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<p>DURANGO — Officials say an extremely effective senior prank has managed to cancel classes for four straight days at southwestern Colorado high school.</p> <p>The Durango Herald reported senior pranksters spread over 30 bales of hay around Durango High School’s common areas. School was canceled again Thursday as cleanup swept and dusted the debris left behind. The cleaning expenses are expected to top $100,000.</p>

MEXICO CITY — The bodies of eight decapitated men were dumped Thursday along roads in Durango, a drug-gang-plagued northern Mexican state already grappling with the horror of discovering mass graves where 196 corpses have been unearthed so far. Six of the naked bodies were found along a highway leading out of the state capital of Durango city, their heads lying nearby, according to a statement from the state attorney general's office. The two other bodies were found in another city street. One was identified as the remains of Gerardo Galindo Meza, the deputy director of a city prison who had...

Durango, Mexico (Reuters) - Suspected drug hitmen dumped six headless bodies outside a school in northern Mexico Monday a day after forensics pulled victims out of a nearby mass grave in a stream of unrelenting violence that is pressuring Mexican President Felipe Calderon. Assailants left the bloodied, beheaded men outside the secondary school in the colonial city of Durango just before dawn and sprayed threatening messages on a nearby wall, hours before students were due to put on a show to celebrate Mother's Day, Durango state attorney general's office said. Prosecutors declined to give more details and police quickly painted...

DURANGO, MEXICO - Investigators have discovered another mass grave with at least 26 bodies Today, authorities will continue searching a site in the city of Durango. The bodies were found on a lot belonging to an auto body shop in a residential area. So far, none of the victims has been identified. The remains are reportedly badly decomposed. The grisly discovery comes just a week after authorities in Tamaulipas found at least 116 bodies in multiple mass graves near the town of San Fernando. That's about 90 miles south of Brownsville. Another 72 bodies were found in San Fernando last...

Tracy Barnes of Durango, Colorado beat the very best biathletes in the world in the Shoot-Out phase the Veltins World Team Challenge in Schalke, Germany. The World Team Challenge, held annually in the Veltins Arena, is the equivalent of the SuperBowl of Biathlon. Tracy grabbed top honors in the prestigious Shoot-Out event, a shooting competition for the top 20 biathletes in the world. In this invitation-only event, 10 women competed head-to-head in a four-stage shooting event duplicating the format for a regular biathlon race (two prone, two standing). In the final round of competition, the top three ladies from the...

A massive deposit of mutilated and processed human remains has been found in the American Southwest. The remains and other artifacts at the site, Sacred Ridge in Colorado, indicate ethnic cleansing took place there in the early ninth century. The genocide likely occurred due to conflict between different Anasazi Ancestral Puebloan ethnic groups. Crushed leg bones, battered skulls and other mutilated human remains are likely all that's left of a Native American population destroyed by genocide that took place circa 800 A.D., suggests a new study... The entire assemblage comprises 14,882 human skeletal fragments, as well as the mutilated remains...

MEXICO CITY – Mexican Federal Police freed two kidnapped journalists held captive since last Monday in the northern part of the country by an organized crime group, officials said Saturday. The two were in a group of four journalists who were intercepted last Monday in the La Laguna region, which includes areas in the states of Coahuila and Durango in northern Mexico. One of them, Hector Gordoa of Televisa, was released Thursday in good health. In an operation based on intelligence work, the agents rescued the two journalists in the city of Gomez Palacio, Durango state, according to a communique...

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican prosecutors say guards at a prison let inmates out and lent them guns to massacre 17 people at a party, then allowed them to return to their cells. Sunday's announcement from the federal attorney general's office represents a shocking revelation about the July 18 shooting in the northern city of Torreon, where the victims included women and children. The director and two other officials at the prison in Durango state have been put under a form of house arrest while investigations continue. Prosecution spokesman Ricardo Najera says there is evidence the director has given inmates permission...

Four journalists have gone missing in the north Mexican state of Durango, a human rights body says. The four had been covering protests at a prison in Gomez Palacio, Mexico's National Commission for Human Rights said. Inmates there have been protesting at a report that accused the jail's director of releasing inmates to carry out drug-related killings. At least nine journalists have been killed in Mexico so far this year. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights says several more have also been kidnapped. 'Picked up' Three of the missing journalists were "picked up" at about midday on Monday and the...

TORREON, Mexico — Eight human heads were found early Tuesday in four separate places near roadsides outside the northern Mexico city of Durango, the local prosecutor's office said. Police found the heads within the space of two and a half hours due to anonymous tip-offs, "but had not identified the victims, nor located the bodies," said a statement from the Durango state prosecutor's office. The victims were males thought to have been aged between 25 and 30, the statement said. The tip-offs said that two human heads had been dumped on each of three roads out of Durango city. Workers...

Thousands Protest Sheriff’s Immigration Efforts ‘Zeroing in on the wrong guy,’ Arpaio says, pointing instead at Congress Protesters take part in a three-mile walk to the county jail complex in Phoenix. PHOENIX - Ten thousand immigrant rights advocates marched in front of a county jail in Phoenix Saturday in a protest that was aimed at Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's immigration efforts and was marked by a clash between a small group of protesters and police officers. Organizers say the protest was meant to show officials in Washington that Arpaio shouldn't handle immigration enforcement, and that Congress and the Obama...

A 33-year-old El Monte school board member and five other men were shot dead execution-style in north central Mexico on Wednesday night, after they were abducted by gunmen, according to family members. Agustin Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo was having dinner with his wife in a restaurant when armed men burst in and kidnapped Salcedo and five other men. All six were found dead Thursday, El Monte officials said. Salcedo’s wife was not abducted.

John McCain in Colorado Details: DENVER WHEN: Friday, Oct 24th Doors Open at 7:30 am - Program Begins at 9:00 am WHERE: National Western Arena 4655 Humbolt St. Denver, CO 80216 TICKETS: You must have a ticket to enter the event. Tickets are free and can be picked up at one of the following locations: McCain-Palin 2008 Headquarters 6334 South Racine Cir, Suite 200 Centennial, CO 80111 Open 9:00 am - 8:00 pm daily Colorado Victory Headquarters 5950 S. Willow Dr., Suite 201 Greenwood Village, CO 80111 Open 9:00 am - 8:00 pm daily Highlands Ranch Victory Office 9135 Ridgeline...

An explosion blew out the store fronts of three businesses in downtown Durango on Friday afternoon, injuring up to five firefighters. The fire was initially reported at 1:40 p.m. as smoke and flame visible from the roof of Seasons Restaurant. Later reports said the fire may have started at Le Rendezvous. At approximately 2:30 p.m. the fronts of Seasons, 764 Main Ave.; Le Rendezvous, 750 Main Ave.; and Half-Price Tees, 758 Main Ave.; blew out at about 2:30 p.m., showering the street with flying glass, bricks and other debris. Scanner reported fire fighters still had “active fire” at Seasons at...

Woman, 89, uses ax to break into home Wed Feb 13, 1:28 AM ET DURANGO, Colo. - An 89-year-old woman used an ax to break into her own home after she locked herself out on a patio hemmed in by deep snow. "I had to bang the glass four times with the ax before it broke," said Geraldine "Gerry" Palmer, who turns 90 this weekend. Palmer said a sliding glass door locked behind her Saturday after she went outside to rearrange some things that had gotten wet on the patio. Snow sliding off the patio roof had formed a pile...

A car bomb has exploded in the city of Durango in Spain's Basque country, lightly wounding two policemen. No-one has admitted carrying out the attack, but officials have blamed the Basque separatist group Eta which called off a ceasefire in June. The bomb exploded in a car parked outside a police barracks in Durango, about 40km (25 miles) south of Bilbao, at 0330 (0130 GMT). A second car bomb exploded in nearby Amorebieta about one hour later. Police said the second car was used by the bombers to flee the scene of the first bombing. There were no injuries or...

Emails Obtained by Face the State; Conservative Members Concerned As business leaders prepare to meet here today as part of the highly influential Club 20, they may just be in for a heated debate. E-mails obtained by Face the State reveal the desires of a one liberal member, San Miguel County Commissioner Art Goodtimes, to bypass Club policies and pull the organization away from its traditional focus. The organization, long active in Colorado politics and seen as the voice for western Colorado business and environmental issues, is convening its committee on agriculture, energy, water, public lands, and natural resources, to...

MEXICO CITY — An assistant state prosecutor in Mexico was detained for questioning in an investigation into the killing of an opposition politician and four others, and the passing of information to drug traffickers. In the border city of Nuevo Laredo, gunmen wielding assault rifles attacked a vehicle carrying a federal Congressman, wounding him and killing his driver just a day after the government announced a crackdown on drug crime in the area. The detention of prosecutor Hugo Resendiz Martinez, who was immediately fired from his post in the northern state of Durango and taken to Mexico City, was a...

The explosives stolen from a West Side storage area were powerful enough to have blown shrapnel more than a half-mile along the highways the thieves drove after stealing the material, a federal agent testified Wednesday. None of the suspects apparently had any training in dealing with explosives, said agent Gary Ainsworth of the BATF. When recovered, he said, the explosives and detonators were packed together— a distinctly bad idea with things that go bang. An air unit helped locate the metal shed where the stolen magazines— steel boxes with wooden interiors made specifically for explosives— were being stored. According to...

Thieves who stole 400 pounds of explosives from a location west of Albuquerque also apparently took a Wells Cargo trailer used to store them and a truck to haul them, according to a papers unsealed in federal court this morning. The advertised $50,000 reward led a confidential informant to a lawyer's office in Durango on Friday with information about the stolen items and the men who took them, an affidavit reveals. But the documents failed to shed any light on how the thieves knew about the explosives or what they planned to do with them. Information from a confidential source...