Violence | featured news

Serious crimes more than doubled in the area around Occupy Los Angeles during the first 45 days since the protesters began their encampment, Los Angeles Police Department officials said.

Occupy Wall Street supporters who staged rallies that shut down the nation's fifth-busiest port during a day of protests condemned on Thursday the demonstrators who clashed with police in the latest flare-up of violence in Oakland, Calif.

It seems as if violence is everywhere, but it's really on the run. Yes, thousands of people have died in bloody unrest from Africa to Pakistan, while terrorists plot bombings and kidnappings. Wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan. In peaceful Norway, a man massacred 69 youths in July. In Mexico, headless bodies turn up, victims of drug cartels. This month eight people died in a shooting in a California hair salon.

More than 30 civilians and as many as a dozen soldiers were killed Monday in an upsurge of violence in Syria, most of them in the central city of Homs that is rapidly emerging as the epicenter of armed resistance to the government led by President Bashar al-Assad.

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie attacks senior figures in the Catholic church over gay marriage. Mr Rennie criticised threats by church leaders to invoke a block vote against proposals to allow same-sex couples to marry in a religious ceremony.

Fighting erupted across much of Sanaa and the death toll for the worst violence in months rose to nearly 50 in two days of clashes.

Police shot dead four people Sunday in China's far northwest, bringing to 11 the death toll in weekend violence in one of the country's most troubled ethnic regions....

Alassane Ouattara has been inaugurated as Ivory Coast's president after months of violence and political turmoil.

A provincial spokesman in Afghanistan said more than 100 people were demonstrating against the the burning of a Quran by a American pastor in Florida.

Violence erupted as tens of thousands of Syrians took to the streets across the country, in the most widespread unrest in years.