Deaths | featured news

A gunman killed 26 people, 18 of them small children, in a shooting on Friday morning at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., about 65 miles northeast of New York City, a law enforcement official said. The gunman, who was believed to be in his 20s, walked into a classroom where his mother was a teacher. He shot and killed her and then shot 18 students in the classroom. He also shot seven other adults, and then killed himself inside the school. Various news outlets identified the shooter as Ryan Lanza. The shooting ranks among the worst in recent United States history.

Norman Joseph Woodland, who was co-inventor of the barcode, has died at the age of 91.

Pandit Ravi Shankar, the best known contemporary Indian musician, died Tuesday evening in San Diego, Calif. He was 92. The sitar star's website announced his death.

A gunman opened fire in a suburban Portland shopping mall Tuesday, killing two people and wounding another as people were doing their Christmas shopping, authorities said. Witnesses described a scene of chaos and disbelief as a gunman wearing some sort of camouflage outfit and a white mask shot an initial burst of fire and then more rounds at Clackamas Town Center. Shoppers tried to find safe areas as teams of police officers began entering the mall to find the shooter.

A surveillance video found at the Little Falls home of Byron Smith shows teenagers Nick Brady and Haile Kifer outside Smith's house on Thanksgiving Day before the homeowner shot them to death after they broke in.

A woman was convicted Monday of first-degree murder in the slaying of a Florida lottery winner.

Besse Cooper, who had the distinction of being the world's oldest person, at 116, dies.

The deaths of five infants and more than 70 reports of children nearly falling out of a popular infant recliner have the federal government looking to stop the sales and manufacture of the product.

When a news photographer witnesses a tragedy in the making, is his obligation to intervene or to document it? That question has cropped up anew following the New York Post's publication, on its front page, of a photo taken moments after a man was pushed onto subway tracks, and moments before he was hit and killed by an oncoming train.

A fire in a clothing factory apparently caused by arson killed 14 people in southern China on Tuesday, state media reported.