Policemen

Taliban militants slashed the hands and legs of five abducted policemen in a southern province and hung their mutilated bodies from trees in a warning to villagers against working with the government, officials said. "The Taliban told the people that whoever works with the government will suffer the same fate as these policemen," said provincial police chief Juma Gul Himat.

A car bomb exploded near a police vehicle in the troubled North Caucasus region, killing four police officers, witnesses and officials said. The blast occurred in the center of Nazran, the main city of violence-plagued Ingushetia, which borders Chechnya. Authorities said three to five other people, apparently civilians, were injured. The blast occurred after police responded to a call about a suspicious car.

After an investigation of the kidnapping of four federal agents, a Mexican judge ordered 18 police officers to stand trial on charges of aiding drug traffickers, prosecutors said Saturday. Several of the officers from Guadalupe, near Monterrey in the northeastern state of Nuevo Leon, also are charged with abducting the four agents on behalf of the band of Gulf cartel hit men known as the Zetas, the attorney general's office said in a statement.

A battle lasting more than five hours between Maoist rebels using mortars and machine guns and police in eastern India killed 24 policemen and 25 rebels, authorities said. The rebel assault, in a jungle in Chhattisgarh state, was the latest in a region where widespread poverty has fueled a lengthy insurgency.

Four minority South Gate police officers who claimed they were harassed on the job because of their ties to two controversial and eventually ousted Latino city officials won a $10.4-million jury award Thursday. The award is believed to be one of the largest ever in a police employment discrimination case and represents another setback for the controversy-plagued, working-class community in southeastern Los Angeles County.

With his combination of literary seriousness (long, heavily researched novels), fruitful relationship to ethnic identity (Jewish) and ability to mine pop genres (science fiction, comic books), Berkeley resident Michael Chabon may have the highest capital of any West Coast writer. Today Harper Collins releases "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," a detective story, sort of, set in an alternate universe, kind of, where the Jews have been resettled to Alaska.

A roadside bomb targeting a police convoy killed nine officers and critically wounded one Monday in western Afghanistan, officials said. The police were traveling in the Bakwa district of Farah province, provincial police spokesman Baryalai Khan said. The Bakwa police district commander was among the nine killed. One of the three vehicles in the convoy was destroyed, Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said.

Four imprisoned Guatemalan policemen were killed during a rebellion by inmates, days after the officers were arrested in connection with the deaths of three Salvadoran politicians, police said. Riot police gathered outside the jail in Cuilapa, about 40 miles east of Guatemala City. On Feb. 19, assailants abducted and killed Eduardo D'Aubuisson, son of El Salvador's late right-wing leader, Roberto D'Aubuisson, along with two other Salvadoran officials and their driver.

Fifteen police officers were killed Saturday when suspected rebels ambushed their patrol in India's remote northeast, officials said. Sixty armed police officers who had been supervising elections in Bishenpur district were traveling in six vehicles back to their headquarters when rebels fired on them with automatic weapons, local police chief Jayanta Singh said. A fierce gun battle ensued, and the rebels then fled into dense forest, Singh said.