Gunmen

Gunmen opened fire Thursday on three passenger buses in the violence-racked state of Veracruz, killing at least seven people, Mexican authorities said. All five attackers were killed in a shootout with federal security forces after the attack, which took place on a rural highway near Panuco in the northern part of the coastal state. State spokeswoman Gina Dominguez said the gunmen were suspected in a separate attack earlier Thursday in El Higo, another town not far from the border with Tamaulipas state.

Two illegal immigrants were shot to death by camouflaged gunmen northwest of Tucson in an incident evoking a pair of 2007 attacks, Arizona authorities said Wednesday. One of the victims was identified as Gerardo Perez-Ruiz, 39, of Toluca, Mexico. The second man remained unidentified but was thought to be from Guatemala. They were among a group of 20 to 30 people riding in the bed of a Chevy truck on Sunday when men with rifles ambushed them, Pima County Sheriff's Deputy Dawn Barkman said in an interview.

Gunmen kidnapped a group of 22 Mexican men in the tourist resort of Acapulco, Mexican media reported Saturday. News reports said the group, from the neighboring state of Michoacan, was seized by gunmen shortly after arriving in the resort city Thursday. The accounts cited information from the prosecutor's office in the coastal state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located. Repeated attempts to reach state officials were unsuccessful. The motive was unknown. A man traveling with the group reported the kidnapping.

The Inglewood where young Fredrick Martin Jr. grew up was plagued by crime, gangs and the fear that came with both. But by the time he returned in 2006, after graduating from college in Texas, the city was slowly turning around. Crime was down. Graffiti had largely disappeared. The barred windows and gated front doors were still fixtures on the street where he lived with his wife and child and grandmother, but every day they seemed less relevant in this community under the flight path to LAX. Until a week ago. Martin, 28, was cleaning the garage on the evening of April 3 with his 8-year-old son and a friend when two gunmen approached on foot and began firing.

The announcement went out on Facebook, an open invitation summoning revelers to a birthday party at the Italia Inn in the northern Mexican city of Torreon. But early Sunday, as musicians serenaded amid food, drink and dancing, gunmen burst into the party, blocked the exits and, saying not a word, opened fire, killing 17 men and women and injuring a similar number. It was one of the highest single-incident death tolls since the beginning of Mexico's raging drug war, which has claimed nearly 25,000 lives from the time that President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led offensive against powerful narcotics cartels in December 2006.

Two illegal immigrants were shot to death by camouflaged gunmen northwest of Tucson in an incident evoking a pair of 2007 attacks, Arizona authorities said Wednesday. One of the victims was identified as Gerardo Perez-Ruiz, 39, of Toluca, Mexico. The second man remained unidentified but was thought to be from Guatemala. They were among a group of 20 to 30 people riding in the bed of a Chevy truck on Sunday when men with rifles ambushed them, Pima County Sheriff's Deputy Dawn Barkman said in an interview.

In Mexico's third mass shooting in less than a week, gunmen opened fire Wednesday at a carwash in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, killing at least 15 people. The midmorning attack took place in the state capital, Tepic, rocked this year by bouts of drug-related violence. Nayarit authorities said 13 of the victims, all men, worked at the carwash and that most were clients of the same drug treatment center, Alcance Victoria (Victory Outreach). As for the remaining two killed, one was found dead at a nearby fruit stand and the other was shot while arriving at the carwash on a motorcycle.

Reporting from Seoul and Zamboanga City, Philippines -- Gunmen raided a remote Philippine village before dawn Thursday and abducted at least 75 people in a restive southern province, an army spokesman said. Within hours the assailants had freed 18 captives, 17 of them children, amid negotiations with government officials, authorities said. They freed nine others today and are demanding that murder charges be dropped The incident was the second recent mass abduction in the Philippines.

Suspected Taliban gunmen burst into a mosque and gunned down the deputy mayor of Kandahar at his prayers, officials said Tuesday -- a brazen attack that underscored the immense challenges faced by Western forces as they push to restore law and order in the volatile southern city. Kandahar and its surrounding districts are the focus of an expected drive this spring and summer to try to expel the Taliban and establish credible governance in Afghanistan's second-largest population center.

Felix Perez Rocha, a plastic surgeon, had finished a liposuction and was starting another procedure when gunmen burst into his operating room and hauled the terrified doctor away. The kidnapping at a high-end clinic in the affluent business hub of Monterrey immediately suggested one of the more cinematic chapters of drug-trafficking lore. A narco kingpin forcing a surgeon to alter his looks and help him evade the law? It has happened before. But on Friday, state prosecutors in Monterrey said it appeared that Perez's patient was the target, not the doctor.

Twenty-two guests on the Carnival Splendor cruise ship out of Long Beach were robbed at gunpoint in Mexico last week as they traveled by bus from a nature hike in the jungle to the Mexican port city of Puerto Vallarta, according to cruise ship officials and local media reports. Hooded gunmen intercepted the tourists' bus about 5 p.m. Thursday as it returned from the pueblo of El Nogalito, known for its trail through the jungle, according to the Mexican newspapers El Norte and La Jornada.

Gunmen opened fire Thursday on three passenger buses in the violence-racked state of Veracruz, killing at least seven people, Mexican authorities said. All five attackers were killed in a shootout with federal security forces after the attack, which took place on a rural highway near Panuco in the northern part of the coastal state. State spokeswoman Gina Dominguez said the gunmen were suspected in a separate attack earlier Thursday in El Higo, another town not far from the border with Tamaulipas state.

Professional baseball player Wilson Ramos , a catcher seen as one of the young building blocks for the Washington Nationals, was abducted by gunmen Wednesday from his home in his native Venezuela. Ramos, a 24-year-old who just finished his rookie season, was taken away in an SUV by four armed men in Santa Ines in central Carabobo state, the spokeswoman for his Venezuelan League team, the Aragua Tigers, said on her Twitter account. Katherine Vilera said Ramos was taken at 6:45 p.m. at his home in the region 95 miles west of Caracas.

A 66-year-old Frenchwoman who was abducted by a band of Somali gunmen at the beginning of the month has died in captivity, French authorities announced Wednesday. Marie Dedieu, who used a wheelchair, lived in a modest beachfront house on Manda Island in the Lamu resort archipelago on Kenya's northern coast. She was seized by gunmen, thrown into a speedboat and taken to Somalia, a war-torn country that has become a base for piracy. Kenyan authorities unsuccessfully pursued the kidnappers.

Gunmen on Friday kidnapped the son of a liberal provincial governor assassinated this year in retaliation for his opposition to Pakistan's blasphemy law. The abduction of Salman Taseer's son Shahbaz in the eastern city of Lahore raised concern that Islamic extremists were intent on targeting members of the Taseer family, some of whom have continued to speak out against intolerance in Pakistani society after the Punjab province governor's slaying...

The dead were mainly mothers and grandmothers, middle-aged women who routinely stopped by the Casino Royale for an afternoon game of bingo or a shot at the slot machines. At least 52 people were killed Thursday when armed men set fire to the gaming hall in a busy commercial center of Mexico's wealthiest city. The attack, carried out in broad daylight, was the deadliest to target Mexican civilians in nearly five years of bloody drug warfare. "Mexico has witnessed one of the most terrible acts of barbarism in memory," President Felipe Calderon said Friday as he declared three days of national mourning.

Armed men opened fire on buses carrying assembly-plant workers near the Texas border early Thursday, killing four people and wounding 15 others in the latest spasm of violence to rattle Mexico. Authorities in the northern state of Chihuahua said the victims, identified as employees of a U.S. car-upholstery plant called Eagle Ottawa, were riding home about 1 a.m. when three company buses came under fire outside Ciudad Juarez. Officials said they had not determined a motive. Witnesses said gunmen jumped aboard looking for a male passenger.

For the second time in less than two weeks, heavily armed gunmen attacked a rehabilitation clinic for drug addicts in the volatile border city of Ciudad Juarez, authorities said today. At least 10 people, patients and therapists, were killed. The gunmen escaped and authorities offered little in the way of motives in the Tuesday night shootings. Rehab clinics are often attacked as drug gangs pursue rivals or attempt to settle old scores. It's the sixth drug treatment center attacked in Ciudad Juarez in the last 13 months.