Massacre

Polish troops stood at attention here yesterday as soil from the mass graves in Katyn Forest, where Soviet secret police massacred World War II Polish officers, was reburied at Warsaw's tomb of the unknown soldier. About 1,000 people watched the ceremony. An official delegation brought two small urns of the soil from Katyn to Warsaw. The other urn is to be placed in a war heroes' cemetery at Powazki, near the capital. For several months Poland and its state-controlled media have openly spoken of how the Soviet secret service killed the 4,500 officers in the spring of 1940.

Coins and medals often have served as political tracts, dissents and memorials. Portraits of victors and vanquished, satiric images and powerful slogans have adorned coins for much of the long march of history. Continuing that tradition is a silver proof medallion memorializing the Tiananmen Square massacre and the democratic movement in China. The medal has just been struck under a commission from the Chinese Numismatic Society and Chinese students abroad. The commemorative was designed cooperatively by Hoi Pun, a Hong Kong native and medalist who participated in the Tiananmen demonstrations in May; Thomas Marsh, a San Francisco artist, and an artist from China whose name is being withheld.

They lay on slabs of ice in the front corridor of the general hospital, lifeless men and boys who only hours before had been on the wrong bus at the wrong time. At first there were 32 of them, so many that the floor was covered with fresh blood. By yesterday afternoon more than half were gone, claimed by relatives for cremation. The wiry corpses were the latest victims of the war raging between militant Sikhs and India's Hindu-dominated central government. They were gunned down Tuesday night - apparently by Sikh terrorists - on two buses just outside this parched market town 150 miles northwest of New Delhi.

OSLO, NORWAY - The chilling images of Anders Behring Breivik simulating shots into the water at the island where he killed 69 people at a youth camp were broadcast around the world yesterday after police took him back there. Restrained by a harness, the Norwegian reconstructed his actions for police in a secret daylong trip back to the crime scene at Utoya island near Oslo. A prosecutor also confirmed Norwegian media reports that police received several phone calls during the attack that were probably from Breivik himself, but wouldn't say how police had reacted to the calls.

TRIPOLI, Libya - A leading international prosecutor viewed human bones and charred clothing at the alleged site of a massacre that survivors say was committed by loyalists to Moammar Gadhafi as Libya's capital fell to advancing rebels. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, then pledged to help bring clarity to such unsolved crimes remaining from Libya's civil war. Earlier Wednesday, he said that the court, based in the Hague, Netherlands, would not challenge Libya's right to try Gadhafi's son and onetime heir apparent in his own country and with Libyan judges.

If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction Munich and root it in a real historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Once you've done that - evoked the actual killing of innocents who but for Palestinian murderers would today be not much older than Spielberg himself - you have an obligation to get the story right.

"I am a student in the Department of Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology, a survivor of the brutal massacre in Tiananmen Square. " So begins the text of a poster that was being distributed last week at China's Harbin Institute, 675 miles from Beijing. The unsigned narrative was read over the telephone to Jing Zhao, 33, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. It continues: "In the early morning of June 4, troops forced about 100,000 people into the square and fired on them indiscriminately.

For 42 hours the body of Marc Lepine had lain in the basement morgue, detested by all of Montreal for the carnage he had inflicted upon the city. Now, at 6:45 p.m. on a bitterly cold Friday, it was being transferred to a stretcher, covered with a blanket and placed in the waiting hearse of the Alfred Dallaire funeral home. To disappear, the city hoped, forever. Behind was left a still-incomplete portrait of his life - a pathetic childhood of violent abuse, and later, years of near-success marred by abrupt withdrawals.

Two days after being named to Nepal's throne, King Dipendra died today, a royal official said. The king had been on life support after allegedly shooting himself and most of the royal family. A member of the State Council, a government body that deals with royal affairs, told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity that Dipendra died at an army hospital in Katmandu. Dipendra was accused of going on a shooting spree Friday night that killed eight members of his family.

OSLO, Norway - The right-wing extremist who has admitted killing 77 people in Norway's worst peacetime massacre told a court Monday that he deserves a medal of honor for the bloodshed and demanded to be set free. Anders Behring Breivik, 32, smirked as he was led in to the Oslo district court, handcuffed and dressed in a dark suit, for his last scheduled detention hearing before the trial starts in April. He stretched out his arms in what his lawyer Geir Lippestad called "some kind of right-wing extremist greeting.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - He's no longer the swaggering general who held Sarajevo "in the palm of his hand" during Bosnia's 1992-95 war. Yet as his long-awaited genocide trial began Wednesday, Ratko Mladic still managed to reopen old wounds with the flick of his hand. Hobbled by strokes and wearing a business suit instead of combat fatigues, the frail, 70-year-old defendant had an angry exchange of hand gestures with the families of massacre victims in the public gallery, separated by the bulletproof glass in the courtroom.

OSLO, Norway - In a scene unimaginable in many countries, Norway's worst mass killer since World War II got to explain his fanatical views to the court and the world for days while dressed up in a business suit. Two days into Anders Behring Breivik's terror trial, the studied formality with which Norway's legal system deals with a confessed killer who rejects its authority is baffling to outsiders, even to some Norwegians. On Monday, the day the trial started, Norwegian prosecutors and even lawyers representing the families of his 77 victims shook Breivik's hand as proceedings began.

DABBING her eyes with the tissues she clutched in her hand, Jessica Nunez endured nearly two hours of questioning Tuesday about the West Philadelphia store robbery that escalated into the massacre of her father, mother and aunt last year. Aided by a Spanish-language interpreter, the 20-year-old woman identified Nalik Scott, 30, and Ibrahim Muhammed, 31, as the gunmen who unleashed the carnage in her family's tiny corner grocery at 50th and Parrish streets. "Obviously, what happened to this family was a barbaric slaughter," Municipal Judge Patrick Dugan said in ordering both defendants to be tried for murder and related charges.

SEATTLE - The attorney for the U.S. soldier accused of killing 17 Afghan civilians said Friday that the U.S. government was "hiding evidence" from the defense team. John Henry Browne said members of the defense team in Afghanistan were told they would have access to witnesses at a hospital, but later discovered the people had been released. He also said the U.S. government has not turned over files to the lawyers defending Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. The defense team said in a statement the prosecution was withholding information "while potential witnesses scatter.

WE PAID $50,000 in compensation for each Afghan killed by Sgt. Bales. Each wounded person got $11,000. This was paid to their families. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT PICTURE?! We give the Afghans how much aid? When Major Hasan killed 13 Americans at Fort Hood in 2009, how much was paid to each family by Hasan? Nothing, nada . How much was paid by this government to each family? Nothing, nada . What is wrong with this country? We need to start taking care of our own and quit worrying about other countries.

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN - The U.S. paid $50,000 in compensation for each villager killed and $11,000 for each person wounded in a shooting rampage allegedly carried out by a rogue American soldier in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Sunday. The families were told that the money came from President Obama. The unusually large payouts were the latest move by the White House to mend relations with the Afghan people after the killings threatened to shatter already tense relations.

KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder, a capital offense that could lead to the death penalty in the massacre of Afghan civilians, the U.S. military said. Bales, 38, is accused of walking off a U.S. military base with his 9mm pistol and an M-4 rifle fitted with a grenade launcher before dawn on March 11, killing nine Afghan children and eight adults, and burning some of the bodies. It was the worst allegation of civilian killings by an American, and it has severely strained U.S.-Afghan ties at a critical time in the decade-old war. It's unclear what prompted the killings, but the case has drawn new attention to the debate over mental-health care for the troops, who have had record suicide rates and high incidences of post-traumatic stress and brain injuries during repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

SEATTLE - With formal charges looming against his client within days, the lawyer for an Army sergeant suspected in the horrific nighttime slaughter of 16 Afghan villagers was flying Sunday to Kansas and preparing for his first face-to-face meeting with the 10-year veteran. John Henry Browne of Seattle said he planned to meet Monday with Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who is being held in an isolated cell at Fort Leavenworth's military prison. Bales, 38, has not been charged in the March 11 shootings, which have endangered relations between the United States and Afghanistan and threaten to upend U.S. policy over the decade-old war. Formal charges are expected to be filed within a week, and if the case goes to court, the trial will be in the United States, said a legal expert with the U.S. military familiar with the probe.

LAKE TAPPS, Wash. - Bypassed for a promotion and struggling to pay for his house, Robert Bales was eyeing a way out of his job at a Washington state military base months before he allegedly gunned down 16 civilians in an Afghan war zone, records and interviews showed as a deeper picture emerged Saturday of the Army sergeant's financial troubles and brushes with the law. While Bales, 38, sat in an isolated cell at the Fort Leavenworth, Kan., military...