Volunteers

Monday, millions of Americans will honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by volunteering for community service. They will collect cans of food for the poor, ladle soup for the hungry and help the homeless. They will talk about their rewarding experiences, and the people they help will express their gratitude. Tomorrow, everybody will return to their normal routines. The MLK Day of Service represents an increasingly popular form of volunteerism - setting aside a day or so to help the needy.

WASHINGTON - The cavernous ballroom of the Washington Hilton had the feel of Old Home Week as hundreds of former campaign staff and volunteers for President Obama's reelection bid assembled there Sunday morning, greeting each other with whoops and bear hugs and breaking out into intermittent chants of “Fired up? Ready to go!” But the gathering, dubbed the Obama Campaign Legacy Conference, aimed to be more than a reunion for the on-the-ground organizers who helped build Obama's grass-roots army.

WASHINGTON - Saying his second inauguration should be an "affirmation that we're all in this together," President Obama spent Saturday volunteering at a local school on a National Day of Service meant to honor slain civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. As the capital hummed with final preparations for the quadrennial spectacle of a presidential inaugural, Obama and the first lady helped stain a bookshelf at Burrville Elementary School...

Allan K. Jonas, a Los Angeles real estate developer and a longtime leader and volunteer with the American Cancer Society, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civic and political groups in Southern California, has died. He was 91. Jonas died Sunday at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica of complications from pneumonia, his son Tony Jonas said. A resident of Los Angeles since 1948, Allan Jonas built his real estate career in the 1950s when he began purchasing and constructing commercial properties near Los Angeles International Airport, which had just started to be used for commercial airline service.

The roadblock facing Harrison Scott and his aging band of volunteers as they try to preserve the Ridge Route north of Los Angeles isn't just the heavy steel gate across the historic paved roadway that was the first to link Northern and Southern California. As Scott tells it, it's also the U.S. Forest Service, which technically owns the two-lane road that was created by horse-drawn scrapers in 1914 across ridge tops dotting the Sierra Pelona mountain range north of Castaic. The Ridge Route's place in California history is well-documented.

WASHINGTON - A former neighbor of the Webster, N.Y., sniper who killed two volunteer firefighters on Christmas Eve illegally bought the guns used in the killing, federal authorities charged Friday. Dawn M. Nguyen, 24, of Greece, N.Y., was charged in federal court with acting as a straw purchaser for William Spengler, who as a felon could not legally buy guns for himself. Spengler was convicted of killing his grandmother in 1980. Nguyen also faces state felony charges on allegations of falsifying business records.

The Times on Tuesday released about 1,200 previously unpublished files kept by the Boy Scouts of America on volunteers and employees expelled for suspected sexual abuse. The files, which have been redacted of victims' names and other identifying information, were opened from 1985 through 1991. They can be found in a database along with two decades of files released by order of the Oregon Supreme Court in October. The database also contains summary information on about 3,200 additional files opened from 1947 to 2005 that have not been released publicly.

WASHINGTON - In the week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, as President Obama and Democratic lawmakers issued urgent calls for new restrictions on guns, America's largest and most powerful gun lobby lay low. But its silence did not mean the National Rifle Assn. had grown conciliatory. When NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre finally weighed in Friday, he delivered a lashing speech that attacked gun-free school zones, the media and violent movies and video games as he pledged his group would train a vast force of armed volunteers to protect the nation's schools.

If you have the money to travel, you'll want to spend it the way you want to spend it. That means making sure rip-off artists keep their mitts off your dough. With this in mind, the members and editors of travel website VirtualTourist have compiled a list of the worst travel scams and schemes and how to avoid them. Pickpockets: Pickpockets no longer limit themselves to the simple "bump and grab. " VirtualTourist members mentioned that in many instances, pickpockets are working in teams: While one shows you a gold ring or points out mustard on your shirt, another cohort is stealing your wallet.

KABUL, Afghanistan - In her small village of Kalota, north of Kabul, the young woman named Hanisa was known to be headstrong and independent. At 22, she had persevered in school long enough to reach 12th grade, and she was determined to flout tradition and work outside her home. Hanisa had just left her house Saturday and was on her way to her first day of work as a village vaccination worker when three men on two motorcycles roared up behind her. She was shot at least six times and collapsed, bleeding profusely from abdominal wounds, according to Qais Qadiri, a spokesman for the governor's office in Kapisa province.