Free Republic

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...