Blood

One photograph captured Jeffrey Hall and his children frolicking in the surf, the other showed his son gripping a toy gun and flashing a Nazi salute along with his dad and a hooded Klansman. Those contrasting images flashed Wednesday on a courtroom wall in Riverside during closing arguments in the murder trial of a 12-year-old boy who pointed a gun at his father's head and pulled the trigger, killing the neo-Nazi activist in May 2011. The fate of the boy, who was 10 years old when he shot his sleeping father, is now in the hands of Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jean P. Leonard, who must decide if the youngster knew what he did was wrong, and what should be done with him. Hate "cooked" inside the boy during years of being his father's punching bag and after hearing Hall threaten to burn down the family's Riverside home with his wife and children inside, said his attorney, Public Defender Matthew Hardy.

We got Osama bin Laden - and now we'll be getting him again on cinema screens across the nation, as "Zero Dark Thirty" hits neighborhood multiplexes. Lauded and criticized, that film's the talk of the town. Is it also the first of a new genre? If so, here are my five nominations for other CIA films. Let's start with the CIA's 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, whose democratically elected government had nationalized the country's oil industry. It couldn't be oilier, involving BP in an earlier incarnation, the CIA, British intelligence, bribery, secretly funded street demonstrations and (lest you think there'd be no torture in the film)

TAFT, Calif. - A 16-year-old was in critical condition Thursday night after a fellow student interrupted a first-period class at Taft Union High School southwest of Bakersfield, confronted him by name and fired a round from a 12-gauge shotgun into his upper body. The assailant, also 16, tried to shoot a second student and missed before a science teacher was able to talk him down, apparently taking the shotgun as the other students fled from the classroom through a door. Police officers arrived after the teacher had disarmed the assailant and took the teenager into custody.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court justices sounded wary Wednesday of giving the police a free hand to forcibly take blood from motorists suspected of drunk driving. "It's a pretty scary image of somebody restrained, and a representative of the state approaching them with a needle," Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said. Though the police stop swerving drivers at all hours of the day and night, rarely are motorists required to undergo a blood test. Typically, an officer tells a driver who appears to be drunk to get out of the vehicle, walk a straight line and recite the alphabet.

An early contender for 2013's finest Christmas song arrives halfway through the new Dropkick Murphys album in "The Season's Upon Us. " It's a rowdy Celtic-punk number in which singer Ken Casey runs down the charms of his extended family, member by miserable member: "My nephew's a horrible, wise little twit," he barks, "He once gave me a nice gift-wrapped box full of" - well, you can imagine the rest. As in its obvious predecessor, "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues, affection accompanies spite in "The Season's Upon Us"; but warmth is all you hear by the time the song's brandy-soaked chorus hits.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. -   James E. Holmes was arrested without incident on the night of a bloody rampage in a suburban movie theater, but he appeared emotionally detached and uninvolved, police testified on Monday as the prosecution began a weeklong preliminary hearing that promised to offer the deepest public view of its case against the former graduate student. Officer Jason Oviatt, who discovered Holmes behind the movie theater, was first to testify in the preliminary hearing, the latest step in the proceedings against the 25-year-old former neuroscience student accused of 166 criminal counts including murder and attempted murder.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. -   Two veteran police officers broke down on the stand Monday morning as they described the horrific crime scene at a suburban movie theater where a gunman opened fire on spectators, leaving a bloody trail of bodies. Aurora police officer Justin Grizzle said he entered the theater where “The Dark Knight Rises” was still playing on the screen and saw people screaming for help, some covered in blood as they desperately sought safety. Fighting back tears, Grizzle said that he slipped on something slick as he tried to make his way into the theater, only later realizing it was blood.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. - Two veteran police officers who were first to arrive at the Aurora movie theater shooting struggled in court Monday to describe the carnage. Strobe lights from the alarm were flashing as the midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" blared on the screen above the screams. Some movie-goers were trying to flee. Others lay motionless on the floor. But what they remembered most was the blood. There was so much of it. Aurora Police Officer Justin Grizzle said some people were crawling for safety covered in blood.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was released from a New York hospital Wednesday evening after doctors treated her for a blood clot that had formed behind her ear. "Her medical team advised her that she is making good progress on all fronts, and they are confident she will make a full recovery," Philippe Reines, deputy assistant secretary of State, said in a statement. "She's eager to get back to the office, and we will keep you updated on her schedule as it becomes clearer in the coming days.

The blood clot that led to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's hospitalization on Sunday is lodged in a vein behind her right ear, her doctors disclosed in a statement late Monday. The doctors said the clot, called a right transverse sinus venous thrombosis, was discovered Sunday when Clinton underwent an MRI as a "routine follow-up" to the treatment she has been receiving for a concussion. The vein runs between the brain and skull. Drs. Lisa Bardack with Mt. Kisco Medical Group and Gigi El-Bayoumi at George Washington University Hospital said in their statement that the clot was being treated with blood thinners.