Hate Crimes

Responding to a rash of racial incidents in the last year, President Bush on Tuesday denounced displays of nooses and jokes about lynching, and said that as past racial injustice fades in memory, the nation risked forgetting the suffering it brought. The president's remarks, at a White House program marking African American History Month, were among his most pointed in recent years on the subject of racial tensions.

Prompted by the fatal classroom shooting of an Oxnard student that prosecutors allege was a hate crime, a state legislator Monday announced plans to introduce a bill to expand diversity education in California schools. Assemblyman Mike Eng (D-Monterey Park), chairman of the Assembly Select Committee on Hate Crimes, said his bill would supplement existing criminal statutes regarding crimes against victims based on their race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

At a memorial attended by more than 500 people in Port Hueneme, Lawrence "Larry" King was remembered Friday as a sensitive child who liked to draw, paint and crochet. One Christmas, he helped his mother crochet hundreds of scarves so that U.S. troops in Afghanistan wouldn't be without a holiday gift, said the Rev. Dan Birchfield.

Five children who were injured or traumatized when a parolee opened fire at a Granada Hills Jewish community center in 1999 will receive $2.25 million from the Washington State Department of Corrections for its failure to adequately monitor the gunman before his rampage. Buford Furrow Jr., 46, is serving a life sentence in prison after pleading guilty in 2001 to the shootings at the North Valley Jewish Community Center.

One punch was all it took. One punch to forever divide. One punch to kill a young man. On a hot summer afternoon along a placid lakefront in the Sacramento suburbs, Satender Singh had come with a group of fellow Fijians to celebrate his promotion at an AT&T call center. Three married couples and Singh, a lighthearted 26-year-old, drank and hooted and danced a crazy conga line to East Indian music. An innocent outing? Not in the eyes of the Russian family a few picnic tables away.

As 14-year-old Brandon McInerney prepares to be arraigned today inthe slaying of 15-year-old Lawrence "Larry" King at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, his lawyer is advancing a defense that at least partly blames school officials for the tragedy. Educators should have moved aggressively to quell rising tensions between the two boys, which began when King openly flirted with McInerney, said William Quest, the Ventura County assistant public defender representing the eighth-grader.

Hate crimes in Los Angeles County rose to their highest level in five years last year, led by attacks between Latinos and blacks, officials said Thursday. The annual report by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission showed hate crimes rose by 28%, to 763, with vandalism and assault leading the way.

The Justice Department said Wednesday it had opened an investigation into the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant in a small northeastern Pennsylvania town. The federal involvement comes less than a week after local officials in Schuylkill County charged three white teens in this month's attack in Shenandoah on Luis Ramirez, a 25-year-old father of two.

A Muslim candidate for the Irvine City Council said Thursday that a councilman's comment linking an Islamic civil rights group to terrorism has led to a death threat against him. Police said they are investigating. Attorney Todd Gallinger, a Muslim convert, said a man called his office Tuesday, about three weeks after Councilman Steven Choi spoke at a forum and urged voters not to support a candidate who worked for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The mother whose questioning of a Thanksgiving kindergarten tradition in Claremont resulted in the elimination of the children's handmade pilgrim and Native American costumes last month has received more than 250 hate e-mails, filled with misogynistic epithets, racist jeers and other abuse. One hoped that her daughter, a kindergartner, would get beaten up at school. Another celebrated genocide of Native Americans. Police are providing extra patrols at her home. And Michelle Raheja is at a loss.