Militia

Federal officials in Michigan have arrested a ninth member of the Hutaree, the Christian anti-government militia charged with plotting to use "weapons of mass destruction" in an attack on police. The suspect, Joshua Matthew Stone of Clayton, Mich., surrendered to federal agents in nearby Hillsdale County, in the southern part of the state, Gina Balaya, a spokeswoman with the U.S. attorney's office in Detroit, said Tuesday. Other members of Stone's family were already in custody -- brother David Brian Stone Jr., 19; father David Brian Stone, 45; and Tina Mae Stone, 44, David Sr.'s wife.

ANCHORAGE - With his Boy Scout good looks and schoolboy cap, Schaeffer Cox was known for striding happily through the treacherous backwater between rabble rousing and revolution. In university auditoriums and community meeting halls throughout the West over the last few years, the 28-year-old Cox has preached the gospel of free will, no taxes and unregulated firearms. He's also warned growing legions of supporters that the dictionary defines "terrorism" as government through intimidation - and that its logical antidote is "horrible rebellion.

Is the plural of militia--malicious? CLAIRE WEINBERG Mission Hills

Five people were shot to death, including a toddler, at a house in the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert on Wednesday, and a white supremacist border militiaman apparently was among them. Authorities have not released the victims' identities, but the private militia group U.S. Border Guard reported that one of the dead was Jason "J.T. " Ready, its founder. Members of the organization say they arm themselves and patrol the border with Mexico to try to combat "narco-terrorists. " Ready also advocated putting a minefield on the border.

Iraqi soldiers killed a Sunni Arab fighter from a U.S.-allied local militia unit Tuesday and arrested his brother, Iraqi police said. Basim Mohammed was shot during a raid in Abu Ghraib, a predominantly Sunni district on the western outskirts of Baghdad, a police source in the district said. The official, who declined to be named, did not say what charges Mohammed or his brother may have been facing.

Five people were shot to death, including a toddler, at a house in the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert on Wednesday, and a white supremacist border militiaman apparently was among them. Authorities have not released the victims' identities, but the private militia group U.S. Border Guard reported that one of the dead was Jason "J.T. " Ready, its founder. Members of the organization say they arm themselves and patrol the border with Mexico to try to combat "narco-terrorists. " Ready also advocated putting a minefield on the border.

After a follower of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr vowed to dispatch militia members to defend Iraqi mosques in the wake of a series of deadly bombings, a statement from Sadr that was widely distributed Saturday made it clear that the Mahdi Army would be reactivated only if the government accepted the offer. The militia's fighters, who were involved in the bloody sectarian violence of Iraq's civil war, were demobilized in 2008 after major confrontations between Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government and the armed group.

China plans to strengthen its nationwide militia forces by establishing training centers in each of the nation's 2,000 counties, the official New China News Agency, quoting an unnamed military official, reported Tuesday. The militias are civilian units that receive some military training.

A Yugoslav deserter who killed two policemen while on the run from his army unit was shot and killed by militiamen Monday after a car chase in northwest Yugoslavia, the official Tanjug news agency said. Several hundred troops had pursued Bojan Plut, 19, since he fled from the Ljubljana Barracks on May 1 armed with an automatic rifle and 700 rounds of ammunition. He ambushed a car carrying two policemen Saturday, shooting both to death.

Not-guilty pleas were entered here Wednesday on behalf of eight of nine members of a Christian militia that prosecutors say plotted to kill police officers and kick-start a violent revolution. The eight, including alleged ringleader David Brian Stone, 45, were among nine members of the Hutaree militia arrested after a series of raids in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio over the weekend. They face charges including seditious conspiracy and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. An undercover FBI agent and a cooperating witness were part of the inquiry, a court document said.

DETROIT — In a sharp rebuke, a federal judge Tuesday acquitted seven members of a Michigan militia of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government with weapons of mass destruction — crimes that could have landed them in prison for life. The ruling is an embarrassment for the government, which secretly planted a paid informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia four years ago and contended that members were armed for war in rural southern Michigan. Nine members were arrested in 2010.

Even after decades of well-documented murder and plunder, even after the International Criminal Court indicted him and a U.S. president dispatched a special forces team to help catch him, African warlord Joseph Kony remained largely obscure to the West. That changed with startling swiftness this week, with the viral proliferation of a smoothly produced 29-minute video, "Kony 2012," that calculatedly taps the power of social media in an effort to make the fugitive leader of the Lord's Resistance Army a figure of global infamy.

  The revolution is long over in Libya, but gunfire still crackles in the night, echoing down empty streets and alleys. Swaggering men in Che Guevara-style berets patrol the outskirts of once-besieged Misurata with antiaircraft guns affixed to the back of their pickup trucks, stalking those they believe are responsible for their city's misery. A militia based in mountainous Zintan refuses to hand over Moammar Kadafi's son and once heir-apparent, Seif Islam Kadafi, and encirclesTripoli's airport, holding both as bargaining chips to extract concessions and avoid being marginalized in the country's emerging political order.

Weary of continuing gunfire in the streets of the capital, Libya's interim government has given notice to out-of-town militias to hand in their weapons and leave Tripoli in order to help steer the country toward civilian rule. Militias have until Dec. 20 to leave, said Abdul-Rafik Bu Hajjar, head of the Tripoli municipal council, threatening to ban all traffic except vehicles from the Interior and Defense ministries if the militias fail to comply. His order has the backing of the new prime minister, Abdel-Rahim Keeb.

Kenya's government has made an urgent appeal to the Obama administration for the Pentagon to provide intelligence and logistical support to Kenya's faltering month-old military operation in Somalia against the Shabab, a powerful Al Qaeda-linked militia. Administration officials are considering the request, which came through the State Department, to provide military surveillance and reconnaissance that could include imagery from drone aircraft. Such aid would represent a significant expansion of U.S. involvement in the chaotic East African nation.

When his parents were killed in a rocket attack, the only person to show a lonely Somali boy named Abdi any kindness, or say a caring word, was a family friend named Abdufazil. The man bought him meat and camel milk. Then he sent the 13-year-old to a training camp to become a suicide bomber. Abdufazil was a commander of the militant Islamist militia Shabab in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, and he told the boy that Christians had killed his parents. He and other Shabab fighters urged him to take revenge for the attack.

The fox is indeed guarding the henhouse when it comes to guns and the Bush administration. It buys completely into the gun lobby's self-serving interpretation of the 2nd Amendment--that it guarantees an individual's right to bear arms--when the document specifically refers to a well-regulated militia's right. The vast pool of published opinion (including the Supreme Court) supports the idea that the constitutional framers meant the amendment to guarantee the right of a new nation, born in a violent revolution, the right to maintain an armed military.

LEBANON Lebanese police said they discovered the corpse of a member of a banned Christian militia opposed to Syria's influence in Lebanon stuffed into the trunk of his car in the capital, Beirut. Security sources said they identified the man as Ramzi Airani, an engineer and member of the banned Lebanese Forces militia, who disappeared nearly two weeks ago amid media speculation that he had been kidnapped by opponents of the group. Lebanese officials declined to say how Airani died.

The commander of Kenya's defense forces declared Saturday that his troops would remain in neighboring Somalia until the threat from the militant Islamist militia Shabab is eliminated and Kenyans feel safe. Given the messiness of other countries' incursions in Somalia, the vow by defense forces chief Gen. Julius Karangi suggests that Kenya's first military adventure since independence nearly half a century ago could be a long one. In 1992, U.S.-led forces launched Operation Restore Hope, which led to the "Black Hawk Down" catastrophe of October 1993, in which 18 U.S. troops were killed and the bodies of some of them dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

The spectacle of Moammar Kadafi's capture at the mouth of a drain pipe and death in the custody of those he long oppressed thrilled Libyans but left a sense of unease about the nation's ability to emerge from his violent legacy. Kadafi's death Thursday in his hometown, the coastal city of Surt, spared Libyans the prospect that the only leader most had ever known would continue exhorting die-hard followers to fight. Few believed that, two months after he had been chased from his capital, Kadafi was in a position to make a comeback.