Massacres

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.

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...

The deed was stomach-turning: Hooded gunmen burst into a Ciudad Juarez drug treatment center, gathered together those inside and lined them up before opening fire with semiautomatic weapons. When the shooting was over, 18 people were dead. Attention focused immediately on the site of Wednesday night's killings: a rehab center, where addicts go to get clean, suggesting a new level of depravity in Mexico's drug violence. Theories abounded: The victims were targets of rival gang members.

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.

The rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army said that government forces massacred several hundred civilians in the southern town of Wau on Sept. 7. A rebel broadcast monitored in Nairobi said that 63 other people suffocated after being crammed into two small cells at a nearby army barracks. The insurgents earlier accused government forces of killing about 600 civilians in the town during a two-day security operation in August.

The first witness in a civil suit filed by two families of victims of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, testified Thursday that Dutch troops protecting the enclave were unprepared for a Serb onslaught and felt "frustrated and powerless" when it came. Asked what the peacekeepers had done to prepare themselves for the Serb attack on the Muslim town, the witness, personnel officer Berend Oosterveen, replied, "We hadn't considered that."

The building where a gunman killed 30 people and himself on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg will be reopened for offices and laboratories, but it won't be used for classrooms, the university announced. Norris Hall will open June 18 for the engineering science and mechanics and the civil and environmental engineering departments. They were the primary occupants of the building when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty members on the campus April 16.

Mexico has rearrested a man accused of ordering the killings of 45 Indians in the southern state of Chiapas 10 years ago. Right-wing paramilitaries killed the Tzotzil Indians, including pregnant women and children, in the village of Acteal on Dec. 22, 1997. The Chiapas state government said it had arrested Antonio Santiz on Saturday.

A human rights group on Monday called for an inquiry into reports that as many as 300 Shiite Muslim civilians were recently massacred by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban in the central province of Bamian. Citing witnesses, New York-based Human Rights Watch said Taliban troops rounded up and shot about 300 men after capturing the city of Yakaolang in January. The Taliban rejected the report. The United Nations said Jan.

A Filipino farmer Saturday confessed to leading a massacre on a village church last Tuesday, killing 17 people including his son, because he was upset that his wife would not sleep with him, the military said. Pelagio Caro was one of nine farmers arrested Friday for suspected involvement in the attack in the mountain village of Bagtik, on the Philippine island of Cebu. Twelve other worshipers were wounded.

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 U.S. Army sergeant suspected in the deadly shooting rampage that left 16 Afghan civilians dead had been passed over for promotion and appeared to face mounting financial troubles on the eve of his last deployment to Afghanistan, according to accounts from neighbors and his wife's blog. Neighbors in the communities around Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, where Staff Sgt. Robert Bales lived with his wife and two children, said Bales had left a house in the town of Auburn abandoned after buying another home and failed to pay homeowners association dues on the deteriorating structure despite repeated demands.

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.

An international court has ordered Guatemala to pay a record $7.9 million in compensation to survivors of a 1982 army-led massacre of hundreds of civilians in the country's Maya Indian heartland, court officials said. Troops entered the hilltop hamlet of Plan de Sanchez, raping women before herding villagers into a building and blowing it up. A total of 268 people were killed.

Refugees fleeing an Afghan city recently conquered by the Taliban say that troops with the ultra-orthodox religious army slaughtered thousands of civilians when they took the town last month. The refugees, who are arriving here each day on foot from the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, say Taliban fighters focused exclusively on an ethnic minority known as the Hazaras, picked out by their distinctive Mongolian features.

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 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.