Chicago police searched Sunday for a gunman who herded five women into the back room of a strip mall clothing store, killed them during a botched robbery and vanished after walking out of the shop’s front door. Officers swept through neighboring strip mall shops, aisle by aisle and with guns drawn, shortly after the shootings Saturday, but found no trace of the gunman. Attempts to find him Saturday with dogs and a helicopter equipped with infrared sensors also failed, authorities said.
A 15-year-old boy was charged with murder Sunday in the shooting deaths of his parents and two younger brothers in their home in a Baltimore suburb. Nicholas Waggoner Browning was charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the slayings of his father, John Browning, 45; his mother Tamara, 44; and his brothers Gregory, 13, and Benjamin, 11. He was charged as an adult. Browning was arrested at 1:05 a.m. Sunday after he admitted to the killings, Baltimore County Police spokesman Bill Toohey said.
Two earthquakes struck hours apart in Rwanda and neighboring Congo on Sunday, killing at least 39 people and injuring hundreds of others, officials said. The first, 6.0-magnitude quake struck Congo early Sunday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The second quake, which registered 5.0, hit a few hours later near the countries’ border, in Rwanda’s rural Rusizi district. Thirty-four people were killed and 231 wounded in Rwanda, according to a Ministry of Health hot line. Frank Mugambage, an official in the president’s office, said some of the victims died when a church collapsed. Rescuers were searching for more victims, he said.
Egyptian troops closed the last breach in Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip Sunday, ending 12 days of free movement for Palestinian residents of the blockaded territory, witnesses and Hamas security officials said. Hamas police aided with the closure, drawing pistols and arresting Palestinians who were throwing stones at Egyptian troops along the frontier. It was a dramatic turnabout for Hamas, whose militants had used explosives to bring down the border wall. The Egyptian troops were allowing Gazans and Egyptians to cross the border to return to their homes on the other side but prevented any new cross-border movement, according to witnesses and Hamas security officials in the border town of Rafah.
Iraq’s presidency council on Sunday issued a controversial law that allows lower-ranking former Baath party members to reclaim government jobs, the final step for the first U.S.-backed benchmark approved by parliament. The measure was thought to affect about 38,000 former members of Saddam Hussein’s ruling political apparatus, giving them a chance to go back to government jobs. It would also allow those who have reached retirement age to claim government pensions. It became law without the signature of the Sunni representative on the three-member presidency council because the constitution requires the body to act within 10 days after the panel received the law, according to Iraq’s constitution.
A five-year, $15 billion effort to combat AIDS in Africa and other areas – arguably the most important and popular international program of the Bush presidency – may become a political battleground as it comes up for renewal. President Bush wants to double and House Democrats want to triple spending on a program that is now treating 1.4 million people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where he will visit in two weeks. Democrats also want to slash spending on a multimillion-dollar component that emphasizes sexual abstinence.
Railway service inched back to normal Sunday in southern China, a day after one person died in a stampede by frustrated train passengers who were stranded for days because of snow ahead of an important holiday. More than 10,000 vehicles were backed up on an icy section of a highway in central China’s Hunan province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The vehicles were backed up for nearly 45 miles, even though workers were removing ice from the roads Sunday, it said. The freakish weather is now in its fourth week, throttling the country’s densely populated central and eastern regions as tens of millions of travelers scramble to board trains and buses to return home for this month’s Lunar New Year holiday.
