Hate Groups

The economic downturn and the election of the nation's first black president are contributing to a resurgence of right-wing extremist groups, which had been on the wane since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment distributed to state and local authorities last week.

An Oklahoma woman invited to a rural Louisiana campsite for a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual was shot and killed after she asked to leave, the sheriff of a New Orleans suburb said Tuesday. Eight people were arrested after authorities found the woman's body hidden under some brush several miles from the remote campsite. Investigators found weapons, several flags and six Klan robes at the site, St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain said in a news release.

The Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday called for an investigation into the campus activities of Kevin MacDonald, a Cal State Long Beach psychology professor whose writings about Jews have been used to support the views of white supremacists.

A member of the white supremacist gang Public Enemy Number One was convicted Monday of conspiracy to commit murder in the 2002 execution-style killing of a gang founder who had disclosed the organization's secrets on a television news program. Michael Lamb also was found guilty of possessing a firearm used in the attempted shooting of an Anaheim police officer.

houston -- No sooner did thousands of African American demonstrators depart the racially tense town of Jena, La., last week after protesting perceived injustices than white supremacists started calling for violence.

Russian ultranationalists chanting slogans against foreign immigrants and Jews marched through a deserted area of the capital Sunday in a carefully controlled display that managed to avoid the violence and arrests of last year's National Unity Day observance.

She wore a tattoo of a Viking wielding an ax, screamed epithets at Jews and dark-skinned foreigners, reveled in the sinister glamour of the bygone Third Reich and married her second husband on Hitler's birthday. Tanja Privenau says she is done with black boots and venomous rage. Burning her pamphlets and scouring her tattoos, she is betraying what for 20 years had defined her: a neo-Nazi underworld run by racist millionaires and militant ideologues.

Four men who authorities say are members of a white supremacist group were charged Tuesday with attempted murder for allegedly stabbing a black man at a Claremont shopping center over the weekend, a case prosecutors have labeled a hate crime. Police say the four were passing through Claremont Friday night on their way to a white supremacist rally the next day outside the federal building in Westwood when the incident occurred.

Fifty-seven members of a white supremacist gang were arrested in Orange County early Thursday in a sweep by hundreds of officers investigating alleged death threats against county law enforcement officials. "We met early this morning and fanned out across the county," said Sgt. Rick Martinez, a spokesman for the Anaheim Police Department, one of numerous city, county, state and federal law enforcement agencies from Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties that participated in the sweep.

This week's arrests of 57 people allegedly tied to a white supremacist gang were sparked when authorities learned of a hit list with the names of an Orange County prosecutor and five police officers, an investigator said Friday. Anaheim Police Lt. K. Switzer said authorities learned of the list last month.