Factions

The ruling Communist Party, posing a political crisis in already unstable, ethnically diverse Yugoslavia, split into rival factions during a special congress Monday, only hours after the party had voted to renounce its monopoly leadership role in the government.

Lebanese security forces continued their crackdown Thursday on a Christian group accused of a deadly church bombing last month amid a news blackout ordered by the government. Troops stormed a Lebanese Forces office in Breij, 25 miles north of Beirut in the mountains that once formed the heartland of the onetime militia's war-time territory. The raid netted 300 U.S.

The Fuentes faction of Orange County Republicans, having beaten back challenges from the center in both the presidential primary and the Republican Central Committee contests, now has no one to blame but itself if things go wrong in November. The only thing they know how to win is low-turnout primary contests, in which that 30% of the electorate that agrees with them can carry the day. They've forgotten that you also need independents and moderate Republicans to win in November, and seem to have lost the ability to attract them.

The town of Wink, N.M., doesn't appear on any official map, the moon as seen from its streets has a pinkish hue, and very odd things lurk beneath the charm of its old-fashioned façade. The exact nature of those lurking things, human and otherwise, is chronicled by Shirley Jackson Award winner Robert Jackson Bennett in his at times horrifying and yet strangely beautiful new novel "American Elsewhere. " The book remains ambiguous about whether we're reading supernatural fiction, science fiction, or fantasy for a long time but then delivers mind-blowing answers.

Republican leaders unanimously approved a resolution Friday urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Proposition 8, the measure under court review that forbids same-sex marriage in California. The Republican National Committee “affirms its support for marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and as the optimum environment in which to raise healthy children for the future of America and … implores the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the sanctity of marriage in its rulings on California's Proposition 8 and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act,” according to a resolution approved at the group's meeting in Hollywood.

Two men in a passing car threw a bomb at a crowded discount clothing and textile store in Paris on Wednesday, setting off an explosion that killed five people and injured more than 60. The explosion, the fifth bombing in the last 10 days and the most deadly so far, blasted the Tati store on the Rue de Rennes, in the busy Montparnasse quarter on the Left Bank of the Seine. Because Paris schools are closed on Wednesdays, the store was crowded with parents and their children.

AL SARRAIN, Yemen - The U.S. drone flew over a cluster of mud houses on a ridge and, according to Yemeni officials, locked onto Adnan Qadhi, a mercurial man of many guises, including radical militant, peace mediator, preacher of violence and army general. Villagers said Qadhi climbed out of his utility vehicle the night of Nov. 7 to make a cellphone call shortly before the missile struck. His photo - broad face peering from beneath a tilted red beret, stars on his epaulets - now hangs in a small grocery store in a land where farmers work narrow fields below the villas of politicians, tribal leaders and a former president that rise like fortresses on nearby hilltops.

From the time he was a child in Peru, the Mormon Church instilled in Jose A. Loayza the conviction that he and millions of other Native Americans were descended from a lost tribe of Israel that reached the New World more than 2,000 years ago. "We were taught all the blessings of that Hebrew lineage belonged to us and that we were special people," said Loayza, now a Salt Lake City attorney. "It not only made me feel special, but it gave me a sense of transcendental identity, an identity with God."

While gang wars raged on the streets of Los Angeles, a little noticed though violent series of attacks broke out among members of the Crips gang imprisoned on San Quentin's Death Row, prison officials say. The battle reached its height last October when Tiequon A. Cox, who was in the Rolling 60s faction of the Crips in Los Angeles, stabbed and wounded Stanley (Tookie) Williams, a body builder who helped found the gang 20 years ago. Williams has denied any continuing role in Crip activity on or off the row. And Colleen E. Butler, Cox's attorney, noted that in prison, "what appears to be the case is not always what happened."

In a breakthrough that could end two decades of war, Afghanistan's warring factions have agreed to set up a governing commission of religious scholars, officials said. The sides agreed to each appoint 20 delegates to the commission, which would rule the country in line with Islamic law. Both sides in the conflict have agreed to abide by the commission's decisions. No date for the formation of the commission was announced.