Crime

LAREDO, Texas - This border city is trying to clear its name. It is so conjoined with its Mexican sister city across the Rio Grande, Nuevo Laredo, that the two are often referred to as "Los Dos Laredos," or simply Laredo. That was great for tourism in happier days. But as drug cartel violence exploded in Nuevo Laredo in recent years, pictures broadcast around the world of gunfights, decapitated bodies piled in abandoned minivans, and severed heads dumped in coolers often bore the same headline: "Laredo.

MOSCOW--Thousands of police and volunteers fanned out over the Russian city of Belgorod on Tuesday, hunting for a 32-year-old ex-convict who is suspected in the shooting deaths of six people, two of them teenage girls. The massive manhunt ranged through every house, street and yard in the city of 350,000, which lies not far from the Ukrainian border about 400 miles southwest of Moscow. “We are still trying to draw a full psychological portrait of the fugitive, but it is quite clear that the man is extremely dangerous and, in addition, armed to the teeth,” Yekaterina Vozhzhova, spokesperson for Belgorod city police department, said in a phone interview.

Crime reports are up significantly for the latest week in 14 L.A. neighborhoods, according to an analysis of LAPD data by the Los Angeles Times' Crime L.A. database . Four neighborhoods reported a significant increase in violent crime. Hollywood Hills (A) was the most unusual, recording five reports compared with a weekly average of 0.8 over the last three months. Rancho Park (E) topped the list of 10 neighborhoods with property crime alerts. It recorded 10 property crimes compared with its weekly average of 4.3 over the last three months.

GIZA, Egypt - The woman with crates of unsold tomatoes breathed in the boisterous music of slum life: creaking shutters, squawking chickens, blowing laundry, clattering junkmen. But the ingrained rhythms only angered Hamid Ali Mohamed, who sat in an alley beside her rusting scales and a slim pile of 12 coins, the equivalent of less than $2 for a day's work at the vegetable stand she inherited from her late husband. "Hey!" she yelled at a passing woman. "Why'd you buy those tomatoes from someone else?"

Charles McKay makes a detailed spreadsheet of the authors he wants to hear during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, typing in his first and second choices and getting tickets ahead of time. Jerry Oborn, from San Diego, said she goes about it another way: "I just wander around. " But McKay and Oborn both said they finish the festival the same way - with a long list of new books to read. "It takes us months to get through all these books by authors who inspired us," said McKay, who lives in the South Bay. McKay and Oborn were among the 150,000 people expected to attend The Times' 18th annual book festival, being held this weekend at USC. In clear, hot weather Saturday, visitors listened to poetry, watched cooking sessions, danced to local bands and shopped at dozens of makeshift bookstores.

Thanks to Sherlock Holmes and his Doctor Watson, we are used to detectives coming in asymmetrical pairs: Your Batman and Robin (superheroes, you say, but their career began in Detective Comics), your Poirot and Hastings, your Morse and Lewis, your Lewis and Hathaway. Your Doctor and his current companion. The hero and the protégé, the genius and the occasionally inspired sidekick. More satisfying to my sensibility is another sort of crime-solving unit: the cooperative team, with or without leader, in which each brings to the table a necessary specialty, the Scooby Gang, as it is often short-handed nowadays.

In "The Simple Art of Murder," Raymond Chandler wrote that the world inhabited by good crime fiction "is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. " During a conversation tantalizingly titled "What We Can't Tell You" on Saturday, four such authors pulled back the curtain on how they craft compelling mysteries....

MEXICO CITY - Contradictory court judgments in the war crimes trial of former Guatemalan dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt this week set off protests in Guatemala City and prompted rebukes from human rights organizations. On Friday, Judge Jazmin Barrios, who is presiding over Rios Montt's genocide trial in Guatemala's capital, called court to order despite a ruling by another judge a day earlier granting an appeal by the defense to annul the case based on a technicality. The Thursday ruling was “illegal,” Barrios said.

MEXICO CITY - Contradictory court judgments in the war crimes trial of former Guatemalan dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt this week set off protests in Guatemala City and prompted rebukes from human rights organizations around the world. On Friday, Judge Jazmin Barrios, who is presiding over Rios Montt's genocide trial in Guatemala's capital, called court to order despite another judge's ruling a day earlier granting an appeal by the defense to annul the case based on a technicality.

Benjamin Kadish was just 5 and attending a summer day camp at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in 1999 when an self-professed white supremacist walked through the door and shot him and several others. On Thursday, the now 19-year-old joined his parents, Chuck and Eleanor Kadish, and several others working to combat gun violence and endorsed former lawmaker Mike Feuer for Los Angeles city attorney. Feuer, who is challenging City Atty. Carmen Trutanich in the May 21 runoff, has often talked about his efforts to stem shootings, both as a city councilman in the 1990s and more recently as a member of the state Assembly.