Hate Crimes

One thing hasn't changed in the Age of Obama: Presidents who try big things face a big backlash. Scenes of gun-toting protesters and swastika-wielding demonstrators speak -- loudly -- to the passions stirred by Obama's attempt to refashion the country's healthcare system, after having already engineered a vast intervention in the sagging economy. Some of the antagonism is undoubtedly race-related. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, which tracks hate groups, reports a dramatic surge in the anti-government ranks of the militia movement over the past year or so, when Obama emerged as a favorite to become the first black occupant of the White House.

The 89-year-old white supremacist accused of killing a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in June had planned the attack for months and was on a suicide mission, a federal prosecutor said in court Wednesday. The disclosure came during a brief hearing in Washington federal court during which the suspect, James von Brunn, spoke publicly for the first time since the June 10 shooting. "The Constitution guarantees me a speedy and fair trial," Von Brunn said in a halting voice.

A bill to make violence against gays and lesbians a federal hate crime cleared the Senate on Thursday and headed to the White House. The 68-29 vote was a victory for civil rights groups that have long sought to expand the federal statute beyond attacks motivated by religion, race, color or national origin. The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign, includes penalties for assaults based on a victim's sexual orientation, gender, disability or gender identity. Atty.

A fourth man sought on suspicion of gang-raping a woman because she is a lesbian turned himself in to police Thursday, hours after officials arrested three other suspects in the case. Josue Gonzalez, 21, was arrested on a $1-million warrant for rape, gang rape, kidnapping and carjacking, said Lt. Mark Gagan, a spokesman for the Richmond Police Department. Gagan said Gonzalez asked for a lawyer when he turned himself in but did not admit to involvement in the case, in which a 28-year-old woman was assaulted Dec. 13. On Wednesday, police arrested Humberto "Pato" Hernandez Salvador, 31, at his Richmond home in connection with the rape case, Gagan said.

Anti-Semitic scrawlings on residential walls were discovered over a two-mile area of Tarzana on Thursday morning, raising anxiety in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood and triggering a hate-crime investigation by police. Residents of the upscale neighborhood just south of Ventura Boulevard awoke to find swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti spray-painted in red on four perimeter walls, police said.

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.

Prosecutors have charged a Russian blogger who wrote on a popular Internet site that police should be publicly incinerated, in what is believed to be the country's first such case against a blogger. Savva Terentyev said he was charged with inciting hatred in a court in the northern city of Syktyvkar. The charges were filed Tuesday. They stem from Terentyev's posting on a Web forum in February 2007 that criticized Russian police in the wake of a raid on an opposition newspaper.

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.