Shootings

A day after an anti-Semite allegedly shot and killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, experts disagreed about whether it was an isolated event or the latest sign of a growing threat by domestic hate groups. The danger appeared to come from two directions: far-right fanatics who feed on domestic conspiracy theories and Muslim extremists who oppose U.S. policies abroad. Both have launched deadly attacks in recent weeks.

Hundreds of police officers and soldiers waged a three-hour gun battle against heavily armed men here Thursday, as residents of a normally quiet neighborhood ran for their lives. One suspect was killed and six kidnapping victims were found dead after the shootout. Four police officers were injured as a monthlong crackdown on Tijuana's crime cartels escalated. The working-class neighborhood of La Mesa resembled a war zone.

The quarrel between black power advocates that ended in gunfire in a UCLA classroom had lasted only a few moments that sunny day. But the controversy over who was responsible for the murder of two young men taking part in a discussion over leadership of a fledgling black studies program at the campus has simmered for nearly four decades. On Thursday, aging leaders of the 1960s Black Panther Party returned to the site of the Jan.

An investigator expressed frustration Thursday at what he said were incomplete and sometimes inconsistent accounts by Marines involved in a March shooting in Afghanistan that left up to 19 Afghans dead. "We were trying to put pieces together and some of them just don't fit," David Kurre, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent, said on the eighth day of testimony in a court of inquiry reviewing the incident.

The bullet holes pockmarking the walls of his home were just three days old when Alberto Capella Ibarra took over the police force of this violence-plagued city. Twenty gunmen dressed in black had swarmed his yard in the middle of the night, and he'd fought them off, firing an automatic rifle. Taking office Dec. 1 as the city's secretary for public security, Capella, a longtime activist, declared war on organized crime and challenged citizens to join him in the battle.

Two Afghan men testified Tuesday that a Marine special operations convoy fired on their vehicles without provocation during an incident last March in which as many as 19 Afghans were reported killed. Testifying from Afghanistan by video link, the men told a court of inquiry that they had pulled their vehicles to the side of the highway when the Marines suddenly opened fire. They said they did not see anyone fire at the convoy, which had been struck by a van packed with explosives moments before.

Two vastly different portrayals of a Marine special operations unit accused of firing on civilians in Afghanistan in March were presented Tuesday to a court of inquiry on the final day of a three-week investigation. In closing statements, defense lawyers said the Marines had followed the rules of engagement while under a coordinated enemy attack, only to be falsely accused by gullible Army officials and duplicitous Afghans.

Reeling from a spate of gang shootings that has left three dead in the last two weeks, Monrovia officials Thursday urged calm in the San Gabriel Valley community while calling for stepped-up police enforcement. "We have the resources and the money to fight back -- and we are," Mayor Rob Hammond said at a morning news conference at City Hall, where he was joined by ministers, school, police and sheriff's officials.

The U.S. Department of Justice has cleared a Border Patrol agent of any wrongdoing in the fatal shooting of a suspected smuggler whose death two years ago focused attention on increasing violence at the California-Mexico border. The 18-year-old who died, Guillermo Martinez Rodriguez, was allegedly throwing rocks at the agent, who shot him in the upper back on a dangerous stretch of the San Diego-Tijuana border in December 2005.

The gunman who killed five students and then himself at Northern Illinois University on Thursday was an award-winning graduate student, described by professors as friendly and respectful. Stephen Kazmierczak, 27, donned a dark coat and black ski cap before he began firing into a crowded lecture hall. But that was an image in sharp contrast to the well-adjusted man who was attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.