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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...