. 1. She told U.N. investigators that over the next three years, from ages 12 to 15, she had sex with nearly 50 peacekeepers, including a “Commandant” who gave her 75 cents. Sometimes she slept in U.N. trucks on the base next to the decaying resort, whose once-glamorous buildings were being overtaken by jungle.

Justice for victims like V01 is rare. An Associated Press investigation of U.N. missions during the past 12 years found nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel around the world — signaling the crisis is much larger than previously known. More than 300 of the allegations involved children, the AP found, but only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators served jail time.

Legally, the U.N. is in a bind. It has no jurisdiction over peacekeepers, leaving punishment to the countries that contribute the troops.

BEIJING — Chinese President Xi Jinping told President Donald Trump in a phone call today that Beijing is willing to work with Washington on ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program but wants a peaceful solution to the escalating conflict.

Xi’s comments came after Trump tweeted that China should do more on the issue Washington sees as an increasingly urgent threat, or the U.S. would go it alone.

China’s calls for calm come as tensions have risen with the deployment of a U.S. aircraft carrier to the area and the conducting of the biggest-ever U.S.-South Korea military exercises.

During their phone call, Xi told Trump that China insists on peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and wants to find a solution to the problem through peaceful means, according to a brief description of the call released by the Chinese foreign ministry.

“China insists on realizing the denuclearization of the peninsula … and is willing to maintain communication and coordination with the American side over the issue on the peninsula,” Xi was quoted as saying.

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today stunned the country by unexpectedly filing to run in the May presidential election, contradicting a recommendation from the supreme leader to stay out of the race.

Ahmadinejad’s decision could upend an election many believed would be won by moderate President Hassan Rouhani, who negotiated the nuclear deal with world powers. Though Rouhani has yet to formally register, many viewed him as a shoe-in following Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s recommendation in September for Ahmadinejad to stand down and conservatives’ inability to coalesce around a single candidate.

Ahmadinejad’s firebrand style could prove appealing for hard-liners seeking a tough-talking candidate who can stand up to U.S. President Donald Trump. His candidacy also could expose the fissures inside Iranian politics that linger since his contested 2009 re-election, which brought massive unrest.

Associated Press journalists watched as stunned election officials processed Ahmadinejad’s paperwork today. Asked about Ahmadinejad’s decision, one Tehran-based analyst offered a blunt assessment.

“It was an organized mutiny against Iran’s ruling system,” said Soroush Farhadian, who backs reformists.

WICHITA, Kan. — Republicans pulled out a victory in Kansas in the first of four U.S. House special elections to replace GOP congressmen named to top jobs in President Donald Trump’s administration, but the next contest for a seat in Georgia could be tougher to hold.

The margin of victory Tuesday for Kansas Republican Ron Estes in the 4th District special election slid to only seven percentage points from a 31-point margin in November, when incumbent Mike Pompeo was running before he was appointed Trump’s CIA director.

In a further warning sign for Republicans, Estes narrowly lost the district’s most populous county around the city of Wichita to his Democratic opponent James Thompson, a political newcomer. Trump won that county by 18 points.

The outcome was a shot across the bow of national Republicans as the party faces three more special elections in Georgia, Montana and South Carolina. Republicans now hold a 237-193 majority in the House.

“Republicans nationally should be very worried,” said Bob Beatty, a Washburn University political scientist. “It’s remarkable that Thompson got this close.”

MOSUL, Iraq — Two houses are all that remain standing on the street with no name in western Mosul, just blocks from the front lines of the battle to retake Iraq’s second-largest city from the Islamic State group.

The once-bustling neighborhood has been reduced to rubble, its sidewalks piled high with a jumble of concrete, bricks and metal.

Standing amid the debris of what was once his home on the newly liberated street, Maan Nawaf blamed IS for the destruction around him. It was IS fighters, he said, who drew the devastating firepower of the Iraqi and coalition warplanes to the street by positioning snipers on top of the buildings after ordering residents to leave, including his elderly mother.

“We said we have a disabled woman, she can’t walk. They said if you don’t go, we will kill you,” he said. The family knew the militants would make good on the threat: IS fighters killed two of his brothers, one of whom was a policeman, as well as his nephew, Nawaf said.

For the few residents who remain in Mosul’s Wadi Hajar neighborhood, the war is far from over. Just blocks away, police units fired mortars at IS positions and helicopters circled overhead, firing into the streets below. IS returned fire only sporadically, the treacherous calm luring the residents into the street between the crashes of mortars.

TOKYO — Toyota is introducing a wearable robotic leg brace designed to help partially paralyzed people walk.

The Welwalk WW-1000 system is made up of a motorized mechanical frame that fits on a person’s leg from the knee down. The patients can practice walking wearing the robotic device on a special treadmill that can support their weight.

Toyota Motor Corp. demonstrated the equipment for reporters at its Tokyo headquarters today.

One hundred such systems will be rented to medical facilities in Japan later this year, Toyota said. The service entails a one-time initial charge of 1 million yen ($9,000) and a 350,000 yen ($3,200) monthly fee.

The gadget is designed to be worn on one leg at a time for patients severely paralyzed on one side of the body due to a stroke or other ailments, Eiichi Saito, a medical doctor and executive vice president at Fujita Health University, explained.