Machine Gun | featured news

Islamists in northern Mali have recruited and paid for as many as 1,000 children from rural towns and villages devastated by poverty and hunger. The Associated Press spoke with four children and conducted several dozen interviews with residents and human rights officials. The AP also saw several other children with machine guns half their size strolling down the streets in Timbuktu, where Westerners can no longer go because of the threat of kidnapping.

A UC Irvine professor accused of setting a
series of fires following his son's suicide
wrote in emails that he planned to get a
dozen machine guns and shoot at least 200
students at his son's high school and then
kill himself.

Syrian forces pounded the western city of Homs Saturday with jets and tanks, sustaining fire with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, activists told CNN.

A cache of Los Angeles Police Department submachine guns and handguns was stolen last week from a secured building used by the department's SWAT unit, raising fears that the weapons, which police had altered to fire only blanks, could be converted back to lethal use, police officials confirmed.