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WASHINGTON - U.S. criminal investigators found no evidence to support the claim of Marines charged in the deaths of unarmed Iraqi civilians that five were shot after trying to flee the scene of a roadside bombing that killed one Marine, a senior defense official said Saturday. Investigators determined that all five Iraqis were shot within arm's length of each other and no more than 18 feet from the white taxi they were ordered to exit by members of a Marine squad in the western Iraqi town of Haditha, said the official, who is familiar with reports produced by the Naval...

Red America, my new blog at washingtonpost.com, has been under attack since its launch. It is a conservative blog on a mainstream media site, so many of the attacks were expected. If one bothers to read it, I believe it stands as a welcome addition to the opinion debate. The hate mail that I have received since the launch of this blog has been overwhelmingly profane and violent. My family has been threatened; my friends have been deluged; my phone has been prank called. The most recent email that showed up while writing this post talked about how the author...

GAFFNEY -- The nation will have a chance to see the state's case against five Spartanburg County teenagers charged with a racially motivated attack when Court TV airs coverage of the trial next week.

DETROIT - A full-page newspaper advertisement depicting black corpses hanging from trees and likening media coverage of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to lynching has drawn criticism in the home stretch of his re-election campaign. The mayor distanced himself from the ad, which was published this week in the city's largest black newspaper and echoes complaints he has made about media coverage. "This advertisement is not affiliated in any way with the Kilpatrick administration or the Kilpatrick for Mayor campaign," Kilpatrick said in a statement. "Detroiters are very passionate people, and while I appreciate the spirit of some of the content, I...

DETROIT - An advertisement in a local weekly newspaper has caused some controversy over its words and a photograph, Local 4 reported. The full-page ad on the back page of this week's The Michigan Citizen carries the headline, "Lynching Is Still Legal in America," and bears a photograph of three black men being lynched. The ad was purchased by the Citizens for Honest Government with the intention of depicting Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick as a victim of media lynching, Local 4 reported. The price of the ad was not disclosed, but according to the rates posted on the newspaper's Web site,...

  Nigerian lynched for witchcraft   A mob in northern Nigeria has beaten to death a man who police say confessed to involvement in ritual murders.The incident came after three women were found murdered and mutilated in Bakori town in Katsina state. Their body parts are thought to have been removed for use in rituals. A police spokesman said that on Thursday, passers-by apprehended a man who appeared to be attacking another woman, who was screaming for help. "They took him to the office of the traditional chief of the town where he confessed to taking part in the...

WASHINGTON – In more than 200 years, the United States Senate has rarely found an occasion to apologize. But today the body is expected to apologize to lynching victims and their families for the Senate’s failure to enact federal anti-lynching legislation during the first part of the 20th century. From 1890 to 1960, 4,742 Americans were documented as having been lynched, with actual numbers believed to be much higher. During that time, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced to the United States Congress. The United States House of Representatives even passed three anti-lynching bills, but all failed on the floor...

(CBS 5) Oakland police are learning more about a brutal beating caught on tape and sold on DVD. The DVD is called "World's Wildest Street Fights," and the scene was taped in Oakland about three years ago. Oakland police found out about the tape Monday, and don't know who the victim is, or if she's alive. "As it stands right now, or homicide section has not been able to identify any unsolved homicides for that time period," said Oakland Police Department spokesperson Danielle Ashford. Investigators believe that the woman was attacked in a parking lot that is now a charter...

MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) - Jewish congregations gathered in a suburban shopping center Wednesday to remember the lynching of a Jewish businessman on the same spot 90 years ago. Leo Frank was kidnapped from prison and hanged in 1915 after being convicted of killing a teenage girl at a pencil factory. Frank, a 29-year-old from New York City, had been sentenced to death for the 1913 strangulation of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old worker whose body was found in the factory's coal bin. But the evidence against Frank was thin, and the governor commuted the sentence to life in prison. Two months...

Letter from North America: “ ‘Ling Chi’ [lynching’s] Shadow” BBC Special Internet Correspondent: Fang Hu Zhai‘Ling chi’, using a knife to dismember a person piece by piece, was a method of torture practiced in ancient China. I am using ling chi here however as a borrowed translation to describe the history of ‘lynching’ in the United States. Most of the history of lynching, the “illegal punishment” by hanging of a criminal without any legal process whatsoever, is tied to southern white racists. In the past, they wantonly killed blacks, other minorities, even white people who opposed their views, and thus...

ISRAELI Arab leaders have called on the Government to refrain from investigating the lynching by Arabs of an Israeli soldier who shot dead four Arabs, including two women, on a bus last Thursday. Knesset member Mohammed Barakei warned that protests could erupt throughout the Arab sector if an investigation is carried out into the soldier's killing. A security official in the Israeli Arab town of Shfaram, where the shootings occurred, said the soldier, Eden Natan Zada, had been beaten to death by the mob after he had been subdued by police and handcuffed. But Mr Barakei denied this, and said...

WALTON COUNTY — With the 59th anniversary of the Moore’s Ford lynchings coming up on Monday, activists are gearing up for a re-enactment of the tragedy. Two black couples, George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Dorothy and Roger Malcom, were killed by a lynch mob of unmasked white men at the Moore’s Ford bridge on July 25, 1946. On Friday, state Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-47, of Atlanta) held a press conference in Monroe to provide more details about the re-enactment

------------------------ Today: July 25, 2005 at 8:8:21 PDT Re-Enactment of 1946 Lynchings Planned By ERRIN HAINES ASSOCIATED PRESS ATLANTA (AP) - Civil rights activists in Georgia hope to stage a re-enactment today of the lynchings that took place on July 25, 1946.

Reid cited Justice Hugo Black of Alabama as a former senator who was appointed to the Supreme Court. Black, a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth, was appointed to the court by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937. “I think it is a great idea,” Reid said about the possibility of appointing a senator to the Supreme Court. “Some outstanding people have come from the Senate. The last was an ex-Ku Klux Klansman who turned out to be one of the greatest civil-rights jurists of all time.”

JUST WHO OWES lynching victims an apology? Judging from some of the commentaries we've seen, you'd think the eight Republicans who did not cosponsor the Senate's lynching apology — including Sens. Judd Gregg and John Sununu — had all been unmasked as former Ku Klux Klan members. (The bill passed on a voice vote with no objections.) But alas, the only former Klansman in the Senate is a Democrat, which brings us to the issue at hand. What the Senate passed last week was not an anti-lynching bill, as some have portrayed it. It was a formal apology by the...

What, me apologize? Jay Bryant June 21, 2005 The United States Senate has passed a resolution, sponsored by Republican George Allen of Virginia and Democrat Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, apologizing as an institution for preventing the passage of anti-lynching legislation. We are still waiting for the Democratic Party to apologize for its role, which is far greater than that of the whole Senate, inasmuch as all the senators who prevented action to abolish lynching for all those decades, were Democrats. The old massahs were Democrats, too, and so were the whip-toting overseers who carried out their brutality on what they...

The United States Senate has passed a resolution, sponsored by Republican George Allen of Virginia and Democrat Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, apologizing as an institution for preventing the passage of anti-lynching legislation. We are still waiting for the Democratic Party to apologize for its role, which is far greater than that of the whole Senate, inasmuch as all the senators who prevented action to abolish lynching for all those decades, were Democrats. The old massahs were Democrats, too, and so were the whip-toting overseers who carried out their brutality on what they regarded as sub-human chattel. The sponsors of Jim...

"The U.S. Senate last night approved a resolution apologizing for its failure to enact federal anti-lynching legislation decades ago, marking the first time the body has apologized for the nation's treatment of African-Americans." The Washington Post, June 14, 2005. --snip-- The Senate wants you to know how terribly, sincerely sorry they are even though not a single member of today's Senate was even in office the last time America saw a lynching. Some were not even born. But that's the way we prefer our apologies in American politics. We don't apologize for our own sins. Bill Clinton never apologized for...

(AgapePress) - This year's Senate apology casts a vote of regret for Senate inaction on lynchings. All in favor, say "Aye!" And for those who didn't sign up as co-sponsors (only 15 of 100 senators didn't), get ready for reporters' phone calls. Apparently, Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran -- not a co-sponsor -- actually answered one of those calls. "I don't feel that I should apologize for the passage or the failure to pass any legislation by the U.S. Senate." He declined, he said, because he felt he could not say sorry for "something I did not do." Cochran's words were...

US examiner concludes that brain damage was irreversible An autopsy on Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman whose condition sparked a legal, medical and political battle that divided America, has backed her husband's contention that she was in a persistent vegetative state before her feeding tube was removed. The report, released yesterday by a medical examiner in Florida,found she had massive and irreversible brain damage, and was blind. It found no evidence she had been strangled or that Michael Schiavo, her husband, had abused her, as her parents had claimed. But the cause of her collapse 15 years ago remains...