Domestic Violence

A polygamist who tortured, starved, imprisoned and beat his wives and children for decades was sentenced to seven life terms in prison Friday by a judge who said the man's "reign of terror" warranted the harshest punishment available. Mansa Musa Muhummed, 55, spoke before sentencing and denied ever mistreating his three wives and 19 children. "I never tortured anyone," he told Riverside County Superior Court Judge F. Paul Dickerson III. "I don't know where that came from."

The Supreme Court upheld the broad reach of a federal gun-control law Tuesday and said that no one who has a conviction for any crime of domestic violence may own a firearm. The 7-2 decision strips gun rights from tens of thousands of people who were convicted or had pleaded guilty to an assault against a spouse, a live-in partner, a child or a parent. These crimes include not just felonies, but misdemeanors.

The mourners carried her severed body inside the white brick mosque on a frosty morning before the sun rose, before the children arrived for school. Removing their shoes, wives and mothers shrouded in black passed through the women's prayer area, cordoned off from the men's with white drapes, and made their way to the washing room.

R&B star Rihanna is cooperating with investigators building a domestic violence case against her boyfriend, the singer Chris Brown, a police source said Monday. The source said the 20-year-old performer, whose full name is Robyn Rihanna Fenty, was providing "ongoing" cooperation to detectives who booked Brown on Sunday on suspicion of making criminal threats against her.

Covina Police Chief Kim Raney was relaxing at home with his family around midnight on Christmas Eve. Lt. Tim Doonan was making late-night preparations for the holiday morning. And Det. Dan Regan was in bed, just starting to doze off. Then their phones started ringing. "Units are responding to a shooting in progress," the caller said.

Edith Moreno was only 12 years old, but last week the Sun Valley girl had a serious question for her friend and next-door neighbor Karina Valdez. What happens when we die? Karina and her parents are Jehovah's Witnesses. Taking her Bible, 12-year-old Karina explained that death was like going to sleep and waiting to be resurrected by God. "I didn't really think anything about it because we were teaching her about our other beliefs," said Karina's mother, Irene Bell. "Edith was just a wonderful, happy child.

Until someone dialed 911 on Feb. 8 to report a disturbance in Hancock Park, the pop star Rihanna and her R&B-singer boyfriend, Chris Brown, enjoyed relatively wholesome reputations. Attractive and talented, the couple were known as sexy but not oversexed, fun-loving but not reckless. The two seemed unlikely to be involved in anything more shocking than an all-night dance party. That image opened the door to a host of commercial endorsements.

Los Angeles Police Department officials on Friday were interviewing officers and scouring electronic records amid growing suspicion that someone inside the department leaked or sold to a celebrity website a photo of the singer Rihanna that depicted injuries to her face she suffered during an alleged assault by her boyfriend.

Accusing his ex-wife of character assassination, Broadcom Corp. founder Henry T. Nicholas III said her attempt to oust him as co-trustee of their family holdings was filled with "outrageous falsehoods," including misrepresenting herself as unable to meet her expenses when she had spent more than $100 million in the last two years. Stacey Nicholas' attorney, Adam Streisand, said he had not seen the filing in Orange County Superior Court and declined to comment. In a filing in probate court Nov.

Hell hath no fury like journalists protecting what they think is a righteous value, as we've seen with the furor over the publication of the photo of singer Rihanna's bruised and battered face. From the Los Angeles Times newsroom to photo desks around the country, to Howard Kurtz's much-followed journalism chat, a consensus has emerged: Use of the photo first posted by the website TMZ amounted to a second victimization of the young star. Kurtz called it "terrible."