Bodies

Seven bodies were dumped before dawn at a school soccer field in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. Neighbors in an upscale neighborhood found banners allegedly signed by a drug gang with the bodies, but officials would give no details about the messages. No suspects had been located. The unidentified victims had been shot, beaten and choked, but the cause of death was still being determined.

Ideally, governmental bodies would refrain from including prayers - even ecumenical, "lowest-common-denominator" ones - in their public proceedings. But if prayers are to be offered, they certainly shouldn't be monopolized by a single religious tradition. That is how the Supreme Court should rule in a case involving a town in New York state. On Monday, the justices agreed to hear a case involving the town of Greece, N.Y., which since 1999 has begun its official meetings with a prayer.

Searchers have found the bodies of three snowboarders missing since early December in a skiing area northeast of Mt. Rainier. Pierce County sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said searchers advantage of melting snow and searched Saturday in the area where the three disappeared. Authorities planned to airlift the bodies from the remote site in the Cascades near Crystal Mountain. Kevin Carter, 26, Devlin Williams, 29, and Phillip Hollins, 41, all of the Seattle area, are believed to have been killed by an avalanche.

My nomination for American hero of the 20th century is someone who lived half his life in disguise and the other half as the world's most recognizable man. He appeared on more radio broadcasts than Ellery Queen and in more movies than Marlon Brando, who once played his father. He helped give America the backbone to wage war against the Nazis, the Depression and the Red Menace. He remains an intimate to kids from Boston to Belgrade and has adult devotees who, like Talmudic scholars, parse his every utterance.

Two mass graves containing as many as 2,000 bodies have been discovered in eastern Congo, officials said. Justice Minister Luzolo Bambi told reporters that the graves were found late last week in the town of Bukavu in a plot of land formerly owned by a member of the Congolese Rally for Democracy, a Rwandan-backed rebel group. Many of its top leaders were integrated into the government. Constantin Charhondangwa, a regional official, said the bodies were discovered by a new owner of the land who was digging to install a septic tank.

Police are digging up a mass grave in a deep pit in northeastern Colombia, where as many as 55 victims of political violence are feared to have been buried, authorities reported. Police said five bodies were uncovered at Hoyo Malo (Evil Hole) near the town of San Vicente de Chucuri, 150 miles northeast of Bogota. They included two men killed 15 days ago by the pro-Cuban National Liberation Army and three people who died more than a year ago. Observers said at least 50 more bodies may be in the pit, according to San Vicente Mayor Alvaro Pico Gomez.

The Orange County coroner's office says a woman and her brother found dead in their home under unusual circumstances on Easter died of natural causes. The coroner's office said this week that 51-year-old Daniel Savage had swallowed three bullets and had black shoe polish smeared on his face -- but he died of a stroke. His 57-year-old sister Jacquelyn was found with blood on her mouth and bruises on her face and neck. The coroner says she died of heart disease. The siblings' sister found the bodies when she went to pick up their father for an Easter celebration.

A 90-year-old woman apparently has been living in a house with the bodies of three siblings, one of whom may have been dead since the 1980s, police in suburban Chicago said. The bodies were found Friday morning by police who were called by a senior advocate, Evanston Police Cmdr. Tom Guenther said. The woman was taken to a hospital for observation. The Cook County medical examiner's office said Saturday that the people had died of natural causes. The dead were identified as Anita Bernstorff, who was born in 1910; Frank Bernstorff, born in 1920; and Elaine Bernstorff, born in 1916.

The poor economy is taking a toll even on the dead, with an increasing number of bodies in Los Angeles County going unclaimed by families who cannot afford to bury or cremate their loved ones. At the county coroner's office -- which handles homicides and other suspicious deaths -- 36% more cremations were done at taxpayers' expense in the last fiscal year over the previous year, from 525 to 712.

TAPACHULA, Mexico - With the first light of day, a team of investigators using shovels and brushes begins picking through the red dirt of the Garden Pantheon cemetery, a ramshackle resting place where a mass grave sits cordoned off by yellow police tape. Black and blue tarps (and one advertising Coca-Cola) shield the work from the intense sun and prying eyes. Slowly, over the next weeks, the team will exhume dozens of bodies that have been dumped, nameless, in the mass pauper's grave toward the back of the cemetery, in this city near Mexico's border with Guatemala.

After two days of searching for a female hiker who was believed lost in the Baldwin Lake area of Big Bear, authorities on Saturday discovered a woman's body and are working to confirm her identity, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said. Karen Dalman, 59, of Big Bear, and friend Bruce Jackson, 56, of Erwin Lake, set off on a day hike together Tuesday morning and became separated after Jackson's pit bull ran off, authorities said. Jackson spent two days walking in the woods before he found his way back to his car Thursday and notified authorities that Dalman was missing, authorities said.

If you don't believe in souls or an afterlife, then a corpse is just a body - potentially a teaching tool, a source of life-saving organs, but little more. In 1829, taking such thinking to the extreme, a radical British pamphleteer named Peter Baume specified that after his death, his skeleton was to be donated for medical education or, failing that, his bones made into knife handles and buttons; his skin was to be tanned to make a chair cover, and his soft body parts used as fertilizer for roses.

In requiring the U.S. Senate to confirm presidential appointments, the Constitution aims to ensure a second level of scrutiny of the qualifications of government officials. But Senate Republicans have hijacked the confirmation process, not only to thwart individual nominees but to undermine laws they don't agree with. If they continue in their obstructionism, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) should revisit the possibility of doing away with the filibuster for nominations. The most immediate test case involves the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that moderates disputes between labor and management.

NEW DELHI - Thousands gathered Tuesday in the rubble of the collapsed Rana Plaza garment factory complex in Bangladesh to pray for the 1,127 people who died in the world's worst apparel industry disaster. Pictures taken at the Islamic prayer ceremony on the outskirts of Dhaka, the capital, showed a rescue worker in yellow headgear affixing a red flag in the ruins. Army personnel, who have been working around the clock for almost three weeks, ended their cleanup and recovery operation early Tuesday, handing responsibility to civil authorities.

The teenage couple drove to the shops in search of supplies for a Halloween party. They visited a Party City store, purchasing glow sticks and knee-high stockings for a costume. They went to a discount store and bought sodas and chips. Cynthia Alvarez, 16, told jurors Tuesday that she and her boyfriend ran the errands in her mother's Jeep Cherokee. But what appeared to be the normal preparations for a teenage soiree was anything but. In the back of the SUV, Alvarez acknowledged, lay her mother's decomposing body.

Chances are by now you've seen " Real Beauty Sketches ," a video released a few weeks ago by the Dove soap people. It documents a social experiment: Women describe themselves to a forensic sketch artist, who draws them from behind a curtain. Then the artist draws the same women based on descriptions from people who've only just met them. The accounts don't exactly line up. "My mom told me I had a big jaw" turns into "she was thin, so you could see her cheekbones. " "I kind of have a fat, rounder face" turns into "she had nice eyes.

MEXICO CITY - Mexican authorities responding to an anonymous tip discovered about 50 mostly mutilated bodies dumped on the side of a highway between Monterrey and the U.S. border, a region where rival gangs are battling for control over a lucrative drug-trafficking corridor. The bodies of at least 43 men and half a dozen women were found Sunday in plastic garbage bags near the town of Cadereyta Jimenez, the location of a large state-run oil refinery, officials in the state prosecutor's office told The Times.

Rachael Mullenix, the Huntington Beach teenager who conspired with her love-struck boyfriend to murder her mother and dump the slashed body into Newport Harbor, expressed only grudging and limited remorse Friday as a judge sentenced her to 25 years to life in prison. "I don't care what the jury thought. I did not do that to my mother," Mullenix, 19, told Orange County Superior Court Judge David Thompson. "I can't even believe this is happening to me."

Arnold Schwarzenegger uses his own improbable rise from bodybuilder to action hero to California governor as an argument for immigration reform. As a teenager in his native Austria, Schwarzenegger saw the United States as the only place he could achieve his outsized dreams. The 11 million immigrants now in the country illegally are not so different from his younger self, he told an audience Tuesday at the USC think tank that bears his name. "These are all very hardworking people.

Homicide investigators Tuesday evening were trying to determine how a body ended up inside a burning vehicle in Rancho Palos Verdes. Deputies responded to the blaze around 2:30 p.m. Tuesday in 30100 block of Miraleste Drive. When the fire was extinguished, the body was discovered, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said. The identity, age and gender of the victim will be determined by the coroner's office. Homicide investigators were at the scene gathering evidence Tuesday afternoon.