Rifle

Three former U.S. Marines and two others were arrested on suspicion of selling illegal assault weapons to Los Angeles gang members, federal officials announced Tuesday. The arrests capped a yearlong investigation into an elaborate scheme to transfer heavy weapons, including AK-47s, to San Fernando Valley-based gang members. Earlier this month, officials from several law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, raided the San Clemente home of former Marine Adam Andrew Gitschlag, 28. He was arrested, and authorities confiscated boxes of automatic weapons and rifles.

A Navy SEAL and two other men have been charged with smuggling illegal firearms, including AK-47 assault rifles, from Iraq and Afghanistan and then selling them to an undercover federal agent, the U.S. attorney's office in Las Vegas announced Thursday. The SEAL, Nicholas Bickle, 33, is assigned to a SEAL team based in Coronado, Calif. He was arrested Wednesday and scheduled for federal court arraignment in San Diego on Friday. Richard Paul, 34, of Durango, Colo., and Andrew Kaufman, 36, of Las Vegas were also arrested Wednesday and will be arraigned in those locations, prosecutors said.

The gunmen pointed rifles at his head, demanding answers. The captive named names. He had lots to say about the Juarez drug cartel. But this drug war interrogation, captured on a "narco-video," carried a twist. The handcuffed man before the camera was no nameless cartel henchman. He was the kidnapped brother of Patricia Gonzalez, the former top prosecutor of Mexico's most violent state, and his account was startling: that his sister took bribes to protect the so-called Juarez cartel and even ordered several high-profile killings.

His friends say he was the kind of person who inspired others to slow down and appreciate life. And that's what people in Calaveras County did after Marine Lance Cpl. Gavin R. Brummund was killed in Afghanistan . Thousands stood solemnly in tribute along California Highway 4 as the grieving families of Brummund and his young widow returned home after claiming the Marine's body in Dover, Del. Merchants in the little towns of...

Dressed in camouflage and hunkering among his soldiers, Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed appeared on the front lines Thursday in an offensive against Islamic militants in his country's shattered capital of Mogadishu, witnesses and government officials said. Fierce firefights rumbled across the city on the 50th anniversary of Somali independence, a landmark spoiled by years of civil war, a refugee crisis and the rise of an Al Qaeda-linked Islamic group that controls all but a few of Mogadishu's streets.

Ethnic violence that began as fistfights and escalated to raging gun battles broke out in the Central Asia nation of Kyrgyzstan, leaving at least 45 people dead and more than 600 injured, Russian news reports and an eyewitness said Friday. The clashes in the southern city of Osh began Thursday evening between several hundred Kyrgyz and Uzbek youths, said the witness, human rights activist Almaz Kalet. Combatants at first battled with fists, sticks and metal rods, but by about 2 a.m. Friday their numbers had grown to several thousand and they were fighting across the city center using automatic rifles, shotguns and other weapons, Kalet said in a telephone interview from Osh, where he lives.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon implored a joint session of Congress on Thursday to ban assault weapons that are showing up in his country in great numbers, and he also denounced Arizona's strict new immigration law. Winding up a two-day visit to Washington, Calderon said that his security forces were seizing tens of thousands of powerful guns that they have traced to the United States. Calderon said the U.S. needed to "regulate the sale of these weapons in the right way."

An alleged gang member was convicted Monday of murdering three people, including a 10-year-old boy, on a quiet South L.A. street in an attack that became known as the 49th Street Massacre. Charles Ray Smith, 41, repeatedly shook his head as the verdicts were read in a packed downtown L.A. courtroom. In the audience behind him, the mother of the 10-year-old victim wept quietly. David Marcial had been riding his bicycle with his 12-year-old brother outside their South L.A. home on a warm June afternoon in 2006 when two gunmen opened fire.

While he was still in high school, Joshua Hardt took one look at his future wife, Olivia, and told friends that some day he would be with her. " 'One day, I'll even marry her,' " she said he told her that he had bragged to his friends. "Joshua knew what he wanted and went for it." So after Hardt finished high school, he decided to enlist in the Army as a way to provide for his future family, Olivia Hardt said. The two were married in April 2007. On Oct. 3, Army Sgt. Joshua M. Hardt, 24, a cavalry scout, was among eight soldiers killed when hundreds of insurgents armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attacked two remote U.S. outposts in the Kamdesh district of eastern Afghanistan's Nuristan province, on the Pakistani border.

A suicide bomber who hid among the Sunni Muslim congregation in a northern Iraqi mosque sprayed gunfire at worshipers Friday and then blew himself up, killing at least 15 people, including the imam leading prayers, officials said. The brazen attack is the latest against Sunni clerics who have increasingly spoken out against the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq since U.S. combat troops withdrew from Iraqi cities at the end of June. The clerics and others fear that militants could take advantage of the transition to step up the kind of sectarian attacks that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war two years ago. The man who opened fire in the mosque in Tall Afar, about 245 miles northwest of Baghdad, first shot the imam, Abdul-Satar Hassan, before turning his AK-47 assault rifle on worshipers, witnesses said.