Massacres

The rebels targeted churches on Christmas Day. Men were killed first, often stripped of shirts and pants, and then bound with their arms behind their backs. Rather than waste bullets, the attackers hacked victims in the back of the neck with machetes or shattered their skulls with sticks. "It happened step by step," said Joseph Kpayajadia, 58, a farmer who hid in the grass and saw his son being killed.

It was nearing midnight when a large man emerged from his rented blue Dodge and approached a brick home at the end of a cul-de-sac in Covina. He wore a handmade Santa Claus suit with boot-covers, belt, beard, glasses and gloves. Hardly suspicious. It was Christmas Eve. But underneath were black street clothes, five 9-millimeter handguns and $17,000 in cash plastic-wrapped to his body. He was pulling a compressor wrapped in Christmas paper and primed with high-octane fuel.

In his baggy shorts hanging below the knees, Puma sneakers and spiky hair, Wang Kangkang is hip to the present, clueless about the past. Although he comes often to see the nightly ceremony of the Chinese flag being lowered at Tiananmen Square, he doesn't know what happened here in 1989 and doesn't really care. "Well, it happened before I was born," the 19-year-old said, looking down at his sneakered feet as the crowd shuffled out of the vast expanse of concrete on a balmy evening.

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.

More than 1,000 border guards were charged Sunday with murder and arson in an uprising that left at least 148 people dead or missing, most of them army officers whose bodies were hurriedly dumped by the mutineers. The details of what the prime minister called "a planned massacre" emerged after the government withdrew its promise of amnesty to the paramilitary force and sought to repair its increasingly tense relations with the military.

Villagers in central Kenya clashed with a criminal gang using machetes, axes and clubs, killing at least 29 people and leaving the streets stained with blood, police said Tuesday. Residents near the town of Karatina fought Mungiki members overnight because the gang had been extorting money from them, deputy police spokesman Charles Owino said. "The majority of the dead are Mungiki members," Owino said. At least three others were seriously wounded.

Despite the Chinese government's intent to keep the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square out of public discourse, audio recordings and excerpts of a memoir by the Communist Party chief who was purged for opposing it have begun circulating quietly on the Internet. Before his death in 2005, Zhao Ziyang secretly recorded 30 hours of tapes that have been turned into a memoir, "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang."

Mexico's Supreme Court ordered the release of 20 men convicted in the 1997 massacre of 45 Indian villagers in Chiapas state and new trials for six more, ruling Wednesday that prosecutors used illegal evidence. Paramilitary fighters with alleged ties to government figures attacked a prayer meeting of Roman Catholic activists who sympathized with rebels demanding more rights for Indians. Over several hours on Dec. 22, 1997, the assailants killed 45 people. The court cited irregularities such as the fact that suspects, largely speakers of the Tzotzil Indian language, were not provided with interpreters.

Bombs struck a cafe in the capital and remote communities in northern Iraq on Saturday, killing at least 18 people, as the visiting Iranian foreign minister warned that the country's instability affected the whole region. The blasts came 10 days after suicide truck bombers devastated the Foreign and Finance ministries in Baghdad, killing about 100 people and dealing a blow to confidence in the Iraqi government's ability to protect people as U.S. forces scale back their presence.

The skeletal remains of hundreds of people killed 15 years ago near the small Liberian village of Kpolokpai were transported in wheelbarrows to a marked mass grave Sunday where they were buried in a formal ceremony. The church service honoring the dead is intended to try to put to rest this particular chapter in Liberia's 14-year civil war, which left an estimated 250,000 people dead. Mourners, including church leaders and farmers, stood with their hands folded as the remains were lowered into a 10-foot-wide pit. Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined that the Kpolokpai massacre in 1994 was led by fighters of the Liberia Peace Council, a rebel group fighting Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia.