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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The scene repeats itself daily on city streets: a driver gets stuck bumper to bumper, blocking an intersection and preventing another car from turning left. But authorities say that was enough to cause Edwin Ramos to unload an AK-47 assault weapon on a man and his two sons, killing them. The deaths immediately drew public outrage, which intensified when authorities revealed that Ramos, 21, is an illegal immigrant who managed to avoid deportation despite previous brushes with the law.

Commentary by Daniel T. Zanoza, Executive Director So, it happens again, this time at Northern Illinois University. Five students are killed by a mad man, numerous others are wounded and then the killer takes his own life. For the next few weeks, we will be hearing loads of speculation as to why. Some will blame the DeKalb, Illinois killings on guns. Some will say the lack of guns at the University prevented school security from defending the innocent. And then some will go into the deeper, psychological explanations for why these young people kill. But many will miss the mark....

I know that many are, rightly, focused on the Primaries and elections. However, news is also happening around the world. Many of these events may not seem to affect those within the US. However, events in other nations show patterns. Patterns point to outcomes. Outcomes which will directly affect America. Today's post focuses on a series of stories from the UK The first article is from The Sydney Morning Herald concerning honor killings among Islamics. Sadly, this cancer of honor killings extends to the US and Canada, but that is for another post. The grainy video, taken on a mobile...

2 charged in Wash. holiday killingsBy DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP Associated Press Writer Posted on Fri, Dec. 28, 2007 AP Photo - King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, left, and Prosecutor Dan Satterberg leave after addressing members of the media to explain charges being filed against a couple accused of killing members of the woman's family, Friday, Dec. 28, 2007, in Seattle. Michele K. Anderson and Joseph Thomas McEnroe, both 29, were charged Friday with aggravated first-degree murder in the methodical Christmas Eve shooting deaths of her parents, her brother, his wife and their two young children. The two were ordered held...

MEXICO CITY - A wave of organized crime violence terrorizing many parts of Mexico is driving fear into the heart of the entertainment business with the murders of several popular musicians, suggesting no one is immune to the rampant brutality. Most disquieting were the weekend slayings of two singers who had crooned only about love and loss, not drugs and guns like some "narcocorrido" celebrities killed in the past. The murders of Sergio Gomez, lead performer for the top-selling group K-Paz de la Sierra, and Zayda Pena of the group Zayda and the Guilty Ones has mainstream singers worrying they...

Austrian Man Shoots Colleague, Slices off Penis in 'Honor Killing' VIENNA, Austria — Austrian authorities said Thursday they arrested an elderly Turkish-born man suspected of fatally shooting a younger Turkish associate and slicing off the victim's penis in what investigators called an "honor killing." ... Officials said witnesses claimed the man allegedly shot the victim, a 58-year-old Turkish-born man, in the street with a shotgun at point-blank range and then cut off his penis with a knife, leaving him to bleed to death. Two teams of surgeons worked at the scene to save the man but were unable to revive...

NEWARK, N.J. -- Three of the young people had been ordered to line up against a wall on the weedy steps behind an elementary school and were shot to death from close range. A fourth was found alive by police slumped near a set of bleachers about 30 feet away, with gunshot and knife wounds to her head. All were from Newark; and all would soon either start or resume their lives away from the violent city, at a college hundreds of miles away. Ofemi Hightower been accepted Thursday to Delaware State University after two years of rejection letters. Terrance...

Mexico takes gloves offPresident gambles with use of military in drug crackdown By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post Article Last Updated: 07/09/2007 07:25:29 AM PDT MEXICO CITY — Every Monday morning, President Felipe Calderon settles in at the head of the table in the presidential library at Los Pinos, Mexico's fortresslike chief executive's compound. Calderon presides over strategy sessions with the leaders of Mexico's army and navy, key players in the centerpiece initiative of his seven-month-old presidency: a military assault against drug cartels. No Mexican president in recent history has convened his security council with such regularity, but few of his...

Forty-eight police officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty last year, the FBI said Monday. Forty-six were shot and killed and two were struck by vehicles. The 48 officers intentionally killed were among 114 who died in the line of duty. Both numbers were down slightly from last year. [Snip] Nearly half of the intentional killings, 22, occurred in the South. Eleven officers were killed in the West, seven in the Northeast, six in the Midwest and two in Puerto Rico Seven fewer officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty last year than in 2005. The...

THIS WEEK, California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez and a group of Democratic legislators will reintroduce the California Compassionate Choices Act, which would allow terminally ill patients found to be of sound mind to request medication from doctors "to provide comfort with an assurance of peaceful dying if suffering becomes unbearable." Like the 1994 Oregon Death with Dignity law it is based on, the California bill nowhere mentions suicide, except to say that "actions taken in accordance with this bill shall not constitute suicide or homicide." That clause was framed to address concerns about legal liability, but the avoidance of "suicide"...

ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Vanishing students. Dead bodies. Fears something sinister is lurking in the shadows. A string of college student drownings across the Midwest has all the makings of great mystery. Or does it? Rumors have persisted for years that a serial killer is prowling Interstate 94, hunting young men in college bars and plunging them underwater. Investigators, though, say there's no evidence of foul play. They say the victims were so drunk they fell in the river and died. Not so fast, says criminologist Douglas Gilbertson. An assistant criminology professor at St. Cloud State University, Gilbertson has spent...

FORT PIERCE, Florida (CNN) -- Four "persons of interest" were being held in the Palm Beach County Jail on Friday in connection with the shooting deaths of a family of four this month along Florida's Turnpike, authorities said. The people in custody, who were not identified, were being held on federal drug charges, authorities said. "We are looking for more people," a law enforcement source said. A late-morning news conference was scheduled to discuss the case. Late Thursday, the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office issued a nationwide bulletin asking people to be on the lookout for a 1999 red Dodge...

Police are investigating a Saturday shooting in Mesa to find out if it's connected with the Serial Shooter, who has targeted parts of the Valley since May 2005. Related Links Today's Top Stories News "We are not 100 percent sure if it is linked, but we want to err on the side of caution and let the community know it's a possibility," said Mesa Sgt. Chuck Trapani. Like the 34 shootings in the West Valley, Phoenix and Scottsdale that police believe were committed by a serial killer, Mesa's recent shooting occurred in the early morning to a victim who was...

Sunnis wage online war over killings By Jim Muir, in Baghdad (Filed: 08/07/2006) A heated internet debate has developed among militant Sunnis over the tactic of murdering large numbers of Shia civilians. The outcome of the website exchanges could be crucial in deciding whether Iraq can pull back from the brink of civil war. The discussions were prompted by a bomb attack last Saturday that killed at least 66 people in the Baghdad slum district of Sadr City. A statement claiming responsibility gave a sense of the bitterness felt by many Sunnis, now an angry minority in a country they...

BEIJI, Iraq - Investigators believe a group of U.S. soldiers suspected of raping an Iraqi woman, then killing her and three members of her family plotted the attack for nearly a week, a U.S. military official said Saturday. Up to five soldiers are being investigated in the March killings, the fifth pending case involving alleged slayings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops. The Americans entered the Sunni Arab’s family home, separated three males from the woman, raped her and burned her body using a flammable liquid in a cover-up attempt, a military official close to the investigation said. The three...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Army general investigating whether military personnel tried to cover up any part of the alleged massacre of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians in Haditha late last year has completed his report. Army Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell has sent his report to Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, and U.S. military officials there were expected to announce that Friday, according to a senior defense official. No information about his findings was provided. The official, who requested anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made, said there is no timetable for how...

Hundreds Palestinian security forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas went on a violent rampage against the Hamas-led government Monday night, riddling the parliament and Cabinet buildings with bullets to protest an attack against their comrades in the Gaza Strip by Hamas gunmen. The security men shot out the windows of the parliament before storming the two-building Cabinet complex, where they smashed furniture, destroyed computers and scattered documents. No casualties were reported. But the mob set fire to one of the Cabinet buildings, causing heavy damage as flames quickly spread. "Every time they touch one of ours in Gaza, we will...

NEW YORK - On a March morning in 1968, American troops swept into a village on South Vietnam's central coast in search of communist guerrillas. Instead, they found unarmed civilians — and gunned them down, leaving bodies huddled in ditches. Nearly four decades later, the notorious name of that hamlet — My Lai — has been summoned from memory again, as the U.S. military investigates allegations of mass civilian killings by a group of Marines in the western Iraqi town of Haditha. While the numbers differ — upward of 300 at My Lai, compared to 24 at Haditha — some...

June 1, 2006 — Military sources told ABC News that there are likely to be charges filed against officers up the chain of command in connection with the killing of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, in November 2005. Those who could be charged include senior officers who were not on the scene at the time of the killing but should have known something wrong had happened and done something about it. Today the White House confirmed that it was nearly three months after the Haditha killings that an investigation began, only after Time Magazine showed a video...

CORINTH, Maine - The Maine Department of Public Safety has no plans to change the state's Web-based sex offender registry despite the killings of two sex offenders whose addresses were apparently obtained online. A Canadian man used the registry to obtain personal information about the victims, authorities said, renewing fears that such lists expose ex-convicts to vigilante violence. "The events of the weekend will obviously be reviewed, but there are no plans to change the Web site at this point," Stephen McCausland, Maine Public Safety spokesman, said Monday. The gunman, Stephen A. Marshall, a 20-year-old from Nova Scotia's Cape Breton,...

Hiding and terrified, some of those inside a Capitol Hill house where six people were shot dead during a post-rave party Saturday managed to call 911 for help, whispering to avoid discovery by the heavily armed gunman, authorities said Monday. Kyle Aaron Huff, 28, taunted his victims at the home at 2112 E. Republican St., saying as he fired, "There's plenty for everyone." Four men were killed in the rampage, but the most shocking revelations came Monday, when authorities disclosed that the other two victims were young girls: a 14-year-old from Milton and a 15-year-old from Bellevue. The King County...

Ankara - Honour killings and blood feuds have claimed 1 190 lives in Turkey in the past six years, despite tougher penalties for such crimes, say police on Friday. Police said that the figures showed that most of the victims and suspected perpetrators were from the country's mainly Kurdish east and southeast, where the practice of killing to clear one's honour was still widespread among the largely feudal population. Of the victims, 710 were male and 480 female, but the proportion of men who were suspects in murders was far higher at 1 413 men to just 180 women. The...

Judith Apter Klinghoffer at the History News Network reports that Nigerian Christians are being macheted by Muslims "outraged at the Danish cartoon nonsense. Gateway Pundit is reporting that 35 persons have been killed, 30 churches burned, and 5 hotels set ablaze. Rantings of a Sandmonkey is reporting injuries, but no deaths yet, in Egypt. In an update, Klinghoffer reports that Nigerian Christians are retaliating: Finally, MSM has the story it has been waiting for, a story about Christians and Muslims killing each other. As I have noted bellow, the Christians have concluded that they can either continue to die or retaliate....

Gang killings put LA on course as murder capital By Catherine Elsworth in Compton (Filed: 26/01/2006) Killings in Compton, the hub of gangland activity in Los Angeles, have risen to the highest levels in 10 years. Homicides increased by 72 per cent last year, putting the district on course to become the murder capital of the US. Nearly 70 people were killed in Compton city itself while at least 10 more were murdered near the area's boundaries. The once-affluent city is known for brutality and guns and during a guns-for-gifts amnesty over Christmas, 610 firearms were handed in, including AK-47s...

The man accused of killing American nun and rain forest defender Dorothy Stang told a jury Friday that he acted in self-defense after mistaking her Bible for a gun. Rayfran das Neves Sales is accused of killing Stang, 73, with six shots from a .38-caliber revolver on Feb. 12 on a muddy road deep in the heart of the Amazon rain forest. Sales testified he and Stang had an argument over who owned the land he was working, and that Stang threatened to "finish him off" with the help of some 150 people living on a sustainable development reserve she...

BANGKOK, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Militants raided a village in Thailand's restive Muslim-majority south overnight, shooting dead up to nine people and wounding eight others, the army said on Wednesday. Residents of Baan Gra Thong, a Muslim village in the southern province of Narathiwat, were blaming the killings on security forces and were barring police and army officials from entry, southern Army spokesman Acra Tiprote said. But he said the army was not responsible. "This is the work of troublemakers who created the incident and blamed it on security officials," the spokesman said. "We have learned that eight or nine...

Baghdad's mortuary reels under the weight of killings By Oliver Poole in Baghdad (Filed: 07/11/2005) The bodies are arriving at the mortuary in Baghdad in such large numbers that the orderlies have run out of places to store them properly. They are forced to leave them in piles in the overloaded freezer compartments or send them for burial in anonymous graves. Grief at the funeral of a driver, killed on Saturday by gunmen Last month there were 972 corpses received, almost all victims of violent death. The vast majority were brought in with bullet holes. Many had their hands bound...

They say if you want a donkey to do something, get his attention first. So, whack him on the head with a 2-by-4. That'll do it. But what about people? How many times do humans have to be hit on the head before they pay attention? Oh, I don't know. Let me count the ways: The U.S. Embassy takeover in Iran; the Hezbollah kidnapping of 20 U.S. and other hostages in Lebanon; destruction of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut; destruction of the U.S. military barracks at Beirut airport; truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait; truck bombing of U.S....

N.C. Hearing Opens on 1979 Klan Killings By TIM WHITMIRE, Associated Press Writer 32 minutes ago Signe Waller, right, is comforted by Cory Wechler, a friend, on stage as she reads her prepared statement, Friday, July 15, 2005, during the public hearing of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro, N.C. Waller was at the November 3, 1979 anti-Ku Klux Klan rally when a violent confrontation between Communist Workers Party members and the Ku Klux at Morningside Homes in Greensboro, left five CWP members dead, including her husband Dr. Jim Waller. (AP Photo/Lynn Hey) GREENSBORO, N.C. - The widow...

More than 7,000 felons have failed to report to their parole agents in Los Angeles County and are considered "at large," with warrants issued for their arrest, California Corrections Department documents show. As of last month, nearly 20 percent of the 35,500 parolees released in Los Angeles County had failed to report -- accounting for more than one-third of the 19,380 parole violators statewide, documents show. With nearly 114,000 parolees across the state and just 3,100 parole employees, analysts say the figures highlight a system in dire need of funding and reform. "We have too many inmates and not enough...

Multan - A Pakistani poured kerosene over his sleeping wife and daughter and burned them to death in the country's latest example of "honour killings", said police on Monday. Police said the 45-year-old man, named as Jalil Ahmed, snapped after his brother caught his daughter having sex with a neighbour in the remote town of Samasatta, about 105km south of the central city of Multan. Police officer Arif Nawaz said that he rushed back from his workplace in Karachi and with the help of his brother tied the 20-year-old girl, named as Shomaila, and her mother to wooden beds as...

KARACHI (Reuters) - Six people, including three assailants, were killed in a suicide bomb attack on Monday at a minority Shi'ite Muslim mosque in southern Pakistan, the latest religious violence to rock the country, officials said. At least 18 other people were wounded, four seriously, in the attack at the Mandinatul Ilm mosque in a middle-class area of the port city of Karachi, hospital officials said. It was the latest incident of religious violence to hit a key ally in the U.S.-led war on terrorism. It came after a suicide bombing at a Muslim festival in the capital Islamabad on...

JERUSALEM (AP) - The man behind the contentious practice of killing Palestinian militants with missile strikes became head of Israel's feared Shin Bet security service Sunday, taking charge of the agency at a time when it faces the additional task of watching Jewish extremists. At his swearing-in, Yuval Diskin warned that Palestinian militants, who have been observing a cease-fire, could resume attacks at any time. "We have to be ready for a renewed outbreak of terror and fight it with determination and professionalism," said Diskin, only the fourth chief of the secretive agency to appear in public while in office....

More people were executed in 2004 than any year since 1996, according to Amnesty International. At least 3,797 people were executed in 25 countries in 2004 - the vast majority in China. The charity, which is calling for the abolition of the death penalty, found executions had peaked at the second highest level for 25 years. Only four countries accounted for 97% of all deaths. China executed at least 3,400 people, Iran executed at least 159, Vietnam at least 64 and the USA 59. China refuses to give official figures for executions, but in March 2004 a delegate at the...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico- Three suspects wanted for years in the killings of women in this industrial border city have been tracked down after spending time in jails and a mental hospital, authorities said Sunday. Nearly 350 women have been killed since 1993 in Ciudad Juarez, located across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, according to federal investigators. About 100 killings of those killings follow an eerily similar pattern in which slender, young women were sexually assaulted, strangled and dumped in the desert. Martin Alberto Favila was arrested Friday in connection with the 1997 killing of Elisa Rivera Rodriguez, said...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than 100 alleged members of the violent Central American street gang MS-13 have been arrested in a nationwide sweep, authorities said Monday. Using information from local and state law enforcement agencies, federal agents charged 103 members of the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, gang with a range of criminal and immigration charges. The arrests came in the New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Newark, Miami and Dallas metropolitan areas over the last several weeks. Officials said MS-13 is one of the largest and most violent street gangs in the United States, and the majority of its members...

Ashley Smith, the former hostage of Brian Nichols, the man suspected of the Atlanta courthouse murders, will be on Hannity in less than an half hour.

Just two days after moving into her Duluth apartment, Ashley Smith is up late unpacking. At about 2 a.m. Saturday the 26-year-old runs out of cigarettes and heads to a local convenience store to buy a pack. When she returns, she sees a man in a truck was waiting outside her door. She had seen the man earlier but didn't think much of it. She gets out of her car and shuts the door. She hears the door on the truck close at about the same time. Fear rises in her. Holding her key in her hand, she makes her...

March 6th marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Manhattan town house explosion that killed radical activists Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins. Oughton, Gold and Robbins were all members of the Weather Underground, a radical offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, but their revolutionary zeal exceeded their expertise in bomb-making. Had they successfully assembled and transported their bomb instead of blowing themselves up, many more people would be dead. The bomb was intended for a soldiers’ dance at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. The late Diana and her friends wanted to murder soldiers and their dates to express...

Robbery, not religion, motive in Jersey City family slaying By WAYNE PARRY ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER JERSEY CITY, N.J. — Robbery, not religion, was the motive behind the savage slaying of a family of four in January, prosecutors said Friday. Two paroled drug dealers who were deeply in debt were charged with four counts of murder and held on $10 million bail in the Jan. 11 killing of the Armanious family, Coptic Christians from Egypt who emigrated to the United States in 1997. Friends of the family had speculated that Hossam Armanious might have angered Muslims with postings he made in...

London 26.02.05 | There is a saying in Venezuela that goes "el que tiene rabo de paja que no se acerque a la candela" which can be equated to "If you live in a glasshouse don't throw stones". The regime of Hugo Chavez has issued an arrest warrant for former Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Perez (CAP) purportedly for having ordered the application of the Avila Plan back in 1.989. As a result very many people were killed by the army. Fast forward 13 years and hear the recording [power point presentation and sound] of current president Hugo Chavez ordering General...

MEXICO CITY- Mexico's federal attorney general's office said Sunday it will investigate the killings of two U.S. citizens and two Mexicans in the central Mexican state of Michoacan. Omar Chavez and Alejandro Munoz, both of Dallas, were among four people whose bullet-ridden bodies were discovered Friday near Tacambaro, about 150 miles west of Mexico City. The four men were reported missing more than a week before their decomposing bodies were found. Authorities found 60 spent rounds of ammunition and one live round that suggested an assault rifle and another military firearm had been used in the killings, according to a...

AMSTERDAM — The Dutch Cabinet has promised it will act quickly to protect seriously threatened immigrant women, many of whom are Islamic and living in fear of an "honour killing". The cabinet partially met an impassioned plea from Liberal VVD MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who threatened during an emotional parliamentary debate on Thursday to lodge a "motion of sadness" against Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner. Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of Islam, said Donner was not doing enough to protect Islamic women. In fact, she claimed the Christian Democrat CDA minister had never woken up from fairytale land, news service...

AMSTERDAM — Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner has rejected a call by MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali to use the intelligence service AIVD to tackle honour killings. Speaking on radio on Friday, Donner said honour crimes and killings were "ordinary crimes" and would continue to be treated as such. Hirsi Ali said in an interview with newspaper De Volkskrant that the police should not only go after the person who actually carries out the killing but also the family members involved in the planning. She suggested the AIVD should be used to gather evidence against all the guilty members of the...

Christian family butchered in NJ -- big thread at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1321798/posts?q=1&&page=1#1  'I don't want you to join me, I want you to join bin Laden'(Paltalk connection to NJ murders?)  See thread: here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1313753/posts for information.  Four family members slain in their Jersey City, NJ home   FAMILY OF 4 SLAUGHTERED   'ISLAMIC HATE' EYED IN SLAYS(threatened for making anti-Muslim remarks online)   Slaying of 4 may be tied to (Islamic) religious extremism (NJ Christian family had throats slit)   ISLAMIC HATE' EYED IN SLAYS   Islamics suspected in multiple slaying in NJ   Tension between Copts, Muslims also immigrated    I...

BANGKOK: Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra vowed to continue arresting ringleaders of separatist attacks as a volunteer rescue worker became the latest victim of violence that has claimed more than 560 lives this year. Part-time rescue volunteer Phanom Promsa-ard, 46, was killed instantly when gunmen shot him four times as he rode to work in southern Pattani province, said police. Police said the killing was carried out by a gunman riding a motorbike, which they described as a "trade-mark" style of attack for southern insurgents. The slaying came as Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra warned that police would shortly issue a further...

Hugo Chavez has begun to kill and repress selectively Until now, the murders -- and they add up to about 100 -- have been random. Someone would fire at a crowd from a bridge and 20 unarmed Caracans would fall dead. There was nothing personal. The objective was to kill anybody. Or, some gunmen would fire against some peaceful demonstrators on a public square, killing Mrs. Maritza Ron, who had traveled to Venezuela to vote against Chavez. They killed her because she was there, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing personal. It could have been a child,...

AL KOSHEH, Egypt - On a sweltering night last summer, the bodies of two slain Christian men were dumped in the center of the Christian neighborhood of this remote village on the banks of the upper Nile River. What began as a local investigation into their murders has exploded into a national case that has reopened old and deep wounds for the Coptic Christian minority living in Egypt's Muslim society. And it has become a dramatic example of the religious intolerance that is pushing Egypt's Christians to steadily leave their homeland. In the weeks after the Aug. 14 murder, the...

1997 MARTYRS OF THE COPTIC CHURCHRodolph Yanney, MD For years the Egyptian Christians have been suffering from the terrorism of militant Muslim groups. Such acts as murdering peaceful Christians in their homes, kidnapping young girls to rape them or force them to marry Muslims, and burning churches and houses have been of common occurrences during the last decade. The police does not intervene when Islamic militants attack Copts. In many cities and villages in Upper Egypt, prominent Christians are forced to pay regularly to the militant Islamic groups what is called gizyah or protection money. Some Egyptian newspapers have reported...

Under President Hugo Chávez, the rule of law in Venezuela has been deteriorating steadily -- some would say precipitously -- for a long time. Two recent events have made matters much worse. The Chávez-controlled Congress last week approved a ''media reform'' bill that imposes stiff censorship on one of the few remaining independent institutions in the country. More urgently, the assassination of prosecutor Danilo Anderson 10 days ago has set off a series of arrests and at least two police killings of ''suspects'' under circumstances that are far from clear. Political killing Mr. Anderson was said to be investigating some...