Massacre

With pant legs rolled up against the heat, Etna Huberty struggled to fix a window screen in the small suburban house she just bought. In the living room, a German shepherd circled unpacked boxes. A year after James Oliver Huberty was killed committing the worst single-episode mass murder in U.S. history, his widow said she also is struggling to organize her life. It is a task that has not grown easier. "At first I was numb.

LONDON — Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic confronted the accusations against him at the opening of his war crimes trial in The Hague on Wednesday with contemptuous gestures to the court and the victims who had come to see him face justice for atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Slowed by age and the hardships of 15 years on the run from the indictment by the United Nations tribunal, Mladic still mustered a hint of his trademark swagger as...

Last weekend's massacre of at least 15 people at a teen party in Ciudad Juarez was horrifying enough. Then the authorities got involved. Mexican officials have issued sketchy and conflicting information, including a death toll that went down. They initially said they were at a loss to explain why gunmen would open fire on decent kids in a private home. Then they produced a suspect who said the attack was part of a feud between drug-trafficking gangs, suggesting that at least some of those targeted weren't so decent after all. When family members exploded with indignation, authorities backpedaled.

Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder in connection with a nighttime massacre at two remote Afghan villages, after villagers say he burst into the homes of civilians with a pistol, rifle and grenade launcher and indiscriminately shot family members in the head, neck, chest and groin. The charges, read Friday to the 38-year-old husband and father at the Army's Joint Regional Correctional Facility on Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., could lead to the death penalty, the military said.

Lin Yee Wong listened as the interpreter read a letter, handwritten in Chinese, that detailed memories of her husband, who was slain more than 26 years ago in the worst mass killing in Seattle's history. Gim Lun Wong was among 13 people hogtied, robbed and fatally shot by three men at the Wah Mee social club in the Chinatown district on Feb. 19, 1983. A 14th victim survived. In the years since, Lin Yee Wong said, she has been able to conceal her grief -- until now, with prison time possibly nearing an end for one of those convicted in her husband's killing.

Los Angeles police said Friday that they are searching for a 28-year-old suspected gun dealer in connection with the massacre of four men at a San Fernando Valley restaurant. Nerses Arthur Galstyan is considered to be armed and very dangerous and is still at large somewhere in the city, possibly hiding with the aid of friends or relatives, said LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, speaking at news conference downtown. Investigators said they believe anger was behind the attack April 3 against six acquaintances at the Hot Spot Mediterranean Restaurant on Riverside Drive in Valley Village.

Syrian state television claimed Monday that 120 members of the nation's security forces were killed by armed groups in recent days in a report that said the government was prepared to "deal firmly and sternly" with any such attacks against its rule. The broadcast cited no sources and offered no footage to verify the report of a "massacre" by gunmen at a police station in the restive northwest city of Jisr Shughur, the site of weeks of ongoing clashes between security forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and pro-democracy protesters inspired by revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.

There's a tendency for eyes to glaze over when reports of violence in the Philippines are reported. "Sorry for the redundancy," we say. But the Nov. 23 massacre of 57 people merits consideration. The victims were supporters and local journalists accompanying a woman on her way to file nomination papers for her husband's run for provincial governor on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. The candidate had reportedly received death threats, and some authorities called this a politically motivated attack.

Between "Dynasty" and Arnold Schwarzenegger's new movie "Commando," there's murders, machine guns and gore galore at Greenacres, the former Harold Lloyd estate. The 44-room, 48,000-square-foot renaissance villa that straddles the L.A. and Beverly Hills city limits is the site of a bloody massacre in "Commando." Schwarzenegger single-handedly seeks revenge on an exiled Latin American politician. Hundreds die all over the gardens.

Reporting from Seoul and Zamboanga City, Philippines -- Twenty-four people were found dead in the southern Philippines after scores of gunmen on Monday kidnapped a caravan of supporters accompanying a woman en route to file her husband's nomination papers to run for provincial governor, authorities said. Officials called the attack a politically motivated massacre. Many of the victims were beheaded and buried in shallow graves. The victims -- at least 13 of them women -- reportedly included a dozen local journalists covering the filing that marked the start of the Philippine election season.

Reporting from Lake Tapps, Wash., and Norwood, Ohio For those who grew up with him, Robert Bales seemed to have a place reserved on easy street. Captain of the football team and president of the sophomore class at his Ohio high school, Bales after just three years of college had an oceanfront condo in Florida. He was also pulling in more than $100,000 a year as a financial advisor. His investment work ran into trouble, though, and when the Sept. 11 attacks came, Bales felt what friends said was an irresistible call.

The man suspected of shooting, stabbing and burning 16 sleeping villagers in a horrific attack that has sparked fury across Afghanistan was identified Friday as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales - a 38-year-old father of two whose life in the suburbs of Washington state was marked by Army potlucks, Sunday brunches with his in-laws and a Disney cruise with his wife and children. "They seemed like a very normal family. He was always really gentle with his kids. He was full of life and seemed like a happy guy for the most part," said family friend Kassie Holland as news rocketed through the blue-collar towns around Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma.

There are days here, in these war-haunted times, when it seems that death might come in any guise, and from any direction. From a bomb buried in the earth. From the sky. From a rusted motorbike haphazardly parked in a busy marketplace, with no one paying it and its deadly package any notice. Or from a soldier who breaks down doors in the dead of night, with murder in mind. Despite a shared sorrow and bewilderment, a jarring disparity has emerged in the way Americans and Afghans view the killings of 16 villagers in rural Kandahar province, allegedly at the hands of a lone U.S. Army staff sergeant named Robert Bales.

Suspected insurgents fired automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades Tuesday at a government delegation offering condolences to villagers in a district of Kandahar province where a U.S. soldier is accused of going on a shooting rampage. No one in the delegation, which included two brothers of President Hamid Karzai and a number of high-level officials, was injured, but a member of the Afghan security forces was killed and another was wounded, witnesses and officials said. Members of the delegation, which also included the Afghan army chief of staff, a Cabinet minister and the Kandahar governor, had just emerged from a mosque in Panjwayi district when gunfire erupted, officials said.

A 19-year-old student at the University of Maryland has been taken into custody and hospitalized for a psychiatric evaluation after allegedly threatening to go on a shooting rampage on the campus Sunday. Alexander Song, a student at the university system's flagship campus in College Park, Md., allegedly promised to carry out his plans at 1:30 in the afternoon, according to a statement from the school's public safety department. "I will be on a shooting rampage tomorrow on campus," he wrote earlier in the weekend, according to the school's statement.

When gunfire echoed in the darkness before dawn, many villagers assumed it must be a night raid, in which U.S.-led troops swoop down on residential compounds across Afghanistan to arrest suspected insurgents. So the safest course, people thought, was to stay quiet and remain indoors. But for some on Sunday, home was no safe haven. The gunman found them. Chanted prayers and muffled sobbing filled the air on Monday during remembrances by Afghan villagers for 16 of their neighbors, nine of them children, who were killed a day earlier during a shooting rampage that authorities said was undertaken by a lone American soldier near his base in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan.

The slaughter last month of at least 15 young people with no apparent criminal ties has galvanized the Mexican public in ways not seen here in more than three years of bloody drug warfare and has forced the government to enact long-resisted policy changes to combat violence. Some in Mexico are wondering whether this is their nation's tipping point, a moment when public outrage that has bubbled along finally overcomes the fear and fatalism that largely silenced or intimidated Mexican society.

Venezuelan authorities Wednesday recovered the body of the 11th and last man who was kidnapped near the Colombian border and killed execution-style in an incident that has stoked tensions between the neighboring countries. Officials in San Cristobal, the capital of the Venezuelan border state of Tachira, identified the final victim as Jose Luis Arenas, 21, a Colombian whose body was found near the town of El Pinal. The bodies of several other victims had been found there Saturday.

One student was killed and four were injured in a shooting Monday morning at a high school in suburban Chardon, Ohio, authorities have reported. A suspect was taken into custody, but his name was being withheld because he's a juvenile, said Chardon Police Chief Timothy McKenna. The suspect, who is believed to be a student at the school, has yet to be charged, the chief said. McKenna announced the death and injuries in a televised briefing. The injured students were hospitalized, McKenna said, but he gave no additional details on their conditions.

"The Flowers of War" has broken new ground for China's movie industry: It's among the first domestically financed films to star a high-profile Hollywood actor (Christian Bale), and its reported budget of close to $100 million makes it the country's priciest production to date. But when it comes to storytelling, Zhang Yimou's 19th feature is decidedly backward-looking: A lavish period weepie set against the atrocities of the Nanking Massacre, "Flowers" abounds with well-worn movie archetypes and slathers on schmaltz.