Free Republic

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.