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For more than two hours on a dark Saturday night, as many as 20 people watched or took part as a 15-year-old California girl was allegedly gang raped and beaten outside a high school homecoming dance, authorities said. As hundreds of students gathered in the school gym, outside in a dimly lit alley where the victim was allegedly raped, police say witnesses took photos. Others laughed. "As people announced over time that this was going on, more people came to see, and some actually participated," Lt. Mark Gagan of the Richmond Police Department told CNN. The witnesses failed to report...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Decades after the civil rights movement, racial disparities in income, education and home ownership persist and, by some measurements, are growing. White households had incomes that were two-thirds higher than blacks and 40 percent higher than Hispanics last year, according to data released today by the Census Bureau. White adults were also more likely than black and Hispanic adults to have college degrees and to own their own homes. They were less likely to live in poverty. "Race is so associated with class in the United States that it may not be direct discrimination, but it still...

By Seema Mehta, Times Staff Writer October 17, 2006 A teenage boy dances behind his winter-formal date, hands on her hips, thrusting his pelvis against her while she hitches up her satiny gown and bends at the waist. Another couple dance facing each other, their bodies enmeshed and their hips gyrating in a frenzy. A boy approaches a third couple, nearly sandwiching the girl between himself and her partner. Teenagers call it "freaking," a style of dance made popular on MTV. Educators call it "simulated sex" that has no place at school dances. This clash between outraged adults and sexualized...

How's this for chilling -- the night before she was shot in Berkeley over the summer, Dartmouth College student Meleia Willis-Starbuck handled the very gun that was used to kill her. That's the story Willis-Starbuck's friend and accused killer Christopher Hollis is telling authorities, and it's one of several new details emerging from the tragic shooting. The 19-year-old Willis-Starbuck, who graduated from Berkeley High School and had just finished her freshman year at Dartmouth, was arguing with a group of UC Berkeley football players and their friends on College Avenue early July 17 and reportedly used her cell phone to...

MILWAUKEE - Police have arrested one more suspect in the sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl on Milwaukee's north side. A 16-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy have already been charged with assisting in the crime and a 40-year-old man is in custody, accused of raping the young victim in a home near n. 6th and Vienna. According to the criminal complaint, the girl says she performed oral sex on as many as 15 boys and had sex with several of them, including the 40-year-old. The 11-year-old girl has HIV. Her mother died of AIDS. The incident sparked community outrage....

Milwaukee police arrested 14,000 people, snagged 200 guns and grabbed 37 pounds of cocaine - all in just three months this summer. Despite such seemingly impressive numbers, crime continues to surge, fueled by what Police Chief Nannette Hegerty calls a "societal crisis" unfolding in neighborhoods gripped by unstable families, few jobs, rampant drug use, teen pregnancy, and topped with a significant dose of anger and hopelessness, the chief said. Faced with such challenges, police can't do it all, she said. "This is a problem bigger than law enforcement," Hegerty said Wednesday. "I think we have a societal crisis." More evidence...

It's another bit of bad luck for a Marine who lost an arm and a leg in Iraq. Lance Corporal Mark Beyers was mugged and robbed outside a restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, last month. The Marine from western New York was dining out with his wife, Denise, while finishing up rehabilitation at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As they left the restaurant, five men approached them and asked for a cigarette. Denise Beyers tells The Buffalo News they gave the men a cigarette -- but the men grabbed her purse, kicked her and knocked the couple to the ground....

NEW ORLEANS - Mayor Ray Nagin, whose shoot-from-the-hip style was both praised and scorned after Hurricane Katrina, narrowly won re-election over Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu on Saturday in the race to oversee one of the biggest rebuilding projects in U.S. history. "We are ready to take off. We have citizens around the country who want to come back to the city of New Orleans, and we're going to get them all back," Nagin said in a joyful victory speech that took on the tone of Sunday sermon. "If we are unified there is nothing we cannot do," he said. "It's...

Second Girl Shot In 9 Days In Englewood (CBS) For the second time in little more than a week, another young girl is shot to death in the same Chicago neighborhood. It's a crime that has people in the Englewood neighborhood outraged. Ten-year-old Siretha White was celebrating at her own surprise birthday party Saturday night when bullets pierced the window of a home in the South Side neighborhood killing her. Just eight days earlier and just blocks away, 14-year old Starkesia Reed was also killed by a stray bullet in her home. As CBS 2's Rafael Romo reports, the...

Money for guns, latest effort to get guns off Minneapolis streets For two days only, a group calling itself Project Cease Fire will be buying back guns in Minneapolis. They'll take the guns for one day in north Minneapolis, and the following day in south Minneapolis. The program comes amid what project officials say is an epidemic of gun violence, not only in Minneapolis but around the country. Details of the program were unveiled Wednesday in north Minneapolis at the site of the first buy back. It will take place Friday from noon to midnight. "Weapons of mass destruction are...

Mandisa likes Abercrombie & Fitch, not FUBU. She speaks proper English, not Ebonics. She takes honor classes and belongs to the Beta Club and National Arts Honors Society at Parkview High. She plays the violin and has danced and sung in area productions of “The Nutcracker” and “My Fair Lady.” Mandisa Surpris, a 15-year-old sophomore, is all this. And she’s black. Some of the other black students don’t know what to make of her. The way she dresses, the way she talks, the grades she earns. She’s an anomaly. To them, she’s more white than black. They’ve even told her...

They seem almost as if they were randomly plucked from Madison's streets - the mother of a 9-month-old baby, the National Honor Roll graduate, the 16-year-old son of a University of Wisconsin Medical School professor. Except for their relative youthfulness, the 12 people charged in a gang-style shooting Aug. 9 in the village of Oregon, WI defy easy generalizations. They are rich and poor, high- achievers and juvenile delinquents. They are black and white and Hispanic and Asian. The crime they are charged with - three vehicles full of people opened fire on a home in a middle-class suburb, wounding...

Pain has become a companion for Rafael Diaz Jr. Whether he is asleep or wide awake, he can't escape it. "There is a tremendous amount of pressure around my eye," he said. "During the middle of the night it is hard because the pain is so sharp. And when I wake up in the morning, I keep asking myself, 'Why did they do this to me?' " It has been about two weeks now, and no one really knows why a group of teenagers and young adults ambushed Diaz's tanker truck off of Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway while he was...

If and when you get into that end zone, act like you've been there a thousand times before -- songwriter Gordon Downie The lyrics of that song came to mind after reading of a multiple shooting over the weekend in Penn Hills. With another multiple shooting in Penn Hills a month ago and 14 shootings in this once-quiet eastern suburb since January of 2004, this isn't exactly rare. But what makes the growing homicide rate in Penn Hills so notable is just who is doing the shooting. Most of the shooters in recent events have been African-Americans, a group...

Young people have been running amok at Sacramento showings of "Coach Carter," the Samuel L. Jackson film about a Richmond basketball coach who straightens out wayward students. Rachel Kahan was at a Century Stadium 14 showing on Arden and Ethan when a riot broke out. "Kids were beating up a security guard, and they attacked the manager," she said. "It was awful. And what makes it worse was that the behavior was exactly what the character Coach Carter is fighting against." Other showings have been disrupted by shouts and threats from boozed up fans. Paramount Pictures, which distributes "Coach Carter,"...

PATERSON, N.J. -- Six teens who were part of a mob who beat to death a homeless man three years ago were sentenced to prison for their part in the "wilding" rampage. The six Paterson youths were sentenced Friday for being part of the crowd of 16 youths charged in the killing of Hector Robles in June 2001.

Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh said that a November 19 brawl that broke out during a National Basketball Association (NBA) game was "hip-hop culture on parade." Limbaugh asserted that the fight -- which involved Indiana Pacers team members and Detroit Pistons team members and fans -- was "gang behavior on parade minus the guns," and that NBA uniforms are "now in gang colors. They are in gang styles." In making the comments, Limbaugh conceded that his remarks were likely to be "tagged as racist." Limbaugh also appeared to compare the brawl to the unrest in Fallujah, Iraq, suggesting that...