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Handcuffed and shackled, Randal Rushing blew the awaiting media a kiss as he was led from a Wilkes-Barre apartment Thursday afternoon. Handcuffed and shackled, Randal Rushing blew the awaiting media a kiss as he was led from a Wilkes-Barre apartment Thursday afternoon. “I had fun,” the man accused of a triple homicide in Scranton said when asked whether he had killed three people. Ten hours after a grizzly discovery at his residence on South Irving Avenue — three people so badly bludgeoned that the manner of death was difficult to determine — Rushing, 25, was taken into custody just after...

Several jurors wept Monday as they listened to emotional testimony from those who lost loved ones three years ago because Juan Manuel Alvarez parked his vehicle on railway tracks, triggering the worst train wreck in Metrolink history. The tears flowed from jurors as well as witnesses on the first day of testimony in the penalty phase of Alvarez's trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court. At one point, presiding Judge William R. Pounders told the prosecutors and defense attorneys that he noticed jurors were "having a hard time." "Almost all are crying," Pounders said. He later advised the panel of...

Jurors today convicted Juan Manuel Alvarez of 11 counts of first-degree murder for the deadly Metrolink crash he caused three years ago when he parked his vehicle on railroad tracks. The jury also found the 29-year-old Compton laborer guilty of arson and a special circumstance allegation that makes him eligible for the death penalty. Jurors will now hear testimony to determine whether Alvarez should be put to death for his crimes. Alvarez sat without showing emotion as the guilty verdicts were announced in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. The jury of nine women and three men took less than two...

LOS ANGELES — Deputy Dist. Atty. John Monaghan told jurors during closing arguments Wednesday that Juan Manuel Alvarez never intended to commit suicide when he drove his SUV onto train tracks at Chevy Chase Drive, having instead perpetrated the 2005 Metrolink train derailment that killed 11 and injured more than 180 passengers as an attention-grabbing stunt. Alvarez is charged with 11 counts of murder with special circumstances and one count each of arson and train wrecking for causing a Jan. 26, 2005, three-train crash when he drove his Jeep Cherokee onto the Metrolink tracks between Glendale and Los Angeles and...

Most people have never heard of Operation Frequent Wind, which ended on April 30, 1975, 33 years ago. But every American has seen pictures of it: the Marine helicopters evacuating the last U.S. personnel from the embassy in Saigon, hours before communist tanks rolled into the city. Thousands of desperate Vietnamese gathered at the embassy gate and begged to be taken with them. Others committed suicide. Those scenes are a chilling reminder of what happens when a great power decides to cut and run. Two of the three presidential candidates are proposing to do just that in Iraq. We need...

EMORY - If 16-year-old Erin Caffey wanted to be free of her family, she seems to have received her wish. In the small hours of Saturday morning, her boyfriend, Charlie James Wilkinson, 19, and his friend, Charles Allen Waid, 20, allegedly found Erin's parents sleeping in their bed and shot her mother, 38-year-old Penny Caffey to death and maimed her father, Terry Caffey, 41, who had forbidden Erin to date Wilkinson the night before, according to a sheriff's office report of interviews with the two young men released Monday.

Andy Garcia is urging fashion-conscious rebels to stop wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the image of Latino revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara because they remind Cubans of terrible times. The actor accepts that Guevara stands for rebellion and is seen as a hero to many, but he sees the revolutionary as a butcher who killed millions of his countrymen. Argentine-born Guevara helped current Cuban leader Fidel Castro overthrow General Fulgencio Batista's government in a guerrilla revolution in the late 1950s. Garcia, who left Cuba when he was five, says, "I'd be curious to go around and ask them how much they really...

Cuban immigrant Julio Gonzalez, who was picked up in the Mariel boatlift in 1980, was mad that he lost his job packing lamps and girlfriend, Lydia Feliciano, of 7 years. He wanted to talk to his girlfriend on March 25, 1990, a Sunday. Feliciano worked at the Happyland Club in The Bronx borough of New York. The Happyland Club was ordered to be closed in late 1988 for having no fire exit doors, alarms, and sprinklers. This would prove to be deadly. Since Feliciano rebuffed him and got kicked out by a bouncer, Gonzalez, was upset over this. With revenge...

'They should hang him - my daughter and grandchild died' A white teenage boy told his mother he "snapped" just before he was arrested by police for opening fire on a South African squatter camp, killing a baby, a young boy, and two adults. "Mom, something just snapped inside me," 18-year-old Johan Nel reportedly told his mother Corrie just before he was arrested by South African police for the incident. Nel allegedly shouted the derogatory term "kaffir, kaffir, kaffir" as he began shooting his .303 rifle at the Swartruggens camp, 100 miles west of Johannesburg. His victims included a three-month-old...

CANDICE Buchan was dancing and having an "awesome time" with friends when a series of bomb blasts ripped through Bali's Sari club, killing both her parents. After being left an orphan at the age of 15, she spoke publicly for the first time today about the death of her mum and dad Gerardine and Stephen in the 2002 Bali bombings. "I still remember being in the Sari Club that night for (a friend's) birthday with a big group of us having an awesome time," Ms Buchan, now 20, told a ceremony at Coogee in Sydney to mark the fifth anniversary...

BATH — Josephine Cushman Vail will lay red tulips on the grave of her little brother today, as she has nearly every year since 1927. Ralph Cushman, then 7, died 80 years ago today, along with 44 other people in what stood for more than 60 years as the largest mass murder in the United States. Vail, 93, said she could just as easily have died with her brother when a disgruntled school board member dynamited the Bath Consolidated School in the quiet, close-knit community 13 miles northeast of Lansing. Vail, then 13, was excused from taking final exams that...

During the immediate aftermath of the massacre at Virginia Tech one week ago, the University President, Charles Steger, quickly mobilized a campaign to save his career. Within hours, shock and mourning were quickly replaced with a full-scale public relations stint. Unfortunately, President Steger was not the only one aiming to capitalize from mass murder: bloggers and commentators across the nation began advocating for a change in gun control policy - either fewer restrictions or tighter control. Wounds cannot be healed if they are not felt. The administrators at Virginia Tech played down the destruction for their personal gain and at...

In response to Mr. Cadorette in the "No More Marxists" section of the Winter 2007 publication, I cannot help but to disagree. The first thing that Mr. Cadorette has to understand is the his personal definition of Marxism is very far from the actual meaning. First of all, Marxism is NOT the same as the Socialism exhibited by the USSR. The economic system attempted by the Soviets after the Bolchevik Revolution of 1914 was not so much Marxism (although it was Karl Marx, who WAS a Russian who is the father of Marxism) as it was Socialism. Furthermore, what the...

Tech gunman shot victims over 100 times By KRISTEN GELINEAU, Associated Press Writer 12 minutes ago Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho fired enough shots to wound his 32 victims more than 100 times before killing himself with a bullet to his head, a medical examiner said Sunday. Dr. William Massello, the assistant medical examiner based in Roanoke, said pathologists have sent blood samples for toxicology testing to determine if Cho was on drugs at the time of his rampage. It could take as long as two weeks to get the results of those tests, he said. Cho was not especially...

Just before 5am on Monday, April 16, Cho Seung-hui got out of bed and walked to his computer. Perhaps he fiddled with his rambling 1,800-word self-portrait of a killer as the insults and grievances that he had been nursing for years coursed through his head. High on his list were his classmates from Westfield high school, who jeered at him to “go back to China” without bothering to check his nationality. Two of them — who happened to attend Virginia Tech — were going to pay later that day. Then there were the college girls who reported him to the...

The search for the propellant of the killer-madness in Cho Seung-Hui tells us more about disorders in American thought than about those of the murderer. Recall first and foremost that the crime was quickly identified as the “bloodiest shooting attack in American history” done by a single person. We accepted this—but quickly rejected its corollary: namely, that if it was that—the most violent rampage in 231 years of history—then it had some claim to be called unique. In fact it differs in magnitude but not in kind from shootings in which 23 or 19 people were killed. If a man...

Troubled state of Virginia Tech killer was known in '05 By Shaila Dewan and Marc Santora Wednesday, April 18, 2007 BLACKSBURG, Virginia: Campus authorities were aware 17 months ago of the troubled mental state of the student who shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday, an imbalance graphically on display in vengeful videos and a manifesto he mailed to NBC News in the time between the two sets of shootings. "You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience," the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, said in one video mailed shortly before the shooting at a...

An Image’s Ties to a Dark Movie | 8:07 PM ET A self-shot photo of Mr. Cho, above, and a still from the Web site of the movie ‘Oldboy.’ (Photos: NBC News, top; Tartan Films) The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004. The poses in the two images are similar, and the plot of the movie, “Oldboy,” seems dark enough to merit at least some further study....

So far, 32 people are dead and another 21 wounded in the attack launched by one gunman reportedly armed with two 9mm pistols and extra magazines at the campus of Virginia Tech on 4/16/07. Virginia is one of the many states with “Shall Issue” concealed gun laws, which means that if a citizen who has not been convicted of a felony or domestic violence, and not judged mentally unstable, the law requires they be issued a concealed gun permit upon request. But nobody in range of the gunman, other than late-arriving police, had a gun. To make it even more...

Within hours of the massacre of more than 30 people at Virginia Tech University, the president of the university issued his first statement on the evil that had just engulfed the college campus and concluded with this: "We're making plans for a convocation tomorrow at noon in Cassell Coliseum for the university to come together to begin the healing process from this terrible tragedy." In this photo provided by the Collegiate Times, ambulances wait on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va., following multiple shootings, Monday, April 16, 2007. At least 30 people have been reported killed. (AP Photo/Collegiate Times)...

ADMIN MOD: although this was on a blogspot, it is important news. Will you please move it to NEWS/ACTIVISM. Thanks. Dozens massacred in gun free zone. AGAIN! The news is still coming in but another tragedy has taken place on a school campus in the United States at Virginia Technical University. A gunman, in the early morning hours entered a dormitory and started shooting students. Several hours later he returned and walked into a second building and did the same thing. Almost three dozen are dead as a result. I had a horrified fear in the pit of my stomach...

MIAMI A major recall of pet food has grown in scope, with an announcement by two major pet food companies that they will voluntarily call products made under their names by a major private label manufacturer. Dog and cat food products from two more companies, Purina and Hill’s Science Diet, have been added to the list of recalled products made by Menu Foods. The pet food is widely sold throughout North America under 48 different dog-food brands and 40 cat-food labels, including Iams (eyemz), Nutro and Eukanuba. The products are distributed by major retailers like Wal-Mart, Kroger and Safeway. Two...

Let us now praise the Iraqi legal system. Scorned by international watchdog organizations and self-credentialed legal minds since its establishment in 2003 as a newly independent institution, it has now done something that the international community’s premier courts have consistently failed to do: punished, in a reasonable timeframe, a mass murderer and delivered justice to his victims. Back in November, it may be recalled, Iraq's High Tribunal judged Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to hang for the 1982 massacre of 148 Shi’ites in the city of Dujail. Initial concerns about an interminable appeals process have...

A Fatwa on the Truth http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10481 It is one of those uniquely modern Western paradoxes, to wit, that the most courageous Europeans are those forced into hiding. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, the Danish editorial cartoonists -- all are paying the price for freely expressing their opinions and beliefs -- or lack thereof. Add to that exalted list one Robert Redeker. M. Redeker, a high school philosophy professor in suburban Toulouse, is in the bouillabaisse for a commentary he wrote last month for Le Figaro in which he accused Islam of "exalting violence," and christened the Muslim prophet Muhammad a...

THE London Tube bombers plotted to kill the Australian cricket team by spraying sarin gas into their change rooms during last year's Ashes series, a friend of the terrorists claims. Al-Qaida commanders allegedly ordered the suicide bombers to get jobs at Edgbaston Cricket Ground and wipe out the Australian and England players. They were instructed to release sarin gas, a highly toxic nerve agent that is one of the world's most dangerous chemical weapons. But cricket-loving terrorist Shehzad Tanweer apparently objected and instead the terrorist cell perpetrated the July 7 underground Tube and bus bombings that killed 56 people and...

Milkman was a popular figure on his roundsTHERE were no children to greet Charles Roberts the last time he collected milk from the Fisher family farm near the Pennsylvania town of Paradise. It was in the early hours of last Monday and the excited young Amish girls who often ran out to greet his arrival were inside asleep. As a tanker driver for a Lancaster County dairy, Roberts was well known to farmers as one of the few “Englishers” — the Amish term for outsiders — who were allowed to pay regular visits to the community’s old-fashioned farms. On his...

Excerpt - PRAGUE (Reuters) - Islamic extremists planned to kidnap dozens of Jews in Prague and hold them hostage before murdering them, the daily Mlada Fronta Dnes reported on Friday. The Czech Republic's leading newspaper quoted unidentified sources close to intelligence agencies as saying the captives would have been held in a Prague synagogue while the captors made broad demands that they knew could not be fulfilled. When those demands -- which were not specified by the sources -- were not met, the extremists would blow up the building, killing all who were inside, the paper added. ~ snip ~...

NEW YORK -- President Bush and his wife Laura stood in somber silence on Sunday after laying wreaths at the site where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once soared. He later pledged "renewed resolve" to remember the lessons of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The Bushes set floral wreaths adrift in reflecting pools that mark the former location of the north and south towers at the beginning of a fifth-anniversary tour that will take them to all three sites of devastation. They uttered no words at the ceremony, and walked hand-in-hand on the floor of the cavernous...

Night was no time for rest. On the contrary, that was when the horrors began. At nine or so the executions would start.... Although we couldn't see the shootings from my galley, we could hear even the slightest sound. The still of the night and the echo of the pit made them even more pronounced." — Former political prisoner Jorge Valls,

"Everyone needs to be killed,'' Omeed Aziz Popal calmly told officers as he sat in the back of a police car after a hit-and-run rampage that left one person dead in Fremont and 19 injured in San Francisco. Just why the 29-year-old unemployed automotive worker allegedly said that remains a mystery. His family says he is mentally ill. But his comments, as recorded in police reports filed by three officers who spoke with Popal, suggest a level of planning that may belie claims of mental illness, authorities say. ................................................... Popal told one officer that he "wanted to come to San...

Brian Steidle's only weapons against mass killing were his pen, paper, and camera. The former Marine captain catalogs what they caught in Darfur, Sudan, with quick-fire urgency: toddlers with their faces smashed in, men castrated and left to bleed to death, charred bodies of villagers locked in huts later burned down. Charged only with monitoring ceasefire violations in the war-wracked region, he soon grew weary of playing spectator to genocide. So after six months, the 28-year-old Mr. Steidle returned to the United States a month ago and launched his own offensive to stop the killing. In mid-March he criss-crossed Washington,...

I was in London last week, where I gained a renewed appreciation for the religion of peace and insights into the war we are in. Thursday evening, I was lying in bed in my hotel room in Russell Square, less than 24 hours after MI-5 and the British police foiled a plot to blow up as many as 10 trans-Atlantic flights – with a potential death toll of 4,000. Officials described it as attempted “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” On the show I was watching, a BBC reporter interviewed a neighbor of one of the 24 terrorism suspects arrested...

A pizza shop owner and a biochemist. An airport worker and the son of a political official. Husbands and fathers. Students as young as 17. Meet the faces of terror. Meet the madmen next door. Outside the view of friends, family and neighbors, a group of suburban men were allegedly plotting a terror campaign to rival - and even exceed - the bloodshed of 9/11. But in a series of raids that began before dawn yesterday, British police arrested 24 people - most of them sons of Britain, most of them never suspected of any wrongdoing by their neighbors. Several...

Police statement on airline bombing plot LONDON (Reuters) - Following is the full text of a statement issued by London Deputy Commissioner, Paul Stephenson on Thursday morning: "We are confident that we have disrupted a plan by terrorists to cause untold death and destruction and commit mass murder. The Commissioner has been fully briefed and he is at New Scotland Yard today. He and I want to pay tribute to officers from the Met's Anti-Terrorist Branch and the security services for the work they have undertaken to disrupt these activities. We believe that the terrorists' aim was to smuggle...

In a recent discussion hosted at the Heritage Foundation, four authorities shared their thoughts and research on the current status and future of Communism today, offering a different take than the one most college students are likely to get in Cold War studies courses. “Who knows that the Soviet Union murdered twenty million people, and the Chinese murdered fifty million through various massacres, trials, and other acts under Communism?” Lee Edwards, Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation said. “Who knows the Communism plague has exacted a death toll surpassing that of all the wars of the 20th century...

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has taken his former secretary as his new wife, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported on Sunday, citing sources familiar with the country. His wife Ko Yong-hi, the mother of two of Kim's three sons, died of breast cancer in August 2004, the agency said. "I heard Kim has been living together with a woman named Kim Ok, who was his secretary, since Ko Yong-hi died two years ago," Yonhap quoted a South Korean government source as saying.

Bill Engvale is a member of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. For years he’s been doing a routine about stupid things that people say. Each example ends with the tag line, “Here’s your sign.” That means a big sign with STUPID written on it. Although geopolitics are not Bill’s metier, he offers a way to cut through the twaddle about the beginning of WW III. Let’s start with Howard Dean. (Remember him? He was in all the papers.) Dean cropped up today giving a fire-breathing speech to the faithful (and forlorn), screaming that we wouldn’t have these problems in the...

Two American soldiers, missing since an insurgent ambush at the checkpoint they were manning last Friday, were found dead Monday night on a street just south of Baghdad. An Iraqi General confirmed to the Associated Press that the soldiers’ bodies showed “signs of torture,” and that the men appeared to have been killed in a particularly “barbaric” way. This assertion appears to be backed up both by the fact that DNA tests were required to positively identify the remains, and by the claim of responsibility made by the self-titled new leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who posted on an Islamist...

ESTONIA, Latvia and Lithuania paid moving tributes today to the tens of thousands of men, women and children who 65 years ago were rounded up in dawn raids and sent to Siberia by the Baltic states' Soviet occupiers. In the early hours of June 14, 1941, some 10,000 Estonians, more than 15,000 Latvians and between 16,000 and 18,000 Lithuanians were herded onto cattle trains and shipped out to the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Union, where many of them died. Addressing a memorial gathering of several hundred people in a park in Tallinn, Estonian President Arnold Ruutel quoted the...

The gunman who killed six people and himself at a rave party was likely the author of a letter that complains about the rave scene and says in part, "This hippy stuff has to end," police said Tuesday. A heavily armed Kyle Huff, 28, had been invited to the party by people he met at a late-night rave. "They're packed in there, groping each other, having sex," the letter said. "I've got to do something about it. ... These people are screwing up the world." The one-page letter was addressed "to Kane" the name of Huff's twin brother, and signed,...

THE US today urged China to account for thousands killed, arrested and missing in the Tiananmen Square crackdown on democratic protesters 17 years ago, saying a reevaluation is "long overdue". "Seventeen years ago, beginning on the night of June 3 and continuing June 4, 1989, the Chinese government brutally suppressed peaceful demonstrations by its own citizens who were supporting political reform and democracy," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement. "The US urges China to provide a full accounting of the thousands who were killed, detained, or went missing and of the government's role in the massacre." Mr...

David Burke, an employee for USAir, now US Airways had his job terminated after he allegedly stole $69 from the airline fund. He pleaded for leniency, which did no good for him. Raymond Thompson was his supervisor and fired him afterwards on December 7, 1987. Thompson tells Burke to have a nice day and Burke cryptically says, "I intend on having a very good day." Later that day, he buys a one-way ticket for Pacific Southwest Airline Flight 1771 from Los Angeles International Airport to San Francisco International Airport. The airplane was a BAe-146 and at the time carried 38...

6 April 2005   http://www.lapl.org/catalog/ Leary, Timothy Francis, 1920- Title(s) Politics of psycho-pharmacology / Timothy Leary. Publisher Berkeley, CA : Ronin Pub. : Distributed by Publishers Group West, c2002. Paging 127 p. : ill. ; 22 cm. Series Leary library [ This from Los Angeles Library, it did not show up at the University of California, nor at the New York Public Library. My question : was this written by Timothy Leary (1920-1997). ] Leary, Timothy Francis, 1920- Title(s) Your brain [!] is god / Timothy Leary. Publisher Berkeley, Calif. : Ronin : Distributed by Publishers Group West, c2001. Paging...

Researcher verifies testimony of key FBI witnes A researcher of the TWA Flight 800 downing says his use of the map program Google Earth to verify the claims of witnesses bolsters his belief that the 747 jetliner was shot down by a missile, contrary to the official explanation. Robert Donaldson, who has carried on the investigation of his brother, the late Cmdr. William Donaldson, re-interviewed a key witness, Mike Wire, whose testimony was used to create the government's explanation. Nearly 10 years ago, after an extensive investigation, the FBI and National Transportation Safety Board declared "mechanical failure" the cause of...

Western Macedonia, Illirida, and Greater Albania By Carl Savich The Greater Albania ideology envisions not only Kosovo and Metohija as integral part of a Greater Ethnic Albania, but also Western Macedonia, or Illirida. The basis for the Greater Albania strategy can be found in the 1878 League of Prizren. The map and borders for the future Greater Albania were determined by the Ottoman Turkish vilayet system. Kosovo and Metohija and Western Macedonia were part of the Kosovo vilayet. The capital of the Kosovo vilayet was Skopje. Kosovo-Metohija is not the end of the Greater Albania ideology, but only the beginning....

sadam told judges Wednesday that he ordered the trials of Shiites who eventually were executed in the 1980s and said their lands should be confiscated, but he insisted that those actions were not criminal.

Before Columbine, there was a schoolyard massacre that would be the worst mass murder in US history until the Happyland Club fire, Oklahoma City Bombing, and 9/11 terrorist attack. It occurred in Bath, Michigan on May 18, 1927. Andrew Kehoe, a farmer and school board member was having money woes. He was angry that he was being taxed. He was a ticking time bomb ready to exploded. He stocked up on dynamite and had 1,000 pounds by the morning of May 18, 1927. He first destroys his house and then goes to the school and detonates the bomb at Bath...

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Top Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive General Ratko Mladic has been arrested, the official Serbian news agency Tanjug on Tuesday quoted a local television station in Bosnia's Serb Republic as saying. No immediate confirmation of the report was available. Tanjug said TV BN reported the wartime Bosnian Serb Army commander had been taken into custody in the Serbian capital Belgrade and was being transferred via the northeast Bosnian city of Tuzla to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. An earlier report by Belgrade's "Studio B" television said Mladic had been located "in the area of...

The Srebrenica operation was planned so that Bosnian Serb forces were positioned in a shape of a horseshoe, thus intentionally leaving space for the Muslim army and civilians to retreat North, North-West towards Tuzla. The distance of 36km and the configuration of the terrain are such that any man in average physical condition can cross it on foot. The military operation was conducted in this manner with the intention of minimizing the number of casualties, since the Muslims had brought in substantial military forces. If the Muslim forces had been hermetically enclosed, a violent fight would have ensued in which...

VIDEOTAPE FILMED IN 1990 SHOWS CROATIAN OFFICIALS PLANNING THE MURDER OF JNA SOLDIERS AND THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF THE KRAJINA SERBS www.slobodan-milosevic.org - January 25, 2006 Written by: Andy Wilcoxson Col. Milan Kotur concluded his testimony at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on Wednesday, the former chief of the Yugoslav Army’s liaison team for the OSCE/KVM picked-up where he left off on Tuesday. Milosevic continued to re-examine the witness about Racak. He produced more documents from the 243rd Brigade of the VJ. These documents showed that the 243rd was not engaged in Racak as claimed by the prosecution. Another claim...